Descend- Seeing Stars by Sean Oswald (the ebook reader .TXT) 📕

he was ready to pay it. Something which he couldn’t hide entirely because of the fusion but still refused to discuss. He didn’t believe he would die today, but he was prepared. He kept a portion of his mind partitioned to focus on his wives and children. Their faces would keep him strong.

      He smiled watching Amelia’s pilot the shuttle. This had all begun because she convinced him an alliance was a good idea. Then the spatial jump drive went online and suddenly they were somewhere else. Thanks to updated scans they had jumped several light years in an instant. This means of travel was unique to them and required PSI. It was also beyond anything the A’snkarnt or Forlorn possessed.

      They jumped out near a group of three Forlorn battleships. Each was more than a mile long and surrounded by a handful of smaller vessels ranging from cruisers that were a quarter of the size to smaller ships which were no more than fifty feet long.

      The idea was to appear where they shouldn’t possibly be and then attack before the enemy could respond. Jay’s mind started dividing up tasks. He said, “Wait and watch. Amelia cloak the ship.” While another part of his mind activated the nanium around him, expanding it into a set of body armor that moved in perfect coordination with his natural movements.

      As soon as the words had left his mouth, he teleported away from the shuttle into open space. It was scary in that a part of him said this was death, but he knew that he could now survive in the vacuum of space. It was just those massive cannons that he wasn’t sure if he could survive.

      He ramped up his skills and had his mind partitioned to run multiple skills at the same time. Durability and speed were maximized even as he flew through the void to attack the closest vessel. It was one of the smaller Forlorn ships, but a perfect test. He astral stepped and sure enough ended up inside the ship.

      The drones and their commander inside moved to attack him, but it was already over, even if they hadn’t realized it yet. He exploded outward in a combined blast of kinetic energy and waves of fire. The enemy was crushed up against the walls and the very frame of the ship shuddered. But they didn’t suffer there long, because the searing heat of his transformation to Fire Form incinerated all of their organic components.

      Not content to kill the crew, Jay held up his hand and separated the molecules of the control panels. He laughed. There would be no putting that back together. A quick scan told him that there was nothing left alive on the ship, but he still streaked to the back and scuttled the engines all the same. This ship would not be of any use to the Forlorn.

      Apparently, they must have realized that something was wrong because Jay’s precognition went off like the 4th of July in his head. He astral stepped out and into the cargo bay of one of the battleships an instant before the small craft he had been on was vaporized.

      Alarms were going off all around him and he could sense the Forlorn warriors being dispatched to him. His vastly improved telepathic senses were able to hear whispers from the Forlorn hive mind connection but was unable to actually pierce the signal. It was not telepathy, but more tech based. Of course, as Jessie would have said, their bodies were simply the most advanced of machines.

      The first group of warriors reached his location primarily because he allowed them too. He was capable of moving so much faster now than even the day before because of all the skill increases. Given a straight light he could have moved over thirteen hundred miles per second now, but of course that wasn’t an option on this ship. Even his improved processing couldn’t react properly to everything at that speed.

      Jay allowed himself to cut loose for a minute. All the stress and fear of the past few months came out as he started slicing the Forlorn to pieces with a PSI blade. He moved amongst them like a whirlwind of death and most didn’t even raise their weapon before they were cut down. He had no mercy for them. Even if he might have felt some remorse before, his bond with Eesa had some of her emotions rubbing off on him. This was a hunt. The hunter might respect the prey, but it didn’t feel sympathy for the prey.

      Then he realized, this wasn’t actually a hunt. This was an extermination. The Forlorn were pests, like cockroaches. They had spread throughout the known universe polluting one galaxy after another. He was just squishing them. That prompted him to maximize the mass of the next group and as their bodies became a thousand times heavier, they were immediately flattened. The organic parts were left oozing out of the twisted metallic remnants.

Jay reached the ship’s engines and began disintegrating all the containment parts. He was being shot by Forlorn weapons intended to cause a breakdown of his cells. His body was so durable and regenerated so quickly that he could have resisted this small arms fire, but Trina’s power allowed him to simply absorb the energy and then ultimately released it as an explosion that ended all the Forlorn around him.

      By that time, the sabotage was complete. This ship was going to blow up and nothing could stop that. Jay astral stepped off of it and into space to watch it blow apart from the inside.

      All along a partitioned portion of his mind had been tracking Eesa’s progress. Her fighter had made short work of the smaller vessels. The enhanced pulse weapons cut right through their weaker shields. The battleship that she