Shackleton's Folly (The Lost Wonder Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page B

bent over, picked up the coil, and made a break for a clearing in the roadway down the street. He sprinted in the direction of the Quest as it landed hard in front of him, making imprints in the pavement and straining the landing gear to near breaking.
    Alec and his pursuers ran toward the Quest ’s open hatch. Alec threw himself, his staff, and coil inside just as the alien closest behind him lit up as it smacked into the force field. Alec got up and hit the “Close Hatch” button as the ground dropped away. He picked up his prized coil and made his way to the command deck. When he passed through the galley, he stopped long enough to stow the copper coil in a closet for safety’s sake. He arrived at the command deck and strapped himself into the pilot’s seat.
    “We have a problem. The Quest is tracking a battleship… no, two,” the alarmed Dancer informed Alec.
    “Let’s get out of here!” Alec took command, punched in instructions, and rubbed the worn spot on the bulkhead for luck. “The Quest can outrun anything they can launch against us,” he said assuredly. Alec had spent a lot of time on the refit of the Quest , a customization to a technical level of sophistication her builders never envisioned. The idea was simple: A fast ship was hard to fire on. The Quest could easily outrun all standard civilian craft and most of the small world navies. Alec lavishly upgraded systems for speed and defense. But there was always a first time.
    The Quest lifted off, smashing through the jungle canopy. The ship flew above the city in a widening circle, came around over the central pyramid, and gave a wag to each side in a salute to the world’s long-gone inhabitants on its way to the heavens.

CHAPTER THREE
    The bayonet-like main-line battleships Illia and Saleen , of the Koty Union, hung in space like enormous predatory birds, challenging any opponent craft to come to them. They maintained a static position in space relative to the battlefield and Daltron-6. They kept the high ground, with the opposition forces of the Metalunan pinned down in the planet’s gravity well.
    A third force fought both the Koty and Metalunans for salvage rights to the world. A formation of marauders reentered normal space from out of the star shine above and behind the battleships and fired upon the sensor arrays and command-and-control sections of the Saleen . The offensive intensity of the attack was repelled by two dozen weapons batteries firing a hailstorm of energy beams and kinetic penetrators — or “needles,” as the gunnery crews called them. The railgun weapons created lethal clouds of death, firing hundreds of thousands of needles. The needles fired at extremely high velocities; their computer-calculated formations were invisible against the darkness of space until an unwary fighter was struck by the cloud of sheer destructive mass. The fighter’s shields, in all too short a time — measured in millionths of a second — were simply overwhelmed by the needles, and the craft was torn to shreds. The needles passed through the ship — five thousand in less than a second. The fleeing marauders that survived the run on the Saleen had eight of their number explode in blazes of light. Only torn and shredded metal was left after the horrific collision.
    The battleships Illia and Saleen watched as their combined fighter squadrons flew by in tight military formation and obliterated all opposition. The marauder forces reformed at a relatively safe distance from the planetary forces and the Koty. Elements of the blockading fleet had decelerated from hyperspace into the area that was to have been empty but now was filled with marauders regrouping. Energy weapons lanced through the darkness as the two groups of fighters fought for planetary control.
    The front line of the struggle moved closer to the planet, as reinforcements from the blockading Metalunan fleet rose from low orbit, taking on all who sought claim to the abandoned