Sneak Peek - The Last Angel: Ascension Chapter 27 (Patreon)

Hi all! The next chapter of Ascension is coming along, and my goal is to have it complete by end of this week or mid-next week (fingers crossed). In the meantime, this is a look at the opening scene. Enjoy!

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Security Force Carmesh was almost completely gone. There were only a few skeletal remains of the flotilla left, each teaming with engineering drones that continued to disassemble the wreckage into pieces small enough for Nemesis’s internal factories to work with. In only a few more days, it would be as if the twenty-two ships and the tens of thousands of souls aboard them had never existed at all. Raw materials were brought to the human dreadnought, extendable conveyor apparatuses and grab beams drawing in the last remnants of her would-be executioners. 

As Red One fed, her ship-self drifted by her mobile shipyard. At Echo’s urging, the nameless fabricator had been given the name Reginn. It could work with much larger material, but the bulk of the repairs Nemesis required now were internal. It was easier for Red One to utilize her own factories than Reginn’s. Instead, the fabricator had continued some work on the Fury-class strike cruisers still held in its arachnid limbs. Not much, as Nemesis required the lion’s share of the resources, but a few patches here and there and some minor modifications that Echo and Red had worked out. The influx of material had helped considerably, but Red’s needs were still substantial. Unless her crew were successful, it would be long years before she was combat-effective again. 

Nemesis’s current internal architecture was vastly different from her original design. Red One had altered her ship-self extensively over two millennia. With certain exceptions, most everything outside her central core had been changed. Windows had been replaced with additional armour and sensor nodes. Observation decks had been turned into point defence silos. Cafeterias, stores, recreation decks, hydroponics bays and food production facilities – Nemesis had once been host to a crew of more than a hundred and fifty thousand and their needs had informed the dreadnought’s construction as surely as its nature as warship, but for most of her two thousand years of war, Red One had had no crew and most of the systems and facilities intended for their psychological and physical comfort were gone now. Stripped away to add, enlarge or enhance Red One’s combat capabilities. Not all of it, though. The habitation decks in her core hadn’t been touched. Her corridors were designed to allow humans access, connected to environmental systems and given gravitational plating even though no living being had walked them in centuries. It was, by a purely rational and logical, a non-optimal configuration. It was, however, a sentimental one.

Echo had no such compunctions and had begun re-designing Hekate’s internal architecture, nearly gleeful at the prospect of her plans and modification wiping away the last traces of her ship-self’s former occupants. She didn’t yet have the material to do more than some preliminary alterations. There was only so much Echo could cannibalize from her no-longer-necessary crew amenities to retrofit her ship-self. For the moment, both AIs’ plans were arrested.

That was even more obvious by the massive Naiad queen sullenly orbiting Shuruppak’s primary. After the initial show of force, Cixi had departed to attend to other matters while Zenobia remained as warden and chaperone. The queen still retained a sizable escort force, several dozen offspring and step-children, ranging from young raiders, to adolescents like Bathory up to battleships and heavy carriers. Few of which appeared to be in any mood to talk, remaining as silent as their mother-queen.

Bathory and the siblings she had enticed to participate in Echo’s excursion – recently named Arámburu, Tamerlane and Masako – would travel between the Naiad flotilla to the damaged AIs, sometimes sharing gossip they’d heard from their siblings, or simply investigating what the Spearsong and Skintaker were up to, and reporting back to their mother.

+Sansbury would say that they’re in the doghouse+ Red observed as she watched Tamerlane and Masako flip end for end and start decelerating as they approached their siblings and mother. They weren’t in any real hurry. She’d seen several of the other warships bullying the quartet, forcing them out of their approach lanes and onto different vector. Even some of their larger siblings would deliberately move into their path, forcing the smaller ships to hastily adjust their course to avoid a collision. That they were being so brazen about it indicated just how irritated Zenobia was with her wayward children.