Free Falco Invictus: On the Forge of War by Rodney C. Johnson

range holy so also the winged-ones
who had made a home at the Himalayan base honored it. Cries filled
the air calling in an unfamiliar language: “Kroi, Kroi, Kroi!”
words filled with anger and despair. Frederika felt the sadness for
she experienced it herself. Pain, sorrow, anger and hatred burned
inside her. In her deepest core she was responsible for the fleeing
figures as though they were her kin. She needed to protect
them.
    Purple lightning struck from the sky. Some
kind of weapons rained down upon the city and turned it to ash. She
knew without a doubt that hope had been lost. Those winged beings
were not taking to the air to do battle, but rather to escape the
carnage that befell their once glorious city.
    In the darkened cabin.
    Frederika sat up, her eyes quickly adjusting
to the night. The dream throbbed in her brain. Something happened.
Her instincts told her this vision, had been brought about by a
change of course in the scheme of the universe. Déjà vu pressed
down on the Morningstar and overwhelmed her. A cold feeling chilled
her bones. Frederika felt as if doom itself had entered her life
and she could do nothing to escape it. A thought nagged at her that
she had some how been at fault for the conflagration of the city in
her dreams. This greatly bothered her. How could the destruction be
her doing?
    Around the room she glanced and Frederika
noticed that Mia had become uncovered on her futon. She went over
and fixed the girl's covers. In the last few days, Frederika had
grown very fond of the girl. Mia became the sister she never
had.
     
     
    [Unknown Space: 1:30 AM Falcanian Standard
Time]
    There is a Tarik aphorism which says the
universe leans toward irony. What had hidden the Bloodwing from the Excalibur 's sensors had been in truth the immense
black mass of a funeral barge launched by a civilization a thousand
years now gone. The barge propelled itself from the depths of
hyperspace back into normal space because of a tremor in space-time
which created a wormhole. Its appearance proved most fortuitous for
the Falcanian crew. Indeed it could be nothing but destiny itself
that these things had converged here and now.
    Fashioned from a dark, sensor absorbing
crystal, the barge was able to block the ship's sensors. Had Braden
followed his gut and sent out a scout, the black sloping barge
would have appeared to the naked eye, but hid the Tair'Aliran from sensors.
    Kulcarin and his crew were right beneath the
massive thing, its mass blocking the faint starlight from view.
Kulcarin should have ordered his ship back to Earth. Instead, he
chose to investigate the object that failed to register on his
ship’s sensors, but could clearly be seen outside the portholes of
his Bloodwing .
    Had he returned home, Kulcarin would have
saved himself a great deal of pain and trouble.
    There came no responses to the Tair'Aliran 's hails. The ship seemed lifeless. The strange
vessel drank in the beams of the Tair'Aliran 's forward
illumination as the attack craft hovered before the ship in search
for a means to dock. No seams or obvious cobbling together of
plating could be found in the whole of the barge. The Falcanian
corvette moved slowly up and under the black ship's hull, searching
for some means to board her and learn about the technology that
constructed a craft completely invisible to modern scanners.
    Lord Aranskrai stroked his goatee and looked
out at the wedge of a ship. He had come out here to stop the DSV
Excalibur from completing her mission. In that he failed. He
thought to compensate for his non-achievement by learning more
about this sleek black ship and its construction. Who had built
her? Where had it come from? How did its stardrive work? Answers to
any of these questions would benefit the Falcanian Khanate.
Kulcarin's sense of honor demanded that he act.
    After three hours, Kulcarin and his crew at
last discovered on the exterior of the black ship what appeared to
be a hanger bay. The bay seemed large