Free Rise of Shadows by Vincent Trigili Page A

watched the first battle play out on the video monitor. They easily took out the four pirates that were waiting for them. They expertly used their jamming technology and the sensor shadow provided by the dwarf star to get the jump on them. The big surprise in the fight was their first hit.
    “Whoa, how much power is that thing packing?” I asked after seeing the first pirate completely vaporized under their initial attack.
    “Sir, we do not have a clear measurement in the logs they provided, but intelligence estimates those cannons are putting out well over ten times the firepower of anything we have on that scale.”
    “Simply incredible,” I said.
    My assistant then brought up the second fight. I watched as they came out of jump space in easy range of the pirates that waited for them, but the pirates started to scatter instead of attack. “Why aren’t they attacking?” I asked.
    “We believe the Dust Dragon engaged a cloak at this point. As you can see, they slowly fly over to their first target, consistent with a ship under cloak,” answered my assistant.
    “The Conure is not a black ops line of cruiser. None of them can cloak,” I said.
    “Yes, sir. This one appears to be heavily upgraded. However, our scans of the ship did not reveal any cloaking technology when they joined up with our Third Wing,” he said.
    I continued to watch the fight, and in this battle a bit of their greenness showed when the pilot overestimated a turn, but still they dominated the fight with ease.
    “Wait! Roll back the video to mark 457,” I said.
    “Yes, sir,” he responded.
    “There! They clearly take a hit from two neutronion missiles. What damage did they take from that?” I asked.
    “Based on their logs, none, sir,” he said.
    “How could that be? Those look like direct hits,” I said.
    “Yes, sir. Intelligence believes they have some kind of shielding in place, based on the explosion pattern recorded in the logs,” he said.
    “Impossible. That ship is too small to have shield generators large enough to handle a blow like that,” I said.
    “Indeed, sir, yet the evidence is clear,” he said.
    Next, I watched the log of the fight with the battleships. This one I was most interested in because Shadow said they planned “to cheat,” and I was very interested in what that could mean.
    “Sir, this log, unlike the others, is incomplete. We do have some additional information from our spies among the pirates to fill in some of the missing gaps, but there are still unanswered questions. It is a very unusual fight,” he said.
    I watched them come out of jump space and fly at great speed towards one of the battleships. The pirates obviously could not see them. “Man, that is some cloak if it is hiding all that power,” I said. I continued to watch as the Dust Dragon flew up next to one of the battleships, sat there for a short while, and then took off at high speed as the battleship suddenly exploded.
    “Wait, what just happened?” I asked.
    “This would be where the logs are incomplete, sir,” he said. “Based on the report from the spies, two wizards boarded the battleship, took control of the engine room, and caused the engines to overload, which destroyed the ship and everything in the area with it.”
    “Two wizards took over the engine room on a battleship? There must have been dozens of armed men in there,” I said. Whenever we boarded the enemy craft, we found them to be vicious and ruthless fighters that were never easily beaten, even with superior numbers.
    “Yes, sir. Our spies tell us that all they heard over the comm were the screams of men dying,” he said.
    “Do we know which two wizards boarded the battleship or how they got on board?” I asked.
    “No, sir,” he said.
    Perhaps I underestimated what Alpha Academy was sending us, after all. One ship whose technology was obviously far beyond anything we or the pirates possessed had just cut a path through enemy lines, accomplishing a feat