Free Last of the Immortals (The Jessica Keller Chronicles Book 3) by Blaze Ward Page A

them at the specific sensor signature of their intended victim.”
    His face grew more serious at this point. Jessica could see pain in them that hadn’t been there before.
    “At the Battle of Petron ,” he continued with a softer look and a nod, “they used the former technique to target the 4–ring Mothership Kali–ma , and in the course of the maneuvering, destroyed Supernova instead.”
    His voice had dropped to almost nothing.
    Jessica still felt as if someone had punched her in the stomach.
    For a moment, the flash of light as Supernova exploded flooded her mind. She felt her breath catch and tried to suppress the flinch she felt, but she knew he saw. Moirrey probably did as well. The others were to either side, and didn’t know her as well.
    But even they fell silent and somber.
    Jessica hadn’t realized how much her own loss had affected her crew, how much they apparently felt her pain.
    She found some manner of solace there.
    Eventually, she told herself, she would be able to remember Daneel without pain.
    She just had to live long enough.
    If there was such a thing as long enough .
    A moment passed. Utter solemnity.
    Jessica took a breath.
    “So how would you solve this problem, Oz?” she asked as her voice began to settle.
    “Ancient sailors,” he replied, “mariners on water seas, used to have a legend about a creature that would call them by singing. A beautiful woman who turned out to be half–fish, luring them to their doom on the rocks.”
    “You mean sirens,” Jessica guessed.
    “Indeed, Commander, the bane of the seafarer on the Homeworld. Replicated here in the hopes of luring Imperials to their own special brand of doom.”
    Jessica let a single raised eyebrow ask her question.
    “When launched, this shuttle craft, this Siren if you will, will emit a sensor signal so very comparable to that of Auberon that, when we briefly turn our own sensors down to almost nothing, Imperial missiles should instead begin to track on the shuttle, following it to their own doom. One hopes that we can lead an entire wave of such missiles so far astray that they are unable to recover and thus pose no greater threat.”
    “I see,” she said. “The two shuttles are identical?”
    “Oh, no, Commander,” Oz oozed charm and confidence. “Although money was no object here, we simply did not have that much in the way of spare electronics that we could cannibalize for this particular occasion, given the constraints of time under which we labored.”
    Jessica followed again as he moved to the second shuttle. This one was in even worse shape. The bow section had a strange, dimpled appearance.
    He pushed a button that would normally open the side hatch. She could tell that there was no hatch here, just a sheet of hull metal that had been quickly welded in place.
    Instead, the entire bow section retracted away from the center, moving up, down, and to both sides on sliding hinges.
    Jessica found herself staring at the nose of a number of missiles, stacked cheek–in–jowl in a honeycomb that filled the entire area where crew, passengers, and cargo would normally ride. She counted eleven warheads, ten of them red and the one in the exact center painted blue.
    “And this, the Manticore,” he continued. “Named for the ancient Persian monster with the body of a lion, the head of a man, and the tail of a dragon that shoots poisoned spines at its target.”
    Oz smiled wickedly.
    “The entire craft is actually a missile, Commander,” he said. “We used a spare control system and wired it in to run autonomously. When launched, it will fly in the direction programmed, until it either comes within a preset range of a target, or until a command is sent from Auberon . At that time, it will sequence out all of the missiles in rapid succession at a designated target or range of targets.”
    “And the blue one fires first?” Jessica asked, intrigued.
    “One of Moirrey’s Mark II Archerfish, sir,” he replied. “I