The Princess of Caldris (12 page)

TO BE CONTINUED...Pandoran
Age Chronicles: No-deal DePaulo and the Core Pirates.”

They were waiting for us when we dropped out
of hyperspace, it could sense them then, a dirty little swarm, and
sickeningly the most frightening thing was they had once been
human.

Klaxons hammered my ears and my empathic
senses were then overwhelmed-the strange Marauders minds, with
their ugly snake eye stares hammering my mind, then the sudden
tussle of twenty hard core air men their adrenaline and training
kicking in with a slam.

“
This is not a drill!”
Coco-butter Parsons howled but the air men’s boots were already
banging steel, half of them at their guns.

We were sitting ducks and there were a dozen
Marauder ships, easy. Particle beam fire slashed away at our ship,
the KanaaFutura. The Marauders doubtless had never seen a Caldris
Royal Navy warship here at the Galactic Core, even through their
snake infected minds I could sense a huge wave of surprise come
back as we took their fire and the mighty KanaaFutura rose through
the maelstrom of ionized particles and maligned atomic clouds her
guns announcing payback.

Nobody missed and the Marauder shielding,
magnetized ore layered over their giant ramjets, began to strip
away in a fireworks show such that the demonic, snaky victimizers
were revealed for the devil they were, squealing and riding fire
with the hellish super-massive black hole and its light-years of
swirling accretion disk as their background.

Still, no one stopped firing on either side
and we rode the streams in a twirling death volley of destruction.
Hammerstein, impossibly, was cursing and longing for a gun
port…

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dante D’Anthony was born
in South Buffalo New York and grew up there and in the Chautauqua
New York wine region. After graduating from SUNY College at Buffalo
where he studied Design, he moved to Miami Florida where he worked
in Architecture, Art Education, and Commercial Finance. He was in
the US Army Reserves, MOS Dragon gunner, and was a Union High
Temperature Insulator on power plants.

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