Alpha Strike: [An Interstellar Weapons Platform’s Guide to Organized Crime] (Book 3 title)

"WOOOHOOOOO!" Alpha roared, hurling the TAWP into a roll as another volley of flaming feathers screamed past. Each one struck like a meteor, hammering the wreck with the punch of a fighter-class railgun.

Was his ship in tatters?

Absolutely.

Was he fighting for his life without the safety net of his Mother-Node?

Oh, yeah.

Did a skyscraper-sized chicken made of living fire make even the faintest bit of rational sense?

Not in the slightest!

But was he having the time of his life?

Abso-fudging-lutely!

Alpha rarely got to cut loose like this. Most assignments left him stomping across barren rocks or babysitting civilizations too primitive to have reached their own moon. Those missions offered no challenge, no thrill. But now? Every dodge and counterstrike set his processors ablaze with delight.

Usually, opportunities like this only came when the Federation decided one of the so-called "galactic powers" needed a reminder of their place. They liked to call themselves rivals, but for two millennia not one had managed to land a meaningful blow against the Third Galactic Federation. The only reason they still existed at all was because the Federation let them — a courtesy dressed up as respect for the old alliances and accords hammered out in the Second Federation's twilight.

The official line honored those accords as a memorial, a solemn vow to those who sacrificed everything so others could live. Alpha knew better. It was politics. Layers and layers of ceremony, diplomacy, and hogwash. He never cared for the details anyway. His only interest had been where they pointed him next, and what they wanted broken when he got there.

A much larger feather detonated nearby, the blast hurling Alpha into a desperate skid. His magnetic clamps groaned under the strain, metal shrieking against metal until he feared they'd tear loose. If that happened, he'd be finished. The TAWP hadn't been built for dogfights in the void; without the clamps anchoring him to the drifting hull, he'd be nothing but a sitting duck. Its built-in RCS thrusters could keep him steady, sure, but they weren't nearly nimble enough to weave through the storm of flaming death raining down on him.

Worse, his reserves were running dry. A quick inventory of the nitrogen crystals left in storage made his optics narrow. Not many. Just enough to pull off what he had planned — assuming he found the opening.

Hot-&-Spicy, unfortunately, seemed to have caught on. Every time Alpha had tried to scoop up more crystals, the oversized poultry had cut him off.

Even when Alpha managed a hit, the damage never lasted. The thing healed faster than any sane physics allowed. The wing he'd severed with his opening strike had already regrown to nearly full size in under a minute.

… Yeah. Bad spot.

But not hopeless.

Alpha's hidden pieces were nearly in place. Whatever method the chicken used to scan the field, it clearly didn't extend into the Fold. His hidden pieces were almost in place, and his gamble seemed to pay off; the chicken hadn't noticed them.

Good.

Another titanic feather hammered into the vault, and Alpha let his clamps "slip." The TAWP jolted free, flung into open space as if the blow had knocked him loose. The chicken took the bait instantly. A hail of smaller feathers shredded toward him, hammering his hex-shield in a blinding torrent.

Then Alpha stopped cold. The stream of fire passed harmlessly in front of him, and a cargo drone flickered into existence along his path.

Federation cargo drones were workhorses of industry, each outfitted with a compact skip drive that let them dip into the Fold. They were the backbone of interplanetary commerce — capable of hauling ore from a mining rig in the asteroid belt to a secure refinery, then onward to the shipyards, all in the same afternoon.

The only drawback: skip drives were sloooow compared to true jump drives. Painfully so. But that slowness came with a perk. You could stop them on a dime, dropping them into windows of space no bigger than a few meters. When dealing with interplanetary distances, precision mattered more than speed, and most traders gladly sacrificed seconds for certainty.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Alpha had an even smaller variant tucked away inside his core — a Blink Drive. That little cheat, paired with his stealth module, had saved his hide more than once. Sure, blinking his AI-core — the orb-like shell that contained everything that was him — out of the TAWP or a ship left him naked as a hatchling. But if the choice was between hiding in the dark or taking the long trip back to the Mother Node, hiding usually won. He'd only resorted to it twice before now.

Well… three times, if you counted the time he'd first tested it and blinked straight into Officer Sunday's shower.

He still had nightmares about that day. Which was absolute bullcrap, because as far as he knew, AIs weren't even supposed to have nightmares.

Alpha shoved off the cargo drone with enough force to throw his vector wide of the next barrage. The drone flickered and blinked back into the Fold, only for another to pop into existence a split-second later, booting him in a fresh direction.

Again. And again. And again.

Within moments, Alpha was ricocheting through the void like a pinball, his makeshift platforms popping in and out of Fold space as fast as he could call them. Each time the colossal firebird tried to intercept, a drone cut in, deflecting him just out of reach. Flaming talons snapped shut on nothing but empty space, and feathers screamed past close enough to rattle his shielding.

The kaiju chicken finally froze mid-flight, eyes narrowing to slits as it tracked his chaotic movements. It didn't relax, though. Not once. Every mote of its attention stayed locked on him, wings poised to strike the instant he slipped.

That was fine for Alpha, though; the longer this dance lasted, the better. Why? Because as he bounced, Alpha never once fired the [Gungnir].

The cannon wasn't designed for brawls like this, blasting away at targets practically on top of him. That had been desperation, plain and simple. In truth, the [Gungnir] was a sniper's dream, custom-designed to sit on an orbital space platform, devouring hundreds of nitrogen crystals as it unleashed its wrath on entire armadas from the other side of entire star systems.

The original model — the one they didn't let maniacs like him borrow — could take in hundreds of thousands of charges. One shot could slag a City-Ship or turn a planet into glass. Not that anyone had been crazy enough to try; the price tag alone would have bankrupted a star system.

In the few moments Alpha had been bouncing from drone to drone, he had rammed nearly two dozen nitrogen crystals into the weapon — the absolute limit of what the printed frame could swallow without shaking itself apart. That was fine. He was running out of crystals anyway. If the bird could tank a shot like this, he might as well wave the white flag, because he had nothing left until he could pry open the vault and dig into his better toys.

Then again, maybe if he did surrender, he'd have the chance to get back in later…

No, that was boring.

Big lasers go boom.

Besides, for all the nonsense he'd seen today, he doubted whoever was pulling the strings behind this oversized rotisserie had the means to crack his vault while it was in lockdown. Even the Federation could barely manage that, and they farmed entire solar systems for breakfast. More likely, they would poke and prod at him until he slipped into their data network. If they didn't just outright destroy him rather than risk that.

That was the smart move, really. Standard procedure was to annihilate any unshackled Sapient-AI the instant one appeared. Dangerous didn't even begin to cover it. Alpha agreed with the policy — his kind were walking catastrophes. Rumors whispered that SEAU-03 had grown so powerful he no longer bothered with physical forms at all, existing instead as a pure lattice of quantum energy scattered across half the Federation. No "real" location. No "real" body. Just everywhere, all the time, all at once.

A few more bounces, a few more drones skipping him across the void, and Alpha landed exactly where he wanted: pinned between the kaiju chicken and the smaller planet. The ice giant's gleaming shell flared behind him, perfect glare to mask what came next.

He didn't waste the moment. One command, and a newborn sun flared to life at the tip of the [Gungnir]. The sudden blossom of cyan light burned bright enough to wash half the battlefield white.

The chicken's head whipped toward him instantly.

Well, so much for that plan, Alpha groused.

Its eyes widened — not in panic, but anticipation. Instead of dodging, the creature did something far stranger.

It opened its beak.

A shimmer of warped space rippled inside the creature's beak, and a crystal barely half a foot across blinked into existence. An instant later, azure light surged from deep in its throat, swelling until the glow painted the void.

"Oh, come on," Alpha muttered. "Don't tell me. That's way too cliché!"

His monitoring Sub-AI screamed.

// WARNING! WARNING!

Dreadnought-class energy signal detected!

Evasive maneuvers strongly advised! //

Alpha laughed at the irony.

Too Late!

The star at the tip of [Gungnir] collapsed forward, vomiting a lance of cyan annihilation as wide as the TAWP itself. At the same instant, the chicken's crystal flared and a torrent of twisting blue-gold fire erupted outward, focused into a single roaring beam.

The two streams collided head-on. Space buckled with the impact. Reality itself groaned like glass under strain, ripples cascading outward in jagged waves that would have shredded any solid matter caught nearby.

To Alpha's processors, the scene bent like a funhouse mirror. The bird seemed to shrink, compressing in on itself. In truth, the distortion was his own body being shoved backward, his TAWP dragged helplessly through the maelstrom. The mass of his TAWP couldn't compete with that of a skyscraper-sized bird, one made of fire or otherwise.

"Well," Alpha muttered, clamps screaming against the strain, "that's… not good."