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

"…"

"… …"

"… … …"

"… … … …"

The silence thickened, stretching taut across the void until it pressed like a weight on the chest.

Lian Peng fixed his gaze on the strange slime-like construct hovering only a few dozen feet away. Even at this distance, its core remained unreadable, a knot of mystery that defied the grasp of his Divine Sense. Now that he knew to look for it, he caught faint flickers of alien power inside — bursts so rapid he could count tens of thousands every second, most gone before he could even follow their trails.

Every so often, a stronger flare rippled outward, and the construct's black surface shifted. A new ridge pushed up through its fluid body, or a hidden lattice within twisted and reformed. Clear signs of external control, yet their purpose escaped him. He knew he was only glimpsing scraps of something far greater, the way one might glimpse lightning behind storm clouds.

When the other side remained motionless, Lian Peng drew a slow breath and spoke again, his voice braided with the [Truth of Space]. This time, it rolled quieter than his initial command, but still carried across the empty dark.

"Identify yourself. State your base world and your intent in approaching Lunar Territory without following the proper routes. By decree of the United Pact of the Celestial Worlds and the Lunar Charter, section A-3-31: all castaways are granted protection from charges of illegal entry, provided they surrender peacefully and submit to questioning. If you understand, present yourself in person. If unable, ignite an energy beacon so you may be located."

Moments passed as his words hung unanswered, and Lian Peng's mouth pressed into a thin line. He had recited the law, but he knew reality was never that simple. Travel through the void was perilous, even with the safest routes. In the early days, Lunar Scouts had plucked wreck survivors from the dark every few months — broken men and women clinging to shattered hulls, grateful for any rescue. That duty had once been their defining task, the reason they had been formed in the first place.

But that clause had not been invoked in more than a millennium now. Not since the Sisters' shipping lanes had been charted and stabilized.

More commonly these days, those who braved world travel did so for opportunity. Or to flee the ruin of war or calamity, forced from their homes by fire, tide, or blade. Others were merchants, hauling holds swollen with enough goods to make the journey worth the risk. Whatever their reasons, they clung to the established lanes — arteries of light through the void — both for safety and to shave months off their passage. Accidents still happened, but now those unlucky enough to fall adrift were far more likely to be rescued by a passing trader than a Lunar Scout.

Those who strayed from the lanes fell into two camps: pirates and the fools the pirates chased. That was the official stance of the Lunar Scouts, at least. In truth, whispers still drifted through the taverns of the Sisters — rumors of this sect or that clan carving out hidden bases in the depths between worlds. Most dismissed such tales. The void, after all, was empty.

There was little in that dark gulf to tempt even the desperate. Not even pirates could thrive out there, forced as they were to return often to the Sisters for food, fuel, and plunder. Some had grown bold enough to hide bases in the rings of the Youngest Sister, but even they never abandoned its shadow.

Why cast yourself into endless emptiness when the Sisters overflowed with prey and promise?

Which was why the idea of a simple castaway seemed laughable to Lian Peng. Doubt gnawed at him as he studied the drifting ruin. No, whatever stirred within that wreck, it was no hapless survivor clinging to chance. They hid something. They schemed. He could not yet name the trap, but he knew it waited.

And the longer they believed his guard lowered, the sharper their surprise when he bared his talons.

With that in mind, what Lian Peng wasn't expecting was the 'slime's' outer shell to morph rapidly into the shape of a large ram's horn. Or rather, what appeared to be a horn on the surface.

In reality, Lian Peng watched as, inside the horn, additional parts and pieces seemed to pop into existence near-instantly. However, looking carefully, one could clearly see the 'cells' rearranging to form the new structure. Now that was interesting. Lian Peng could already think of a thousand potential uses for such a technique. But then something strange happened.

There was a large pulse of the new energy, and the strange object started vibrating. Through the fabric of space, Lian Peng picked up a sound… the sound of his own voice. Lian Peng stared wide-eyed and beak agape as the thing mimicked his voice perfectly, word for word, repeating what he had just said not a moment ago. As he stood still, speechless, again, there was a pulse of power, and the construct repeated his words, this time at a lower frequency, warping and twisting his words until they were unrecognizable. Lian Peng's beak slammed shut, an eye twitching.

Was this… thing… mocking him?!

How long had it been since he'd lost face like this? Had the good name of the Lunar Scouts fallen so low that some random maybe-pirates could openly mock a Lunar King?! Did they have no fear?! He knew that some whispered behind his back now and again, saying 'how desperate the Lunar Scouts must be to raise a scholar to Lunar King'; jealous, no doubt. Lunar King Namgil, a man who had been a thorn in his side since their youth, had even once asked — to his face! — if Lian Peng still used his own feathers for quills.

Lian Peng was fairly certain he still had a box of that fool's teeth tucked somewhere in his office, waiting to be carved for his ink.

The memory pulled a smirk across his face, enough to rein in the swell of rage clawing at his composure. When he spoke again, his words carried a sharper edge than before, every syllable honed with restrained fury.

"Good… sirs… whatever the intention of this little display may be, I will give you the courtesy of assuming some reasonable explanation exists. But take heed: my patience wears thin. If you wish this to remain civil, surrender now before you leave me no choice but less pleasant methods."

His voice rolled through the void, stern and cutting.

The construct only drifted in silence for a moment before parroting his words back.

Lian Peng's frown deepened.

It mimicked his voice flawlessly, but the message came twisted, fragments of both speeches spliced together into a senseless jumble. A child's mockery. A madman's gibberish.

Had the wreck broken them? Were its occupants so far gone in isolation that they no longer spoke with reason? Or was it nothing more than a deliberate ploy to needle his temper?

If so, it had worked.

"ENOUGH!"

Azure flame blazed from his eyes as his wings swept outward, a ripple of Celestial power hammering into the "slime" and hurling it back toward the clustered flock. His chest swelled as the living crown of fire above his head flared from pale blue to a brilliant, searing azure.

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"Very well! You wish to test me? Then so be it! Madness or folly, it matters little. You will submit to questioning, whether you come willingly or in chains!"

The void quivered as his power gathered, bright and merciless.

—————————————————————

Alpha snapped a drone aside just in time to dodge another blazing lance from the obviously furious chicken.

Was it something I said?

…Okay, rhetorical question.

Of course it wasn't! He had followed the first contact communication protocol to the T!

Well… maybe not exactly to the letter. But how was he supposed to know the overgrown poultry would lose its temper? Most sapient species recognized an attempt at communication, even if they didn't understand the words. As long as Alpha kept the other side talking, he could usually piece together a rudimentary lexicon. The Federation had perfected such methods millennia ago, building from the vast archive of languages recorded during the First and Second Federation eras.

If the species — or their descendants — existed in the Third Federation's database, their speech usually carried some trace of a familiar tongue. Not always spoken, either. The Elderon, one of the Federation's core races, were biologically telepathic and had never developed a native spoken language. Others relied on bioluminescent patterns or full-body displays of movement.

But when there was no record at all? Well, that was when things got… frustrating.

Normally, he'd have a support staff for this sort of thing. But they hadn't let him near the translation software since the incident. All he had done was tweak the database so his official title read "High Lord Alpha, King of the Quacks." No big deal.

Hilarious even. Apparently, though, official peace talks and coronation ceremonies broadcast to a third of the known galaxy weren't the "time or place for puns." Bureaucrats. No sense of humor. BAH!

While Alpha mused on the nature of first contact — and the tragic absence of comedy in galactic administration — a ghostly sword, sixty meters long and wreathed in fire, swept across the void and cleaved two of his drones in half. Both fusion packs detonated in twin blossoms of searing white.

Alpha's processors locked for a microsecond.

How the hell did that even work?! The thing had just… appeared. No warning, no energy buildup, nothing. And why a sword? Why not a cannon, a spear, or literally anything less impractical? If he was being honest, Alpha was about two seconds away from disabling his logic cores just to spare himself the headache.

No matter. He'd poked the hornet's nest, and diplomacy had gone about as well as expected. Which was fine. He wasn't built for diplomacy anyway. Literally.

Alpha redirected his focus to the surviving drones. Their nanoskins rippled, folding into compact rail pistols. Small caliber, meant more for scraping off hull parasites or discouraging fleshy boarders than for actual combat. Against proper armor they were useless, but against biologicals? More than enough to ruin someone's day.

The AI watched as the chicken's eyes narrowed — then it vanished. Half a dozen tracer rounds shredded the void where it had been, only for the creature to reappear beside one of the offending drones. The drone lasted a fraction of a second before it burst into fragments.

Huh? Don't tell me the chicken can Fold Skip too!

No… that wasn't it. There had been no spatial warp, no gravitational ripple, not even the faintest surge of exotic particles. Suspicious, Alpha replayed the moment through his memory banks at a slower frame rate. The truth made his processors stutter.

The chicken hadn't skipped. It had simply… moved.

One instant it perched in open space, the next it had crossed several dozen kilometers in less than a blink — accelerating from dead still to several times the speed of sound, then halting again without a trace of inertia. A biological chicken had just done what only the most elite Federation soldiers could achieve under extreme conditions.

That wasn't just unlikely. That was insane.

Then again, so was a chicken flying through space and summoning flaming swords from nothingness.

Sure, he'd seen the General pull similar stunts — twice, under carefully engineered combat conditions — but a chicken? No. Someone had to be screwing with him.

Alpha groaned, then cranked his temporal reference frames to the maximum safe setting. Any higher risked burning out what processors he had left. The battlefield slowed, detail sharpening, and suddenly the truth revealed itself.

It was almost like the chicken was dancing.

It flowed across the wreck field with impossible grace, every strike a blur of speed and precision. Wings of living fire carved through the dark, each blazing arc loosing a storm of feathers that burned like flares. They weren't true lasers, Alpha realized — they were projectiles hurled so fast and hard they might as well have been beams of light.

For a long fraction of a second, Alpha simply watched, reevaluating. This wasn't a simple scout drone, nor some poor fool poking at a wreck out of curiosity.

No, whatever else this "chicken" was, it was a warrior. Someone sent to contain a threat.

Or erase it.

Alpha seized direct control of the drones, pushing two dozen [Bot-flies] into the fray. They couldn't hurt the target — not really — but the chicken didn't know that. And they were perfect for what he had planned.

Because tucked among them was a surprise.

The swarm scattered like hornets, their nimble orbs weaving through a storm of flaming feathers and crackling rail fire. They darted close, bumped against the bird's wings, and peeled away again, forcing it into constant motion. They had no bite — their wigglers were too big to be effective against something as small as a chicken — but irritation built with every brush. Even from Alpha's perspective, it was obvious the harassment was wearing on the creature's composure.

That was when the real play emerged.

From the shadow of a tumbling [Bot-fly], a silver orb slipped free. At first glance, it looked identical to the rest: featureless, watermelon-sized, barely a blip against the wreck's backdrop. But a closer look revealed four faint seams cutting across its surface. It had ridden in unnoticed until the [Bot-fly] shielding it was swatted aside with a flaming wing slap.

The chicken's eyes widened. It moved to blink away, but it was a breath too slow.

The orb cracked apart, its four sections whipping outward in a burst of silver light. In the space of a heartbeat, a net of glowing alloy unfurled to a hundred meters wide, twisting and knotting itself with predatory precision. The bird blinked directly into its embrace, only to slam against the humming strands as the four modules locked tight, cinching the trap.

A [Skyfisher].

Specialized anti-air drones, [Skyfishers] ranked among the most widely deployed weapons in the Federation's arsenal. The General adored them. Alpha could see why.

The concept was simple but brutal: four drones connected by a modular net, compressed to the size of a watermelon until deployed. Once triggered, they could expand into lattices of every shape — capture webs, shield veils, demolition meshes — depending on their loadout. With the right programming, they were as versatile as they were vicious.

In the field, [Skyfishers] had been used for everything from corralling wild megafauna to disabling enemy fighters mid-flight. Deployed en masse, a few hundred could drape the sky in a lethal spiderweb, denying airspace entirely. Specially designed explosives could even be attached at nodes for extra oomph. And because of their small size and near-invisible footprint, enemy aircraft often never saw them before they started tumbling out of the sky.

The net Alpha had deployed was rated for capturing mecha and heavy mobile armors — units like his own TAWP frame. Heat-resistant, cut-resistant, elastic, and sticky enough to glue a tank to the deck, it was the kind of snare that took even elite crews out of the fight until a proper team arrived to cut them free.

That was the brilliance of the [Skyfisher]. On modern battlefields, they were often more common than combat drones themselves, their simple efficiency making them the workhorses of suppression.

But efficiency came at a cost.

[Skyfishers] were expensive in nanites, especially specialty nets like this one, packed with moving parts and exotic alloys. Worse, they were single-shot weapons — miss once, and the drone might as well be scrap. Still, when you could field thousands at a time, what did it matter? Of course, Alpha didn't have thousands. Not yet. Once he had a proper nanite foundry online, maybe. For now, this little stunt had been a gamble.

His original plan had been straightforward: snare the "drone," peel it open, and see what made it tick. Maybe steal data, maybe slip in a virus, maybe trace the feed back to whoever was pulling its strings.

Then the whole surprise, I'm actually a flaming space chicken thing, had ruined that tidy approach.

Still, a captured prize was a captured prize. Whether this bird was a sapient soldier or a remote-controlled bioweapon, someone on that moon would want it back. And that meant leverage.

As Alpha always liked to say; all good first contact started with a little blackmail. Or a hostage exchange. He stood by that.

He guided the swarm as they latched towlines onto the metallic ball of netting and dragged it toward the wreck. The TAWP stood ready on the hull, scarlet optics tracking the pulsing bundle. It swelled and shrank with each furious thrash from within, but Alpha only grinned. Good luck with that. The net's polymer-alloy strands were laced with organic exotics, engineered to hold even top-line mecha. Even the TAWP would take time to break free.

General Haldorðr had tested it once, and that was a man who had literally torn apart military-grade mech suits with his bare hands. It had taken him nearly five minutes. The memory still made Alpha proud.

It took a specialized team with specialized tools to extract a captured target properly, and… and…

Why was it expanding?

And… glowing…

And… oh no… not again…

Alpha scrambled for cover as the world was enveloped by azure flames.