Disclaimer – Everything either does belong to Joss or it should. I’m just borrowing his shiny ‘verse for a while.

The 21st Lancers belong to the British Army so I’m borrowing them too. I hope they don’t mind.

Thanks to my regular readers for making it worthwhile to continue the story and special thanks to my Proof-Reader Landry.

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AI Warship Shadow – Under Hard Burn – 2520AD

Ideally Shadow would have ambushed the lone Zheng He class vessel but there just wasn’t time. He had places to be. The archaic ship was slightly out of his way but if he didn’t total it first it might go for Serenity/Granite Gorge, which were under full burn to Revelation and that was unacceptable.

Although with his reactor running at maximum the AI was putting out enough of an EM field for the other ship to detect him, his weaponry was powered down so the vessel would not know what he was carrying until he got well within effective range. It was pulsing its drive, altering its acceleration, which meant a long-range Railgun strike wasn’t going to work so Shadow was going to have to close in and burn a hole in the ship with his directed energy weapons.

The Zheng He was one of the earliest vessels, which was used at the dawn of the colonial period when humanity left Earth-That-Was en-masse. It was armed with primitive lasers and might have some of its original missile armament but neither weapon was even a remote match for Shadow.

To Shadow’s delight the Reaver ship altered course towards him. That would save some time. They were probably so used to being the top of the food chain out here it never occurred to them there might be something in this corner of the ‘Verse a damn sight meaner than they were.

Timed to the split-second Shadow powered up his Lasers and lowered his Particle-Beam Cannon into position just before he entered effective range.

Over on the Zheng He class vessel even its ancient threat recognition software would be able to detect the energy spikes of the five directed-e