Free Web NovelChapter 517: Chapter 517
"I should have seen this coming! How could I be such a f*cking idiot?!" Avery shouted, berating himself for allowing an enemy to have snuck aboard. fɾeewebnoveℓ.co๓
They had carefully vetted the members of the crew and Kasandra had even asked them questions while listening with her enhanced hearing for any lies.
Still, there were some species she had not trained to pick out changes in their heart rate, breathing, and body language that allowed her to tell when people were not being truthful.
If Kasandra’s and Kaiden’s enemies from their home had been keeping track of Avery and his team’s movements for a while, it was plausible that they had managed to sneak someone into the crew.
Avery did not know for certain if the infiltration happened during the first or second round of recruitment.
Still, if he considered the timing of this attack, it was likely that it was during the most recent recruiting effort where they shored up their losses from Zefield’s expedition.
There was also the possibility that one of the crew members was merely being bribed for their cooperation, but that would have come with a lot more risks.
The person in question could have just taken the payments and then told everything to Avery. Without any actual loyalty to a cause, anyone would be a lot more likely to become a double agent rather than betray Avery.
He offered good pay and befits for the work they did, and the Intrepid had some pretty luxurious facilities so far as spaceships went.
Regrettably, all that he could do now was try and clean up the mess they found themselves in.
"Ezra, I want you to gather a team of security personal and flush out and find the rat that’s damaging our internal systems." Avery said, having contacted his second-in-command with his terminal.
He made similar calls to Olivia, Burke, and Kaiden as well.
Since he was not yet ready to deploy their ships to fight back yet, he figured it would be better to get the people he knew he could trust to hunt down the enemy agent or agents hiding on the Intrepid.
After he had received responses of confirmation, he turned his attention back to the assault happening outside.
The Intrepid was being constantly bombarded, and it was only thanks to the vessel’s powerful shields and their attackers’ unwillingness to fire any highly destructive munitions that they were still doing fine.
Fortunately, if these people’s goal really was to capture Kasandra and Kaiden, then they would not risk destroying the Intrepid.
They needed to disable it and then board to find their targets. Although, if they did get onboard, there was little chance they would leave anyone else alive.
"We just received an encoded response from Cerise. She has a unit nearby that’s patrolling two systems over. There’s only nine of them, but she’s sending them our way. They should arrive in around nineteen minutes." Jasmine said ad Avery contemplated what they should do.
A distress call was already being sent out from the Intrepid, so it would not be too strange for a group of Alliance Police that was luckily nearby to respond.
The real problem was going to be lasting those few minutes.
It had only been a little over four minutes since the one hundred sixty-three ships had started attacking, and the Intrepid’s shields were already close to dipping below seventy percent.
Their enemies were also becoming more emboldened with every passing moment.
With at least one spy being onboard, there was no doubt that these assailants knew that the Intrepid was not what it appeared to be.
If Avery gave the order to deploy their weapons and launch the ships in the two hangers, their attackers would be in for a hell of fight.
To avoid failing the mission Cerise had given them, Avery could not due that though. And every second that he continued to hold back, the less the people after Kasandra and Kaiden felt threatened by reprisal.
"We need to stall in anyway we can. Anything that you two can think of, do it. I need to concentrate now, so don’t disturb me unless it’s important." Avery said, addressing both Kasandra and Jasmine.
After he did, he sat in his chair in the lotus position and closed his eyes.
While using the Intrepid’s weapon systems to attack or defend would give them away immediately, there was something that Avery could do that would not be detected by any sensors.
Even visually, all that would be seen was the outcome, without anyone being able to descend the cause.
’Six kilometers is still about all I can handle, but it will have to do.’
Tuning everything else out, Avery focused on his psionic abilities.
The entire flow of energy around him became visible, and without hesitation, he began severing anything closing in.
Lasers moved too quickly for him to intercept, and projectiles focusing only on momentum like multi-cannon fire had nothing for his powers to interact with.
Missiles on the other hand were slow enough and packed with plenty of electronic devices for him to attack.
To anyone watching, it would look like a misfire had occurred. Not something that was too uncommon. Any one thing inside being damaged could cause a missile to not go off.
However, it did not take long for their enemies to notice that nearly all of the explosives that they were launching ended up just stopping out of nowhere.
Another unexplainable phenom that they encountered was phantom attacks on their shields.
Whenever anyone got too close to the Intrepid, some sort of undetectable weapon would strike against their shields.
Naturally, this was Avery using his ability to severe energy. His power was truthfully was not particularly effective against shields since he would have to exhaust their capacity to get through them. Something that he found vexing. If he could slip past them, he could attack the vessels’ systems instead.
Thankfully, the enemies did not know about Avery’s power’s weakness, and being hit by a strike that no one could see and no instruments could detect served as a useful deterrent.
After just a few more minutes, no one was willing to get too close to the Intrepid any longer.
