It was littered with weapons, an array of tracking signatures intersecting on his command carrier like a lattice of inevitability. It flared a bright red as it vented its CKRO, seeming to exhale like a mythical beast. Nearly a kilometre long, mythical beast may have been an understatement.
Rumours of the Black Nova had spread like oil over Coalition territory, wisps of the creature heard even in the Coalition capital: Raum.
The voices of his officers were mere echoes as he watched the predator close in on his ship.
“Can we outrun it?” the captain asked.
Tactical was frozen at his station, not believing the readouts the instruments were telling him. “Nothing can outrun that. Shall we open fire?”
“Nothing can kill that.” the captain replied.
There was a surreal gracefulness to the creature. It seemed to be watching them, orbiting their carrier wryly along the z-axis, spinning slightly on its own axis as if to get a good look at its target.
Fighters, like water, seemed to flow from it, ever since it jumped in the stream hadn’t ended, a cloud of craft adding to their mothership’s tracking lasers, illuminating the captain’s ship like a flashbulb.
It fired. Power failed. The hull shuddered. Officers grabbed their stations for support, their shouts muffled as the air escaped; as everything decompressed.
There was no escape.