Chapter 46: Wilds
They were in the boonies now. At the ass-end of human space now. The middle of bum fuck nowhere.
And that put a massive grin on Derek’s face.
They’d left behind the core the very instant they’d left Sol, jumping out of it with their very first catapult jump, then spent quite a bit of time faffing around in “The Rim,” aka the semi-industrialized scattering of systems around humanity’s home, nominally extending around a hundred light years from that point, though there were several places that qualified in terms of population and tech, that lay outside of it.
But now, they were beyond even that, a place home to only those wielding magic, who’d given up on bringing along the vast tech base required for “modern” life and were instead forging something entirely new.
Enclaves of magic and the unknown.
What could be better?
Actually using their newly acquired freedom and testing their goddamn weapons!
So right here, in this random star system, nameless, save for an astrological catalog number, the Dragonfly’s guns fired under Derek’s command for the very first time.
The first time ever outside of testing, to be precise, though you wouldn’t know that from watching the way small asteroids exploded under the hammerblows of the lasers and particle beams that made up the Dragonfly’s secondary armament, the lighter lasers that normally served as point defense vaporized the resultant debris.