（外文电子版资料）Simon Hawke - Hammer of Light, Omen of Darkness.pdfVIP

HAMMER OF LIGHT, OMEN OF DARKNESS by Simon Hawke A Descent: FreeSpace Story There was a moment, a brief, incandescent moment, when Creed Harlow could have chosen death. It would have been so easy. Instead, he’d hesitated ... just a beat too long ... and now it was too late. By default, he had chosen life. And now he’d have to live with it. The Vasudan gunner was damn good. In that fateful moment of Harlow’s crucial hesitation, the gunner had taken out the Apollo fighter’s entire port weapons bank. One shot. The Banshee cannon pulse-blast had sheared the entire bank of secondaries clean off their mounting struts, like a laser scalpel slicing through soft tissue. And now Harlow had nothing left to fight with. The starboard weapons bank had already been destroyed, along with the primary disruptor pods. The Vasudans knew that; they could easily see where the GTF Apollo fighter had been crippled, shot to pieces as if some gigantic sledge hammer had knocked huge chunks right off it. The amazing thing was that the cabin still maintained integrity. The life support systems were still functioning, even with the shields gone and over half the ship reduced to slag. And they wanted to mothball these puppies, Harlow thought. The Apollo was one goddam terrific piece of hardware. He had been lucky. If anyone could call this luck. The Vasudan squadron got in close under the pretext of providing escort, which was always welcome in this sector ever since the Shivans had appeared in the Ikeya system, coming through the node with some kind of huge, Cruiser-class vessel rumored to be about the size of Rhode Island, capable of launching somewhere between several hundred and over a thousand fighters. Intelligence was a little wonky on that score. The reports were mostly secondary sources, panicked subspace frequency transmissio