You could tell that, though they were under attack, everyone from the captain to the soldiers was fired up. Some even seemed eager to slap those Imperial fleets right in the face.
Looking at the soldiers' enthusiasm and the Imperial forces' wretched state, Yu Lian couldn't share their feelings. All he could hear in his ears was noise.
He had thought that, at the very least, the Imperial forces wouldn't discover him before he reached the end of the Cloud Tower Passage.
For four days, the lone Pilgrim had proceeded cautiously along the narrow route, keeping its aether waves and radio transmissions silent. But just as it was about to cross the border of the Imperial Cloud Tower Star Region, it was finally spotted by the dense array of deep-space probes.
These sensitive, active-sensing deep-space probes were expensive, but the Empire had spared no expense, deploying at least a hundred along the nearby routes. It was almost as if they were scanning a field of prairie dogs with "Eyes of the Heavens."
When the probes activated and began actively scanning space for subtle mass fluctuations, they also set off the Pilgrim's warning systems.
Perhaps they'd developed a kind of empathy for one another because they were both expensive Imperial war machines.
But these costly war machines had become watchtowers in the border systems, used like disposable goods.
As the captain put it, "The Imperial bastards use them like cans on a tripwire. Back home, the farmers in New Chang'an use things like these to catch rabbits."
Actually, cans on a tripwire weren't much use for catching rabbits. They were more likely to catch prairie dogs. Still, with the Empire putting on such a show, it would be rather embarrassing if the probes did nothing at all. The Empire had certainly