"We're not prey! All ships, turn around! Activate the jump engines immediately!" Major General Eskett roared, clutching the charred command console.
His battlecruiser, the Admiral Durlie, was indeed burning, but it hadn't suffered any fatal damage. Compared with the friendly ships that had already broken apart, they were lucky.
Through the ship's viewports, scorching beams of energy streaked through space, weaving into a matrix of light that flared and died in an instant. Yet even that furious barrage had failed to inflict enough damage to fatally cripple the battlecruiser that had broken through.
With flames licking along her hull and craters pocking her sides, she was like a battle-hardened warrior charging through a hail of blades. She plunged ahead with unstoppable momentum into the number-one gravity well of the Shanhai A system, now renamed Juyong Pass.
And so, after the Empire left seven or eight warships of various sizes behind in the system, its probing attack on the Shanhai Corridor ended in failure.
This had happened on January 15, 835.
"How many times has this happened now?" King Shazhamen asked, watching their ships retreat.
His voice and expression were perfectly calm. He was still the same composed, refined gentleman he had always been.
But that only made the imperial generals present all the more unsure whether the Imperial Elector was genuinely calm or suppressing a dark fury. They stood there trembling.
Then the youngest man present held up a number with his fingers and said matter-of-factly, "The sixth time."
He was the current King Soren, barely twenty years old. He made it clear that he was a king too, just like old King Sha. Sure, the other man was the senior king and he the junior, but that didn't mean he had to humor the older man's moods. He could