When the alarm began blaring, Yu Lian initially thought they had run into a rearguard left behind by the raiders. But before the Throne could give him an exact count of the enemy fleet, he suddenly realized that his emotions were frighteningly steady—as if he had merely come across a cat napping in the grass beside a park path.
As a battle-hardened psychic, he should, in theory, have had some kind of emergency response. Yet he hadn't even felt the slightest emotional stir.
Either the pirate group opposite them had an unsurpassed psychic who was a master at playing possum, someone who could not only hide himself but also use some kind of spiritual array to keep the entire fleet hidden with him.
But that made no sense! If the enemy really had such an impressive trick, shouldn't they be good at hiding? How, then, had the Throne's passive detection radar picked them up?
The other possibility was that this enemy fleet, whose appearance he had never anticipated, truly posed no threat to him at all.
...All right. A mature warrior could never let himself get cocky; he had to stay calm. Yu Lian reminded himself, then immediately ordered the Throne to switch to normal cruising speed and bring its shields up to full power. Next, he checked the status of the battleship's main guns. The positron and ion cannons had both regained power, and only then did he relax a little.
His voice was calm and measured as he issued his orders, and the crew members, who had been looking somewhat tense, settled down at once.
By then, detailed intelligence on the enemy ships had finally arrived on their terminal screens.
There were more than thirty ships of various sizes, all converted from armed merchant vessels. Three of them