Harem Assassins : King Sekton's Harem Planet, Book 2: A Space Opera Harem Adventure Baron Sord (good books to read for adults .txt) 📖

metal and silicone. The nightside flickered with packets of light shooting information this way and that, traveling in a cross-cross of straight lines and 90-degree turns.

To a human observer like Tim Pittwell, Pandemon might resemble a spherical and metallic motherboard bristling with overclocked processors and flickering fiberoptic data lines.

Somewhere in orbit above the mechanical planet, Hade’s warship unfolded into space, its spiked and savage hull appearing as a series of spinning, twirling, and unfolding triangles that had not been there a second before.

On the warship’s underside, ghastly green light poured from one of the hangar bay doors as it whirred open. The sounds weren’t audible in space, but inside the hull of the warship, the high-torque motors rumbled and whined.

Hade’s destroyer detached using its smaller docking thrusters. Once clear, its main plasma drive lit up, shaking both ships as it sped toward Pandemon.

Closer to the surface, the planet was teeming with cybernetic unlife. The light from the two suns circling each other at the center of the Pandemonium Solar System — Aught and Naught — bathed Pandemon in a constant wash of deadly radiation that easily pierced the cybernetic planet’s thin atmosphere. For Pandemon’s unliving inhabitants, that radiation fueled all unlife.

Hade’s destroyer hurtled toward the dayside of Pandemon, streaking over the metal and microchip landscape — the “cyberscape” — of precision structures.

An endless ocean of slowly swiveling Em-Panels covered every upward-facing surface. These electromagnetic, full-spectrum voltaic panels harnessed every watt of solar radiation exploding from Aught and Naught. Every panel automatically followed both suns throughout the day, creating slow-motion panel-wave patterns observable from space.

Crossing the double-terminator where Pandemon’s dayside shadowed to nightside, Hade’s destroyer missiled low over the dark cyberscape. Thick steam clouds billowed up from countless fusion cooling towers, set everywhere in pairs, quads, or octs.

Dotting the cyberscape elsewhere were relics from Pandemon’s ancient past. Jump Towers. The ancient towers sent columns of light beaming straight up into space, transmitting the unliving minds of Pandemon’s inhabitants in the form of pure data, beaming them to receiver starcraft that had ventured out from the Pandemonian Solar System millions of years ago, intent on exploring the farthest reaches of their home galaxy without the benefit of Fold Drive. Like any software upgrade, the latest Pandemonian minds and technical innovations could be transmitted at the speed of light to the oldest and most distant surviving Pandemonian sub-light starcraft scattered throughout their galaxy. That practice had been obsolete for millennia, ever since the Kurkullans had invented and distributed viable Folding Technology to a large portion of the universe, a technology the unliving denizens of Pandemon now relied on as much as any other alien race that used it for intergalactic travel and commerce.

Today, Pandemon’s Jump Towers were merely an artifact of their ancient history, kept alight for the sake of tradition, and as a symbol of a proud era of historical Pandemonian superiority and galactic dominance that was eons gone.

It was now merely a historical curiosity that, long before the Kurkullans had licensed their Folding Technology to member planets of ITAP — the Intergalactic Trade Alliance of Planets — the unliving overlords of Pandemon had been steadily expanding their empire of unlife across their home galaxy and into the nearest surrounding galaxies for millions of years at sub-light speeds, and doing so faster than any other pre-Fold space-faring civilization could manage at the time. If not for the arrival of Folding Technology for everyone, courtesy of the generous Kurkullans, the unliving overlords of Pandemon might have eventually achieved their rootkit plan of universal domination, crushing all life and replacing it with Unlife.

Many of today’s most prestigious Universal Historians believed the Kurkullans had unwittingly and single-handedly saved all organic life in the known universe from a fate worse than death, simply by virtue of sharing their Fold Drive with everyone else… for a reasonable licensing fee. The Kurkullans were generous, but they weren’t altruists.

They were capitalists.

For the Kurkullans, licensing their Fold Drive to every ITAP member planet was merely a way to maximize universal commerce and increase sales of their superior technologies to paying customers. The Kurkullans knew you couldn’t make money without customers to sell or license your products to, the more the better.

Plasma engines whined and crackled as Hade’s destroyer slowed somewhere above the sprawling, megastructure compound of a Cybertronic Conversion Factory on the nightside surface of Pandemon.

Engines screaming, the destroyer hovered down between razor-sharp factory buildings and settled heavily onto its gear. The underside ramp lowered with a whir and clanged against the deck. Shrieking engine turbines slowed to growling and the plasma generators crackled to quiet. Cooling vents jetted impressive clouds of pressurized condensation.

Hade trotted down the ramp, his armor red and resplendent, led by his viciously barking and lunging cybernoid Killhounds yanking at their spiked-chain leashes. When Hade reached the metal deck of Pandemon, his titanium hooves clang-tinged like happy hammers on friendly anvils.

Vok Nyfe followed, standing calmly on his quietly hovering plasma-driven levitation disc. His black cloak billowed slightly around his skeletal cybernetic form. As always, he proudly held his infinitely-transforming technomantic staff.

A squadron of pirates in Stygian power armor thudded along behind Vok Nyfe, carrying their Stygian K177 assault rifles at the ready. The pirates were heavily armed because every square meter of Pandemon was as dangerous as the jungles of Zalaxia. The adaptive camouflage plates on their Stygian armor switched automatically, changing from the dingy patterns that mimicked the interior of Hade’s destroyer to the inescapable cyberscape prison of straight lines and right angles surrounding them on Pandemon.

Hade stopped on the segmented deck and whipped his white-hot plasma tail. The thin air was humid and the deck was slick with moisture from the fusion cooling towers. Light hitting the wet deck scattered in a kaleidoscope of reflections bouncing in random directions.

Hade’s Killhounds barked incessantly, the sounds echoing off the surrounding metal walls of the Conversion Factory. Still lunging, the Killhounds’ case-hardened claws squealed and gouged the metal deck, spraying sparks and peeling up curling strips of