Nightfall (Blood on the Stars Book 10) by Jay Allan

Author:Jay Allan [Allan, Jay]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: System 7 Publishing
Published: 2018-11-01T04:00:00+00:00

* * *

Anya Fritz stood outside Dauntless’s reactor control room, staring at the thick metal door. She paused as she moved to enter the space, held back by something unseen, but definitely felt. She’d been in the chamber dozens of times before the fighting around Megara had begun, but the last time she’d entered the space in an emergency, she’d almost died there.

Walt Billings had died.

Fritz was a cold fish, a fact she’d always known about herself. But now, she felt fear and remorse, and she struggled to step into the haunted space, cleared now of the radiation that had so poisoned it, but not free of the spirits of Billings and the others who had died there.

Those who had died following her orders.

Those who had died when she had lived.

She walked across the large room, her boots clicking on the polished metal floors. To any observer, she appeared as resolute and unshakable as she ever had. But inside, she was hurting.

The room looked immaculate, almost untouched by the battle raging through the system, and by the usual desperate damage-control efforts of stringing cables and equipment across an already battered chamber. Fritz had seen many combats, and she’d come to realize the factor randomness and luck played in each. She’d served aboard two ships that carried the name Dauntless, and both had been desperately damaged in some of their fights. But this time, so far, at least, the enemy’s fire had found other targets, and Admiral Barron’s flagship had avoided all but light and superficial damage.

So far.

That couldn’t last, she knew. If her plan didn’t work, if she couldn’t get the ships of the fleet out of the trap springing all around them, Dauntless would be blasted to scrap, as would every other Confederation ship in the system. Megara was as good as lost. The only question that remained was if the fleet was also lost.

She stopped in front of a massive control panel and paused, for just a second. She’d run her calculations a dozen times, and she was as sure as she could be it would work. But the margin was slim, the exact levels of the fuel feed and the reaction control almost like threading a needle. If she erred on the low side, nothing would happen, or the reactors would just shut down. The fleet would face the advancing Hegemony forces, and it would be destroyed.

If she pushed just a bit too hard, the reactors would jump right through the redline, and systems would start to overload. Catastrophically. As in ships vanishing in the fury of unleashed nuclear fusion. She’d always been sure of herself, but she’d never done something as wildly desperate as this.

She sat down at the lone workstation on the wall, turning toward the half-dozen engineers standing behind her as she did. “I’m going to set up the coded sequence and transmit it to the other ships of the fleet. Klein, Verity, I want you to check out every circuit in these reactors, every conduit.

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