To Stand Defiant by Glynn Stewart

Author:Glynn Stewart [Stewart, Glynn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Faolan's Pen Publishing
Published: 2022-10-17T16:00:00+00:00

23

New Edmonton System

02:30 March 2, 2738 ESMDT

A ship under Alcubierre-Stetson drive was invulnerable, inviolate. Locked in its own private universe, the regular world was merely a strange bow of light visible for those brave enough to look outside an ordinary window.

A ship in warped space wasn’t quite invisible—but it was untouchable. Even for the last few minutes, where their velocity dipped below that of light, they were difficult to see—and blind.

But for the first time since the Alliance of Free Stars had shattered the Commonwealth’s communications, James Tecumseh had q-coms and q-probes. The robotic spacecraft circled Periklos’s fleet at a million kilometers, giving Saint Bartholomew’s crew a view of their target only a few seconds out of date.

They knew where their enemy was and their enemy didn’t even know they were coming.

“We have Genoa dialed in,” Ferreiro told James. “Are you sure about this, sir?”

“If I were sure about this, the rest of the fleet wouldn’t be coming in on the sequence needed for the backup plan,” he pointed out. “One way or another, this invasion is going to stop.”

The Commodore chuckled grimly.

“That’s for sure. Sixty seconds. Hold on to your hat.”

The air was already keening around James. Threading the needle was always a fascinating experience, though at least they weren’t going deep this time. Periklos had wanted to cut his deployment time down and had believed he’d know if Dakota moved.

He’d been wrong, but the sound tearing at James’s eardrums was a reminder that the universe wasn’t happy to have humans twisting space-time into pretzels so they could violate its fundamental laws—and inside the gravity wells of large objects, that discontent became even more evident than usual.

There was enough time for one final check. Saint Bartholomew’s systems were all green. The rest of the battleships were fifteen minutes behind them. The carriers and cruisers were ten minutes behind that.

The command ships were dialed into the same sensors he was. The rest of the fleet had enough q-coms to get a go-no-go signal, which was all they were going to need today.

“Thirty seconds. All hands stand by. All lances fully online.”

James was still linked to the battleship’s bridge, listening to the calm reports. The keening was growing even sharper, and he pushed past it, taking a final few moments to make sure his uniform was as presentable as possible.

It was silly…but it might well matter.

“Five seconds,” Ferreiro said sharply. “We’re almost there.”

“Execute Counting Coup, Commodore,” James ordered softly.

The battleship crashed back into reality like a breaching whale, her emergence locus nailed down with every bit of precision that her crew could manage. Across a single light-day, they’d nailed it within five hundred kilometers—and emerged barely five thousand kilometers from the Stellar League Navy battlecruiser Genoa.

Dictator Kaleb Periklos’s personal flagship.

Twenty-four positron lances flared in space, their targeting updated in the quarter-second between emergence and activation. Enough antimatter to obliterate even the most powerful warships blazed out into space…and missed Genoa by less than a kilometer on all sides.

“Dictator Periklos, this is Admiral James Tecumseh,” James said into the video pickup on the bridge grimly.

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