The overhaul wasn’t a hundred percent finished, but it was close enough. Normally, once the final repairs had been completed, they would run tests while still in the yards, make tweaks, perform simulations, then bring her into orbit. There they would run another full battery of tests and take her for a longer test run before declaring her battle ready.

  But this was war. There was nothing normal about it. There’d been no time to run diagnostics; better hope they hadn’t overlooked something critical. The next few moments would be tense ones.

  The inertia engine hiccuped, and a giant fist first shoved Tolvern into her chair, then tried to fling her at the ceiling. Finally, it worked properly, and gravity returned to normal. The ship broke the cloud cover, still accelerating rapidly.

  Blackbeard held together. Of course she did. She was a damn good ship.

  Minutes later, they were in outer space, the curve of the planet below them. From this height it looked like a single ocean, deep, almost midnight blue. A string of emerald-green islands encircled the equator like a jeweled belt, with another ring of islands crowning the northern polar region.

  The world had two small, silver-colored moons, and a neighboring planet gleamed like an enormous red star. Beyond that lay the Milky Way, an endless swath of stars, still so breathtakingly beautiful and peaceful looking no matter how many times Tolvern looked at it.

  The alien fleet swung around the planet and shattered the peace. Four hunter-killer packs jostled for position like wolves snarling and biting at each other’s flanks. The lances dominated in numbers, slender and gleaming gold in reflected sunlight, but there were several of the heavier spears among them. And then, pulling around behind them, the harvester ship.

  Bigger than a battleship, it resembled an elongated octopus, with a bulbous, warty head that bristled with weapons and several short stalks on the other end, opened now to reveal a large inner docking bay. The harvester ship plopped out pod-shaped shuttles like it was laying eggs on top of the planet. These dropped into the atmosphere, glowing red as they absorbed heat.

  No doubt they carried more of the giant warrior-gatherer birds, and would fall by the dozens on every island and population center. Killing and burning and gathering their gruesome harvest.

  Silence ruled the bridge for a long moment, broken only by the tap of Nyb Pim’s long fingers over his console. Alone among the crew, he continued his work, charting a course to jump away from this doomed system.

  “Enough,” Tolvern said. “Everyone, move.”

  Her words were like a jolt of electricity to the stagnant bridge. Cloaks came up, and the ship angled away from the planet and the Apex fleet. Tolvern kept her eyes glued to the viewscreen while they worked. No sign yet that the enemy had detected them.

  Other ships burst through the atmosphere, Hroom and human alike. A new stream of refugees. Apex let them go. Maybe a few tens or even hundreds of thousands would escape—for now—but they were little more than fleas jumping off the back of a drowning dog. Millions would remain on the surface, and it was on these that the buzzards would enjoy their unhurried feast.

  Tolvern thought Blackbeard would slip away with the other refugees. She brought them next to a freighter and matched its lumbering speed. Stay in its shadow, rely on cloaks. They slid past a hunter-killer pack. The lances seemed to sniff at the freighter as it passed, but didn’t deviate from course to destroy it.

  “All right,” Tolvern said, her stomach a bundle of knots. “Time to hit the gas.”

  Capp sent the order to the engine room. They swiftly pulled away from the freighter and passed between the two moons on their way to deep space. Nyb Pim gave the coordinates to carry them to the jump point out of here, back toward where they’d left the Hroom general. Still no sign of pursuit. Tolvern let out a deep breath.

  “Oh, no!” Smythe said from the tech console. “Now he sends it? Of all times, now?”

  “You’re babbling, Smythe,” Tolvern said. “What is it?”

  “A subspace message from Admiral Drake.”

  “Well, what is it? Don’t just sit there gawking, send it through.”

  Have inflicted heavy damage on an enemy fleet with modest losses suffered to Royal Navy forces.

  This was typical understatement on Drake’s part, she was sure. No doubt he’d delivered a crippling blow. But the part about ‘modest losses’ might also be understated. She kept reading.

  Under pursuit by an unknown quantity of enemies. Seeking rendezvous at agreed upon location at your earliest possible convenience.

  AJD

  The agreed upon location meant Sentinel 3. The message had no doubt been sent to the Hroom general, as well as to Captain McGowan, who had been picking his way out from his defense of the home worlds, leading Peerless at the head of a second fleet.

  “What do we do now?” Smythe asked.

  “We’ll do our best to obey,” she said dryly. “The so-called Dragon Quadrant is a dangerous neighborhood for a lone cruiser, and we might not make it.”

  “Eh, Cap’n?” Capp said. “I think you’re missing the question.”

  “It’s a subspace message, sir,” Smythe said.

  “I know what it means,” she said, watching the viewscreen. “Drake sent a message and Apex no doubt heard. Bad timing, but all we can do is deal with it.”

  Enemy ships were already moving. Two of the hunter-killer packs split away from the planet.

  “We’re getting hit by active sensors,” Smythe said. “They caught the subspace, all right. Now they’re looking for us.”

  “They won’t see us, right?” Capp asked. She rubbed her buzzed scalp. “We’re cloaked, and Apex sensors are bollocks. Right, Cap’n?”

  “We’re about six inches away,” Tolvern said grimly. “Bollocks or not, I think they’ll find us.”

  “Then we’re buggered.”

  “You could say that,” the captain agreed.

  “Why did he send it now?” Smythe repeated.

  Yes, why now? He could have sent it a week ago, or in three days, when she was in the clear. Give her a billion miles to work with and it wouldn’t matter if Apex could temporarily pinpoint her location or not. But here and now, when she was so close she could feel the enemy’s hot breath on her neck as she crept past? Hardly his fault—Drake wasn’t one for sending frivolous messages—but the timing couldn’t have been worse.

  “There we go,” Smythe said. “They got us. Their sensors are about as sophisticated as two men banging metal buckets with hammers and listening for the echo, but now that they’ve fixed on us, they’re hitting us regularly. We can’t lose them.”

  The hunter-killer packs flew past the freighter, which still lumbered gamely away from the planet. The freighter made an awkward turn, what passed for an evasive maneuver, which would have been as effective as a giant tortoise trying to dodge a pack of lions, but the lions weren’t interested. They kept going, coming straight after the fleeing human warship.

  The lances were out of weapon range, and Blackbeard was increasing the gap between herself and the pursuing ships. As the two sides built speed, Blackbeard’s advantage would only grow, if not for those blasted short-range jumps. It was only a matter of time before the enemy appeared on Blackbeard’s flanks.

  There was nothing left for it now. “Drop cloaks. Bring all weapon systems online.”

  Back in battle. And the odds were grim. Realistically, nonexistent. Tolvern’s only hope was to inflict a few blows before she went down with her ship.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  For once, Drake awakened quickly after passing a jump point. He shook his head, no more stunned than if he’d stood up too quickly and gone lightheaded. He was giving orders even before the dizziness passed.

  Drake had suffered a final moment of doubt the instant he approached the jump. It must be another trick. Make him think there was a third, hidden enemy fleet in the system, that they’d surround his fleet and annihilate it. Trick him into running toward the only jump point out of the system.

  And what was on the other side? Maybe nothing. Maybe the aliens were beaten down, convinced they were going to be destroyed by Dreadnought and her support ships. Apex had finally met its match and could only hope to trick him into running away. But if that were the case, why hadn’t they tried to make a run for it themselves? They could jump ahead of him, stay out of his range indefinitely.

  The other possibility was that a massive enemy force waited on the other side of the jump point. Lances, spears, even a harvester or two. He would come through stunned, and they’d tear him apart before he could recover.

  But the area around the jump point was clear.

  “Get us away from here,” he told his pilots. “Any direction. The rest of our fleet can follow, and we’ll plot a new course as soon as we’ve had a look around. Lloyd, get us cloaked. No long-range sensors, we can’t give ourselves away. And somebody find the jump points in this system.”

  As those wheels set themselves in motion, Drake turned his attention to organizing his forces. Normally, he’d position his corvettes out front. They were the quickest out of the blocks in a scrape, more powerful than a destroyer, and more maneuverable than a cruiser. But Apex’s ability to leap into the fray rendered them vulnerable.

  Instead, he positioned Dreadnought in the vanguard, with his cruisers bringing up the rear. He set a destroyer screen on one side, with the corvettes below and behind. The missile frigates and torpedo boats took a comfortable, protected position above Dreadnought.

  They were underway even while the last two cruisers were still jumping through. He took a small risk in leaving them to catch up with the others.

  Scans brought up more information. This system was a desert. There were two rocky inner worlds, slightly inside and outside the so-called Goldilocks Zone, respectively. One a hot, gas-choked planet, the other cold enough for carbon dioxide to fall as snow. There might once have been a more promising planet somewhere between their orbits—the huge number of asteroids in wobbly orbits around a yellow-orange star seemed to indicate that something had broken up at one point.

  They found four jump points in the system. The one they’d just come through was located among the rocky inner worlds. Another was so close to the star that they’d be sweating by the time they approached. It matched no known signature, but appeared quite stable. Another was a wobbly, unstable jump way out past the icy planetoids on the edge of the system. The tech officers estimated its age as less than two years and its eventual decay sometime in the next six months. Perhaps sooner.

  It might lead nowhere, or it might drop them inside the gravity well of a neutron star. They could send a probe, but as unstable as it was, even if they did jump safely through, they might find that it was a one-way trip.

  The final jump point fell in an empty region a few million miles outside the orbit of the system’s largest gas giant, a massive brown dwarf with several large, almost planet-size moons. Where did the jump point lead? His tech officers were studying the data coming back from scans, but Drake had low expectation of successfully identifying it until Koh let out a burst of excited Chinese.

  “This signature matches!” she said. “Admiral, look at the database from Sentinel 3.”

  She sent over the information. No charts existed of this system, but there was a ream of data from the Singapore home world. And one of the outgoing jump points from Singapore itself was a match for this one—not identical, but the database was a decade out of date, and even the most stable jump points changed with time.

  “How sure are we?” Drake asked. “Give me numbers.”

  “Seventy-eight percent confidence,” Lloyd said. “Not a certainty by any stretch. Nearly one in four chance that it leads somewhere else.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Koh said after another burst of Chinese, this time spat out like so many curse words. “It has to be the same jump point, it has to.”

  “Hold on,” Lloyd said. “Refined data coming in from the latest scan.” He hesitated. “Make that only fifty-nine percent. And a lower degree of confidence in the assessment.”

  Koh looked more uncertain now. Drake didn’t like the odds, either. That was barely above fifty-fifty. He wanted a few minutes to consider the options, but events conspired against him.

  The tech officers had been hammering away with active sensors, looking for another hidden fleet. And Lloyd shouted a new discovery. Ahead of them, snugged in near a pair of wandering asteroids in loose orbit around each other, came something with a dull heat signature and emitting radiation. At first glance it was a massive ship, three times the size of Dreadnought. The Apex mother ship?

  No, it was a derelict, a wreck. And not a ship at all, but a battle station. A sentinel battle station, to be specific. Broken in pieces, destroyed in battle. Koh clenched her fists when it became clear what they were looking at. She dropped her head.

  “Commander Li told me there were eleven sentinels,” Drake said. “Each one placed at a critical position to protect the home system. I guess that answers the question about our jump point.”

  Koh lifted her head. “So it is Singapore on the other side.”

  “Most likely, yes.”

  Her tone was mixed bitterness and hope. “You know what that means, Admiral, what we have to do. Surely, you must.”

  “It means that Apex is trying to herd us toward Singapore,” he said.

  “No, it means . . .” Her eyes widened slightly.

  “Exactly. They’ve as good as invited the fleet through. Opened a channel for us, invited us to leave, but only to here. And what do we find when we get here? Convenient, isn’t it?

  “And what will we get if we jump through to Singapore?” he continued. “A welcoming party, no doubt. We know there’s at least one harvester ship in orbit around Singapore, together with a large enemy fleet. There are two fleets behind us, and most likely a third. Their strategy seems obvious. Push us through to Singapore and smash us between the hammer and the anvil.”

  “Or, it could be the opportunity to free my planet and save my people.”

  “Without the rest of our forces?”

  Her brow knit together and she chewed at a lip as she studied the screen and the data scrolling across it. This time she had no answer for him. Expressions across the bridge showed the same story. Doubts and fear spread from one face to the other.

  “So we have no choice,” Manx said. “We can’t go back, and we can’t go forward. We have to stay here and fight it out. Shall I send a message to the other ships?”

  “We do have a choice,” Drake said. “We have several. Apex plays tricks, and they’ve got our heads spinning now. Where is the trap, where are they pushing us? This could be a trick to keep us in the system while they bring their final fleet into play. Well, humans can play tricks, too. And if this is a poker game, we can call their bluff.

  “The enemy won’t be guarding the other side of that jump point,” he continued. “This whole battle has developed too quickly, and until recently, the buzzards were trying to destroy us, not push us through. Apex may not be facing a civil war, but it’s full of factions. We’ll use that against them.”

  “What are you saying, sir?” Manx asked.

  “Give orders to the fleet. We jump through to Singapore. We catch them before they’re ready.”

  It was a gamble, a risk with the naval resources of the Kingdom of Albion. If he guessed wrong, he’d lose his fleet and his life, but more importantly, Albion would be stripped of her defenses. Nothing would hold Apex back.

  But war was always a roll of the dice, a spin of the wheel. Life itself was a gamble in this uncertain universe filled with hostile, expanding civilizations. Many of history’s most important battles had turned on a bold gambit, a wrong decision, or a bit of luck. If humanity thought that by taking to the stars they would change not just the odds, but the nature of the game, they were wrong. They’d fought out their age-old struggles on Earth only to emerge into a cosmos filled with the same violent conflicts.

  Human civilization was still young in the universe. Would it continue to grow, or would the human race be devoured by an even more aggressive, hostile species? On the other end of that jump point lay the answer to his question.

  Drake ordered his forces toward the jump, determined to take his fleet through and find out.

  -end-

  Book Three: Shattered Sun

  Chapter One

  The Hroom general and his young adjutant stood in the loading bay, eyeing the single-seat spacecraft. It sat on a rail in front of them, waiting to be shuttled to the launch tube, there to be hurled from the sloop of war into space. The adjutant gave a worried whistle through her nose slits.

  “Lord General,” she said, “I am not sure it’s advisable. Very unsafe. Very unsafe, indeed.”

  “Nonsense,” Mose Dryz said. “A skimmer craft is serviceable to five million kilometers, although with the size of that cockpit, I imagine my legs will be in need of a good stretch before I’m through. Perfectly safe, though.”

  “That is not precisely what I mean. It’s the cultists. Once they look at you . . .”

  “Because I am pale and pink instead of purple?”

  Another whistle, but this one turned into a hum that sounded disapproving. “Yes, Lord General. To be perfectly frank, that is exactly what I mean.”

  The younger Hroom was Lenol Tyn, from one of the most important families in the empire. Her father was a senator, her mother a cousin of the empress herself. The Lenol clan—the whole planet of Tyn, in fact—prided itself on being free from sugar addiction. Some families had been known to sell their own children to the humans when they fell to the addiction so as to keep their lineage pure. Now that an antidote was available, injections were mandated by law on the planet of Tyn. All Hroom would be inoculated against sugar addiction.

  “Listen to me,” Mose Dryz said. “The cultists have promised me safe passage. You don’t think they are lying, do you?”

  Lenol Tyn flushed deep purple. “The cultists are as incapable of human-like deception as any Hroom. I would never fear a lie.”

 

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