Defiant

By William C. Bragg

The discovery of the Ark ended the global civil wars. It took three years to get inside the massive buried ship, and within three minutes of opening the Ark, a message appeared on every electronic device on the planet,
War is coming, and you are not ready.
The map the Ark provided brought humanity to the First Contact War that nearly wiped out mankind. Slowly, humanity has begun expanding again, searching for clues of the true origins of mankind. Hoping to be prepared for a war that may never come, humanity has once again begun expanding into the galaxy.
While en route to join the Third Expeditionary Fleet, Defiant has found a powerful potential ally that may gain humanity access to the Galactic Alliance if they can keep them safe and somehow return them to their home world. Trapped in an uncharted star system as the star is collapsing into a black hole, Defiant has found an ancient enemy that has plagued the galaxy for millennia and must somehow survive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9781984585356

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Copyright © 2020 by William C. Bragg.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 06/24/2020

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CONTENTS

Prologue

Chapter 1   Uularian Space, Seventy Years before Scra’rn Invasion

Chapter 2   Singularity

Chapter 3   Decisions

Chapter 4   Escape to the Expanse

Chapter 5   Do or Die

Chapter 6   A Taste of What Is to Come

Chapter 7   Marines

Chapter 8   Third Expeditionary Fleet

Beginnings

There are so many people I would love to thank for this book, but one person stands above the rest in love and support throughout the creation of this book:

My wife, DeeAnna.

Thanks, Babe.

PROLOGUE

Gamma Geminorum, 109 light-years from Earth,

January 3, 2213

C ORPORAL PATROW WAS tired, so very tired. Crouching behind his favorite boulder, he began the ten-second reloading process-front magazine for plasma and middle drum for laser and started to power the slug thrower and the one-kilogram tungsten ingot that the weapons AI would analyze the target or let him select the type of round, flash-mold a shell, and launch it at nine hundred meters a second. Damn he loved Storm weapon systems. How many reloads had he gone through guarding this damn valley, he could not say.

His body armor had been new when this shit started, and now, he doubted that it would hold an environmental seal. His armor’s sustenance system had run out earlier today and had been blown out, he really wasn’t sure. Of the reinforced platoon he’d led into this valley to hold, only four Marines remained. Thousands of the Scra’rn had died in the valley, and they still came. Not too bad considering how badly they had been outnumbered.

Holes had been blown into various places on his armor, melted and burned away. He had to scavenge several pieces off his fallen Marines to keep in this fight.

His heavy weapon emplacements had chewed them up so badly the Scra’rn had brought in aerospace fighters and what may have been a bomber or gunship. They were learning. Of course, until they learned how to keep the sky clear, heavy weapons and antiair weapons would continue to chew through anything they sent down. They loved bunching up and rushing a position to overwhelm positions and inflict as much carnage as possible. Crossing fields of fire turned trees, grass, a lake, and literally thousands of them into sickening yellow mud. The whole area would stink for months.

At least they didn’t have armor, Patrow thought, noticing another group rushing up one of the trails that led to his boulder. These fucking things were tough enough without tanks; fuck that. Fucking things could climb, and why they hadn’t tried to scale the cliffs to get around his position was beyond him. Of course, the fuckers were mean and tough, but no one could call them smart. They had an animal cunning of sorts…kind of.

The mini drone showed Patrow six of the scabs trying to act like they knew about being stealthy as they crouch-ran by the base of the cliff. The drone fed him the most viable targets on each and recommended target selection in order.

Fuck that, he thought, sliding to the left side of the boulder and lobbing a plasma grenade to the rear of their group. The Storm weapons AI interfaced with each Marines AI and neural implant, at a thought the weapon sucked power from two battery packs, shaved off a small piece of tungsten, ignited it, mixed it with plasma, and fired it a nanosecond behind a laser. The laser cooked the air between the detonation point and the weapon, creating a perfect vacuum. The superheated gas and molten tungsten detonated at the desired location, spraying 6,200-degree death for about twenty meters.

Four of the scabs vanished in yellow mist; the other two ran away from the blast straight toward him. Superheated gases exploded around where he had fired from and strafed his boulder as Patrow slid back into cover and around the other side. It didn’t even take the blink of an eye to switch fire to plasma for the first and laser with the second shots, the fist blowing the scab to burning body parts and chopping the second in half from hip to throat.

Almost too easy, another group of the fucks down. Near the bottom of the path, a high-pitched whine cycled and peaked, bringing a smile to Paltrow’s tired face. One of the idiots had picked up a Storm. Any human could pick up the weapon, and any human military could use it. An allied species could carry the weapon, but if a bot, AI, or nonhuman tried to fire it, it exploded. Always, without fail, it exploded. Marines always joked about riding the Storm when that happened, and it never failed to bring laughter.

Jansen, did you hear that?

Aye, Corporal, riding the Storm killed ten of ’em. They are pressing here and at your position. Fuck them up, Corporal!

Semper Fi, Marines.

Smiling, Patrow knew the rush was coming, mentally sending a flash message to command. He called in fire support, doubting he would get it anytime soon.

I need this valley held, Colonel Mills said, and like a dumb grunt, he grabbed several squads and came, fought, and held this fucking valley for two days. Or was it three? It surely couldn’t be more. His armor had juiced him good with some form of exotic compound, and the AI even gave him the molecular model for it, but he hadn’t paid attention. It kept him awake and alert and magically kept him from feeling the fatigue associated with a fight. He would pay for that boost, just not today. Three days juiced was actually slowing him down now; to feel the fatigue even juiced up was a bad sign.

Blaster bolts came from the everywhere, his shield failed, and shots bounced off his armor and blew holes into it. Pain flooded his legs, torso, and arms, but it wasn’t over until the Scra’rn, where all dead or every last human was. The Scra’rn were nasty, but many aliens had found out the hard way that humans could fight.

This valley had been a park a short time ago, a place for thousands of people from the city behind him to come and play and enjoy nature. A place away from war, the Alliance, and the universe at large. This was a long-settled world and should have been safe. The Third Fleet was anchored here, and the Victus Vallus Shipyards was here as well. The Scra’rn should not have found this world or even attacked it. Yet here they were. Perhaps the prediction models had been right, or maybe the intelligence geeks finally figured out how to track them. It didn’t matter; the humans were here waiting for them to arrive. No one in the Galactic Alliance could have absorbed the losses the Scra’rn had absorbed, and still they came.

Once nearly purple skies and green grass, forests, and lakes covered this world; now the skies were filled with smoke, haze, and falling orbital debris. wreckage of ships littered the once pristine forests not far from this valley. Patrow remembered falling ships burning up in the atmosphere before crashing over the horizon. Countless fighters and gunships swarmed anything that made it through the planetary defense grid and the fleet. The Scra’rn had come here in force, and even a grunt like Patrow knew their losses were horrific, yet they were intent on taking this world, as intent as the humans who had no intention of letting them have it.

Diving into cover, Patrow called for fire again and hoped it would be enough. He had seen several dropships and reported them yesterday; what was taking so long? Where had the air support been? Setting off several limpet mines to slow the scabs, he came up and began gunning them down. There were far too many for him to kill. He would try, but in his heart, Corporal Patrow knew it would not be enough.

One by one, the last of his Marines blinked off his HUD.

Negative on ordnance. Papa Four Actual, hold position.

Hold position? How in the hell was he going to hold position? His boulder was a godsend, and from here, he had dispensed death from above. The Scra’rn had set up a firing line at the base of both paths leading up to him and were spraying his position with fire. Crawling to the lip, he selected laser and cut three in half, lobbed three grenades to his right path, then switched to full automatic fire as he sighted the left path.

Position is falling. I cannot hold, Patrow said in a very cold voice. This would be over soon as the two surging groups of Scra’rn met at the center and never slowed their advance to him.

Patrow hadn’t cussed; that was a bad sign. He was actually pleased he had sounded so calm. Leaping up, he selected shotgun shells and began a methodic sweep, ejecting metallic balls, plasma, and a cutting beam trying to take as many of these scabs down as he could before they overwhelmed him.

Something hit him hard, spinning him around. Another Scra’rn ripped the weapon from him and died with his vibroknife nearly severing its misshapen head. As he fell, Patrow flung the knife into another rushing Scra’rn through his eye, the eleven-inch blade slicing into its brain. As he hit the ground, Patrow snatched his sidearm and tried to roll the thing, grappling him to the side; three quick shots took out another one as more and more armor fell off him.

Fuck, he thought as his grappler pulled back enough leg armor to sink its needlelike teeth through his skinsuit deep into his left thigh. Where had the leg armor gone? Waves of pain shot through him, and somewhere in his mind, he remembered that a bite from a Scra’rn was infected before the teeth left the flesh. Their venom would shoot across an organism’s pain receptors, agitating them to something akin to pure hell. Screaming in agony, Patrow stabbed him in between the four eyes with his pistol and pulled the trigger.

His helmet split open, killing his communications, HUD, and most importantly, the filters that kept the Scra’rn stench from him. He had no clue if his armor’s medical suite was functional or if pain meds had been injected. It would be over in seconds. As the world began fading, the things reached for him.

As his vision tunneled into darkness, something large and black flew over him, and another Scra’rn was ripped off him. Patrow couldn’t hear and could barely see, and instinct drove his pistol up to something trying to move him. A very strong grip held his wrist and kept the weapon pointing upward.

CHAPTER 1

UULARIAN SPACE, SEVENTY YEARS

BEFORE SCRA’RN INVASION

As soon as they made these discoveries the Romans began

to copy Greek arms, for this one of their strong points:

no people are more willing to adopt new customs and

to emulate what they see is better done by others.

—Polybius, 125 BC

T HE UNITED EARTH Alliance’s Defiant , a Legatus - class heavy cruiser, jumped into a shipping lane. It wasn’t a human shipping lane as humans did not use warp technology, preferring the longer distance faster than light jump drive that enabled a ship to jump from short distances to upward of one hundred light-years in an instant. It would not be too long before human ships would be able to jump much farther with far less recharge time.

While warp fields existed and the human equivalent, the Alcubierre drive, was sound, humanity had not invested deeply into the area of warp travel. Warp travel offered many benefits for transportation of goods and personnel, but it was not practical for military uses. Warp is easy to track and counter. One of the reasons the Defiant was in this system in the first place was to look for a specific ship, and it was that ship’s warp trail that made it very easy to track.

Humans had made first contact with a race of traders recently and were asked for assistance in dealing with piracy on their borders and recovery of the freighter they were currently tracking through the void.

Captain-Con. Jump Complete, passive sensors engaged, speed fifteen thousand kilometers per second, no hard contacts. Detecting recent warp activity and several other smaller warp signatures.

Reports flooded through the command information center very near complete center of the ship. Since it was so far from anything, the likelihood of an enemy destroying it was slim. Twenty men and women were sitting at stations around the circular room manning stations, checking countless systems on the ship, and verifying what the computers and AI told them.

I have the warp signature of our cargo ship. Plot is on the board.

Con, flank speed, maintain low profile, launch me a set of stealth probes. I want to know what’s in this system.

Captain, aye-aye, flank speed.

The captain, a holdover rank from Earth’s naval history, was a tall, thin man with steel-gray hair and a neatly trimmed beard. His neural implants told him everything his bridge crew said as well as the ship’s artificial intelligence. In many ways, the AI was the ship; she controlled everything from life support, engines, weapons, weapons guidance, lydar, radar, and gravity detection to countless other functions of the ship, all the while its crew acting as if they were in charge.

Secure from general quarters. Set condition three.

Attention on deck, attention on the ship, secure general quarters. Set condition three.

Captain Hansen, sir, his executive officer asked, stepping beside him, pausing as her vacuum helmet slid back over her head and tucked itself into the small compartment along her softsuit uniforms collar. Gesturing the holoboard that displayed the current system, the Defiant’s location, current course, and the targets trail they were following, he added, Why exactly are we here again?

First contact, XO, he said with a smile.

Throughout the ship, hundreds of compressed air tanks began filling the ship with breathable air, and blast-proof hatches unlocked and began opening. Blackened corridors began lighting up, berthing areas’ hatches magnetic locks were disengaged, and doors into pressurized sections began displaying a holographic circle that would enable entry. Med bay was stretched across several decks, with numerous hatches beginning to open and force fields surrounding the CIC, engineering, and medical winking out of existence.

Why are we running errands for a new species and possibly getting entangled in combat with hostile powers so we can be friends?

I don’t trust these creatures any more than you do, XO. Command seems to think this goodwill assignment will help us get into the bigger galactic stage, meet more players, expand our influence and our territory.

Arching an eyebrow, Commander Tomlin, Defiant’s second-in-command, waited for him to continue.

She would be one hell of a captain soon, much sooner than her peers; hell, she would get her own fleet someday. Perhaps that was why he requested her for this assignment. Good people were everywhere in the military services; it was a requirement. But exceptional people like Commander Tomlin were few and far between. She would be his voice of reason and would quietly question his every decision, but once decision was made, she attacked as though it was the only thing in the universe that mattered.

Maybe we are merely transporting new gear to the Third Fleet.

Two, exactly two, brand-new, fresh from the factory Ithaca-class gunships, and several pallets of ammunition and one hundred new-type torpedoes?

Having signed for the two gunships, Tomlin would have checked each one and each crate, torpedo, and stick of gum that came on board. Having read the specifications before picking them up, Hansen had ordered six to replace his current Cossack-class gunships; they were nearly twice as potent as the Cossack gunships, ablative armor, quad-barreled rail cannons vice the tri-barrels. The main dual gauss cannons were far more powerful and could launch the new torpedoes, and most importantly, they could jump. The Defiant could not even launch the new torpedoes yet; they needed space dock and extensive modifications to her launchers and transfer and loading systems. The new torpedoes where classified well above his pay grade unless he got a higher one; he could not even look at their schematics. Rumor had it that the mark 4s were game changers to the fleet. At twenty-one meters long, they had better be something special, or two weeks in space dock would be a waste.

I argued against this, Mission Commander. Not much I can do. I don’t wear stars.

This stinks, sir, she said, turning away. She turned to the board, and with a wave, the holo changed, showing their relative position from human space. "We are fourteen jumps from the nearest human world, outpost or fleet.

We are alone, with no contact for orders or hope of reinforcement, she continued. Cruisers, every single one of them, have two destroyers, four attack frigates, two light frigates, and sixteen corvettes, and yet we are out here by our onesy.

The holo changed again, showing the last six jump locations. Two new species discovered, and this one appears to be much higher in the technological department but has no active defenses but a very large merchant fleet that we are somehow protecting?

Rescuing, Commander, and yes, you are right, Tomlin said, waiving the holo back to course and heading, "pirates may lead us to other technology and buy us goodwill to this stellar Alliance we have been hearing about.

The brass and above wants to meet the Alliance and very much wants to join. It is goodwill, Commander.

Contact! Two, one-eighty, minus thirteen degrees, forty million klicks out, go active?

Negative, AI, light readings?

At two light-minutes away, giving up their position was not an option.

Sir, old light shows several dozen small ships maneuvering around a much larger ship. I am detecting what appears to be laser and plasma weaponry.

Is that our freighter? Hansen asked, knowing the answer.

Yes, sir, ion trail and red-light shift indicate something was at warp and suddenly came out, detecting no interdiction fields.

Interdiction fields were a nasty bit of technology that created a gravimetric disturbance that broke open a warp field in a violent manner; many ships were reduced to near-luminal speed debris fields by interdiction fields. Humanity had stumbled across the technology in their first stellar war, and yet another reason not to use warp was ingrained into the human mind. It was dangerous.

Additionally, the holographic display zoomed in, corvette-size ships with what appears to be a heavy frigate or light cruiser to provide support.

Action stations, increase to flank plus ten, Tomlin said, turning away from the hollow field and moving to her station near the front of the bridge.

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Marine duty on ships was usually a very boring job. Lots of training in the hangar bays, the only area on a ship large enough to do anything resembling training and constant drills to keep their skills sharp, and lots of classes and sweeps of the ship. While the navy had good security, droids, and AI-controlled antipersonnel weapons, if boarded, the Marines would stop the bleeding and take the ship back compartment by compartment and then secure the shipboard and capture the fools that had dared to board their ship. It was a Marine thing, an additional slap in the face to go with the pummeling the boarders would take, trying to capture a human ship.

In rare instances where ship boarding was needed, they would mount out in one of six gunships, enter, and secure ships, cargo, or personnel. If command staff wanted to go to a planet’s surface, Marines would provide security, which was pretty much just standing around waiting to kill something.

By Corporal Hatfield’s estimation, this trip sucked. Four months on this crate, and he’d set foot off ship twice. Both times to carry large boxes and look intimidating. He spent hours in the gym, on the mats grappling his fellow Marines or in one of the training labs. When blessed with something interesting to do, they let the Marines play in the flight deck.

Slapping a card onto the table, he laughed. You guys suck!

No fucking way, one Marine said, reaching for his chips. You got to be cheating.

He pulled his vibroblade from the small of his back very slowly. Nobody wanted to fight with blades against Hatfield, not even Billy. Hatfield began twirling the blade between his fingers before sinking in into the table to the knife’s hilt.

Pointing to the EM blocker, a small hand-sized disk sitting on the table, he said, EM fields up, neural implants, PDA. Fuck, even skinsuits can’t compute in this.

Nothing hacks a skinsuit. They can still compute. It helped you somehow.

Bending over the table to light his smoke with the base of his blade and scooping his winnings with the other, he laughed.

Slappy, you are wearing a hardsuit, and it ain’t helping you any, is it? The tech is nearly a hundred years old. Nanomesh that protects you, it is not electricity conductive. The smart suite in it will keep you alive if your armor kicks, but that’s all. The AI in your head gets married to the hardsuit. Your hardsuit is nothing more than an armored skinsuit.

You can’t get electrocuted in a skinsuit. There is nothing to fry.

You counted cards then.

"Genius! Hatfield said, sliding on his jacket. Of course, I count cards! Who doesn’t?"

The jacket was what connected the skinsuit to the battle armor. Snug fitting, it had magnetic plates and locks that let the armor instantly attach and would stay attached unless blown off, released by the wearer, or pulled off with a special tool. Useful that.

You could hold power cables in this shit and only feel a tickle. Why do you think all the squids on ship carry a force gun?

Billy smiled and raised his hand. Because stunners don’t work on Marine skinsuits. Force blasts will launch your ass, and when you land, it is the concussion that knocks you out.

Good work, Billy. You finally reading my reading list, or maybe the commandant’s reading list? Hell, I would settle for you reading a book at this point.

No, Corporal, just got blasted a couple of times when bosun started talking shit.

Cocking his head to the side as if to ask his Marine what the hell he continued, he said, Math, Corporal, if the AI is down, crew is four thousand fifty, medical, mechanics, fighter jocks, cooks, one hundred—air quotes—security detail and six hundred Marines.

It goes sideways. We can take the boat. Bosun didn’t like it and stepped up. I clocked him.

That’s how you got your ass kicked last month?

Billy spent a day in med bay and never said a word. Rumor had it that one very upset bosun had to have his testicles operated on.

Lights went red, and every head in the berthing area swung to the one MC.

Action stations, action stations, set condition one throughout the ship. Ready launch in four minutes.

Comms blared through neural implants as Marines raced to their bunks and armor began flying on. Countless drills had taught every spacer in human space to don a suit in one minute. Marines had to go from completely nude to combat armored in sixty seconds, and that drill started in boot camp and continued throughout a Marine’s career. Every ship in the fleet made Marines do it on the flight deck upon arrival and repeat again and again until the XO and CO were satisfied.

Corporal Hatfield had never missed the mark on that endeavor. To him, going from a thirty-degree flight deck and sitting on your bare ass sucked. Sliding into a skinsuit, throwing on a support jacket, sliding into chest piece, upper and lower leg, and arms finishing with a helmet meant warmth. The XO made them do it five damn times.

The Defiant had numerous alarms for different crewmen; some were for the fighter jocks and flight crew, others engineering. But the one that pulled everyone from whatever they were doing was general quarters. With action stations, thousands of oxygen storage tanks throughout the ship began depressurizing a vast majority of the ship. Only a few sections of the ship kept pressurized—medical and parts of engineering. Fighting in the void was a dangerous task, and every crew member was outfitted for void combat everywhere in the ship with their uniforms, skinsuits equipped with void helmets and gloves that would retract when not in use.

Fully armored, Corporal Hatfield snatched his weapon harness and rifle while beginning to check his fire team leaders as they began checking their Marines. Even cooks would be in void gear in seconds; a hole in the hull was a bad thing, and Marines did not die without permission. Getting spaced was an insult, per Marine Corps regulations.

As squad leader, Corporal Hatfield knew the status of every one of his Marines by looking at his HUD, but checking was second nature. If all the fancy tech went off-line, you had to fight on. Backups and triple redundancy helped keep Marines alive to win battles. No power? A vibroblade was still sharp enough to shave with. Can’t fire smart rounds? A bullet traveling at nine hundred meters a second would kill your ass just as dead as a smart shell that pierced armor, then fragmented and sent those fragments around your body to explode. Maybe someday the Marines would go all in for full-energy weapons, but that day was a long way off.

Powered armor was a good thing; it made a normal human into something much faster, larger, stronger, and tougher than the current Marine armor. Current armor augmented a Marine’s strength and reflexes through the fibers in his suit that acted and reacted like normal muscles, enabling him to carry the sixty pounds of armor and thirty pounds of weapons, ammunition, and supplies that he and all other Marines carried without effort. Marines had not broken out the power armor in months; like tiny man-size robots, they generated terror in every race to encounter them and seemed indestructible. They were the pinnacle of combat technology, and the mere sight of the suits could quell uprisings or send pirates running.

Following his squad toward the gunships that would ferry him and his platoon to the alien freighter, the numerous briefings and mission preparations flowed through Hatfield’s mind. Ships schematics, locations of power stations, engine compartments, engineering, bridge, crew quarters, medical bays, and cargo bays all had been uploaded into his AI and could be overlaid on his HUD.

Assaulting a ship in space was risky, and Marines trained hard for ship boarding and repelling boarders. Every Marine on board had trained for months in orbit around Jupiter, assaulting everything from old Earth naval vessels, space mining dregs, mine shafts, and every conceivable ship the brass had come up with. The Uularians even provided the ships master codes, ship schematics, crew, and cargo manifests. They’d chased this thing for a week, and every Marine on board Defiant knew their individual objectives and the objectives every other squad.

The rules were simple in warfare: strike first, strike hard, move and keep moving, and above all, don’t fuck this up.

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Many people believed the heart of any ship was engineering where everything was powered or the fighter decks. Some even believed it was the weaponry that made the ship. The truth was simple—the engines of a vessel was her heart; the brains was the bridge. For a warship, it was the Command Information Center, CIC. Here sat or stood the various brains that ran an operation—the Commander Air Group, CAG, who directed the wing commanders; the Gunner who told the AI where and what to shoot; the navigation crew; the operations officer, OpsO, who ran the ship’s various operations and logistics; the executive officer who implemented the CO’s vision; and the old man, the captain who played his various instruments like a master choreographer.

The Defiant’s CIC buried deep within the armored hull had one entrance in and out protected 24-7 by four Marines, all in powered armor, and two fully armed Marines with canines, K9 units, that stood before a thick armored hatch that led up into the CIC. On both sides of the hatch, blue fields shimmered over dozens of hexagonal shields. Atop the stairs, two more fully armored Marines stood guard. From the entrance steps, one could go left or right and rise the five steps into the CIC itself to see the holoboard sitting just above the floor projecting a perfect three-dimensional representation of anything one of the officers wanted to see. The CO, XO, and OpsO all had command chairs behind the waist-high wooden railing surrounding the holoboard. Gunnery, navigation, and operations covered three walls, with the other three being CAG, engineering, and security.

In less than a minute, the ship’s air was the same cold vacuum as the space around it. Protective gear was essential in the void, and fighting in a pressurized environment was insane to humans. Data streams filled dozens of screens as the data came in, and as it was relayed by the AI or crew, it became part of the sixteen-foot hologram hovering in front of the old man.

Ion trails detected, corvette and frigate analogs are using some form of ion thrust.

They are fast. Looks like front-facing weapons only.

That’s our target. She’s big. They are cutting off containers. One container appears to be being towed away from the ship. Another is coming loose.

Fighters ready for launch. Marines en route to gunships, request weapons free.

CAG, go get that container, Captain Hansen ordered. Not waiting for an acknowledgment, he focused on the plot before him.

"I count thirty corvette-size craft, no attack fighters. Corvettes are one twenty-five meters long, look like cigars. Designating corvettes as Charlie 1 through 30."

Frigates are wide trident-looking things, wider than long, mass nine thousand tons. Scope has ten frigates, designate Bravo one through ten.

Cruiser analog is bigger than us, estimate laser weapons. I am detecting overlapping ECM waves, looks like they are brute force blocking comms. Designate Alpha.

CO, XO request permission to engage. They have boarded our target, Gunner Fisher called over his shoulder.

More and more data flowed through various systems and personnel on the bridge toward the captain. Too much data for a single person and even with training and coordination, it all came down to one man or woman sitting in the big chair to make the call. Each report came with more data and symbols on the holoboard.

Gunner, I want that cruiser gone first, mains on him. Put the batteries into the frigates, Hansen said. Gesturing through the holographic field, he drew a curved line. Point Defense Cannons, (PDC) or close in weapon systems, and torpedoes destroy those corvettes. Open all tubes, AI, calculate and fire torpedoes.

Load full spread of EMP torpedoes. Let’s blind them as we enter their lines.

CAG, as soon as mains fire, launch drones. Fighters and gunships, commence operations, Hansen said into his void helmet.

Lights dimmed as the primary mass drivers sucked power from the engines to force two one-thousand-kiloton projectiles to one-half the speed of light. As the depleted uranium-coated tungsten steel shells fired down the massive rails that ran the length of his ship, two large square covers that protected the tubes jumped to the side to allow the shells to pass an instant before the shells left their launchers to close less than a second later. The mass acceleration could slow ship by nearly a quarter of its speed, but combined with their forward momentum, the two shells would impact an enemy ship before they knew what hit them.

The Defiant was built around a weapons platform. In this case, two weapons platforms. Long hexagonal towers ran the length of the ship from front to rear, tapering off into a square cap at the fore, before firing the caps open, revealing the exit of the mass driver it housed. Coiled around the six-meter circumference were one-thousand-foot tubes where numerous electromagnetic coils could hurl the massive projectiles at just over one-half the speed of light, or c.

The wings were more-than-pretty decorations that cocooned the main guns. First, they protected the main cannons by adding much-needed protection along the flanks, above and below the cannons. The wings running the length of the ship acted as additional weapons platforms for heavy gauss cannons, torpedo, missile launchers, and point-defense cannons and further all but hid the hangar bay and flight deck. Second, the wings added mass and area for power generation, crew quarters, repair shops, storage space, and the flight decks. From above the ship looked vaguely like a mat black, dual-tipped spear bristling with turrets and no visible exhaust or propulsion systems.

Spaced across the hull were twelve four-barreled cannon turrets that would not look amiss on a World War II vessel. Triangular rather than circular, these twenty-meter-long guns had three segments that folded back when firing so as to lessen the shock to the hull and turret housing. Each segment of the segmented barrels could fire various thousand-kilogram shells across the void at nearly a full third of the speed of light. The Defiant was a ship of war with thick, heavy armor, ablative hull platting all a deep dark black that absorbed and deflected light and confused sensor systems.

With both side and vertical launch tubes, the Defiant could put one hundred torpedoes into space in a matter of seconds. From nuclear, plasma, and kinetic rounds, the torpedoes provided a punch at distances of hundreds of thousands of kilometers away. They could not be dodged because of the multiple AI tracking and coordination from the ship, probes, and even each other. No fancy maneuvers could save a pilot or ship with the only option to destroy the torpedo or confuse it with chaff, ECM, or debris.

Dozens and dozens point defense cannons (PDCs) provided a barrier of sorts to enemy attack craft and inbound missiles and torpedoes. Capable of firing thousands of rounds a second, they had independent sensors and AIs that worked in conjunction with the ship’s AI and each other to all but ensure nothing got near the Defiant without permission.

The two mass drivers were separated by about two hundred feet; here sat the engines, power plants, and main drive. Fitting snuggly between the two on the underside were the hangar bays, flight decks, and vertical launch bays. The wings extending outward housed the main batteries and launch tubes.

So far, every culture that the humans had met used various forms of propulsion: ion discharge, electromagnetic, plasma, even nuclear propulsion. For humans, these forms of propulsion were not effective use of space, and the use of accelerant was a danger while in combat or another catastrophe that seemed to be rather common in the galaxy. Human ships had gone along another path: they used gravity. In the near center of every human ship sat a large spinning metallic sphere held in place by a powerful magnetic field, and around the sphere was another large metal sphere. Two spheres spun around the sphere, attached to large reinforced pylons that were part of the ship’s frame. To turn the ship, the support structures simply turned, shifting the gravity field and sending the ship in that direction without the need to apply different thrust or angle the ship or other issues the humans had discovered in their fifty-year expansion.

Using an exotic metal that even the engineers on board and virtually everyone in the fleet not wearing two stars knew anything about, this sphere was what humans used, a form of the Alcubierre drive that created a gravity field around the ship that pushed and pulled the ship at the same time, allowing for tremendous speeds and saving vast amounts of space and weight that would otherwise be used in other propulsion methods. This provided amazing thrust to weight and was relatively easy to maintain.

The sphere created mass, and the outer rings altered the mass around the ship, creating a version of the Alcubierre drive that enabled a ship to slide through space without thrust, saving vast amounts of energy and bypassing what most species encountered thus far used to drive and turn their ships. It left little, if any, indication of their passing, generated no heat, and bypassed the physics involved in turning a ship, removing the need for crash couches and saving people and equipment from terrible g-forces of turns. Human ships could execute impossible turns at speeds that would turn crews to pink paste or sheer a ship in half if they attempted such maneuvers.

Closing in on the fleet, a large pulse of sensors emitted from the entire ship and pinged outward at the speed of light.

Across Defiant, hatches flew open, triangular barrels suddenly moved with their turret mountings spinning to ensure no friction or issues, then the AI locked them on target. Silently, the front caps blew forward, and nearly invisible streaks shot forward. Torpedoes flashed from magnetic launchers, entering space in a silent blue scream before the weapons miraculously spun and zipped off in various directions, seemingly defying physics.

Massive twenty-inch barrels recoiled as thousand-kilogram tungsten slugs blasted into the void at one-third c. Defiant began a slight spin, exposing her profile as she passed over the massive cargo freighter disgorging fighters and larger gunships.

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The pulse wave exploded from the Defiant as it expanded at the speed of light that bounced off everything it hit, sending data back toward the ship like a sonar blast in water. The burst of light, radio waves, and heat painted everything for any ship to detect and lit the Defiant up like a lighthouse. In the leading wave of torpedoes, electromagnetic bursts sent a very real simulation of nuclear detonations. These detonations blocked out, muffled, and confused sensors and played havoc with communications. Torpedoes were smart, and the pulse had painted their targets as effectively as a neon sign. The EM pulse would knock out unshielded electronics and confuse lydar, radar, and heat emissions, and torpedoes did not care in the least as they dodged debris and anything resembling antiweapons fire.

Two seconds after the pulse, two ten-thousand-kilogram kinetic shells traveling at a one-half c, three hundred million kilometers per hour, passed completely through the left rear of the ship, setting the interior atmosphere on fire. That instantly converted steel, plastic, and polymers into plasma as the shells ripped through the internal structures into molten fragments, instantly obliterating the fusion plants powering it before they could chain-react and destroy their fuel supplies, leaving a radioactive shell drifting through space as the shells exited the molten wreck’s other side.

Torpedoes found frigates completely unaware. Several torpedoes slammed through some form of energy barrier and passed completely through hulls and out the other side. The Defiant’s pulse drew every ship’s attention, and in the two seconds from the pulse to the first impacts, frigates and corvettes saw torpedoes and kinetic death coming. Some managed to evade kinetic shells; some tried firing on the incoming torpedoes. The Defiant slid into the area like a vaguely triangular black wing pouring fire into the void.

Six gunships and twenty fighters sped through the void toward the incredibly large container vessel.

That was way too easy, Tomlin said, scanning through various screens of the battle.

We hit them with their pants down, Captain Hansen said, turning toward the Commander Air Group. I want eyes on that thing and full scan of surrounding area, he added, waving at the freighter.

"They were too intent