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Chapters (42)
  1. Cover Blurb
  2. Contents
  3. Chapter One
  4. Chapter Two
  5. Chapter Three
  6. Chapter Four
  7. Chapter Five
  8. Chapter Six
  9. Chapter Seven
  10. Chapter Eight
  11. Chapter Nine
  12. Chapter Ten
  13. Chapter Eleven
  14. Chapter Twelve
  15. Chapter Thirteen
  16. Chapter Fourteen
  17. Chapter Fifteen
  18. Chapter Sixteen
  19. Chapter Seventeen
  20. Chapter Eighteen
  21. Chapter Nineteen
  22. Chapter Twenty
  23. Chapter Twenty-One
  24. Chapter Twenty-Two
  25. Chapter Twenty-Three
  26. Chapter Twenty-Four
  27. Chapter Twenty-Five
  28. Chapter Twenty-Six
  29. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  30. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  31. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  32. Chapter Thirty
  33. Chapter Thirty-One
  34. Chapter Thirty-Two
  35. Chapter Thirty-Three
  36. Chapter Thirty-Four
  37. Chapter Thirty-Five
  38. Chapter Thirty-Six
  39. Chapter Thirty-Seven
  40. Chapter Thirty-Eight
  41. Chapter Thirty-Nine
  42. Chapter Forty

He looked back down at his console, reading the updates from the departmental heads.  There didn't seem to be any major problems, thankfully, which meant that they were as close to being ready for action as they were ever likely to get.  But if the First Space Lord was wrong ... Ark Royal might miss out on the war entirely, then find herself forced to flee.  Rumour had it that some ships were already taking colonists – and a small industrial base – well away from the aliens.  But rumour was unreliable at the best of times.

They’d have real problems maintaining that technological base, he thought.  Or of choosing the colonists, when the time came to leave.

Tapping a switch, he brought up the First Space Lord’s modified chart, showing the tramlines he believed the aliens could use.  Ted saw his logic, but the whole conclusion rested on a dangerous gamble.  What if the aliens had tricked the human observers?  Or what if their tech was vastly more advanced than anyone had realised?  Hell, what if they’d managed to escape the tramlines entirely?

We'd be dead, he thought.  Escaping the tramlines was the holy grail of human gravitational research.  If that happens, the war will be lost completely ...

Shaking his head, he brought up another piece of analysis, but rapidly realised that it was worse than useless.  There was no hard data on the aliens, so speculations on their psychology and motivation were pointless.

We know they want to kill us, he thought, dryly.  That's the important detail.  Everything else is immaterial.

Chapter Nine

Chapter Nine

No one had bothered to give the system a name, not even the miners who had flocked to the asteroid cluster when a survey party had discovered that the asteroids were rich in raw materials.  The brief wave of interest in the system hadn't lasted past the discovery of other sources in more habitable systems, leaving a handful of miners and settlers making a living from selling what they mined at low cost.  According to the database, most of the settlers really wanted to isolate themselves from the rest of the human race.

It was hard to escape the feeling, James decided, that they had succeeded.  If Ark Royal hadn't known the settlements were there, it was quite possible that they would have been overlooked.  They were really nothing more than a handful of mined-out asteroids, closed ecosystems powered by solar collectors.  There wasn't much room for expansion, he knew, but they could maintain their position for hundreds of years before they had to make some hard choices.  By then, human space would have changed so radically that who knew what sort of society would greet them, if they chose to return home?