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Chapters (44)
  1. The Crimson Worlds Series
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  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
  43. Chapter Forty-One
  44. Epilogue

She tried hard to cling to her faith, to hold on, even as the seconds counted down, to all she had believed during her life.

Three.

“The way is the way…”

There was doubt there now as she repeated the mantra, questions she could no longer suppress. But she didn’t have to. Not anymore. For her, duty was over.

One…zero.

Deep within Invictus, a cache of hydrogen bombs detonated, and in a fraction of a second, the Alliance’s largest and proudest ship ceased to exist, vaporized in the fury of nuclear fusion. For a few seconds, the remnants of Katrine Rigellus and Invictus remained, a miniature sun, expanding briefly and then contracting, fading away and leaving nothing behind but the emptiness of space.

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty

CFS Dauntless

En Route to the Krillus Transwarp Link

307 AC

The battle was over, a victory, if anything so costly could be thus characterized. Dauntless’s crew had suffered terribly, but none worse than its ravaged fighter wing. The losses they had suffered were devastating. The training manuals stated that any combat unit taking casualties at such a level was effectively destroyed. But the fighter pilots were cut from tough cloth, and they accepted that they flew each mission with death as a wingman. And as a group, they’d be damned if they were destroyed, or anything like it. Each and every one of them was ready to respond if the claxons rang again, even now, to move grimly down to the bays and launch once again into combat.

But there was no call to arms now, no battlestations lamps glowing red or alarms ripping through the air. The survivors were gathered, as was their tradition, to sit up long into the night, to drink, to be there for each other…and to send off those they had lost.

“To Ice.” Jake Stockton raised the silver mug above his head. His usually confident voice was tentative, shaken. He looked at the others, eleven men and seven women…all that remained of Dauntless’s fighter wing.

“To Ice,” Kyle Jamison said, raising his own mug. “And to the others we lost here. Courageous warriors all. Heroes of the Confederation.”

“Heroes of the Confederation!” The others repeated the toast in something that came close to unison.

The pilots in the room knew they were lucky to be alive. They had survived more than the battle itself, nightmare that it had been. Most of them had also been low on life support by the time the wounded Dauntless had managed to track them all down and tow them aboard. It had been a slow process, towing each fighter aboard the wounded mothership, and by the time Stockton had been brought in he was unconscious, moments from suffocation.