Legend

by Webb, Nick

  “They already have,” said Haws. He motioned off camera. Another man entered the frame.

  “Christian?” said Proctor, in shock.

  “Surrender, Shelby.”

  “Oppenheimer. No.” Granger balled a fist. “What have you done?”

  “The Findiri are not aliens, Shelby. They’re human. Changed, sure. Different from us, sure. But human. And if accepting their rule means we can finally, finally end the Swarm threat, then so be it.”

  “No,” said Proctor.

  “Shelby, you’re not in charge. Granger is not in charge. And apparently neither is President Sepulveda, who seems to be missing and presumed dead since Interstellar One was slagged. And neither is his legal successor, Senator Cooper, who is also presumed dead. You know who is in charge? Me. In the absence of civilian leadership and as the leader of United Earth’s armed forces, I hereby surrender, and offer our support and allegiance to the new leaders of United Earth.”

  “I said, no,” said Proctor. “You want Earth? You’re going to have to go through the Independence.”

  Granger looked at her in amazement.

  “And, I suspect, over half the fleet. They’re not going to roll over just because they have a fucking coward at the top.”

  “Shelby, it’s finished. It’s over. We lost. The only way to build the future is in partnership with the Findiri—the new men, as Talus says.”

  “Like hell. Do you think the Dolmasi are just going to surrender?”

  “They’ll be destroyed if they don’t,” said Oppenheimer.

  “And the Skiohra?”

  “Same. If they want to live, they’ll join the Findiri too. Same with all the other aliens. I think in that I have something I agree with the Findiri on. Like we’ve learned with the Swarm, it’s too dangerous having aliens running around out there, out of control, threatening humanity at every turn. If the Findiri can finally bring us security against the dangers of the universe, then so be it.”

  “Can you hear yourself, Christian?”

  “Surrender, Shelby. Earth is lost.” He paused a moment. "No, it’s not lost. Earth is found. Earth is triumphant.”

  She was calm. Calmer than she’d thought she’d be. One day she knew she’d make the decision that would result in her imminent death, and now that it finally came, she felt . . . peace. “Not today, it isn’t.”

  “Shelby—”

  “We lost Britannia. We’re not losing Earth too. Tell your overseers, Christian: I resist.”

  She flipped the comm channel off, and turned to Granger.

  “I sure hope you know what you’re doing,” he said.

  WE ARE WITH YOU, SHELBY PROCTOR. WE ARE ONE. The voice of her companion blared in her head. She paused a moment, then the hint of a smile.

  “So do I.”

  “We can’t beat them here. Not just us. Not just the Independence. Not against their whole fleet.”

  She smiled. A fatalistic smile. But it had some joy in it. “Not just us.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTY

  Sol Sector

  Earth

  ISS Independence

  Bridge

  They’d no sooner stepped back onto the bridge when the explosions started back up again. “Admiral! Direct hit from the Findiri ship!”

  “Well they didn’t waste any time. Evasive maneuvers. Get us out of the shadow of the flagship—it’s doing us no favors now. All PDC and rail gun crews, weapons free. Target their weapons first, but don’t be choosy—take whatever shot you can get. Tell the Kobe it’s time.” The Independence couldn’t q-jump yet. She needed to buy more time. She had to get Granger out of there.

  In her mind, she reached out to Danny. Get out of here. Get the President to safety. I’ll meet up with you if we can get out of here.

  But Aunt Shelby, we can’t just leave you.

  Go!

  She could almost hear the anguish in his mental voice. Fine. Just—make it out, okay? And with that, she felt his mental presence leave, jumping far, far away.

  Granger watched the holographic battle schematic hanging over the command console. “We’re no match for those two ships.”

  Proctor motioned to the comm station. “Sampono, send a message to the fleet. We need them here now. No matter what the status is of their engagement with their target.”

  “Aye, ma’am,” she said.

  It took nearly a minute, during which time the three ships exchanged a flurry of weapons fire while soaring high over downtown Bern, but several flashes indicated her task force had arrived.

  “We’ve got some, Admiral. The Seoul and the Bucharest. A few more.”

  “What’s the status of the q-drive?”

  The engineering officer looked like he’d rather be somewhere else than deliver the news. “Still down, ma’am. They’re going to need more time.”

  “Hull breach on decks three and four!” said Urda. “We’re venting atmosphere there. Emergency bulkheads jammed!”

  The brief snippet of hope she felt on seeing the other IDF ships arrive was squelched when at least a dozen Findiri ships snapped into existence all around them. Shock wave after shock wave washed over them as the atmosphere was pushed back in an instant, and she wondered what destruction those waves were causing on the surface. She’d lost several hundred people on board. How many had the city of Bern lost? Thousands? A million?

  “Reading over . . . fifty enemy ships, Admiral,” said Urda. He looked up at her. “Our task force won’t last long here.”

  “Shelby, there’s still time,” said Granger, quietly. “I can still offer myself up. They might stand down.”

  She looked at him. “No, Tim. They won’t. And we simply can’t afford for you to fall into their hands. What if they dig around in your head and learn all that technology you’ve forgotten? The Granger-moons? What if they get the technology for that? We have at least a hope of defeating their ships. Defeating moons that can destroy an entire planet? No. I’m not risking another Britannia.”

  “Admiral, we’re about to lose life support,” said Urda. “And engineering says the q-drive is still several minutes from being fixed.” He was shaking his head. “I—I don’t think we’re going to make it in time.”

  “Very well. Signal the fleet. Tell them to get to safety. Regroup at San Martin.”

  The bridge was somber, even amidst the chaos. Her words were like a death sentence to them.

  DON’T LOSE HOPE QUITE YET, SHELBY. HELP IS HERE. WE ARE ONE.

  She reached out to her companion. What do you mean?

  “Admiral!” Urda was pointing up at the view screen. “We’ve got company. Lots of them.”

  Proctor watched the screen as dozens of ships snapped into place and joined the fight. She saw another IDF starship appear. One she recognized well.

  “Captain Whitehorse is hailing us, Admiral,” said Sampono.

  She finally breathed. “Put her through.”

  The view screen split, with Captain Whitehorse filling one half and the other half showing ship after ship arrive in a flash. “Admiral, it worked. The Russian Confederation sent some ships. The CIDR. Even the Trits. And the Eru, ma’am. They’re sending . . . everything.”

  Proctor watched the entire sky above them fill with the gargantuan rotating drum of the Eru, along with dozens of their warships—ships she just fought not days ago.

  “Ma’am! The main Eru ship just sent us an audio transmission!” said Sampono.

  “Play it,” she said.

  The speaker flared to life, and the voice of the alien rang out across the bridge. “Unt’unt’wa,” it said. And repeated. “Unt’unt’wa. Daf fogoti unt.” The transmission ended.

  We are one.

  “You’re a miracle-worker, Jerusha. You can explain later how you convinced them. The Independence’s q-drive is down. We need a few more minutes to get it up. Can you hold them off until then?”

  “They’ll never know what hit them, Admiral.”

  Proctor had seen her share of battles o
ver the years, starting with Swarm War Two and culminating in the battle of the Penumbra black hole. All were uniquely terrifying in their own way. But never before had she waged a battle between capital ships within kilometers of a planet’s surface. Never immediately over a city. Even as she watched, one of the ships in her task force lost all power to its conventional thrusters and began to plummet to the ground.

  “My god, it’s going down right in the middle of the city,” said Granger.

  The ship clipped the edge of one skyscraper, sending it toppling over, before ramming head on into a larger skyscraper. The ship and the building exploded in a fiery blast, and the wreckage carried by the wrecked ship’s momentum flew onward, pelting a third tower with a barrage of debris that brought it down too.

  “We’ve got to get everyone out of here,” she said. “Away from the city. Away from Earth.”

  “Ma’am?” the engineering officer waved her down. “The repair team says we might, might, have one q-jump in us.”

  “Finally. Captain Whitehorse, thank you and get out of here. Conventional thrust out of the atmosphere and see if you can lure the Findiri ships away from the city, then q-jump out to San Martin. We’ll regroup there. And send a broadband signal to everyone: withdraw. We’ll fight another day.”

  Granger leaned in to her ear. “Wait. I left Lieutenant Qwerty at Yale. He’s got that manuscript. If we want to stop the Findiri . . .”

  She paused, but shook her head. “No time. We’ve got to get you out. He’ll have to find his way to us.”

  She waited for the imminent protest, but to her surprise, he stepped back. “You’re right.”

  Will wonders never cease?

  Ensign Destachio glanced back at her. “Ma’am?”

  She nodded to him. “Get us out, Ensign.”

  The tug at her stomach was particularly violent, but when it was over—it was over. The viewscreen changed to show the star field of deep space.

  Zivic, who’d remained uncharacteristically silent for the battle over Bern, said, “Well at least that shit show is over.”

  Proctor finally sat down. “Commander? This shit show is only getting started.”

  EPILOGUE

  Britannia Sector

  Orbit of Britannia Debris Cloud

  ISS Dirac

  Captain’s Quarters

  It was getting late on the ISS Dirac. The nighttime shift was almost half over, and finally—finally—Captain Rayna Scott was starting to feel a little sleepy.

  Talking to people did that to her, and she’d been talking to data technician Sarah . . . did she ever ask her last name? Ensign Sarah—they’d been discussing the video data provided by President Sepulveda for over two hours.

  Her eyelids felt heavy. She’d been awake for over thirty hours. Analyzing data excited her. Kept her awake, Especially civilization-saving data.

  “Okay. Last thing I can think of, dearie. It’s a long shot.”

  “Captain?”

  “Check the database that Sepulveda brought over. See if we can find another video of this same location, same time. But from much, much farther away.”

  A few moments silence. “Okay, ma’am. This could take awhile.”

  Her eyelids. How the hell does a two-gram body part feel like it weighs a fucking ton?

  “Just . . . wake me up when you find it.”

  She, finally, mercifully, let her eyelids drop. Just for a moment.

  “Ma’am?”

  Her eyes snapped open again, and she wiped drool from the corner of her mouth. She groaned. “How long was I out?”

  Two hours, most likely.

  “About two minutes, ma’am. I got kinda lucky.”

  “Oh. Well. Two minutes of sleep does wonders for the body.” Indeed, her eyelids now felt like a few pounds each instead of a fuck-ton. Progress. “What have you got?”

  “Something remarkable, ma’am. I’m just—well, take a look.”

  Sarah sent the video file over from wherever she was working and Rayna waved it on to play. She saw the familiar view of Titan bearing down on Britannia, the unearthly green glow of half its atmosphere casting strange shadows onto the buildings near the beach. But this time she could just make out Avery’s retirement home sitting up on the top of the cliff overlooking the ocean, no bigger than a few pixels on the screen.

  “It’s a security camera from one of the beach resorts nearby, ma’am.”

  Indeed, she saw hundreds of little dots on the beach. Some of them were moving. Very quickly. She felt a pit in her stomach when she realized they were vacationers staying at the resort behind the camera. She could imagine what they must have been thinking. The terror they were feeling. But she forced that from her mind. Focus on the data, Rayna.

  “Okay, watching it now,” she said, and glanced at the timestamp. The Swarm ship would show up in about five seconds.

  There it was. Appearing just after a brief flash and oversaturation of the camera. And next to it—

  “Aha! I knew there was something behind it. It’s another ship. And it looks remarkably like the old gunships IDF used to use. In fact,” she paused it and peered closer. “If I’m not mistaken, that’s Interstellar Two. The ship that Avery was allowed to use in retirement every now and then.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Believe it or not, that’s not the interesting part.”

  Oh.

  She waved the video onward. The sky began to glow white. The missing four seconds approached. And then….

  The flash that ended the previous video.

  But this video didn’t end. The flash was not from Titan colliding.

  The flash was really a collection of smaller flashes. Each of which by themselves could have oversaturated the camera. But when the light subsided, a fleet hung in the atmosphere above Avery’s house and the two ships already there.

  A fleet of Swarm ships. Of the variety that attacked Earth thirty years prior.

  “My. God,” she said, and slowed the video down to one tenth.

  “It gets better, ma’am.”

  “Are you shitting me? Better than this?” She watched with bated breath. The time stamp clicked down at one tenth speed from three and a half seconds. To three seconds.

  To two.

  The original Swarm ship and Interstellar Two next to it disappeared, and in their place it was as if the entire cliff erupted in a massive explosion of earth, white hot magma, and fire. The nearest Swarm ship caught a chunk of rock and began exploding, and then the rest of the fleet was almost simultaneously crushed by the falling mass of Titan, and then—

  The video ended.

  “Holy shit,” said Rayna.

  “I’ll say, ma’am.”

  “Someone—perhaps Avery herself, but we can’t be sure—took Interstellar Two to the Swarm’s universe through an artificial singularity housed somewhere in Avery’s compound. It returns with one Swarm ship. Then an entire Swarm fleet. Then the first two ships q-jump away, initiating the huge explosion we saw—never q-jump near matter, dearie—and the entire fleet is left to be slaughtered by Titan, just two seconds later.”

  “Yes, ma’am. It appears that way.”

  “Well. Someone is a tactical genius.” She became uncharacteristically solemn. “And this means there’s a Swarm ship out there. Right now.”

  Her eyelids were getting heavy again. They were relentless. But this time, she’d earned it.

  “Sarah, get this to—oh, I don’t know. Granger. And Shelby. And that president guy. One of them will know what to do. I’m out.”

  She finally let her eyelids crash down, and her face soon met the desk.

  Thank you for reading Legend, Book 7 of the Legacy Fleet Series. If you enjoyed this book, would you please leave a review?

  Leviathan, Book 8 of the Legacy Fleet series, will be released September 9th, 2021. Preorder it now!:

  Smarturl.it/leviathanwebb

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