Bitter Glory will be released next week. It is a short work, about one-third the length of one of the novels, so if you don't like shorter stories, it's probably not for you (I'm not trying to discourage anyone from buying it, of course, but I want to make sure you all get what you expect).
So until next week, here's a sneak peak...
Bitter Glory
Chapter 1
Control Center - AS Wasp
In Earth Orbit
The command chair was
surprisingly hard and immobile. Garret
would have sworn the small ridge along the back was designed specifically to
poke him in the spine. He’d ached to sit
there for so long, but always in his imagination the captain’s seat was
comfortable, inviting. Now that he was there,
shifting his weight awkwardly, he had a new thought…maybe the commander
shouldn’t be too comfortable. Perhaps to
be in command was to be constantly on edge.
Whatever the truth, he
would soon find out. The privilege of
command was now his, and the burden as well.
He’d longed for this day since he’d first donned his midshipman’s
whites, and his service since then had been an uninterrupted road to the
captain’s chair. Garret was a brilliant
officer, but he was cocky too. His
evaluation reports all said the same thing - he was a tactical genius with an
uncanny ability to anticipate enemy maneuvers.
They also said he was audacious, even reckless…that he lacked caution.
He’d talked many times with
one of the professors at the Academy about the heavy responsibility of being in
that seat, of the sometimes terrible consequences of decisions that were the
captain’s alone to make. Captain Horn
had been a decorated officer with a spotless record and an unimpeded trajectory
to the admiralty. Instead he ended up,
years later, still a captain, but now behind a desk teaching midshipmen. One of those decisions had gone horribly
awry, but Garret never knew just what it was that had so affected Horn that he
could no longer face the command chair.
He liked and respected Horn, but he was also young and arrogant enough
to be sure nothing like that could ever keep him from his destiny.
Garret smiled as he
glanced around the small control center, each of its five workstations gleaming
white and silver. Wasp was so new they
were still peeling protective polymer wrapping off the equipment. She was the second ship of the class to enter
service, and she was all his. He had
already decided she was perfect…other than the hideous chair.
His crew hadn’t boarded
yet. Technically they were all still on
leave like him, scheduled to report the next day….today, actually, as it was
well past midnight, station time. But
Garret couldn’t stay away. He’d wandered
down to the bay, intending only to take a quick look at the ship sitting in her
docking cradle. It was quiet on the
station, almost eerily so, with no one around except the skeleton crew working
late night maintenance.
She was the most beautiful
thing Garret had ever seen. Aerodynamics
wasn’t an issue in spacecraft design, but the Wasp had a sleek, streamlined
hull anyway, largely because of the need to wrap the ship around its dual
torpedo tubes. The heavy plasma
torpedoes were something new, and they made the Wasp a very dangerous vessel,
with a punch that could hurt even a capital ship. Nothing was free, of course, and that
offensive power came at a high cost in sacrificed armor and defense. The fast attack ships were known as “suicide
boats” for a reason, though the crews tended to take the name as a badge of
honor.
Garret admired his ship’s
form, 102 meters of dark grey heavy metal alloy held in place by two large
brackets and connected to the station by half a dozen snaking umbilicals. They were almost done fueling the reactor;
the food, equipment, and other supplies had already been loaded. In another hour she’d be ready to go.
He had promised himself
he wasn’t going to go aboard again tonight, but after standing in the docking bay
for a while he couldn’t resist. His captain’s
credentials gave him 24 hour access, even though the ship was technically
closed to all but maintenance personnel.
He climbed through the access portal and made his way methodically down
the tube. The umbilical was a zero
gravity environment, and it was slow going, grabbing the handholds and sliding
himself along.
The attack ships didn’t
have the same level of artificial gravity as larger vessels. When the ship was underway, the core would
rotate, providing the feel of partial gravity to much of the vessel, but that
would be half Earth-normal at best. In
the docking cradle she rotated along with the station, and once Garret climbed
out of the tube he experienced a reasonable facsimile of the station’s 0.85
Earth-normal gravity. It wasn’t actual
gravity, of course, but it felt real enough.
He lost track of how long
he’d wandered around the ship, prowling its empty compartments, before he ended
up on the bridge, back in his uncomfortable but prized chair. A capital ship had many levels and mazes of
corridors, but Wasp was a vastly simpler vessel, with three decks, two above
the spinal-mounted torpedo tubes and one below. Each deck was traversed by a
single primary corridor with several small lateral accessways. Serving aboard Wasp would be a cozy affair.
He leaned back in the
command chair and breathed in deeply. There
was an odd collection of smells in the air, the scent of plastic packing
materials mixed with faint burning odors from new systems activated for the
first time. Later today he would sit in
this very spot and give the orders for Wasp to break free of the station’s
embrace and begin her voyage to whatever destiny awaited her. The Alliance was at war, so that future would
no doubt include a considerable amount of combat. Garret had no idea whether Wasp would be
assigned to a battlegroup or a detached hunter squadron, but wherever she went,
he was certain his crew would do their duty.
He would see to that.
He knew he should go back
to his quarters on the station and get some sleep; the day ahead promised to be
a momentous one. But he couldn’t bring
himself to leave the ship…his ship, and every time he shifted his body to go,
he just ended up sliding around in the chair.
Eventually he closed his eyes, not sure if he was asleep, awake, or
somewhere just on the cusp between the two.
His mind drifted back, dreamlike, over the years that led to this day,
to his service as a junior officer, and further into the past…to a younger
Augustus Garret what seemed like a lifetime ago.
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