“By the time you get our transports to us, I’ll have everything locked down enough that we can leave a battalion behind and bring the other three to Sol,” she confirmed instantly.
“All right, Brigadier, we’ll see you shortly,” he told her.
He rose from his chair, striding up to the main holodisplay as his flag deck crew watched, waiting for him to say what they knew was coming.
“Rhianna, hit the Rebellion channels,” he told his com officer. “Inform Archangel that Bombardier is moving.”
It would take several hours for the message to percolate through the network of wormhole communicators that linked the Confederacy together, but that was fine. It would take fourteen hours for Battle Group Vigil to reach the wormhole station.
By the time they were ready to transit to Sol, the Rebellion would be activating cells across human space. Most of those were irrelevant to Isaac—he cared about the cells in Sol, the ones that were supposed to take over Earth Fortress Command.
“Cameron.” He turned to his operations officer. “Please inform all Captains that we are initiating Bonaparte. They are to set their course for the Eridani Wormhole Station, matching Vigil’s maximum flank acceleration.”
He smiled.
“Officers, it’s time to retake the Confederacy for her people.”
His orders set the entire flag bridge into motion—and thousands of people throughout the hull of the battlecruiser as well. The big holographic tank in the middle of the flag deck showed the icons of his battle group, twenty-five strong.
Eight of those icons were useless in a fight. Two hundred and twenty meters long and carrying a battalion of Confederacy Marines apiece, the Orbital Attack Transports technically weren’t under his command.
Brigadiers Zamarano and Michaels had thrown in with his rebellion long before, though. Eight battalions. Two brigades. A tiny force to fling against the might of the Confederacy, but it was what he had.
Ten ships, smaller than the OATs, moved around them. Those were his destroyers, speedy little ships that were designed to make high-speed attack runs at ships like his Vigil.
Two missile cruisers flanked the main formation, his snipers that would try to take out destroyers before they closed on the battlecruiser flagship.
Four warp cruisers led the way, their vulnerable drive rings making them the only ships in his rebellion that could outspeed light on their own. Everyone else required the wormholes, and the warp cruisers couldn’t carry the battle to come.
That would fall on Vigil herself, the four hundred and thirty-meter-long behemoth at the heart of the battlecruiser group. Two full battle groups guarded Sol, and while Battle Group Vigil out-gunned either of them individually, the fight to come would test them to their limits.
“Battle Group is in motion,” Commander Cameron Alstairs told him quietly. “Estimated time of arrival at EWS is sixteen hundred hours Greenwich Meridian Time, June fifth, 2386.”
There was no need for Alstairs to give him the full date, but the weight of the moment was on them all. Only once before had units of the Confederacy Space Fleet turned on their government.
The result of that was what Isaac Gallant was going to fix.
“We have confirmation from Archangel,” Rhianna Rose told Isaac. “All plans are now in motion, and Archangel has double-confirmed activation of Dynamite and their cell.”
A cell-based structure made sense to Isaac, but it made the kind of massive, multisystem plan they were executing cumbersome. As “Bombardier,” he was in the second tier of cells, but he didn’t know Archangel’s true identity—and all Archangel knew about Bombardier was that they were a battle group commander.
That would probably have been enough to get a lot of people killed. The Confederacy only had twenty-six battle groups, after all.
In many senses, though, Dynamite was even more key to their plan than Isaac. Dynamite was a division commander in Earth Fortress Command—there were only six of those, and Isaac was pretty sure he knew which one Dynamite was.
Dynamite would deliver the EFC to the rebellion and, almost more importantly, neutralize Liberty. Isaac would back Battle Group Vigil against any of the Confederacy’s other battlecruiser groups, but his force could not fight the Confederacy’s dreadnought.
“77th Brigade’s transports are rendezvousing at EWS,” Alstairs reported. “Brigadier Zamarano reports the last of her people who are going will be aboard in twenty minutes. Colonel Nguyen is retaining command of the station; he gives us thirty-three minutes to wormhole activation to Sol.”
“Have they had any problems with the communication lockdown?” Isaac asked.
“Nothing,” Alstairs replied. “No questions, even. That seems…odd.”
“That’s very odd,” the Admiral agreed. The Eridani Wormhole Station was responsible for all outgoing interstellar communications from the Epsilon Eridani System. It had been silent for over thirteen hours. The rebellion had an excuse and a reason for that, one that should have passed muster, but they hadn’t even been asked for it.…
“Sir?” Rose asked quietly.
The word hung in the sudden silence on the flag deck.
A moment later, Captain Lauretta Giannovi appeared on the computer screen tattooed into Isaac’s left forearm. His Italian-born flag captain looked…uncomfortable.
“I can’t put my finger on it, sir,” she told him. “But something doesn’t feel right.”
“I know,” he agreed. He rose from his chair, studying the holographic display.
“We’ve already initiated,” he told his flag deck crew. “We can’t abort now—if we do, thousands are going to die for nothing.” He shivered. “Once Archangel’s messages start arriving, half the Confederacy is going up in flames.
“We can’t stop now,” he echoed. He studied the position of his fleet. Currently, they were decelerating for a nice, calm wormhole transition. One that wouldn’t draw attention when they arrived in Sol for anything other than its size.
“In fact, Cameron—order all ships to cease deceleration. Bring up engines at full, straight at the wormhole target zone. Have Colonel Nguyen prep the wormhole for immediate activation. We’re going to hit it as fast as we can and punch clean through.”
“We’ll draw all kinds of attention when we come out,” Alstairs noted.
“Surprise would be nice, but the positioning of Sol’s battle groups is what we’re actually relying on,” Isaac reminded him. “Pass the orders. Let’s punch it.”
The warships and transports flipped in space, no longer slowing as they approached the wormhole station but blazing toward it. The smaller ships matched Vigil’s acceleration, keeping pace with the battlecruiser that would have to carry the heaviest fighting once they reached Sol.
In some ways, it was almost a relief to Isaac when the other shoe dropped.
“Admiral, we have wormhole energy signatures,” Captain Giannovi said flatly over the link from the bridge. “Dropping them to the tactical feed now.”
Signatures. Plural. That was definitely not good.
“How bad, Cameron?” he asked quietly as the data filled in on the display.
“No details on who’s coming through yet, but we have nine individual wormholes forming,” his ops officer replied. “Wait…I have emergence.”
The battlecruisers led the way. Enterprise, from Alpha Centauri with her overstrength battle group, the Confederacy’s other strategic reserve force.
Dante, the previous flagship here in Eridani.
Calypso, from Conestoga.
Athena, from Tau Ceti.
Zulu, from Erewhon.
Victoria, from New Soweto.
And Glorious from Sol itself.
Eight battlecruisers. Only Glorious was Vigil’s equal; the other ships were older, smaller to various degrees. Vigil could take any one of them—but there was no way she could take all of them.
“Sir, the last wormhole…” Alstairs trailed off as the data codes propagated.
&nbs
p; Liberty. As long as the battlecruisers but eight times as wide and carrying six particle cannons to the battlecruisers’ one apiece. The Confederacy’s only dreadnought, with a ninth battlecruiser for escort and an entire battle group to support them.
“IFF codes confirm the First Admiral is aboard,” Isaac’s operations officer concluded. “What do we do?”
Ten capital ships versus one. Nine battle groups versus one. If they were here, Isaac could be almost certain that Dynamite had failed, and Earth Fortress Command was still in loyalist hands.
“Sir, Liberty is hailing us,” Rhianna Rose told Isaac. “…It’s the First Admiral herself.”
Of course it was.
They could run. They had enough of a velocity advantage that Battle Group Vigil might be able to pass through the gauntlet and make it into the outer system.
It wouldn’t help them. If Nguyen tried to generate a portal, Zulu and Athena were positioned to disable the station’s exotic-matter projectors. They couldn’t leave the system. Any other option was just…wasting time.
“Admiral Gallant is repeating her hail,” Rose told him. “What do we do?”
Isaac exhaled and nodded.
“Cameron, order the battle group to cease acceleration,” he said quietly. “Rhianna…put my mother on.”
The ships around him shut down their engines, coasting on inertia toward the entire fleet that was waiting for them as the image of First Admiral Adrienne Gallant, the unquestioned military dictator of the Confederacy of Earth, appeared in the main holotank.
Isaac had inherited his merely average height from his petite mother, even if his dark coloring took after his father, a native of New Soweto.
Adrienne Gallant was slightly built and pale-skinned, with hair that had faded from gold to silver over the course of the last twenty-plus years of dictatorship. She didn’t look like the bloodyhanded tyrant who’d ordered the deaths of hundreds of thousands to maintain her power base.
Looks were deceiving. Isaac’s mother had blasted her way into Earth orbit and “temporarily suspended” the office of President when the President and his cronies had become too openly corrupt for anyone to tolerate anymore.
Like most revolutions, she’d had popular support. When that had faded, she’d had the Fleet.
“Isaac,” she greeted him. “Are we going to play games about what’s happening here?”
“No,” he said stonily. “You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t have enough information.”
“I would not,” she agreed. “Commodore Trevelyan was your mistake, if you wondered. He was doing such a good job, too, until he tried to co-opt the wrong person and panicked.” She smiled coldly. “In his place, I’d have made better arrangements to kill Captain Pratchett if she was uninterested.
“Instead, your entire house of cards has come crumbling down. So, tell me, Isaac, are you going to run the gauntlet?”
He was eyeing the math. Vigil was the newest battlecruiser in the fleet—there were perks to being the dictator’s only child—which meant he had a slight but measurable range advantage with his particle cannon over the rest of the Confederacy Space Fleet battlecruisers.
Vigil could potentially kill at least one, possible even two or three, of her older sisters.
But then Liberty would end Isaac’s revolt.
“No,” he finally admitted. “I’d ask you to guarantee my people’s lives, but we both know how often those guarantees have been ignored.”
That was probably a low blow, but it was true nonetheless.
“I have done what I must,” Adrienne Gallant said coldly. “I thought you understood that.”
“I did. It was everything else I objected to,” Isaac replied.
“Order your ships to stand down and prepare to be boarded,” the First Admiral told him. “Your rebellion is over.”
Isaac nodded and killed the channel.
“You heard her,” he told his people. “Stand them down. Stand them all down.”
He waited there, in his command chair on his flag deck. Watching the red icons of Confederacy assault shuttles swarm over the fleet he’d hoped to free his people with.
He waited there until the Marines came to arrest him.
Exile by Glynn Stewart
Interested in reading more? Exile is available now.
About the Author
Glynn Stewart is the author of Starship’s Mage, a bestselling science fiction and fantasy series where faster-than-light travel is possible–but only because of magic. His other works include science fiction series Duchy of Terra, Castle Federation and Exile, as well as the urban fantasy series ONSET and Changeling Blood.
Writing managed to liberate Glynn from a bleak future as an accountant. With his personality and hope for a high-tech future intact, he lives in Kitchener, Ontario with his wife, their cats, and an unstoppable writing habit.
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Other books by Glynn Stewart
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Duchy of Terra
The Terran Privateer
Duchess of Terra
Terra and Imperium
Darkness Beyond
Shield of Terra
Imperium Defiant
Relics of Eternity
Shadows of the Fall (upcoming)
Exile
Ashen Stars: an Exile Prequel Novella
Exile
Refuge
Crusade
Starship’s Mage
Starship’s Mage
Hand of Mars
Voice of Mars
Alien Arcana
Judgment of Mars
UnArcana Stars
Sword of Mars
Mountain of Mars
Starship’s Mage: Red Falcon
Interstellar Mage
Mage-Provocateur
Agents of Mars
Castle Federation
Space Carrier Avalon
Stellar Fox
Battle Group Avalon
Q-Ship Chameleon
Rimward Stars
Operation Medusa
Peacekeepers of Sol
Raven’s Peace
The Peacekeeper Initiative (upcoming)
Shattered Stars: Conviction
Conviction
Deception (upcoming)
Vigilante (With Terry Mixon)
Heart of Vengeance
Oath of Vengeance
Bound By Stars: A Vigilante Series (With Terry Mixon)
Bound By Law
Bound by Honor
Bound by Blood
ONSET
ONSET: To Serve and Protect
ONSET: My Enemy’s Enemy
ONSET: Blood of the Innocent
ONSET: Stay of Execution
Murder by Magic: an ONSET Universe Novella
Changeling Blood
Changeling’s Fealty
Hunter’s Oath
Noble’s Honor
Fae, Flames & Fedoras: a Changeling Blood Universe Novella
Fantasy Stand Alone Novels
Children of Prophecy
City in the Sky
Relics of Eternity (Duchy of Terra Book 7) Page 32
