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Synopsis

When the Sturm, a group of "species purists," returned from the far reaches of Dark Space to eliminate any human with genetic or cybernetic enhancements, their victory seemed inevitable. Yet, as they waged war against humanity, a small group of battle-hardened heroes rose to the task of beating back the invading force.

At a horrendous cost, Commander Lucinda Hardy, Admiral Fraser McLennan, Sephina L’trel, Booker3 and Princess Alessia led the only resistance to the Sturm's overwhelming forces. Amid the ruins of a civilization utterly corrupted by the Sturm's horrific darkcode malware, they must gather allies and weapons where they can. Old enmities must be overcome and unlikely partnerships forged.

Surrounded, outnumbered and outgunned, the resistance cannot hold out. By strategy and deception, they must force a decisive confrontation with the Sturm. A final stand that will demand the ultimate sacrifice... and extreme violence.

Excerpt

Chapter One

The young woman's home, a bright and particular star, appeared as a cold point of light, no different from any of ten billion. As her ship sped through vast, impossible arcs of space, the single speck grew, first to a distant orb of cool white light and soon enough into the warm and welcome sun of Coriolis.

"Home is the sailor," the old man whispered, "home from the sea."

Lucinda Hardy could not trust herself to speak of anything but duty.

"Done and done well, Mister Chase," she said, congratulating her helmsman on a perfect approach. She struggled to hold her voice steady. "Weapons, stand ready. Sensors, sweep the sky."

"Aye, ma'am," her officers replied in unison.

All around her on Defiant's bridge, young men and women, many of them first lifers like her, leaned into their duties. Some of them--those born of Coriolis, like her--bit down on those untempered feelings that threatened to undo them.

Off the starboard bow lay home.

Lucinda kept her face neutral as Defiant's powerful sensor sweeps fed data into the hologram forming in the central well of the bridge. Habitat Coriolis emerged from the darkness as a space gray, sun-ravaged cylinder of carbon armor and sculpted regolith, a hundred kilometers long and thirty kilometers across. Every pulse and sweep of active sensor energies revealed more detail. The trencher works and scaffolding of the industrial zones at the sunward end of the Hab. Shadows crawling through the valleys and up cold, unprocessed mountain peaks of repurposed asteroid mass a hundred kilometers away at the starward cap. The constellation of smaller Habs and fabs gathered along and around the immense length of the primary structure, all of them turning through space to match the spin of their gargantuan mother world. And she was relieved to see hundreds of ships, maybe thousands of them, huddling within the lee of the Commonwealth's largest and most populous arcology.

"They're scanning us, Commander," her systems chief, Lieutenant Bannon, reported.

"Be more specific, Mister Bannon," Lucinda said. "Who is scanning us?"

"All of them, ma'am," he said, the trace of a smile at the corner of his mouth. "Nine hundred and forty-two civilian craft of all classes, six military vessels, one of them an Armadalen recon'vette, the Kiama. No targeting locks."

"Very well. And Coriolis?"

The smile faded from Bannon's face.

"No sign of the Intellect Coriolis, ma'am. The Hab is running autonomous subroutines augmented by--" He frowned. "Well, it's patchy, Commander."

"I could, of course, take command of the Habitat and those warships not--"

"No," Lucinda Hardy snapped at Herodotus.

The ancient Intellect floated a short distance away from her, an eight-foot-tall teardrop of lustrous black x-matter crammed with neutron star densities of processing topology. Hero's carapace displayed an exaggerated caricature of an old man who barked, "You'll do nothing of the sort, you grabby little munter."

After hitching a ride on Hero's sentience matrix for three weeks, Admiral Frazer McLennan's temper was poor. Lucinda was grateful that the old warrior didn't completely sacrifice himself at Natuna--he had copied his consciousness to Hero before folding onto the bridge of the Combine battleraider Khanjar, where he spat an antimatter submunition at the traitorous Deputy Prince Pac Yulin, and McLennan now seemed resentful that it had even been necessary.

"Avoid doing anybody a huge favor," the Intellect remarked to nobody. "They'll never forgive you for it."

"Quiet, the both of you," Lucinda said.

She had grown accustomed to demanding compliance from them, even though McLennan was the supreme commander of all allied forces throughout the Greater Volume. And Herodotus? Still happy to inform you, at the merest provocation, that he remained an Armada-level Intellect of unparalleled seniority in the Terran Defense Force. Perhaps the only surviving primary Intellect in all of human space.

Luckily, Lucinda wore the uniform of the Royal Armadalen Navy, not Earth, so while she owed due deference to McLennan as the senior admiral in the Volume and to Hero as the prime Intellect, she was master and commander of Defiant, and on these decks her word was law.

"But of course, Lieutenant Commander," Herodotus smarmed.

"Och aye, your ladyship," McLennan added. His comic likeness glared up the slope of Hero's casing as though the Intellect hovered somewhere over him rather than all around in the billions of lines of engram code that expressed the totality of his consciousness, his memories, his indivisible personality.

"'Quiet' means 'for f***'s sake, be quiet,'" Lucinda suggested. As in, shut the f*** up, she added to herself. It would not be appropriate for the crew to see her give vent to her frustration.

Instead, she asked, "How stands the task force, Mister Bannon?"

"Holding station at the edge of the heliosphere, ma'am."

"And Ariane?" Lucinda went on, almost wincing.

"Captain L'trel is also waiting just beyond the limit of the termination shock, Commander."

At least there's that, she thought. It was always a live possibility with Seph that she might just fold directly into one of her favorite bars and start shooting up the joint if they didn't have her drink mixed and chilled on arrival.

"Incoming from the Hab, ma'am," Lieutenant Nonomi Chivers announced. "It's the... ah... temporary governor. A Professor Boylan, ma'am."

"Do we know who he is besides the temporary governor?"

She did not expect an answer. Defiant could not make a safe link to the Hab with the Sturm's malicious code crawling all over the substrate.

But of course, Hero spoke up.

"Having scanned a copy of the voice print in your comms buffer, I believe it's a Professor Paul Boylan," he announced before adding in a stage whisper, "Just an adjunct professor, though. Classics and Early Corporate history at Shogo City Community College."

Lucinda chewed her lower lip.

"I guess if he was teaching Star Trek at Shogo U, he couldn't have been that good or that rich," she said, mainly to herself. "Couldn't afford basic mesh or backup, I'll bet. Okay, Nonomi," she said with more confidence, "can we talk to him but keep the Sturm's code out?"

"Yes, ma'am," Chivers said. "We can launch a repeater sat and take a basic AV link, washed through a malware filter."

"And that's a clean feed?" Lucinda asked.

Lieutenant Chivers glanced at Herodotus. Before she could answer, the Intellect spoke up.

"I built the filter, so it's perfect. Go ahead, plug right into the Hab. I promise, no malware will get through. I am..."

"Very, very smart, yes, thank you, Hero," Lucinda said before he submitted himself for an award. "Okay. Lieutenant Chivers, if you would. We'll take the professor on holo right here."

"Very good, ma'am," Chivers acknowledged, dancing her fingers through the holographic controls at her station to launch a tiny comm sat with Hero's filters on board.

An image flickered to life in front of her.

But it was not Professor Boylan.

Lucinda gasped.

She could not help herself.

Her father, Jonathyn Hardy, stood before her and all the crew of HMAS Defiant.

"Hello, Lucinda..."

"Dad?" she croaked out, losing her grip on the command presence she had worked so hard to forge.

"...I'm sorry that we can't meet yet," her father said as though he had not heard her. Because he hadn't. The hologram on her bridge was a recording, not a live feed.

Lucinda fell silent. All the crew within the ship's command center were likewise stilled. McLennan and Herodotus, too. A pulse beat thickly in her neck, and she swayed a little with a wash of dizziness.

"I'm still a long way from home," Jonathyn Hardy said and smiled, and in his smile, she saw all the kindness and gentle warmth she remembered from her childhood. But he looked terribly old and frail now, as though the decade they'd been apart had pressed down on him with the weight of a hundred years. The image of her father blurred as the tears came. She tried to blink them away, gritting her teeth, but it did not help. The recorded holo came apart in a wash of runny color.

She could still hear him, however

Copyright © 2026 by John Birmingham

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