Rebellion of Stars (Starship Blackbeard Book 4) Read Online Free PDF

to sit and wait, they seemed to be thinking. Another hour, no longer, and three loyalist destroyers would come to Hot Barsa’s aid.
    Tolvern was happy to encourage this thinking as long as possible. She didn’t need long. In fact, she didn’t want to fight at all, only drop the pod into the atmosphere and scoot for cover. And so Tolvern brought her ship straight in, as if she had nothing to hide. She sent a communication to the orbital defenses, but garbled. Meant to sow confusion, nothing more. At first, it seemed to work.
    But when she was a hundred thousand miles out and approaching one of the planet’s small moons, the enemy opened fire. It was a probing attack, a single missile from Fort Gamma. Meant to flush out her intentions, no doubt.
    She ordered countermeasures, then squawked a protest. This time, ungarbled. Don’t shoot at us! We’re peaceful.  
    The enemy didn’t buy it. Fort Gamma resembled a giant, lumpy baked potato about ten miles long, and missiles and torpedoes now launched along a broad front.
    Tolvern clenched her handrests on the bridge of Philistine . This was it, her first combat at the helm of her own ship. For a moment, panic came clawing up from her gut, threatening to leave her frozen in terror and indecision. But she heard Captain Drake’s calm voice in her mind, imagined how he would respond. Her fear vanished as quickly as it had arisen.
    At the same time, her crew was already performing as ordered. The pilot changed the angle of approach to minimize their vulnerability. The tech officer and the gunnery launched countermeasures. Fire control systems answered fire with fire. Soon, missiles were detonating on the surface of the fort.
    “Hold the cannon,” Tolvern said. Her voice sounded calm, authoritative. A voice to be obeyed. “I want them to think we’ll be swinging past for another attack.”
    By now, they’d nearly cleared the first fortress and had somehow avoided taking any damage to their shields. In a moment, they’d come into range of two more forts, but she didn’t intend to wait for them to appear.
    She opened a channel to the away pod, poised for launch in the engineering bay. “We start the countdown sequence in three minutes.”
    “Ready and waiting,” came Corporal Martin’s gruff voice. She was the marine leading the surface expedition.
    While the channel was still open, Tolvern heard Henry Jukes’s high, nervous voice. Brockett’s young assistant sounded terrified. Hard to blame him. He was about to be slingshotted in an unpowered away pod toward the planet’s surface at three thousand miles an hour, while enemies tried to blow him to smithereens.
    “Captain!” someone broke in from engineering over the com. “We have incoming hostiles.”
    Incoming hostiles? What? Where?
    Tolvern’s fingers worked the console. Couldn’t be the destroyers. They were still too far out. Ground craft? Something hidden on the far side of the planet? Drake’s entire fleet had been studying Hot Barsa from a distance for weeks now, and there should be nothing here. Not so much as a frigate.
    “What the devil are you talking about?” she demanded. “Where?”
    “The fort!”
    She’d been ignoring the red lights, the flashing warnings, and the heat signatures along the schematic of the small moon. The fort was throwing all sorts of destruction their way, but it was the responsibility of other crew members to neutralize those attacks. Except this.
    Now Tolvern understood why the fortress had seemed so calm. It had been hiding a secret. Three torpedo boats, each a third the size of Philistine , launched one by one from a hidden hanger on the side of the moon. They must have been hiding there, already manned and engines hot.
    In deep space, torpedo boats of this size escorted larger ships. They were not swift enough or powerful enough to brawl with even a modest-size ship like the rebel destroyer. But here, protected by the massive guns of orbital fortresses, their