The Phoenix War Read Online Free PDF

worthless. They’d
failed. The Empire was doomed. The corrupt influence had won… This cannot be! Justice must win in the end! Mustn’t it? Summers found herself thinking nothing was true anymore. Everything
she’d ever hoped; everything she’d ever believed… wiped away so
suddenly…
    To her horror—and surprise—she felt tears,
hot burning tears that dampened her eyes. She fought them, barely
keeping them from flowing in earnest. Tears. Actual tears! She hadn’t cried since she was a little girl… not in public. She
scarcely managed to hold them back, reminding herself that she was
an officer in uniform—and the command officer besides! She had to
keep it together! But as she did, she found herself wondering what
the point was. It was over. They’d lost. And in the end everyone
dies anyway. Death. The ultimate injustice, still undefeated after
billions and billions of years—in all the time that’d past since
that very first strand of RNA had formed and began the cycle of
life, death had always come to claim its victory. Every single
time.
    Justice was a fairy-tale. A dream. Nothing
more. Millennia ago mankind had invented religion to explain away
the injustice of death, but like the many mythologies that had
risen and fallen with each passing generation, Justice itself was
an empty, pleasant lie. A cheat. A con…
    “You are rallying your ships?” asked Summers.
“Why bother?”
    “To fight, Commander. To fight,” came
Raidan’s stalwart reply. “This isn’t over until I say it’s
over.”
    It was then that Summers realized what she
wanted to do. “Give me those coordinates,” she demanded. “It’s time
Calvin’s ship was returned to him. And if there is to be a fight,
one last, glorious, desperate fight, then I’ll be damned if the
Nighthawk isn’t there.” And me with it .
    “That’s not a good idea, Commander,” said
Raidan.
    “And why not?” she asked, her teeth
clenched.
    “If this battle can be won—and I believe it
can, then one more small frigate in our numbers, like the
Nighthawk, will only make a small difference in our firepower. But,
even if that’s what tilts the scale, we will never truly have our
victory. Not if it means those isotome weapons are still out there.
Even if we somehow salvaged the Empire, it could never be safe. Not
if weapons that powerful are in our enemies’ hands. You know that
as well as I do. Right now the Nighthawk is our fastest ship, and
already hot on the trail of the isotome weapons—following our only
lead. We can’t give all of that up just to have one more dog in the
fight…”
    Summers realized that he was right. If the
Nighthawk went to the rendezvous, yes, she would see Calvin again,
and sooner rather than later—provided the boy wasn’t foolish enough
to let himself get cornered at Capital System by the Eighth and
Ninth Fleets—but the isotome weapons would remain a menace at
large. Weapons that could eradicate billions of people in a
heartbeat; they could eliminate whole civilizations, destroy the
stars themselves, and extinct entire species. They were the
greatest instrument of evil ever designed. But if she stayed the
course, maybe… just maybe, she could stop them in time.
    Perhaps there is a fleeting hope
yet …
    “And what of Calvin?” asked Summers. The
Nighthawk was his ship after all. And Summers didn’t want to usurp
his command, despite what that stupid idiot Miles thought.
    “Calvin wants you to hunt down those isotome
weapons,” came Raidan’s reply. “Trust me.”
    A part of her was skeptical. A part of her
doubted that Raidan would know that, since Calvin wasn’t with him,
nor was he in contact with him currently—according to Raidan’s own
admission. Yes, the more she thought about it, the more certain she
was that Raidan had made that up, to encourage her to hunt after
the weapons. To give her an excuse, should Calvin later object.
Summers knew Raidan was lying. Raidan cannot be trusted … but
she