Into the Darkness: Crimson Worlds Refugees I by Jay Allan Read Free Book Online

for fewer than 50,000. He knew that, and his actions spoke accordingly. But he was still carrying the guilt. As he knew Garret was too.
    “Very well, Commodore.” Harmon was a captain by rank, but navy tradition demanded only one officer be addressed as captain on a vessel. Flag Captain Horace was the unlikeliest officer in the navy to give a shit about nonsense like that, but traditions that old stuck, and Harmon received the courtesy promotion when someone called him by rank on Midway .
    Compton took a deep breath. “Time to first transit?” He knew the answer, but sitting around with nothing to do wasn’t going to help the crew or him.
    “ Saratoga’s in the lead, sir. Projected insertion in three minutes, twenty seconds.”
    It was no accident that one of the fleet’s two other Yorktown class battlewagons was in the front of the line. Admiral Barret Dumont flew his flag from Saratoga , and there was no one Compton trusted more to handle a crisis than the feisty old firebrand of the Second Frontier War. Dumont had been retired when the First Imperium invaded human space, but he’d rejoined the colors when Garret had rallied the navy to face the deadly new threat. Dumont was old, over 100, but he didn’t look or act like it.
    Compton had placed Midway near the end of the line. The only ships behind her were the six cruisers of the squadron that had decelerated to pick up Kato’s crews. It wasn’t where he belonged, he knew that. But it was where he had to be if he was going to live with himself.
    He felt an urge to rush down to the landing bay, but he stifled it. His place now was on the flag bridge. He knew Hurley would be hurting, mourning all the people she’d lost in the last few days, and he resolved to speak with her as soon as events allowed him the time. The whole fleet had suffered terribly in the fighting in X2, but the fighters had been truly decimated. He’d see some medals given out, commendations for the valor of the pilots and crews of Hurley’s squadrons—though he wondered how much meaning such symbols would have in their new reality.
    Compton felt the minor disorientation he always did when Midway slipped through the warp gate. He looked around the bridge, watching how the rest of his staff reacted to the strange, and still largely unexplained, trip through the portal. The use of warp gates was well-understood, but human science had largely failed to align its understanding of physics with the miraculous effect of simply flying into one of the strange phenomenon and emerging lightyears away. The only thing that was known for sure was the trip was not instantaneous—it took a small fraction of a second to reach the other side, during which time the transiting ships, and their crews, were somewhere . Exactly what that meant, whether there was simply some kind of tunnel through normal space—or if the vessel and its crew briefly passed into some alternate universe or dimension—was purely a guess.
    “Welcome to system X4, Admiral Compton.” Dumont’s gravelly voice burst through the com unit a moment later. It would take Midway’s systems a few minutes to recover from the warp gate transit, but Saratoga had been in the system for over an hour. “The scope is clear. No enemy forces detected.”
    Compton felt a wave of relief flow through him. All his carefully-crafted plans would have been for naught if his fleet ran into more First Imperium ships in X4. But a clear scope meant one thing—his people had a chance. They were lost and cut off from home. They were exhausted and scared and low on supplies. But they weren’t dead yet. And even that had seemed impossible less than a day earlier.
    “Send a fleet communique, Commodore.” His voice was taut, his tension slightly lowered but still there. “It’s not time for celebrating yet. All ships are to set a course for warp gate two and lock into the navcoms. And all personnel are to prepare to get back in the tanks as soon as the