Free The Terran Gambit (Episode #1: The Pax Humana Saga) by Endi Webb

not kind to their prisoners, and Jake began contemplating pointing the nose of the fighter away from the Earth and making a gravitic shift to Mars or one of the Jovian moons. He could escape there. Blend in with the population. Hide out until the Resistance rose again.
    “Take us back,” she said in an almost robotic voice. “Time to face the music.”
    A cold knot formed in his stomach, which only grew over the flight back to the Florida panhandle.
    Dad gives up. Not me. Not me, dammit.
    He glanced up through the top viewport in the cabin. Po caught his eye. “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t run. Don’t even think about it. They’ll catch you, and when they do, they’ll torture you, then execute you. And me. Just … don’t,” she repeated.
    “Why not?”
    She set her jaw, and locked her cold, steely eyes on his. “Because. When I held the charred bodies of my children in my arms as they took their last gasp, I swore, I swore, I swore,” she said with rising intensity, “that I’d make the Empire pay. That I’d make them suffer. That I’d bring the battle back to Corsica itself and obliterate the Empire. And me hanging by a noose now means fewer dead Corsicans later.”
    He looked back to the controls. The smoking crater that marked Dallas’s passing started to sink below the horizon behind them, and Jake furiously pounded once on the dashboard console, cracking the casing.
    I always win.
    “But not today,” he breathed.
     
     
     

3
     
    Three years later
     
     
    “ A DMIRAL T RAJAN?” T HE GRAYING , rail-thin officer poked his head through the ready room door. He hated disturbing the man, especially before breakfast, and made a mental note to have his XO do the honors next time. “Admiral?” he repeated.
    “Do come in, Captain,” a voice from the chair in the center of the room said.
    Captain Titus of the Corsican battleship NPQR Caligula stepped through the door and started to walk towards the chair when the voice interrupted him.
    “Close it, please, Captain,” the sonorous, husky voice said. Titus pulled the handle and shut the door, standing at attention. He’d learned months ago not to speak out of turn with the new Admiral—new, not as an Admiral, but new aboard the Caligula . The Imperial Fleet Command had transferred Admiral Trajan to the Caligula ’s battlegroup recently, and so far Trajan had not revealed his true purpose onboard, which ostensibly remained highly classified.
    Captain Titus looked around his old ready room. Unfortunately, Admiral Trajan had converted it into makeshift quarters. A mat lay spread against the wall behind the desk, without so much as a pillow or blanket to suggest that it was, in fact, the man’s bed. Very few personal belongings cluttered the space, except for the wall, which now displayed a variety of musical instruments. A violin, a trumpet, several exotic looking wind instruments that Titus could not immediately identify, and one pair of horns that looked deceptively like blowpipes hung crossing one another like an old-style skull and crossbones.
    “Do you like heavy metal, Captain?” the Admiral asked, without turning his chair around to face him, which was fine with Titus—he loathed looking at the Admiral’s face, as did most of the crew.
    “Sir? Like tungsten?”
    “No, Captain. Like the music.”
    Captain Titus shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir. I’m afraid I’ve never heard it.” Up until that point he hadn’t been aware of a barely audible screeching noise that permeated the room. At first it seemed to him just background noise of the ship, or the work of some mechanic one deck below or above.
    Admiral Titus motioned with his finger, which the computer assistant understood as an increase in volume. Captain Titus clamped his hands over his ears as a cacophony of pounding sounds blasted his head. Hardly music, the clashes and screeches made his head pound, and he winced. Half a minute went by and Titus considered bolting from the