Free The Phoenix Requiem (The Phoenix Conspiracy Series Book 7) by Richard Sanders

would have belonged to the ISS Victory . Four-times as massive as the ISS Andromeda , with a dozen more gun decks, twenty more missile launchers, six-fold as many beam weapon emitters, and more armor plating than a deep space outpost—all smoothly and perfectly contoured into the aesthetically beautiful frame that was the Victory. The only downside to the titan-like Victory was its propensity to draw fire, as the biggest and most obvious target.
    Traditionally, the Victory , and all previous ships to bear its name, served as the flagship of the entire Imperial Navy, not to mention the personal vessel of the reigning monarch. That meant, currently, the ship belonged to Queen Kalila, and was bound to follow her orders. During the Civil War, Sir Arkwright—who had held command as guardian-steward of the vessel on behalf of Caerwyn Martel—had chosen to do all he could to keep the Victory away from any and all violent encounters between human ships. Ships that once had been—and still should be—allies.
    When he’d learned the war had ended, he happily had returned the ship to Kalila, since humanity had once again united under one fold. Only, to his surprise, she hadn’t chosen to take the vessel as her personal flagship, and instead ordered Sir Arkwright to retain command of the vessel, charging him also with the duties of keeping the Fleet Admirals in line and serving as flagship for all future battles. Sir Arkwright had accepted this charge graciously. And with some overconfidence, he took the vessel, along with command of the second fleet, and joined the rag-tag group of fleets and fleet admirals in an attempt to mount a defense against the invading Polarian horde by making a stand at Centuria System. Neither Sir Arkwright nor the Victory had been able to make the kind of difference he had hoped. By the time he called for return, with the queen’s permission, the action had proven a spectacular failure: heavy human losses, few enemy casualties, and, ultimately, the destruction of a planet that had been home to billions of lives.
    He would never forget the projection of the planet on the 3D display as a black swarm of countless ships surrounded the gem that was Centuria V…
    Ever since that battle—slaughter, actually—he had moved the Victory to Capital System, where the Dread Fleet was predicted to attack next, and had commanded all fleets under his jurisdiction to do the same. During that time, while the queen was busy consolidating broken fleets and putting them under his direct command, Sir Arkwright had been spending every waking hour he could afford studying the tapes recorded of the Battle of Centuria. Anything that could be learned from it might reveal a weakness in the enemy. If not, however, it should still hopefully help him from repeating the same kind of mistakes he’d made defending Centuria—before ultimately withdrawing.
    “Layheri Alpha fell to almost no resistance,” he thought aloud, as he manipulated the tactical display before him. “And then Centuria V fell too, almost as easily. Despite the presence of so many Imperial warships. Why? ”
    He knew why. It had been because of that damned Polarian Phalanx technology. After witnessing its effectiveness first hand, Sir Arkwright had asked his engineers how to construct and make use of a similar tactic. If the Polarians could combine their shield strength into one massive whole, what stopped the Empire from doing the same?
    The reply had been overly technical, but the ultimate response had something to do with the fact that Imperial ships generated their shields differently than the Polarians, making the human ships stronger individually, but it was not possible for such shields to combine into one. Sir Arkwright couldn’t help but think the supposedly-backwards Polarians might have come up with the better idea after all, no matter how “state-of-the-art” human warships were.
    What he didn’t understand was why the Dread Fleet cared so