Free The Oncoming Storm by Christopher Nuttall Page A

their luck.
    “Good,” Kat said. She took a breath, then leaned forward. “Bring us up to one hundred percent power.”
    The quivering grew stronger as the ship shook herself down, but the status lights remained green. Lightning wanted to move, Kat realized; she’d been in the shipyard far too long. And now she was in open space.
    “Take us towards the convoy,” she ordered. Briefly, she wondered what the Admiralty would have told the merchantmen if Lightning had been unable to escort them. Probably would have detached a cruiser from Home Fleet to do the honors. “Mr. XO?”
    “All stations report full readiness,” the XO said. “No problems detected.”
    Kat smiled and sat back in her command chair as her ship sliced through the vacuum of space, heading towards the gathering convoy. The quivering was almost completely gone now, even though the starship was operating at full power. She glanced down at the constant stream of updates from the datanet and felt a wave of relief as she realized that most of the bugs that had crippled Uncanny had been removed. At least the Navy had learned from the disaster, she noted. She’d always had the impression the Navy was slow to learn, let alone incorporate changes into later generations of starships.
    But Uncanny lost power in front of a horde of dignitaries, she reminded herself. King Hadrian himself had been there. No one could be allowed to sweep such a balls-up under the table.
    She leaned back and studied the long-range sensors as they came to life, feeding data into her personal display. Tyre was one of the most heavily industrialized star systems in the known galaxy and it showed. Her sensors tracked asteroid miners, remote industrial nodes, cloudscoops for mining helium-3 from the gas giants, and thousands of spacecraft or starships making their way to and from high orbit. Tyre itself was surrounded with orbital defenses, including thirteen massive battle stations and countless remote platforms. It all looked so safe and impregnable.
    Earth felt the same way, she thought, feeling cold ice running down her spine. At Piker’s Peak, she’d studied the Breakaway Wars. Who knows what will happen when the system comes under attack?
    She shivered. Before the Breakaway Wars, the UN had believed humanity’s homeworld to be untouchable. They’d found out the hard way they were wrong and they hadn’t lived long enough to correct their error. And now, all that was left of the once-proud Sol System was a handful of asteroid settlements, struggling to survive against the odds. The UN and most of the worlds that had taken the lead in fighting it’s control were long gone.
    “Approaching convoy waypoint,” Weiberg reported. On the display, the nine freighters were coming into view, grouped around a small trade station. There was a faint hint of amusement in his voice. “Request permission to slow down.”
    “Granted,” Kat said. Had she ever been that young? She looked towards Lieutenant Ross. “Contact the convoy master. If they’re ready to depart, we might as well leave the system at once.”
    She waited for the response, silently regretting the lack of a formal launching ceremony. Lightning had been commissioned weeks ago, of course, but it would still have been nice to have a dedication. But the Uncanny disaster had ensured that her sister would have a far less public launch and departure. There had been so many questions asked in Parliament that the Navy had bent over backwards to avoid publicity this time around. Kat didn’t mind—there would have been questions about her qualifications she would have found hard to avoid—but her crew deserved better.
    “The convoy master reports that his ships will be ready to depart in twenty minutes,” Lieutenant Ross said. “They have to bring up their own drives.”
    Idiot, Kat told herself sharply. A freighter—even one of the most modern freighters in the galaxy—could hardly afford to keep its drive field active at