Read Jack of Harts 2.5: Wolfenheim Rising for Free Online

meant.
    He saw the life he’d live in over a century, and the life he’d lived in the last five years.  He’d done so much more in the last five years than he’d ever imagined doing.  And he really had done it.  He saw many of the times she’d nagged him into doing it, too.  Well, maybe nagging was unfair.  It just felt like it some mornings.  But for the first time, he saw what she meant with that oath and recognized what she was doing.  He could live with that.  He smiled, and she let out a long, relieved breath.
    “I see.”  Callahan’s words pulled Malcolm’s attention back to the older man as he started walking down the stairs again.  “Then it really would appear we have much business to discuss today,” Old Man Michael Callahan added and guided them into the bar he’d owned for nearly two hundred years.

Just about everyone’s heard of the First Battle of Epsilon Reticuli.  The greatest Alliance defeat of The War.  Over three hundred warships lost in a few hours.  First use of gravitic jammers.  No survivors.  History says a lot of things about that battle.  Most of it isn’t true.  You see, there were survivors, and some of them came to the Wolfenheim Project, looking for work.  That’s why I know the truth of what happened there.  And why it left such deep scars.
     
     

III
     
    The Peloran construction yard seemed to grow larger as the shuttle approached, main engines firing at near maximum power.  The blue glow of fusion-powered engines swept space in the shuttle’s path, decelerating her to match the station’s slow orbit around Alpha Centauri A.  Explosions of white-hot light betrayed the existence of dust particles and larger debris in the shuttle’s path, while objects caught in the edges of the four fusion torches burned orange or red.  Other colors flared into existence for a second from time to time, only to fade back to black again as whatever strange elements existed in that particular speck of dust burned away.  As Malcolm McDonnell watched, the engine wash created the closest thing to true vacuum he would probably ever see so near a working shipyard.
    Wolfenheim floated above the yard, the over six hundred meter length of a modern Class One Colonization Ship barely visible in the pale sunslight of the Alpha Centauri trinary star system.  She was everything a new colony needed, from the hibernation systems that could keep ten thousand people asleep during the trip to the literal hundreds of modular sections that would separate to become buildings when they reached their destination.  The ship had a single mission, one that would be accomplished only by the effective dismantling of the colony ship herself.
    Malcolm’s eyes strayed to the ships whose mission it was to make certain Wolfenheim finished that trip alive, no matter what hazards they met along the way.  He scowled as his eyes found only eight ships.  There should be nine.  He sighed and scanned the eight he did have, happy to at least have been able to find them.  He counted five frigates, the oldest over a hundred years old.  The youngest was a true whippersnapper of a mere eighty-three years, having been retired only twenty years before The War began.  The two destroyers hadn’t fired a shot in anger in over fifty years, but at least they’d been able to make the trip to New Earth under their own power.
    Malcolm’s gaze stopped on Normandy , the jewel of his squadron.  He’d found her in Harmony, playing the part of a floating museum, complete with retired fighters in her twin hangar bays.  They’d been so ancient nobody had bothered to refit them for The War, and even Normandy’s outer armor had been reclaimed for use by “real” warships years before.  That last bit had actually been good news, since it made it easier to access her hyperdrives and refit them for the long trip to New Earth.  And the Peloran had done wonders for her, just like they had for every other ship he