Victory (book)

Victory is the third book in the Legacy Fleet trilogy by Nick Webb. It was published on March 9, 2016.

Description

United Earth burns.

The Swarm runs rampant across our space. We mourn the loss of thousands of ships and millions of fallen comrades. Billions of fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers--all gone, all dead. It is time we end this, for our moment has come.

But victory never comes without sacrifice. Heroes are not taught nor trained, but forged in blood and ashes. Our grandchildrens' history books will tell our story, and glorify the heroes and legends.

The Swarm will be conquered; we will prevail.

At any price.

VICTORY

Summary

The world of Indira is under attack, and Granger, still smarting from being used by Vishgane Kharsa, arrives with his fleet too late—the planet is almost completely destroyed. To make matters worse, the Swarm has unleashed another weapon—a supermassive dreadnought, a hundred kilometers long, that is basically a planet killer.

Granger manages to destroy an entire super-dreadnought and has his sights on another when the dreadnought initiates contact, revealing that the massive ships are part of yet another alien race under Swarm control, the Skiohra. Vice Imperator Scythia Krull, the leader of the vessel, claims the Skiohra are no longer fighting for the Swarm, and asks to meet a few days later.

Granger, President Avery, and Admiral Zingano are all skeptical. It sounded too convenient. The war is going very badly. So Avery decides that after the parlay, General Norton would lead a massive strike force to board the Skiohra super-dreadnought, seize it, and point it at the Swarm fleets.

At the meeting, Granger learns that the Skiohra are essentially a race of mothers, each female carrying tens of thousands of sentient embryos, each a fully developed person, connected to the mother through something resembling the Swarm’s meta-space link. Only a select few are born to the exterior life—the rest live inside the mothers for centuries. Scythia Krull claims that she and her interior children worked on the Russian Singularity production station, outfitting the Swarm carriers with the dreaded weapons.

She reveals much of the Swarm plan to Granger, who believes her, and tries to prevent the impending invasion.

General Norton doesn’t listen to Granger, as he believes the Captain to be under Swarm influence. The invasion proceeds, hundreds of boarding ships and cruisers show up, as well as dozens of Swarm carriers, which confirms Norton’s suspicions.

The battle is grueling—half of the fleet is destroyed. Admiral Zingano is killed, and the Warrior is destroyed. Norton even brings the half-repaired Constitution with him and hurls it at the super-dreadnought in a vain attempt to subdue it. The operation is a complete disaster, and Granger—having escaped with his crew to Zingano’s ship ISS Victory, convinces Krull to trust him. The Victory and the Dreadnought escape, making their way to the Russian Production facility where they will attempt to stop the Swarm plan.

Krull claims the Swarm plan is to hurl all the debris that has been scooped up by the singularities deployed against human worlds at Earth, destroying and subduing it permanently. The singularities come in pairs, and what goes in one side comes out the other, but the timing can be controlled. The Swarm has calibrated all the singularities such that everything that goes in one end will come out the other roughly this moment—right before Granger arrives on the Victory. The debris has all conglomerated in a huge ball the size of a small moon, and the Swarm’s plan is to then transport it all through one last singularity and aim it at Earth.

Meanwhile, Isaacson has been sent by Avery on a mission to the Russian Production facility, where he is to meet with President Malakhov, ostensibly for secret peace talks.

Volodin, though, is trying to convince him that he should kill Malakhov and Avery both,so that Volodin can take over the Russian Confederation and Isaacson the United Earth government. Once there, Malakhov tries to convince him that they are on the same side an reveals his decade-long plan: use all the debris sucked up by the singularities and hurl it down to the planet below the Production Facility—what Malakhov claims is the Swarm homeworld.

Isaacson, sick of being played by everyone, aghast that Malakhov has been planning this for a decade, in a moment of extreme anger and frustration shoves Malakhov off a high drop-off, supposedly killing him. Volodin congratulate him, then touches him, infecting him with the Swarm virus. Isaacson’s implants detect the virus, and explode, killing them both. But before he died, his implants also delivered a computer virus to the devices the Swarm had installed aboard the station to monitor what Malakhov was doing.

But it’s too late—the giant ball of debris vanishes, on its way to Earth. Granger shows up. They see old Ballsy from two months ago appear from a singularity, and moments later, old Fishtail appear from another one. Old Ballsy, confused at seeing the Skiohra dreadnought, the Russian ships, and the ''ISS Victory'', thinks Granger is at the top of the conspiracy, and manages to grab a severely wounded Fishtail out of her fighter before returning back through the singularity he traveled through.

Granger boards the station, and discovers that his “vacation” four months earlier had actually been to this station. Old Granger is there, still dying of cancer. The old Constitution is being altered to erase signs of its presence at the Russian station, and outfitted to deploy singularity devices. Granger is confused that his old self is still dying of cancer, when he decides to inject his old self with the Swarm virus, which would cure him of the cancer, but put him under Swarm control.

With old Granger under Swarm control, current Granger has a pivotal conversation with his old self where he discovers that the planet below is only the homeworld of the liquid beings the Swarm has corrupted, and that the true Swarm enters our universe through the black hole at the center of that solar system (it’s a binary system—a star and a black hole orbiting each other).

Granger’s last minute plan is to take the ''Victory ''towards the black hole with one part of a singularity pair. Proctor would take the other end of the singularity pair, transport to Earth through the singularity the Swarm had used to transport the debris ball, and send the entire debris ball through the singularity pair she and Granger held, hurling the debris into the black hole, disrupting the meta-space connection.

The plan is put into action, but as Granger approaches the black hole, Fishtail appears behind him, wounding him and taking the singularity container. They fight, and Fishtail reveals why the Swarm never trusted either the Russians or the Skiohra with the anti-matter weapons—anti-matter in the black hole could also easily disrupt the metaspace link. Granger opens the singularity container, heaves the singularity at Fishtail, who disappears in a flash (collapsing the singularity, due to mass-disparity), and Granger rushes to activate the anti-matter bombs Avery had covertly installed on most IDF ships, ostensibly in preparation for a counter-invasion of Russian Confederation worlds, but which now serendipitously provided the firepower to shut down the meta-space link.

We leave Granger eternally falling down the gravity well of the black hole as time slows down for him and he watches the outside universe speed up due to relativistic effects, and him wondering if he’ll get to watch the end of the universe. Proctor, on the other end of the singularity pair, is told by Krull that now that the other end is collapsed, they can use their singularity to create a huge explosion on the debris ball still headed towards earth, knocking it off course, and possibly catching the escorting Swarm carriers in the explosion’s wake. It works, and the battle becomes a mop-up operation as IDF, Skiohra, and Dolmasi ships finish off the remaining Swarm carriers.

Ballsy sees Fishtail appear out of the singularity, and space-walks outside his own fighter, grabbing her and saving her, again, nearly losing his life. He wakes up in a hospital on Earth, surrounded by his fighter crew, who tells him that the trip through the singularity cured Fishtail of Swarm control, and on a videocall, he sees her with her son, Zack-Zack.

In the epilogue, it’s revealed that Avery and Malakhov were in it together from the beginning, planning the Swarm’s ultimate destruction through their risky gambit, but they acknowledge their plan ultimately would have failed, had it not been for Granger, Proctor, and the Constitution.