Constitution (book)

Constitution is the first book in the Legacy Fleet Trilogy by Nick Webb. It was published on June 28, 2015.

Description The year is 2650 75 years ago, an alien fleet attacked Earth. Without warning. Without mercy. We were not prepared. Hundreds of millions perished. Dozens of cities burned. We nearly lost everything.

Then, the aliens abruptly left.

We rebuilt. We armed ourselves. We swore: never again. But the aliens never came back.

Until now.

With overwhelming force the aliens have returned, striking deep into our territory, sending Earth into a panic. Our new technology is useless. Our new ships burn like straw. All our careful preparations are wasted.

Now, only one man, one crew, and the oldest starship in the fleet stand between the Earth and certain destruction:

ISS CONSTITUTION

Summary

The ISS Constitution is old, having defended Earth against the first Swarm invasion 75 years ago. Captain Granger is also old, sick, grumpy, and wants nothing more than to retire to a nice Florida beach. But IDF (Integrated Defense Force—United Earth’s military) has plans to not only retire him, but the ship too. Against Granger’s protests, Commander Shelby Proctor is assigned to convert the “Old Bird” into an orbiting museum, complete with fighter pilot simulators, gift shops, restaurants, etc. This causes great conflict between Proctor and Granger.

Meanwhile, several chapters follow a few disappearing starships. The Veracruz sector has gone dark, and the scout ship sent to investigate finds unidentified ships razing with unimaginably powerful weaponry.

During the decommissioning ceremony for ISS Constitution at Lunar base, four Swarm carriers appear in the Jupiter system, destroy a few Jovian supply depots on Jupiter’s moons, then bear down on Mars with incomprehensible speed. Maximum alert is raised, and the Constitution finds itself scrambling to refit itself and put it on a war footing, in less than two hours. Commander Proctor, still at odds with Grangers, starts to shine as she helps ready the ship.

Constitution, rather than help with the defense of Lunar Base, is sent ahead with a few other ships as an escort for the Vice President, who’d attended the ceremony. Vice President Isaacson, revealing his true character, orders a q-jump engine destined for the ship carrying students be sent to his ship instead so he can escape to Earth before the Swarm overtakes them.

With Isaacson gone, Constitution faces the 1st of three battles in the defense of Earth.

The first happens about halfway back from the moon, when the Swarm, having destroyed the fleet remaining at Lunar Base, overtakes the small caravan of ships guarded by the Old Bird and a few other IDF cruisers. It’s a bloodbath, The Swarm handily carving up the ships as easily as it had the fleet back at Lunar Base. Their weapons easily cut through the “smart steel” armor that outfits most ships. As a computationally-based material, it has been “hacked” by The Swarm, with help from Vice President Isaacson, who’d given the information to his friend, the Russian Ambassador Yuri Volodin, who had arranged the initial Swarm attack as a little skirmish to inflame public opinion against President Avery, and get her sacked.

The Constitution escapes because its armor is old, and made out of ten meters of solid tungsten. It q-jumps away, punctured and ravaged by the Swarm’s green anti-matter beams, barely escaping the new “artificial singularity” weapon that devastated the surface colonies on the Moon. Constitution ends up way over-jumping its target of Valhalla station near Earth due to the gravitational interference of the singularity weapon the Swarm had been forming when the Old Bird escaped. It plots a course for Valhalla station, in geosynchronous orbit over Earth. They accelerate at maximum, planning on flying by the Swarm carriers and hitting them with mag-rail slugs for a minute or two during the flyby. There is a singularity forming, and Granger launches the empty ''Rainbow ''(the schoolkids’ ship) at it, disrupting it. Valhalla station ends up mostly destroyed, and when another singularity appears, Granger orders Commander Pierce to order a pilot to ram it, who picks Hotbox. Hotbox tries, but is destroyed in the attempt. Pierce then orders Fishtail, who is successful, and disappears in a flash. The Swarm invasion fleet continues on towards lower orbit around Earth, leaving the ''Constitution ''behind. They figure out that sending mass through the singularities while the Swarm is still generating them causes power fluctuations aboard the Swarm ships. When they catch up to the Swarm and start to engage, Granger blacks out—the tumor in his brain causing a seizure. Proctor takes over. Granger listens to the battle from sickbay.

When the ship is evacuated, he hides, and with everyone gone, he heads to a radiation-flooded engineering, where he pilots the ruined ship into a singularity. The sheer mass of the ''Constitution ''entering the singularity is enough to cause massive power feedback on the remaining Swarm ships, and they explode, but the Constitution disappears. Seconds later, it reappears, careening through the atmosphere. Proctor, in her escape pod, manages to reboard the Old bird, finds Granger seated asleep in a chair in Afterburners—the Old Bird’s unofficial pub—and steers the ship to skid across the Great Salt Lake, coming to rest on the main boulevard of South Salt Lake City, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake.

In the hospital, it’s revealed that the cancer is gone, and Proctor tells Granger that certain audio recordings on the Old Bird reveal he was gone not for ten seconds, but three days. Later, at Abe Haws’ funeral, Admiral Zingano convinces Granger to return as the Captain of the Warrior, and warns him that people “at the top” of the government have their eye on him.