Excerpt Reveal: To Challenge Heaven by David Weber & Chris Kennedy

In a universe teeming with predators, humanity needs friends. And fast.

We’ve come a long way in the forty years since the Shongairi attacked Earth, killed half its people, and then were driven away by an alliance of humans with the other sentient bipeds who inhabit our planet.

We took the technology they left behind, and rapidly built ourselves into a starfaring civilization. Because we haven’t got a moment to lose. Because it’s clear that there are even more powerful, more hostile aliens out there, and Earth needs allies.

But it also transpires that the Shongairi expedition that nearly destroyed our home planet … wasn’t an official one. That, indeed, its commander may have been acting as an unwitting cats-paw for the Founders, the ancient alliance of very old, very evil aliens who run the Hegemony that dominates our galaxy, and who hold the Shongairi, as they hold most non-Founder species, in not-so-benign contempt.

Indeed, it may turn out to be possible to turn the Shongairi into our allies against the Hegemony. There’s just the small matter of the Shongairi honor code, which makes bushido look like a child’s game. We might be able to make them our friends—if we can crush their planetary defenses in the greatest battle we, or they, have ever seen…

Please enjoy this free excerpt of To Challenge Heaven by David Weber & Chris Kennedy, on sale 1/16/24

PUNS RELENTLESS ,
SHONGSYSTEM ,
241.5LYFROMEARTH ,
APRIL7,YEAR41TE.

I find myself, as I rather suspect you expected, surprised to see you,” Vlad Drakulya said.

“No! Really?” David Dvorak smiled as he extended his hand to the man history knew as “Vlad the Impaler.” Among other things.

“The boat bay gallery in which they stood was somewhat larger than the one Vlad had left behind aboard the dreadnought Târgoviște. Not unreasonably, perhaps. Târgoviște, which Vlad had captured from the Imperial Shongair Navy four decades earlier, was over I’ve kilometers long . . . but that was barely twenty percent of the Planetary Union Navy ship Relentless’s length. What was surprising—aside from the fact that the Planetary Union hadn’t existed when Vlad left the Sol System—was that, despite the absence of any spin section, the boat bay’s up and down were as firmly established as they would have been on the surface of Earth itself.

A half dozen or so men and women—and three other . . . beings—stood behind Dvorak in that obviously artificial gravity. Most of the humans wore military uniforms, although not that of any military which had existed when Vlad left Earth, and all of them smiled in obvious amusement as he and his companion took in their surroundings.

“The nonhumans among them weren’t equipped to smile.

“Whyever should you be surprised?” Dvorak continued. “I mean, be reasonable, Vlad! You did leave a planet full of humans with the entire tech base of the Galactic Hegemony. What did you expect us to do with it?”

“Obviously, very much what you did do,” Vlad replied, shaking the proffered hand, “although you appear to have applied rather more . . . vigor to the process than I had anticipated.”

Dvorak chuckled and extended his hand in turn to the very tall, very black, former-Marine who had followed Vlad from the shuttle into the boat bay.

“It’s good to see you, too, Stephen,” Dvorak said, gripping his hand firmly. “Your dad and mom asked me to tell you they miss you.”

“You told them about me?” Stephen Buchevsky sounded much less amused than Vlad had, and his eyes darkened.

“I did.” Dvorak met those dark eyes levelly, still gripping his hand. “I know you didn’t want them told you were a vampire. “Things changed, though, and you know I never liked lying to your dad, even by omission, about that. And before you get too bent out of shape people’s attitude about the vampires is one of those things that have changed—changed one hell of a lot—since you left.”

Buchevsky looked at him for several more of Dvorak’s breaths—Buchevsky didn’t breathe anymore—and then released his hand.

“All right.” He still wasn’t happy about it, but he nodded. “I wish you hadn’t. But maybe things have changed enough for them to handle it. I hope to hell they have, anyway.”

“Believe me, they have.” Dvorak laid a hand on Buchevsky’s shoulder and squeezed. “That’s why Pieter and Dan both agreed I should tell them. So did Jasmine, for that matter.”

“Even Jasmine?” Buchevsky’s lips quirked. “I’m starting to feel ganged up on!”

“But only in the friendliest way!” Dvorak assured him.

“Yeah. Sure!” Buchevsky drew one of the deep breaths he no longer really needed. “Dad . . . took it okay?”

“He not only ‘took it okay,’ his sermon the next Sunday was about the mysterious and miraculous ways God moves to achieve his purposes, and he used you as an example.” Dvorak smiled as Buchevsky’s eyes widened. “Not much worried about the ‘vampiric taint,’ your dad. And he and your mom also asked me to tell you they look forward to seeing you again a bit sooner than you probably anticipated.”

“I guess ‘a bit sooner’ is probably one way to put it.” Buchevsky shook his head with a smile of his own, obviously grateful for the opportunity to change topics. “Just how much ‘sooner’ did you have in mind, though?”

“Well, when we say ‘a bit,’ we mean ‘quite a lot,’ actually.” Dvorak’s smile segued into what could only be described as a grin. “The monkey boys and girls came up with a new way to break into phase space, and we can go a lot higher than the Hegemony.”

“How much higher?” Buchevsky asked.

“Gamma bands . . . for now,” Dvorak replied, and watched Buchevsky’s eyes widen. “e phase-drive aboard Târgoviște, which represented the Galactic Hegemony’s best hardware—as of eighty years or so ago, which wasn’t even yesterday yet for the Galactics’ glacial approach to technology— could break only into the upper reaches of the alpha bands, which allowed them a maximum apparent velocity of a little more than six times the speed of light, and explained why it had taken forty years for Târgoviște to reach the Shong System from Sol. But if Relentless could go as high as gamma. . . .

“”at means you can pull damned near twenty lights!”

“A tad over twenty-four, actually, because the Gannon Drive doesn’t need particle screening.” Dvorak’s expression would have filled the Cheshire Cat with envy. “We can get all the way up to point-niner-niner cee, nineteen percent better than anything the Puppies or the Hegemony can pull. We dialed that down a bit, though. We didn’t need that much speed to beat you guys here, and it seemed like a good idea not to push things to the max on our very first extended gamma-band voyage. So we held it down to twenty-two cee. Made the trip in just over twelve years. Well, a smidge under six, subjective. If we had pushed it all the way up to point-niner-niner, we could’ve done it in just over ten years and only fifteen months, subjective.”

“Gannon Drive?” Buchevsky repeated in a rather shellshocked voice.

“The actual official name is the Gannon-Jackson-Nesbitt Drive, but shorthand—” Dvorak shrugged. “Chester gets a little pissed with us over that, but Warren Jackson and Trish Nesbitt are fine with it. “They insist he did most of the heavy lifting.”

Buchevsky opened his mouth again, then closed it firmly before he could parrot the names of people he’d never met.

“Look, the Gannon Drive’s only one of the things we need to bring you guys up to speed on. Why don’t we take the two of you to the &ag briefing room where we can talk about that. Among other things.”

“Quite a few other things, I suspect,” Vlad said, glancing at nonhumans in the greeting party.

“Their heads were distinctly saurian looking, with high, pronounced crests covered in a line down, and they were built on a lean, slender model. “They appeared to be toe-walkers, and although those heads were shaped quite differently, they reminded him strongly of the velociraptors from one of his favorite science fiction movies. All of them were at least twenty centimeters shorter than he, which made them over thirty centimeters shorter than Dvorak or Buchevsky, but two of them were noticeably taller than their companion.

“Oh, definitely,” Dvorak told him. “Definitely.”