The Defiant Stand Is Live
Book 1.5 of The Vethrak Requiem launches today.
While humanity reached for the stars, one ship held the line. Today that ship gets her book.
The Defiant Stand is out. Free on Kindle Unlimited. $3.99 as an ebook.
This is the story of the people who stayed behind.
In The Exodus Rush, humanity survived the Vethrak invasion and turned toward the stars. In The Tau Ceti Gambit, the first fleet crossed twelve light-years and met what was waiting on the other side. Between those two moments, someone had to hold the door. Someone had to guard the fuel lines, watch the construction berths, and keep the mission alive long enough for the fleet to launch.
That story belonged to the UENS Defiant and the Rivera brothers who held her line.
Captain Marcus Rivera commands her, though some days his own mind is the greater threat. The invasion broke something in him that discipline alone cannot fix. His brother David serves as his XO, holding the ship steady while wondering when he gets to be more than his brother’s keeper.
Six months after the invasion, a critical fuel processing facility on Titan goes dark. Without that fuel, the extrasolar fleet never launches. The people who seized the station have decided that humanity’s reach for the stars is a death sentence, and they have built something to prove it: a recall beacon, salvaged from Vethrak technology, that would scream humanity’s location into the void.
One ship. Two brothers. A signal away from calling back the fleet that nearly ended us.
I love writing the big books. Fleet engagements. First contact. The chapters where civilizations turn on a hinge. The Defiant Stand is not that book. The scale is a single ship, a single crew, and the truth that the people who hold the line do not get the glory. They get the homecoming.
That was enough to make me want to write it.
The format shaped the storytelling. Every chapter went up on Substack one at a time, and every installment had to earn the reader’s return. The harder challenge was the relationship at the center of the book. Marcus and David Rivera share a bridge and twelve years of silence about the invasion that shaped them both. The emotional beats live in the pauses, in what goes unsaid until someone finally breaks.
If you read it weekly here as it serialized, thank you. You read it the way it was first meant to be read, one chapter at a time, the pressure building. The novella is the same story, polished and tightened, ready for the shelf.
If you are new, here is the door.
While we’re here, a note about what’s happening on Substack this month.
The Iron Wake is the black-market salvage syndicate behind the Lurker Core, the modified weapons, and the stolen research notes that drive the crisis in The Defiant Stand. By Year 12, the Wake is a fact of life in Sol. An institution dangerous enough that two brothers and one warship have to clean up what it sells.
This month on Substack, we go back to where it started.
Thirty-one stories across May follow Anya Rask, a licensed UEN salvager in Year 1, as she crosses the line from contract recovery work to founding signatory of the Iron Wake Protocol. The years that turned a scrap crew into the institution Book 1.5 takes for granted. The Drift Covenant, Greyline Parish, the Threadbank, the Saltglass Circuit. All of them rise in parallel.
If the Iron Wake’s reach unsettled you in The Defiant Stand, May shows you how it got that reach.
The Defiant Stand is on Amazon now. Free with Kindle Unlimited, or $3.99 as an ebook.
The fleet is about to leave. The Defiant held the line so it could.
https://www.amazon.com/Defiant-Stand-Vethrak-Requiem-Book-ebook/dp/B0GWS9BJ1C
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