01/31/2026
FREE excerpt from the epic shared-world space opera anthology, NOT TO YIELD!
NOT TO YIELD
Ten years in the making (Michael H. Hanson first conceived of the project in 2015 while attending LibertyCon and it was finally published in 2025), NOT TO YIELD, a massive shared-world anthology written by 18 of today's most talented sci-fi authors, the epic space opera retelling of Homer's THE ODYSSEY is here!
Created & Edited By:
Michael H Hanson
Stories by:
Jason Cordova - Marisa Wolf - Edward McKeown
Aldea Berrycloth - Allison Chrysler Smith - Arthur Sanchez
Benjamin Tyler Smith - Beth W. Patterson - Brian Bigelow
Dina Leacock - Gustavo Bondoni - Mallory Makepeace
Richard Groller - R.J. Ladon - Shirley Meier
William Barnhill - William Joseph Roberts - Michael H. Hanson
It is the end of a bloody and savage 10-year-long interstellar war. Earth is part of the 230 sentient races of the Polisian War Fleet on their su***de mission to destroy “The Scourge,” an unknown, bellicose, spacefaring species whose only purpose is to annihilate all intelligent life and colonize their sterilized worlds.
On the far side of The Milky Way Galaxy, Captain Tennyson Illiadus and her crew of The Ekaterina infiltrate the enemy’s massive, rogue Dyson sphere, and set off a devastating Singularity-Bomb, an all-devouring Dark Matter Fountain which not only extinguishes the enemy but most of the galactic space-gate network that is the travel infrastructure for the entire galaxy.
The Ekaterina is now cut off from Earth. Stranded far from home, the crew must combine cold-sleep hibernation, near-light-speed relativistic space flight, and random, unmapped, Dark Energy Arterial Tunnels in a dangerous, epic journey of Homeric proportions.
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Prologue to NOT TO YIELD:
“Twilight”
Thirty-one-year-old Commander Tennyson Maria Illiadus’s eyes open thirty minutes before her normal Oh Dark Thirty Hours alarm clock setting. Her sleep is invaded by ten years of ghosts, and they succeed in dragging her back to reality. Groaning, she hits the head, then washes her hands and splashes cold water onto her face before dressing in navy issue sweats and sneakers. She proceeds to jog through the outermost corridor of the middle and largest deck of the large spaceship, relishing the deck plates’ artificial point nine-zero Earth gravity.
The Ekatarina is two years old and battle-hardened, a war vessel bearing the rents and wounds of multiple strikes and hits, all scarred over now with rapid and not very pretty re-plating with rough quality and scrap ablative armor. The ship just went through a rushed repair, refit, and upgrade, which means its most important parts are all in fine working order. Its appearance, though, leaves much to be desired. All aboard her know she is no stranger to death and suffering. She is in the pocket-battleship class, an ancient planet-side naval designation denoting a smaller, lighter, less armored, and much faster version of a standard battleship. The Ekatarina is a skirmisher that moves quickly between the stars while packing a big punch… and today marks the beginning of its most important mission since it was first launched out of planetary orbit to join the Polisian Fleet.
Ship’s light is at half-luminescence at this twilight time between work shifts, a setting she finds comforting for her daily run.
Illiadus, a newly minted Captain and one of many officers finding the steady annihilation of the fleet over the years to be conducive to rapid advancement in the ranks, has fought for this coming day across the span of ten long bloody years of interstellar war. From Third Lieutenant to Full Commander in a decade, she’s earned every single one of her promotions during a series of fearless and deadly engagements, two of which tragically ended in the destruction of two whole Fleets and the continued large-scale loss of life throughout the massive battlefield that is the Milky Way Galaxy.
For ten years the Polisian Space Navy, the fighting arm of the newly incorporated galaxy-wide Polisian Federation of Civilizations (consisting of two hundred and sixteen sentient species) fought a terrible war of attrition against an overwhelming space-faring race from beyond the galactic rim. A bellicose species whose incursions into the galaxy proper threatens annihilation everywhere. A secretive and mostly unknown species, as none has ever been captured or interrogated, they are dubbed, The Scourge, for such is their awful imprint on this corner of the universe.
Captain Illiadus jogs past the half-dark Combat-Information Center (CIC). She can see the nine-person night shift finishing their drills and salutes several who spot her through the armored transparent bulkheads that separate them. In thirty minutes, the command center will be lit up like a Christmas tree and swarming with crewpersons. She takes two lefts that lead her to the bowside of Main Engineering. All three engines have been replaced, and radioactive fuels replenished. Ordnance is stockpiled as well as every other conceivable supply deemed necessary for the successful completion of today’s mission.
Today’s possible su***de mission, Illiadus thinks, but one certainly worth the price.
She ponders this thought with a strange intensity. Ten years of war. Billions dead. Dozens of worlds in dozens of solar systems turned into lifeless wastelands. A merciless faceless enemy that brooks no surrender and offers only death. And here, a major player, Captain Illiadus herself, embracing the offer of ultimate revenge upon an entire alien race bent on multiple genocides. As a stage play this life and death drama would no doubt be filled with mystery and existential angst and powerful articulate soliloquys… but the reality is much more mundane, and far more chilling.
It’s us or them, Illiadus thinks, they’ve rejected dozens of envoys of peace, slaughtering them all. The numbers of dead have grown into macabre abstractions, almost meaningless. But my family, mother, father, my friends, my lover, all gone… yes, this math is very simple. I want revenge, and I’m captaining a ship filled with men and women who want the same, who have similar stories, who want to strike back, no matter the cost.
The tactics and strategies have all been worked out. Success will depend on one ship’s willingness to accept all consequences, and two others, one being Illiadus’s The Ekatarina, possibly suffering the same fate, or perhaps a much more horrifying and lingering one…
Continuing her job, Illiadus narrows her eyes and silently thanks every battle deity in hearing range that she’s successfully demanded, threatened, and bribed enough senior officers to acquire one of the best surviving Chief Engineers in the Fleet, Lt. Commander Walter Lehmann. At forty-nine he is far above the average age of the ship’s crew, and his confidence, experience, and abilities are a much-needed asset she is incredibly grateful for.
She takes two more lefts through hatchways between bulkheads and finds herself paralleling the chow hall where she can hear the clanging hustle and bustle of the fifteen-person cooking staff that has been slaving away on breakfast for the past forty minutes. Real ham and eggs, hot waffles, chipped beef on toast, sizzling steak, hash browns and home fries, ripe cantaloupe and freshly squeezed orange juice… it is a death row inmate’s lavish last meal that three hundred home world and colonial Terrans are about to feast on.
Her First Officer, another godsend, is Commander David Aithon. A solid officer, he knows this crew like the back of his hand and has a penchant for anticipating her orders with a speed and professionality bordering on telepathy. His one drawback is his borderline flirtatiousness, but he always snaps back into line before the need for discipline or worse. Aithon also has a darkness he’s managed to hide from most others, a strange melancholy kept chained behind a wide ingratiating grin, sparkling eyes, and a quick wit. Illiadus suspects this since the first day she met him, but the man is a highly efficient pro she has come to rely on ever since he joined the crew. Besides, the steady advance of The Scourge into The Milky Way has damaged so many souls…
Illiadus picks up her pace. She has only ten minutes left in her run. The surviving remnants of the defeated Polisian First and Second Fleets are currently joining the Third Fleet as she jogs, thus making it the largest space fleet in the Polisian Space Navy’s history. Nevertheless, its size is superfluous, as reconnaissance has recently shown that the enemy’s gargantuan mobile home base (an artificial sphere whose circumference matched Mercury’s orbit around Earth’s sun) contains dozens of fleets whose overwhelming numbers simply cannot be defeated.
Not fairly at least, Illiadus thinks with an evil smirk, but all is fair in love and war, and the Scourge deserve no mercy. Everyone on The Ekatarina and several other ships that will be leading this mission are survivors, victims of The Scourge’s criminal lack of mercy who have lost rivers of loved ones in the past ten-year holocaust.
In three hours, this multi-species fleet of haunted, revenge-seeking professionals will mass at the opening of a Galactic Jump-Gate, one of thousands composing the eons-old network of instant transportation devices constructed and deployed throughout the galaxy by an ancient, unknown race whose every trace, with the exception of the gates, disappeared long ago.
Illiadus enters the main interior flight hanger and proceeds to jog its periphery on an elevated catwalk. She smiles. Down on the deck, Commander of Marines, Major Helen Ironbear puts her seventy-four troops through a withering round of calisthenics. A tall solid figure sporting a mohawk haircut, the Major circles the group of muscular young men and women with a vicious snarl on her scarred face while her fingers caress the top of her holstered tactical tomahawk.
“You call those pushups?” Ironbear screams, “are you f**king kidding me! Drop your asses. T**s to the floor. I want ten more! Let’s do it… now, ONE for the Captain, TWO for the Corps, THREE for the Chaplin, FOUR for his w***e, FIVE for the…”
Yes, Illiadus thinks as she finishes her perimeter and exits the hanger, Ironbear, you’re the perfect extension of my desire for discipline and enforced compliance on this ship of war.
The rest of the senior staff are pros that she knows she can rely on in a crunch, Medical Officer Commander Kyle Sorlan, a colonist who has waded through rivers of blood in many a makeshift surgery theatre in the midst of triage and even horrid but necessary mercy killings. Her Weapons Officer, Chief Warrant Officer Yaqub Al-Quam, a believer whose strong faith is only matched by his keen knowledge of the vicious tools of his trade. These and several others compose the wall of flesh that is Illiadus’s personal armor, and the immediate extension of her will.
If all goes as planned, The Ekatarina will be one of three vessels exiting a jump-gate on the other side of the galaxy, far from the main fleet, doing its best to play its part in a daring charade that might, just might, bring an end to the vicious invaders and this long war. The odds of survival after bearding the enemy in its den are calculated by command’s top A.I.s as somewhere around zero. There are just too many unconsidered and unknown contingencies which themselves spawn reams of possibilities that simply cannot be nullified or counteracted and thus planned for in the time frame laid out for the Third Fleet’s upcoming attack.
Illiadus hits her personal shower and then quickly puts on her uniform. Her face in the small mirror has a tight, almost glowing fanaticism about it. Hers is a will of ten-point steel, and nothing short of death will put a dent in it. For two weeks she has trained the new crew in multiple drills, battle simulations that push every single officer, middle ranks, and enlisted to their mental and physical limits. The Captain needs to know they will not break under extreme pressure. About one dozen people snapped and were quickly replaced.
An hour after waking, passing dozens of bustling and saluting crewpersons, Illiadus strides into the now highly active CIC, the ship’s control center located deep within the pocket battleship’s interior behind heavily armored and shielded bulkheads, which is now mostly filled with young though experienced laser-focused junior officers.
She sits in the Captain’s Chair and turns on the ship’s main intercom.
“Good morning, crew,” Illiadus says, “let’s get down to business.”
-End Of Prologue-
NOT TO YIELD can be purchased at AmazonDotCom.
