"Defiant! Acknowledge! Defiant!"

Only silence answered. The signals officer looked up at his captain. "I've lost her."

The skipper of DSS Messina stared into a trail of red-hot enemy wreckage that seemed to go on forever. Their last contact with the renegade battleship had her flying directly into its heart. Now there was nothing.

Radiation alarms were still sounding on the bridges of his and at least eight other pursuing starships. The power releases weren't measurable. There were no instruments built for such intensity. Space itself burned like the heart of a volcano. No scan could exceed a few thousand miles without being overcome by disruptive interference. It would be a day or more before any vessel in the vicinity would even be able to lower her screens.

And somewhere out there, Fleet Captain Marcus Raze and his crew of fanatics might still have been alive, fighting for their own notion of honorable victory aboard a vessel wreathed in fires of her own making. She had become the incarnation of rage itself, forever chasing enemies both real and imagined, certain the valiant heart that sought justice could never be defeated.

This is the story of the Alliance crew that believed its refusal to surrender would give them one chance to touch the face of God.

She was called Defiant. BB 44. Last of her kind.