HONOR & RENOWN

A PEACEKEEPERS OF SOL PREQUEL NOVELLA

GLYNN STEWART

Honor & Renown © 2023 Glynn Stewart

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to any persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

Published by Faolan’s Pen Publishing. Faolan's Pen Publishing logo is a registered trademark of Faolan's Pen Publishing Inc.

CONTENTS

Visit Me Online

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Continue the Journey in Peacekeepers of Sol

About the Author

Other Books by Glynn Stewart

Preview: Raven’s Peace by Glynn Stewart

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1

“DIGNITARIES AND GUESTS, may I present His Excellency Admiral Christopher Harris Macleod of the Joint Commonwealth Space Force!”

The announcement of Christopher’s arrival muffled much of the ongoing conversation on the garden patio. The sky above Tiān Jiā’s capital city of Xīn Shēnzhèn was a sight to behold at the dullest of times, and part of the purpose of this party was to observe one of the regular meteor showers tearing through the atmosphere of what had once been called Tau Ceti e.

Still, the other purpose of the party was to welcome the officers and civilian dignitaries of Christopher’s squadron to the Tau Ceti System, so his arrival—in full dress uniform, of course!—drew attention from the crowd.

Governor Ko Rong certainly knew how to impress, Christopher observed. The stone-flagged center plaza of the garden was easily a hundred meters on a side, and unless the British Admiral missed his guess, the inlaid mosaic of the Great Wall of China had been made with actual stone from the Great Wall of China.

The plants around the plaza were also imported, more native to Shenzhen or Beijing than the northern continent of Tiān Jiā. They must have required regular replenishment, given that Tiān Jiā’s climate was politely described as rigorous.

Xīn Shēnzhèn was in the geographic equivalent of his own Scotland, far north of the equator and edging toward what would be ice caps on another planet. Here, that meant it was merely forty-three degrees Celsius out on the patio.

Ko Rong herself materialized out of the crowd, her wife in tow, and shook his hand in an energetic fashion more suited to Americans than to either of them. He, of course, took that in stride, bowing over her hand and greeting her in carefully learned Mandarin.

Christopher’s Mandarin vocabulary was mediocre, but his accent was impeccable.

“Welcome to Tiān Jiā, Admiral Macleod. It is a pleasure to host the Extrasolar Squadron for these exercises.”

“And it is a pleasure to be invited to them,” Christopher replied in turn. He took the delicately fingered hand of the governor’s wife next, bowing over it as well and giving the woman a smile that left her surprisingly flustered.

The Governor and her partner were in their late forties, he judged. Both were gorgeous, if about two decades too young for his own tastes.

“I know that I have officers and crew enjoying the hospitality of the PLASN across the planet,” he continued. The People’s Liberation Army Space Navy were the interstellar armed forces of Zhōngguó, the People’s Republic of China. “I am delighted that you have made time for myself and Em Reynolds.”

“Where is Vice President Reynolds?” Ko asked. “There are many people here who will wish to speak to BAST’s representative.”

“Travis will be fashionably late, as always,” Christopher said with a small smile. Undermining the representative of British Aerospace Systems and Technologies would be unwise even if he wasn’t under orders to support the man.

BAST was, after all, one of the Famous Five megacorps who owned and were owned in turn by the British government. The Joint Commonwealth Space Force wasn’t completely dominated by the United Kingdom, but aggravating the corporations that might as well be the UK’s government was… unwise.

And Christopher knew perfectly well what his job actually was these days.

“I understand that Shangjiang Chu Jia is here somewhere?” he asked politely. “I’d like to take advantage of the opportunity to speak with him face to face, not through a video screen.”

“Of course,” Ko said. “Come, walk with me, Admiral.”

SHANGJIANG CHU JIA was a short man, easily twenty centimeters less than Christopher’s own towering Highlander build, but his breadth had clearly required careful tailoring of his uniform. For all of that, though, his stark white attire was just as impeccable as Christopher’s and his salute was perfectly timed.

Technically, Christopher and Chu held the same rank in their own forces, with Shangjiang being equal to his own Admiral. But the JCSF had a grand total of forty-eight starships capable of interstellar travel with the skip drive. The People’s Liberation Army Space Navy was roughly double that—and China controlled an entire star system in Tau Ceti.

Christopher’s eight starships were outnumbered by the permanent formation funded and crewed by Tau Ceti’s government, let alone the force the PLASN had brought for the exercises of Operation Enduring Empire. The JCSF’s Extrasolar Squadron did have a third of the capital ships in the system—four battlecruisers versus the PLASN’s eight “carrier-cruisers”—but they only had a quarter of the warships in the system.

“Admiral Macleod,” Chu greeted him once the politicians had left them together. “How are you finding our Celestial Home?”

“Tiān Jiā is a beautiful world,” Christopher said. “I’ve seen most of the planets humanity has settled these days, but few are as spectacular.”

“Or as hot,” Chu observed. “One finds the inclusion of shipsuits in formal uniforms useful here.”

Both of them shared a knowing grin. Unlike the civilians at the party, their dress uniforms were designed to go over the universal bodysuit of a spacer. And given that a shipsuit was designed to keep a human alive in deep space, managing body temperature in mere forty-degree weather was nothing.

“I am looking forward to the exercises, Admiral,” Christopher admitted. “I haven’t seen your newest ships in action yet.”

“You will be impressed,” Chu predicted. “Our new-generation starfighters and carrier-cruisers are an elegant weapon for our more civilized times.”

“I believe my opinion on starfighters is a matter of public record and published articles,” Christopher pointed out with a grin. “They keep trying to hang a carrier on Our Ness.”

Our Ness was RNESS, the Royal Navy Extrasolar Squadron. In no official capacity did the ESS—or, indeed, any part of the JCSF—belong to the Royal Navy. But there was too much weight of history for the Royal Navy not to have passed on vast amounts of tradition to the younger “naval” force.

Both Queen Victoria the Third and her late uncle, King James the Fourth and Ninth, encouraged the cross-pollination. The JCSF was its own entity… but if a JCSF officer referred to the Royal Navy, everyone knew perfectly well they didn’t mean anything that floated.

“I am fond of the weapon myself,” Chu observed. “There is much to be said for the extension of a capital ship’s range.”

“And, as I wrote in the JSCF Journal recently, any job that can be done by a starfighter can also be done by either a shuttle or a destroyer,” Christopher replied. “And a capital ship without an escort should be going to find an escort, not poking trouble with a glorified crewed missile.”

The Chinese officer chuckled.

“I used to fly one of those glorified crewed missiles,” he noted. “I cannot disagree with the descriptor.”

Their conversation was interrupted by the arrival of the local president of a major industrial combine. Christopher’s engagement with the pleasantries was automatic—a handshake here that he let linger a moment too long, an arched eyebrow there that could fluster even a matronly executive.

He knew his game and he played it to the hilt. But the moment the woman moved on, he let her name fall out of his brain. If he needed to know it later, he had a neural implant inside his skull that could play back the encounter perfectly.

Silicon preserved, allowing the flesh to focus.

“We are a long way from Earth here, Admiral Macleod,” Chu said quietly. “I feel that allows you and me a certain honesty on what we are here for.”

“Perhaps,” Christopher said brightly. “I serve Her Majesty’s will, of course.”

And there were markers among the slew of multicolored ribbons on his black uniform jacket that warned the wise that he, unlike many officers of his generation, had actually seen missiles and railguns fired in anger. At the beginning of the seventh decade of the twenty-third century, that was rare.

Well, except for the Americans and the Russians. That particular brush fire was staying contained for the moment, even as everyone eyed it carefully. Everyone here, Chinese and Commonwealth alike, was officially neutral—and almost certainly cheering for the Novaya Imperiya to get their teeth kicked in.

Space was far too big to tolerate getting into other people’s backyards, in Christopher’s measured opinion, even if the United States Colonial Administration did control one of the most useful skip lines out of Sol.

“Your Mr. Reynolds wants to sell us your R-Type battlecruisers,” Chu said quietly but firmly. “And, if he can manage it, get enough information on our carrier-cruisers to position the Q and R-Type ships as the purchase of choice for other powers, versus our own Type SX-Fifteen cruisers.”

The Commonwealth in general, and the United Kingdom in particular, retained their relevance and influence by being a source of high-end technology—and being everyone’s favorite partner.

The new colony in Keid, for example, had been founded by the African Union and answered politically to the nations of that continent. But it had been financed by British banks and backstopped by British—as well as Indian and Chinese, if Christopher had to admit it—expertise.

“I can’t really confirm or deny any of that,” Christopher observed. “If that was our intention, of course, we would be spending the next few days showing off all of the shininess of our newest battlecruiser.

“Coincidentally, that fits with the type of exercises we’re supposed to be doing, doesn’t it?”

Christopher had no illusions about the reality of his job. He commanded a demonstration squadron, one occasionally called on to handle pirates or natural disasters but a force whose primary purpose was to show off BAST’s technology to potential buyers.

Even he wasn’t sure where the United Kingdom’s government ended and the Famous Five began at this point… and he didn’t think anyone in the government was, either.

“It does,” Chu agreed. “Frankly, I think the design philosophy variance between your R-Types and our own SX-Fifteens is sufficient to give them almost completely different roles. For my part, there is a definite desire to show up your squadron and potentially send you back to your command with a glowing review of the latest Celestial Guardian starfighters. We are, after all, prepared to sell starfighters to the Commonwealth powers.”

“It’s a lovely set of exercises where we’re all trying to sell each other things, isn’t it?” Christopher murmured.

“It is. I don’t think we want your R-Types,” the Chinese Admiral said bluntly. “I’m prepared to be proven wrong, but I think you only have one real trick aboard them that we have any interest in. And while I want to see it in action, I’m not sure you have the authority to show off the gravity buckler.”

“You’re not even supposed to know that exists, and yet somehow I suspect it’s in the brochure,” Christopher said. The gravity buckler was brand-new with the R-Type battlecruisers. There were at least a dozen Q-series battlecruisers floating around other fleets, but the R-Type was only just becoming available for sale.

And given that the R-Type had the only operating system using gravity-projection technology for defense, Christopher would just as happily keep them for the JCSF. But that wasn’t how his country, his service or the alliance he served operated.

“Will the buckler be included in your demonstrations?” Chu asked.

“Not in the exercises,” Christopher said calmly. “But given my understanding of Em Reynolds’ plans, you might be able to request a confidential demonstration of the system.”

The first S-type battlecruiser, Sovereign, had commissioned just before he’d left Sol, after all. That was how the JCSF worked: there were always two types of battlecruiser and destroyer under construction and three in service. Five R-Types had been built; three more were planned. One S-type had been built; seven more were planned. One of each type would be built every year, and each would stay in service for twelve years before being sold off along with built-to-order ships.

“I look forward to it,” Chu told him. “I think that the R-Type lacks the starfighter strength to be useful for the PLASN, but if the gravity buckler lives up to the rumors, my superiors may end up placing large orders with BAST for the component, if nothing else.”

“Dignitaries and guests,” the announcer interrupted, “may I present the Honorable Vice President Travis Reynolds of British Aerospace Systems and Technologies!”

“And that, Admiral Chu, is my signal to go be as much of a sales prop as my battlecruisers,” Christopher told the other man, their moment of candor drawing a bit more sardonic honesty from him than he usually allowed himself.

“I look forward to the exercises, Admiral Macleod. I anticipate them being an educational delight for us all.”

2

CHRISTOPHER UNDERSTOOD EXACTLY the game Travis Reynolds was playing. He suspected the rest of the dignitaries—a mix of local officials, officers of the PLASN and senior Party officials from both Tau Ceti and Earth—were all equally aware.

Reynolds hadn’t quite made everyone wait. There was a lot more going on at this party than just meeting the Commonwealth officers and industrial representatives—and since Christopher had arrived first, anyone who really needed to pin down someone from the ESS had the Admiral to hand.

But by being the last of the major guests to arrive, the nebbish-looking Englishman had made himself the center of attention. There were few other big names on the guest list, which made Reynolds the one everyone was going to remember most easily.

Reynolds was smooth enough to use that, sliding into conversation almost immediately with a trio that Christopher’s implant said were senior Party bureaucrats from Earth. For his part, the Admiral slid through the crowd with the ease of long practice to provide his extraordinarily decorative backup.

The sales rep—Reynolds was basically the sales representative for BAST, his title of Vice President of Interstellar Sales, if anything, understating his role—shifted into a familiar and comfortable shared stance.

Christopher, at almost two meters tall and intimidatingly broad across the shoulders when he chose to be, loomed a full thirty centimeters over his civilian companion. His white dress uniform almost matched his hair, but careful physical exercise and gentle medical intervention kept him in marathon-running shape.

Only a small percentage of the people at the Governor’s mansion would be able to recognize the important bits of metal and ribbon on his chest, but the collection and the gold braid made for an impressive sight, one Christopher knew how to move, even how to stand, to emphasize.

Travis Reynolds, on the other hand, was a dark-haired man in a business suit who looked like he wanted to install tweed patches on the suit. His neatly trimmed beard held a carefully measured amount of gray, making his late-fifties age clear.

“Admiral, may I introduce Ems Wen and Il-Seong,” Reynolds said brightly. “Ems, I hope you recognized Admiral Macleod. He commands the Extrasolar Squadron for Kingdom and Commonwealth, and is gracious enough to permit myself and my staff to ride along for exercises like this.”

“The Admiral’s reputation precedes him,” Wen, the taller of the two men, said with a small bow. “Everything I have heard says that the ESS is in excellent hands.”

“I tell my Captains that every morning,” Christopher agreed. “The hands I’m talking about, of course, are theirs.”

“Wen and Il-Seong both work for the Ministry of Industry,” Reynolds explained. “I’m surprised to see such senior members of the Ministry in Tau Ceti, I have to admit.”

If Reynolds hadn’t known the two men were not only in Tau Ceti but at this party, Christopher would eat his flagship. And quarter-million-ton battlecruisers took a lot of eating. Given how swiftly the BAST executive had sought the two officials out, Christopher didn’t even need to check his databanks. They were almost certainly involved in starship procurement for PLASN.

“There is much work to be done and being done here in Tau Ceti,” Il-Seong said, his voice very soft. “Our Ministry has many affairs that require careful management by people with as much context as possible.”

“And you’re not worried about the war?” Reynolds asked. “The Novaya Imperiya isn’t far from here, after all.”

“The Russians know better than to provoke a second war while they are still being taught the harsh lessons of the first,” Il-Seong said. “We, like your Commonwealth nations, are neutral.”

Probably more neutral. While the Commonwealth overall was definitely neutral, England was very much neutral in America’s favor. Fortunately for Russia’s Novaya Imperiya in Epsilon Eridani and their attempt to seize key transit systems to charge tolls on, the United Kingdom was only first among equals of the Commonwealth these days.

“One cannot always expect perfectly rational decisions out of Russia,” Reynolds murmured.

Il-Seong smiled, and Christopher suspected that his friend had stepped into an intentionally laid minefield.

“In my experience and study of history, Em Reynolds, the decisions of Russia’s government are always rational. Europeans and Americans, though, simply cannot grasp the parameters used.”

And that, Christopher knew, was talking about more than just Russia and more than just the current brush conflict between the Americans and the Russians, a fight that currently was staying out of the Sol System.

The Centauri-Eridani War, as it was being called in the news medias, was staying out of inhabited systems entirely. The whole mess had started over the Novaya Imperiya seizing uninhabited systems and trying to charge the same transit tolls the United States Colonial Administration charged to pass through Alpha Centauri.

“We are better at understanding each other’s culture in this age, but humanity remains human,” Reynolds agreed genially. “Are you planning on observing the exercises later this week?”

“There are others here to pay more attention to that, but I imagine we will be present for some of the maneuvers,” Wen replied. “Myself more than Em Il-Seong. His focus is more… hydrological.”

“Dams and gravity batteries?” Christopher asked. It wasn’t a guess—his shuttle had flown over the massive hydropower-generation and -storage facility being built less than fifty kilometers outside Xīn Shēnzhèn. Once it was done, water and sun would provide most of the capital city’s immense power needs.

“Exactly. I’m reviewing our engineers’ plans for the next stage of the project,” Il-Seong replied, a crack in his control allowing the deep contentment of a man who was good at and enjoyed his work to slip through.

“I, on the other hand, am reviewing our orbital platforms, and I would very much like to no longer have a giant microwave emitter pointed anywhere within five hundred kilometers of a city I’m standing in,” Wen said with a chuckle. “I helped write the safety parameters for our latest wireless power transmissions, but that doesn’t mean the idea doesn’t make my skin shiver.”

“I spend my life walking distance from a multi-gigawatt laser and two of the highest-density fusion reactors humanity ever built,” Christopher said. “I understand all of the safety features, and yet…” He grinned at the other man. “I understand your point.”

That was, of course, ignoring the fact that he wasn’t much farther from the hundred megaton-range nuclear warheads. Weirdly, Christopher was far more comfortable with the nukes than with the fusion cores.

The nukes, after all, weren’t active twenty-four-seven.

“I believe we may have monopolized too much of your time,” Reynolds said brightly to the bureaucrats. “I see Zhongjiang Wibawa and I want to have a word with him before the night gets too old.”

Zhongjiang—Vice Admiral—Ruslan Wibawa was the head of the People’s Liberation Army Space Navy Tau Ceti Station. On paper, the Tau Ceti Station was simply a detachment of the PLASN. In practice, they operated as a semi-independent arm answering to the system government, managing their own personnel, promotion and—most importantly from Reynolds’ perspective—acquisition.

It was going to be a very busy night.

3

“ADMIRAL ON DECK!”

Christopher did not, as a rule, go everywhere with an escort. The JCSF had relatively light ground contingents on their ships overall—not least because the JCSF had zero ground troops of their own.

The guards waiting for him on HMS Renown’s flag bridge were Royal Marines. They were more responsible for the flag bridge itself than his security, but they took all of their roles seriously.

He didn’t bother to tell his people to stand down from attention as he crossed to the main displays. None of the ESS flag staff were foolish enough to actually stand to attention for him entering the room—not without strangers around to see.

Pageantry and theater were things Christopher had made sure his key personnel understood and would play along with, but part of that understanding was knowing when it wasn’t necessary.

“Anything to report?” he asked aloud. That was mostly addressed to Rear Admiral Ariane Kistler, his Australian Operations Officer—but he said it loudly enough that everyone in the room could hear him.

“Everything is about as expected,” Kistler told him, stepping up to join him at the big screen. The high-definition display was as tall as Christopher himself and easily three meters across. It was the clear center point of the flag bridge, with two of Kistler’s top people sitting behind it and managing what the Admiral needed to see on a moment-to-moment basis.

“Renown, Rodney, Resolution and Repulse are all reporting ready for action and standing by for the exercises,” she continued. “Each battlecruiser has loaded twenty missiles with training systems.”

“And the destroyers?”

“Chatham-on-Ceres is suffering from a technical issue with their primary life-support-management computer,” Kistler warned. “Captain Bachchan has ordered the primary offline for review by her systems specialists. The secondary doesn’t appear to have picked up whatever bug is giving them headaches, so she has no concerns unless the exercises are going to keep us away from support for more than a week.”

“Operation Enduring Empire is only scheduled to last three days,” Christopher reminded her. “So, I don’t have any concerns there. The others?”

“Liverpool, Dublin-on-Mars and Rockport are all reporting green and ready for exercise operations. The destroyers have armed eight missiles apiece with training heads for live fire.”

No one was going to fire a missile—even a space-to-space antishipping missile with a fusion engine capable of a hundred gravities of thrust—with an actual nuclear weapon in a training exercise.

Well, not this kind of training exercise. Christopher had definitely ordered real nukes fired at targets for testing before, but today, the point was to demonstrate that his gunners were better than Chu’s.

“All fighters are also showing green and online,” she observed without him asking. He could hear the amusement in her voice.

The Blackburn Blackstar was a perfectly reasonable starfighter, capable of almost a hundred and fifty meters per second squared of acceleration while carrying two short-ranged rockets with hundred-kiloton warheads of their own.

Christopher just couldn’t see any scenario where he’d need sixteen starfighters that wasn’t better served by eight shuttles and a pair of destroyers.

“Two of Resolution’s Blackstars are in space, flying local patrol,” Kistler continued. “My schedule says we leave for the exercise point in twenty minutes.”

Christopher reached out until his fingers engaged with the haptic field in front of the screen. A control panel appeared in response to the combination of his touch, his fingerprints and a challenge-response code from his implant.

A few taps later, the schedule for Operation Enduring Empire appeared on the section of the screen between him and Kistler. Both of them knew the schedule and the plan—and the real purpose of their mission.

“Did Reynolds’ collection of those-to-be-impressed arrive on schedule?” he asked.

“Yup. These three ships, here,” Kistler told him, tapping icons on the display that flickered in response to his gesture. “The African Union Space Agency frigate Isandlwana is carrying two senior officers from the AUSA’s acquisitions team. The European Union Flotte Spatiale has a couple of people on a civilian liner, Vaterland, that’s trying to pretend they’re not watching but has cleared a course with Tiān Jiā’s controllers to keep them in full sight of the exercise at all times.”

“And the Antariksh Raksha Sangathan?”

Christopher spoke Hindi decently, though not fluently—along with seven other languages—which made dealing with the Bhaarateey Antariksh Raksha Sangathan, the Indian Space Defense Organization, easier than it might have been.

He wasn’t sure if the ISDO would send anyone official. He suspected that Captain Kaveri Tamboli, HMS Renown’s commanding officer, was only a few months at most from handing in her resignation to the JCSF and joining her nation’s space force.

The JCSF had long since reconciled themselves to the fact that India was the only member state powerful enough to run a separate, if small, space navy on their own. The United Kingdom rankled at that… but the JCSF existed because the UK couldn’t afford to run an interstellar battle fleet on its own.

Since the JCSF was still bigger, a significant portion of the ISDO’s senior officers had served in the Commonwealth, rising to starship command before returning home.

“The Raksha Sangathan has official representatives on Shenandoah,” Kistler told him, highlighting the United States Space Force cruiser carefully pretending it wasn’t the EU liner’s guard dog.

Christopher studied the position of the three ships for a second and then chuckled.

“The Novaya Imperiya has people aboard Vaterland, don’t they?” he asked.

His second-in-command was silent for a second, then shook her head.

“Officially, no one has said anything,” she admitted. “But yes, there are members of the Russian military acquisition teams aboard the EU liner. How did you know?”

“Because Shenandoah is positioned to protect Vaterland but she’s also positioned to make sure Vaterland doesn’t go anywhere without her permission,” Christopher told her. “Which means the Americans are doing more than just keeping an eye on friendly ‘civilians.’”

He shook his head.

“So long as their war stays out of Tau Ceti, no one cares. Make sure someone quietly puts a word in Shenandoah’s Captain’s ear, though,” he said thoughtfully. “Kingdom and Commonwealth might be generally in favor of the Americans in their current mess, but if they cause trouble while we’re trying to sell ships to everyone, the boardrooms might run out of warm fuzzies real fast.”

And in the modern United Kingdom, the boardrooms of the Famous Five were at least as important as Her Majesty’s Cabinet.

WHATEVER CHRISTOPHER’S opinion of the practicality of the modern space strike fighter, he had to admit that the little ships made for some spectacular formation flying. PLASN had eight carrier-cruisers of three different classes—SX15, SX14 and SX13—and between them, they carried a hundred and twenty starfighters.

Even when a military was showing off, it was a lot easier to make sure the fighters were top-of-the-line than the capital ships. All of the forty three-ship flight squadrons were fully equipped with the Model 2259 Celestial Guardian, the latest products of their fabrication facilities.

At that moment, every one of those starfighters was wrapped around the PLASN fleet in a formation that made a fine impression of a serpentine lung-type dragon.

“Okay, people,” he said loudly. “Everybody is showing off, so let’s take advantage of the chance to learn as much as we can. Cruisers, destroyers, fighters—I want every scrap of data you can pick up and integrate on the lot of them!”

Christopher’s people were already working away. Tags on the display marked each cruiser with its class and name—and then linked it to the starfighters they’d launched.

The core of the PLASN force was a clearly planned match for the ESS: four SX15 carrier-cruisers, the most modern ship available to China and her colony. They’d brought two older SX14s along to make the point about the relative size of the PLASN to the JCSF—and the Tau Ceti Station was operating the pair of decade-old SX13s.

None of the Chinese cruisers had lasers, and intelligence said that they had a lot fewer railgun autocannon than Christopher would prefer. Even the SX15 only had eight missile launchers to the R-Type’s ten, though she did have eighteen starfighters to the R-Type’s four.

And packed it all into thirty thousand tons less than the R-Type.

“Eight carrier-cruisers and sixteen destroyers,” Kistler murmured in his ear. “You’d think we made them nervous.”

“I think the bloody Americans make them nervous,” Christopher replied, softly enough that only the other Admiral heard his curse. “If the Yankees decide to take serious exception to the Novaya Imperiya, remember that we’re one skip from Epsilon Eridani here. They’re more concerned than they want to show.”

“And they’re showing it more than they want to, too,” his Ops Officer replied. “Look at that squadron of destroyers over there.”

“I saw them. Shenandoah is a tight piece of work, but those tin cans will eat her lunch if she picks a fight.”

Four of the most modern Chinese destroyers, basically a match for the Type One-Nineteen destroyers of his own command, were maneuvering far closer to Shenandoah than was probably politic.

But, like the presence of an equal number of modern capital ships to the ESS and twice as many capital ships overall, Christopher knew that the PLASN had choreographed every piece of this exercise.

Which was fine. He and Reynolds and his staff had gone over the plan assuming the Chinese would set up the entire exercise to make themselves look good. It was Christopher’s job to show that, even with those disadvantages, BAST’s ships were better than the Chinese could build.

They probably weren’t going to sell ships to the main PLASN. But the Tau Ceti Station was running old carrier-cruisers, ships they might be able to sell Governor Ko on buying replacements for. The African Union Space Agency and the ISDO were more regular customers—both forces had multi-ship formations of Q-Type battlecruisers—but everyone was buying parts from BAST.

That was what the Famous Five did. They made Kingdom and Corporation utterly essential junior partners to everyone they could.

“Any surprises I should be aware of?” Christopher asked.

“Just one, and I don’t think they meant us to see it.”

“Oh?” Christopher arched an eyebrow at the junior officer who’d spoken.

“Fighter maneuvers are never as clean as anyone would like,” the woman said after glancing at Kistler for permission to speak further. “With this kind of pretty parade flying, issues are inevitable. Some wires got crossed and two of their squadrons almost flew right into each other.

“They were fine, but they pushed some serious emergency acceleration there to avoid collision. Emergency acceleration of about one hundred and forty.”

“That seems… low,” the Admiral noted.

“The PLASN has mostly tried to keep the Guardian’s acceleration curve under wraps,” Kistler pointed out. “Not just this model but the last few as well. Most exercises like this have been choreographed to keep fighters around the hundred-meter-per-second-squared mark for a decade.”

“Make a note,” Christopher ordered with a chuckle. “We’ll want to find a few chances to show off the Blackstar’s acceleration curve. Zero to one-fifty, straight out of the gate.”

“I thought you didn’t like the Blackstar,” Kistler asked.

“I don’t like starfighters,” he replied. “The Blackstar is decent enough for a piece of hardware that exists to scratch a need more born of media and recruitment drives than military necessity—and regardless of what I think of it, we’re here to show off our tech and prove everyone wants to buy British, not Chinese.”

British meaning mostly from Ceres in this case, but while the asteroid nation was politically independent, the Famous Five had it just as wrapped up as they did the United Kingdom.

“For Kingdom and Commonwealth, Admiral Kistler,” he said cheerfully. “If we’re going to be a demonstration squadron, then the pride of the Royal Navy and the Joint Commonwealth Space Force demands that we be a damn fine demonstration squadron.”

That shouldn’t be anything new to her—but he also knew that Kistler was on the very short list of names being considered to eventually replace him as commander of Our Ness.

“We’ll be in the exercise zone in sixteen hours,” she told him with as reproving a headshake as she could get away with. “Do we want to show off on the way?”

“No. In fact, keep the crews at no more than Readiness Two,” Christopher ordered. “Beer and sandwiches all around. Let’s enter this game with our morale in tip-top shape. I know Kingdom, Commonwealth, and British Aerospace Systems and Technologies have provided us with better ships than anyone else has.

“So, let’s make sure our people, who are damn fine too, are in the mood to use everything to its best.”

4

“AND… FIRE!”

All four R-Type battlecruisers were rotating in space as Christopher watched. He timed his command perfectly and his people obeyed perfectly. All four ships, each of them a curved wedge in space, fell into alignment with their target simultaneously and fired as one.

Today, the main lasers fired without force, glorified flashlights that crossed space in an instant and highlighted the two SX14 carrier-cruisers before they could stabilize their own targeting. The beams flickered, representing the pulses of energy that they’d carry at full power, and the two Chinese ships flashed signals declaring themselves destroyed.

“Execute echelon six,” Christopher ordered. There were eleven different maneuvers that could have followed this one, depending on how the Chinese cruisers reacted, and all eight of his ships were waiting for his declaration of which one.

Echelon six took the ESS sideways, cutting away from their perpendicular vector to avoid “enemy” fire. The PLASN cruisers were not taking his demonstration of the range of his battle lasers lightly, and missile salvos—each group of eight missiles represented by a single real-space missile with a self-destructing training payload—blazed through space toward his ships.

His own ships were firing as well, and the same PLASN squadron that had been shadowing Shenandoah was too close for their own good. His destroyers focused their fire, and while the PLASN’s destroyers were better equipped with antimissile autocannon than their cruisers, his battlecruisers added their own fire.

All four PLASN destroyers flashed their “destroyed” signals within twenty seconds of each other—but so did Chatham-on-Ceres and Dublin-on-Mars. All six destroyers maneuvered away, clearing themselves out of the action while keeping close enough to intervene if a missile did something unexpected.

The Chinese cruisers hadn’t had to worry about destroyers in their faces, and now their salvos descended on the Extrasolar Squadron in force. This wasn’t the exercise where Christopher could demonstrate his ship’s secret shield, which meant his people had to take down missiles with autocannon and starfighters.

And there were a lot of Celestial Guardians accompanying the missiles. His Blackburn Blackstars were more than pulling their weight, but sixteen ships against a hundred and twenty weren’t odds a slightly superior machine could change.

As the “loss” of the Blackstars weakened his missile defenses, Christopher reflected that maybe he should have let them attach Illustrious to his command. Maybe.

Resolution was the first R-Type to flash a destroyed signal—and Rodney joined her before any of the Chinese capital ships did the same.

“Guardians are launching… Yeah, I think that’s it for Exercise Two, ser.”

The Guardians hadn’t launched real missiles at his ships any more than they’d fired real railguns at his fighters. Still, eighty of them fired a hundred and sixty virtual short-range rockets at his fleet, and the two surviving battlecruisers and their pair of destroyer escorts might have done okay at handling the fire from the motherships, but they couldn’t handle that tsunami.

“Got one,” Captain Tamboli said on the link from the bridge. “And… maybe… Nah, we’re done.”

Christopher grinned at the woman’s enthusiasm. He hadn’t expected that last kill, but his Flag Captain had managed to line up her battle laser at the last moment and introduce…

“Wait, did we just ‘vaporize’ Shangjiang Chu’s flagship?” he asked.

“Why, yes, yes we did,” Tamboli said in a self-satisfied tone.

The numbers filled in on the screen in cold-blooded detail and Christopher’s grin widened.

“Now, let’s not tell anyone this,” he cautioned Kistler and Tamboli, “because we lost, so I have a stick to wave, but I do have to admit that I can live with a six-to-four loss rate when we started outnumbered two to one!”

He’d rather win—but while he could see ways to do that, he was going to keep those tricks to the confidential demonstration he was planning for Shangjiang Chu.

THREE MORE EXERCISES followed over two days. Some had the ESS working with a portion of the PLASN squadron. Chu even managed to inveigle Shenandoah and Isandlwana into taking part in the last one.

“And that marks a clean sweep, ser,” Kistler reported with satisfaction as Isandlwana and Chatham-on-Ceres cut through the last Celestial Guardian fighters to land a killing blow on Shenandoah with a short-range missile storm. The African frigate had no internal magazines for her missiles and was basically unarmored, but her obsolete vertical launch system–style single-shot launchers let her pack twenty missiles into her salvo.

The missiles were the last generation of BAST’s antishipping weapons, and once they’d been fired, all Isandlwana had was an American-built ten-inch heavy railgun. Christopher figured the design was a glorified suicide bomber, unlikely to survive a real fight and desperate to launch her missiles before a more-capable warship blew her to pieces.

But in formation with the ESS’s four Type 119 destroyers, she’d survived the main fighter duel, survived the clash of capital ships, watched both of the Chinese destroyers assigned to Red Team get blown apart, and hidden behind the shield of Chatham-on-Ceres defenses to deliver the killing blow to the American cruiser.

“So, what’s left of Red Team?” Christopher asked drily. “I do prefer scenarios where we live, I have to say.”

“To quote an old saying that was wrong at the time, there seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today,” Kistler said. “And just like when Beatty said it, we’re looking at a few different issues. At least we get to identify them in exercises instead of getting a few thousand people killed.”

All four ESS battlecruisers had been assigned to Red Team, alongside two of the Type SX15 carrier-cruisers. Christopher had held overall command of Red Team, while Chu had taken command of Blue Team.

Unfortunately for Christopher’s carefully laid battle plan, Renown had been ruled mission-killed with her communications out in the first exchange of fire between the battle lines.

“And which exact problem do we have today?” Christopher asked, his tone still desert-like. “If I hadn’t made sure all of the capital-ship commanders knew the plan, we might have been in real trouble.”

“Honestly, ser, I think the individual superiority of our battlecruisers in a direct missile exchange was going to tell no matter what,” Kistler pointed out. “Once our adjusted fighter-defense program got the battle line into range, it was already decided.”

“At which point, of course, Renown was mission-killed and Repulse destroyed in the first salvo.”

“Yes, ser.” Kistler sighed. “Chu is very, very clever, ser. He’s recognized over the exercises that our battlecruisers are not just bigger than his carrier-cruisers but, ton-for-ton, deadlier without their fighters. His carrier-cruisers give up too much to pack in the Guardian wings.”

“They have to,” Christopher told her. “There are days I think we give up too much for four bloody fighters, and they put eighteen into the Fifteens!”

“He used the fighters and a level of knowledge an enemy hopefully wouldn’t have on our order of battle to identify Renown during the fighter strike,” his Ops Officer told him. “Then focused his fire on us, using the starfighter missiles to degrade our antimissile capability. They split the focus between Renown and Repulse even after they’d IDed us to hide what they were doing.

“And then the entire first salvo was targeted on Renown and Repulse.” She sighed. “And our own computers judged that our coms array is too damn vulnerable to near misses. We may want to have Tamboli’s engineers look into that—the simulator gave us some ugly power backflashes from a one-megaton blast that was at least twenty meters from the hull.”

“And Repulse?” Christopher asked.

“The adjudicator judged that Repulse lost over half of her defensive cannon to the starfighter pass,” Kistler said bluntly. “So, she took six direct hits in the main clash. The composite armor we use is better, centimeter for centimeter, than anything else I’ve seen… but it isn’t bringing us through that.”

The imbalance in numbers had turned the capital-ship clash into a mutual massacre. Of the twelve capital ships in the exercise, only Resolution had survived—leaving Shenandoah the most powerful unit on Blue Team to draw the fire of the remaining escorts.

“Well, the honors are even in the end, I suppose,” Christopher noted. “And given how many advantages the exercises gave Chu and Blue Team over the last two days, I think the fact that all four victories were Pyrrhic and two of them were mine makes the point Reynolds wanted.”

The “watch” he wore chimed as he spoke of the devil, and he tapped a couple of commands. The device had no screen of its own and mostly acted as a controller and firewall for his neural implant—to access the hardware directly required a degree of self-hypnosis Christopher wouldn’t engage in around other humans, and nobody was giving any external network direct access to the silicon in their brain!

Still, the watch allowed him to bring images from the implant into his vision, and it popped up the incoming message from Travis Reynolds asking for a meeting.

Of course, Reynolds’ request included an exact time and location. It had all of the details of the order the BAST executive knew better than to give… and that both of them knew it effectively was.

“I’ll be in my office,” he told Kistler as he forwarded the message to his secretary. “I can’t see anything critical coming up, but interrupt us if you need to.”

“Just sorting out where the chicks are and sorting out courses to take us all back to the coop, ser,” Kistler replied. “We’ve got it.”

5

CHRISTOPHER TOOK a couple of minutes in his office to make sure that he—and the space itself—were impeccably turned out before Reynolds arrived. The other man was probably the closest thing he had to a friend in the Extrasolar Squadron, but there were appearances and protocol to keep up.

Technically, Reynolds was nothing more than a passenger. In practice, he spoke for the Board of the first-among-equals of the Famous Five and had the ear of the Prime Ministers of three major Commonwealth members—Ceres, Australia and the UK itself.

In some ways, Reynolds had more direct and measurable power in the modern United Kingdom than the Prime Minister. He didn’t give Christopher orders… but Christopher hadn’t heard Reynolds ever give an order or even a direct instruction.

The man was just used to his softly worded polite requests being treated as commands, which somewhat undermined any attempt on his part to actually ask for things.

Reynolds certainly didn’t ask for permission to close the door behind him when he entered Christopher’s office, but he slid a gift-wrapped bag onto Christopher’s desk before taking his seat.

The Admiral shook his head at the other man and somewhat theatrically checked for scratches. The check was unnecessary—the desk had first seen service on HMS Dreadnought in 1905. Finding a new scratch was an exercise in futility.

“What did you find on Tiān Jiā?” he asked Reynolds as he opened the bag. He knew what it would contain, though the details of which unusual liqueur someone who knew him had acquired were always a discovery.

“The local Luzhou Laojiao,” the executive replied with a chuckle. “I’m sure they should probably call it something else, given that nothing is being fermented in Luzhou anymore, but they say they moved one of the fermentation cellars here in its entirety.”

Reynolds shrugged.

“I asked a local sommelier for advice,” he admitted. “It’s always a pleasure to add to your collection.”

“And you want what today?” Christopher asked with a chuckle—but also produced two whisky glasses from inside the desk and poured them both a healthy shot of the alcohol. A sharp scent of peaches wafted through the office, and he inhaled it.

Reynolds, as usual, had done pretty well. Christopher’s collection of exotic alcohol was as much a collection as anything else. After fifty years of interstellar service, he had a lot of bottles of strange and different beverages tucked away in a climate-controlled vault in what was supposed to be his suite’s office.

His steward had long since acquired about seven different ways of resealing the bottles to preserve them, too. He’d received enough gifts like this to keep well ahead of his ability to actually drink the liquors for a long time.

“I can’t just want to give a friend a present I found on the planet—a gift I know to be to his taste?” Reynolds asked plaintively.

“You could, but you wouldn’t,” Christopher replied. “You bought three different alcohols while you were down on Tiān Jiā for the meeting, and you’re going to dole them out to me as you need minor favors.”

“I am wounded,” the executive told him, pressing his hand to his chest. “I bought five different bottles.” He sniffed derisively. “Just three gifts for my favorite Admiral? Who do you think I am?”

“A pain in my distinguished posterior,” Christopher said. He took a sip of the peach liquor and smiled. “But a pain with good taste. What’s on the docket, Travis?”

“Chu wants a demonstration of the gravity buckler,” Reynolds told him. “Unlike the Shangjiang, I know damn well you didn’t promise him anything beyond that he would be able to ask for a demonstration.

“Which he has done.”

“Of course he has,” Christopher agreed. “We’ve demonstrated handily over the last two days that while the Celestial Guardian might have better electronics than the Blackburn Blackstar, the Blackstar can fly rings around the damn things and they both have fundamentally the same weapon fit.”

“Their fighter-to-ship missile is better, but don’t tell him I said that,” Reynolds said. “I have some notes to send R&D when we get home—both on the fighter electronics and their missile suite.”

“Biggest win for you, I think, is that anyone who watched this is going to want to buy the Blackstar over the Guardian,” Christopher noted. “But we’ve also, I think, demonstrated that the R-Type is a better capital ship than the SX-Fifteen. Specialization does that. I’m not a fan of our starfighters, but if we’ve decided we want to strap the best of our young officers to flying bombs and send them out to explode, we may as well bring a damn carrier.”

“And Illustrious is where, exactly?” Reynolds asked.

“Ceres. While Indomitable is at Earth, undergoing refit.” Christopher shrugged. “As I’m sure you told everyone when JCSF acquisition declined to buy a class of three, two ships is not a reliable capability. Especially when we have, effectively, three sets of home vacuum to guard.”

Earth and Mars at least had a lot of other powers playing guard dog as well. Ceres was on its own, and while the Royal Ceres Guard punched above its weight, they were a spaceborne coast guard, not a space force.

“But… regardless, I think we’ve done a good job of selling the R-Type this week for you. If Chu is asking seriously about the gravity buckler, I suspect he either figures someone up the chain might actually buy the R-Type, or he had existing orders to get eyes on the grav-shield.”

“Much as I would love to get an order for twenty R-Types from PLASN—and such an order would pay for both of our luxurious retirements somewhere equatorial back home!—I’m only really hoping to convince them they need to equip the SX-Sixteen with a gravity buckler,” Reynolds told him. “We build eight ships in a class for the JCSF, but remember that the Chinese build classes of twenty—and eight ships a year, not two.

“Eight gravity bucklers a year is almost as much cash in pocket for BAST as a full S-type battlecruiser.”

“I’ll be pleased if you get the sale, but it’s not like I get a commission,” Christopher pointed out.

“Admiral, if we sell an entire fleet of R-Types to the Chinese coming off these exercises, I will make you take a goddamn commission,” Reynolds snapped. “And I’ve told you before, there is a damn comfy consulting gig waiting for you on Ceres if you ever decide it’s time to hang up your sword.”

Reynolds wasn’t even the first BAST executive to tell Christopher that, and he shook his head as he chuckled.

“I married the JCSF a long damn time ago, Travis. If I didn’t give it up for Jessica Florence, I sure as hell am not giving it up for just a cushy retirement.”

There was a moment of surprised silence.

“Please, please, please tell me you didn’t dump one of the most successful actresses of the last century to be a military officer,” Reynolds said slowly. “Though, either way, this is a story I might need to hear!”

Christopher had figured that Reynolds was too young to recognize Florence’s name, but he supposed she was still performing.

“Not much to tell,” he admitted. “We met when she was filming on board my ship at the time. We hit it off, and at first, her flitting around known space for her films and my being away for military tours worked out for both of us.

“But she got very successful very fast and wanted to have a partner who was there to help ground her and manage things—and her partner certainly didn’t need to work.” Christopher chuckled. “I know she wanted me to be her kept husband and on-hand manager… but I also suspect she always knew I was going to choose the JCSF.”

He looked past Reynolds for a few long seconds, staring half-blankly at the Loch Ness Monster emblem of the Extrasolar Squadron.

“I’d have made a terrible career manager,” he observed with a chuckle. “And an even worse kept man. She knew it… but she needed a man who could give her more than a week every few months.”

Or a woman, as it had eventually turned out. Christopher had met Jessica Florence’s wife, Samantha, and had to admit that Sam was a far better fit into Florence’s life than he would have been.

“That’s… amazing,” Reynolds said. “Damn. My sisters idolize her. I don’t think I even knew you’d met her, let alone dated her.”

“Ancient history, Travis, for all of us,” Christopher murmured. “From what I remember about your family… your sisters might not have been born yet.”

It had been almost fifty years earlier, after all.

“As for current history, I need that demo, Christopher. I really do think we can sell the PLASN on the bucklers.”

“That’s not my concern, to be honest,” Christopher observed. “If anything, I’m concerned over whether we should sell the PLASN our one major technological advantage over the other powers.”

“BAST was first to market with the buckler, but we won’t be the last,” Reynolds said grimly. “The question, in all honesty, isn’t will the SX-Sixteen have a gravity buckler? It’s will the SX-Sixteen have a British-built gravity buckler?

“And if it does, that’s hundreds of jobs secured in the Isles and on Ceres for the next decade. So…”

Christopher chuckled.

“Part of my job is to look real good for your sales pitch,” he observed. “And we don’t get enough time to play with the buckler in real space for my peace of mind, either. Do you have a schedule in mind?”

“If you and Chu are in agreement, I think we take the ESS and his flagship off toward Tau Ceti f. That’ll put a good chunk of the meteor cloud between Tiān Jiā and the demo to give us some privacy.

“I want a confidential demonstration,” Reynolds reiterated. “I’ll admit that we’d happily sell it to the AU or EU, but the agreements on the Centauri-Eridani War say we can’t sell the system to either the Americans or the Russians.

“Which means if Shenandoah gets sensors on the demo, we’ll have some uncomfortable conversations with people we generally like.”

But the Famous Five didn’t like the United States more than they liked world peace and the economic benefits thereof.

“I’ll have my coms team touch base with Shangjiang Chu,” Christopher promised. “It will be a relatively small and careful demonstration. A few low-power laser strikes, a couple of more dramatic pieces… not using the buckler to smash our way through the meteor cloud or anything.”

There was a long pause.

“How much liquor would I need to buy to get the latter demonstration?” Reynolds asked.

“More than I can drink in what’s left of my lifetime, so… no,” Christopher replied. “I will not put any of my ships in real danger for demonstrations.”

“That’s fair, that’s fair. But since we don’t have any sixteen-inch railguns lying around for demonstrations, blocking some natural high-speed debris may…”

“Trust me, Travis,” Christopher said smoothly. “The demonstration will be more than sufficient for any of our needs. Chu will be impressed.

“I can guarantee it.”

6

TAU CETI F was far less appealing to humans than e, the world now named Tiān Jiā. Like Tiān Jiā, f was inside the habitable zone of the star. Unlike its closer-in sister, it had yet to develop anything resembling a biosphere.

There were plans to bombard the planet with water asteroids as the first stage of terraforming, but only the most basic of surveying and preparation had taken place. At that moment, there was nothing around Tau Ceti f at all.

Nothing except the eight warships of Our Ness, the SX-15 type carrier-cruiser Zunyi and two PLASN destroyers.

“You would think that the Shangjiang didn’t trust us or something,” Christopher said sardonically as he eyed the three Chinese ships.

“If Chu didn’t trust you, Admiral Macleod, I’m sure he’d have brought more than three ships,” Reynolds pointed out. The executive had joined Christopher on the flag bridge—something he’d done often enough that even the Marine guards hadn’t given him more than a handful of dirty looks.

Some parts of the ESS’s personnel were less reconciled to their demonstration-squadron role than others. Christopher had long since reconciled himself to being the dog part of the dog-and-pony show—which included following requests from a civilian who wasn’t even part of the government on paper.

“Over the last few days, I think you have successfully demonstrated that two destroyers aren’t going to save an SX-Fifteen that ends up in laser range of one R-Type… let alone four.”

Christopher smiled.

“Not much in the universe would,” he observed. “Fortunately for everyone, though, there is one thing. Kistler!”

“Resolution is standing by to execute stage one,” she replied crisply. “Repulse is ready for stage two. Chatham-on-Ceres and Liverpool are standing by for stage three, and Rodney is standing by to sing soprano.”

“Let’s not tell Captain Garland that we just implied her ship was the fat lady,” Christopher said. “Is Zunyi ready for her part?”

“Shangjiang Chu says he is delighted to see what you get up to,” Reynolds told him. “I’ve tried to talk up the man’s expectations, but I don’t think he believes me.”

“I thought you were a salesman, Travis,” Christopher said. “Don’t we want him to believe we’re going to deliver less than we can?”

“Oh, that was my plan,” the executive replied. “But he really doesn’t expect much of this.”

“Well, then. Admiral Kistler? Inform Captains Tamboli and Champion to commence stage one.”

Every stage of this was choreographed to the nth degree. They’d done this before, though the only demonstrations of the gravity buckler they’d carried out had been for Commonwealth leaders.

This was the first time anyone else was going to see the buckler in action, but Christopher had faith in his people.

He was the dog of the show, but the pony was always the most impressive part.

“And… now.”

Resolution flipped in space, accelerating hard as Captain Champion’s ship broke away from the main body of the ESS. She flipped at five thousand kilometers, bringing the main spinal battery to bear and firing.

It was a low-charge shot, one that wouldn’t do any real damage to Renown even if it hit—and every aspect of this was choreographed. The projectors snapped to life exactly on schedule, and the beam hit a zone of space where, suddenly, gravity was completely different.

“Forced a miss, twenty-six-degree deflection,” Kistler reported. “As expected. Stage two?”

“Proceed as planned,” Christopher ordered.

Repulse didn’t open up the range. As stage two kicked off, the three ships for stage three and four of the demonstration were moving away to give themselves distance to cross, but Repulse simply swung around to present her full topside firepower.

The one system Christopher didn’t have available to demonstrate with was the heavy railguns preferred by the USSF. For this purpose, though, forty-two quadruple twenty-millimeter / five-hundred-KPS magnetic autocannon could take their place.

Three seconds of sustained fire flung over three hundred steel slugs toward Renown. A single hit by a twenty-millimeter slug wouldn’t be crippling, but that many could cause serious damage to the battlecruiser at this range.

But the gravity buckler was in place. The slugs were only about six centimeters long, but that was enough for the tidal forces to rip them to pieces. What left the gravity field was nothing more than sand, and even that was scattered across a vector cone that posed no threat to Renown.

“Well done,” Christopher murmured. “My compliments to Commander Richards and Commander Howard. They are to execute stage three at their discretion.”

That took part of the choreography out of the scenario, he knew. There was a specified time that the two destroyers were supposed to fire. By ordering discretion, the Admiral was adding an extra layer to the exercise.

Mostly the question of which of the two destroyers opened fire first. It was supposed to be Howard’s Liverpool, and they were supposed to sequence the two salvos six seconds apart.

Instead, both destroyers fired all six of their missile launchers within a second of each other, sending a dozen missiles—all, thankfully, with self-destructing training heads aboard—blazing toward Renown at a thousand MPS^2.

Even Christopher held his breath for a moment as the buckler swung around. This was easier, in some ways, than the autocannon shots—there wasn’t enough time for the missiles to match the five-hundred-kilometer-per-second velocity of the railgun slugs.

On the other hand, the missiles could dodge. And because they were JCSF missiles, they knew what a gravity buckler looked like.

Icons flashed across the main screen and then vanished… one of them way too damn close.

“Tamboli?” Christopher asked calmly.

“Missed one with the buckler,” his flag captain said, equally calmly. “Hit her with an autocannon burst to be sure.”

“You good for stage four?” Christopher asked.

“Did it look like that hit us or something?” Tamboli replied. “Captain Garland can take her best bloody shot.”

“This is not that part of the demonstration,” Christopher said mildly. “Are you ready?”

“We’re ready.”

All Christopher had to do at that point was nod to Kistler, leaning back in his seat as Rodney made turnover, aligning her main gun with the flagship and firing at full power. If the battle laser had connected, it would have blown clean through the battlecruiser and probably killed everyone aboard.

Even Christopher had a moment of fear as the energy signatures spiked across his displays—but Renown didn’t even shiver.

“Kistler?” he asked.

“Twenty-three-degree deflection,” she told him. “We were never even in danger.”

Christopher had been aboard battlecruisers for this particular demonstration before and knew, intellectually, that she was right. On the other hand, the most powerful single weapon in any human space force had just been fired directly at him.

“Thank you, Admiral.” He turned his gaze back on Reynolds. “Shall we have a chat with Shangjiang Chu, Em Reynolds? I hope we lived up to his expectations.”

“Admiral Macleod, you lived up to my expectations,” the executive told him brightly. “And I, my friend, am far harder to please than a potential customer!”

“I WILL ADMIT, Admiral Macleod, that I did not expect you to fire a multi-gigawatt pulse laser at your flagship,” Chu said with a chuckle. “I believe it made your point, though.”

The PLASN officer sat behind his desk on his flagship while Christopher sat on his own ship. Both of them had wallscreens that covered an entire wall of their office, creating an illusion of the two rooms being merged.

Reynolds was incapable of sitting while making a sales pitch. That the executive was standing beside Christopher’s desk was the clearest sign, to the Admiral at least, that he was planning on just that.

“It’s not the first time we’ve tested the system like that,” Christopher told Chu. “There is a reason we start the test with one of the lasers in flashlight mode, though. For a test, I don’t want a mistake.”

“That hardly undermines the performance your people turned in,” the Shangjiang said. “Both your hardware and your crews, Admiral, and the hardware doesn’t care if a foreign admiral has praise for it.

“Please pass my respect on to your personnel. The hardware is incredible, but their skill shows as well.”

“I will,” Christopher promised. “Thank you.”

“If we were to come to an agreement on the purchase of R-Type battlecruisers, training on all of the ships’ systems would be included, of course,” Reynolds noted. “I know that Zhōngguó prefers to manufacture their own, but I think that Admiral Macleod has demonstrated the value our battlecruisers would supply alongside your SX-Fifteens.”

Chu looked vaguely pained for a moment before he brought his face back under control.

“Since you have inserted yourself into a conversation between officers, you get the frankness of that conversation, Em Reynolds,” Chu told the executive. “Which is, bluntly, that your cruisers’ armor is fancy tissue paper. Combined with the political parameters of our acquisitions, there is no universe in which the People’s Liberation Army Space Navy will ever acquire BAST-built capital ships.”

“Not to smother my poor friend’s shock,” Christopher said with a chuckle, knowing that Reynolds would take both Chu’s bluntness and his own amusement at it in stride, “but our armor is better than tissue paper. We integrate our energy-dispersal networks in a way that even the Americans haven’t matched yet.

“They, like you, use layers of ferroceramics and dispersal networks. Our composite armors integrate the dispersal network into the casting of the armor itself, rendering secondary layers of armor unnecessary.

“Kilo for kilo and centimeter for centimeter, BAST’s composite armor can resist more force and more heat than any other armor I’ve seen.” Christopher waved a dismissive hand. “Our ablatives are much the same as anyone else’s, but the underlayer is more capable than you might think.”

“And at twenty centimeters thick, it could be made of pixie dust and neutronium,” Chu replied. “An American sixteen-inch railgun shell at seven hundred kilometers a second is going to go right through it.”

“Given the defensive layers on the SX-Fifteen, I would be under the impression that fancy tissue paper is the PLASN’s preferred type of armor,” Reynolds purred. “Certainly, BAST is capable of replacing the dispersing composite with sequential ablatives.”

Christopher was dismissive of his own ship’s ablative armor for a reason: not because it was bad but because he knew perfectly well that the Chinese system was better. Renown, for example, had a single five-centimeter layer of ablative armor, a reactive system that would detonate sections of explosives to deflect a hit.

With the energy-dispersing composite behind it, that was probably enough. The PLASN version, however, consisted of a three-centimeter layer that was slightly more effective… and was backed by seven more such layers, with little or no conventional armor.

“On the other hand, if we’re being frank, we all know that neither the armor currently in use by the JCSF or the sequential ablatives in use by the PLASN can stop an American sixteen-inch railgun shell or a Russian forty/six-fifty.”

The Russian weapon was forty-centimeter-caliber / six-hundred-fifty-KPS velocity. It was slower than the American version, but Royal Intelligence suggested that the slug was enough heavier to make up most of the impact energy difference.

“But the gravity buckler can,” Reynolds inserted as if they’d planned it. “You saw its effect on a massed salvo from our defensive guns.”

“You cannot compare a two-centimeter shell at five hundred KPS to a forty-centimeter shell at seven hundred KPS,” Chu pointed out. “Even a USSF sixteen-inch shell has seven thousand times the mass of your defensive slugs—and ten thousand times the impact energy.”

“Since the only heavy railguns in this system are aboard Tiān Jiā’s orbital forts, we have to improvise,” Christopher replied. “We both know that our primary battle laser is an overall superior weapon in any case.”

“It is much easier to dodge a seven-hundred-KPS shell than a laser with a hundred-thousand-kilometer range,” Reynolds agreed. “As your own SX-Sixteen designs bear out.”

The silence on the call was chilly for a few seconds before Chu shook his head, half-amused and half-aggravated.

“Why am I not surprised that you know we’re including a spinal laser in the next-generation cruisers?” he asked drily.

“It is my job, Shangjiang Chu, to know what you might need,” the BAST executive pointed out. “Just as you knew that the gravity buckler existed and could ask for a demonstration, I know every specification already decided on for the SX-Sixteen. BAST has already submitted proposals for manufacturing some components of the cruiser.”

“The full specifications, including the presence of the laser, should have remained confidential,” Chu noted. “You realize, Em Reynolds, that I will have to report that leak when I return to Earth.”

“I have confidence that the distribution of that information to BAST was fully authorized,” Reynolds replied.

Christopher let the two dance for a moment as he tapped on his watch, pulling information from Renown’s systems into his implants and onto his vision. No matter how important the meeting was, he needed to keep up to date on the affairs of his squadron.

Everything was looking perfectly quiet. The five capital ships and six destroyers were completely alone at Tau Ceti f, and the rest of the star system was cheerfully buzzing along as usual.

So, why was the back of his neck itching?

“I imagine, then, that you knew that I was asked to evaluate the R-Type—and the gravity buckler specifically—for components we wanted to include in the SX-Sixteen,” Chu noted.

“Personally, I would argue that the PLASN could use a mixed-capital-ship fleet, including a heavier direct-fire component anchored on something similar to our battlecruisers,” Reynolds said. “I recognize my biases there, of course, Shangjiang—but I am also a student of operational theory and military history. Historically, imbalanced fleets are at risk if one of their weapons arms is successfully countered.”

“Which is why our carrier-cruisers are capable of both carrying starfighters and delivering heavy missile fire of their own,” Chu replied. “Like the JCSF, we decided that heavy railguns are simply too inaccurate and too easily evaded for practical use. The focal-distance issue for a useful anti-ship laser is something you resolved before us, but it does change the combat environment.”

Christopher had seen that himself in the five years since the first R-Type had been commissioned. It was only in the last year that the ESS had switched over from Q-Types to R-Types, after all—Our Ness was kept to a uniform equipment list, almost always of the ships BAST was currently trying to sell to non-Commonwealth powers.

The solitary S-type battlecruiser, Sovereign, would normally have remained part of the Earth Squadron. Given the political concerns around the Centauri-Eridani War, she had instead joined Resistance, the only R-Type not under Christopher’s command, in the International Peacekeeping Squadron.

That eighteen-capital-ship formation served as a pointed reminder to America and Russia that their war would not be permitted to come home to Sol.

And it wasn’t even a secret that Sovereign and Resistance were equipped with BAST’s latest spinal heavy laser, capable of hitting targets at up to a hundred thousand kilometers. That was nearly the maximum range of the missiles in Renown’s magazine, a range that they took seven minutes to reach.

The laser crossed it in a third of a second. It just needed to be over a hundred and fifty meters long to reach its maximum range, rendering only the massive spinal installations of the new Commonwealth ships useful.

Laser-based directed-energy weapons weren’t new. Laser-based directed-energy weapons that could deliver nuclear-weapon-level energy pulses at a third of a light-second were.

“Even the Americans finally gave up on the heavy railguns in favor of a laser on the Idahos,” Reynolds noted to Chu. He coughed delicately. “I cannot officially say anything, but we may have sold them key parts of the design.”

“As you did for us?” Chu said drily. “I see that BAST’s definition of neutrality is… flexible.”

“Idaho was commissioned two years ago,” Christopher pointed out. “The war has only been going on for a year. She was laid down four years before it started!”

The PLASN officer chuckled and shrugged.

“I am not the person making the final decision, Em Reynolds,” he told the executive. “I will take my impressions back to PLASN’s acquisitions team and give them my opinion.” He snorted. “I doubt it’s much of a shock to say that my opinion will be positive. That is a terrifying defensive system your people have developed.”

Christopher said nothing. Part of his job since receiving four of the six gravity-buckler-equipped warships in existence had been working out countermeasures. Even if BAST wasn’t trying to sell the buckler to anyone who wasn’t an active threat to the Commonwealth, no technological advantage lasted forever.

“I’m glad our demonstration lived up to the reality of the system,” Christopher told him. “My people enjoy the opportunity to be soldiers and not rescue workers.”

“There are days, Admiral Macleod, where I wish that humanitarian aid and rescue was all our modern fleets ever had to do,” Chu admitted. “I doubt I am alone in that.”

“Not even on this call, Shangjiang Chu,” Christopher admitted. For his own part, he preferred the days that Our Ness had to charge to the rescue, unleashing their swarms of shuttles and massively powerful engines to save people.

He didn’t mind being a show horse, but it was good to get to do some actual work.

“This, however, is where we part ways,” he continued. “We’re closer to the skip line to Luy Seven-Two-Six-Eight here than we would be at Tiān Jiā, which is our route home.”

“Making the long jump?” Chu asked, clearly curious.

Luy 726-8 was almost nine light-years from Earth. With the lower mass of its two component stars slowing things down slightly, it was a nineteen-hour skip from Luy 726-8 to the Solar System.

The generally accepted safe time limit was sixteen hours. There was an entire branch of physics and engineering dedicated to extending that number, but Christopher was prepared to stay inside the sixteen-hour—a maximum skip of eight light-years—limit.

He was assured that modern skip drives, even civilian ones, could push a twenty-hour jump. It would almost certainly be safer to do so in a battlecruiser… but he wouldn’t risk it.

“No, we’re taking the long way to show the flag near but not in Alpha Centauri. The Barnard’s Star route,” Christopher told him. “It’s not fast, but we have to remind the Colonial Administration we exist.”

“Without, I see, paying the Colonial Administration tariffs for taking a warship through Alpha Centauri,” Chu said with a chuckle.

There were four useful skip lines out of Sol. Barnard’s Star and Alpha Centauri were two of the more useful ones, and both were locked down under the control of the United States’ Colonial Administration, the people who ran America’s extrasolar colonies and were, in the main, responsible for teaching the Novaya Imperiya—their Russian equivalents—not to screw with American cash flow.

Two of the systems he’d be passing through, both named Lacaille with different strings of numbers, had been regarded as neutral territory right up until the Novaya Imperiya had claimed them and set up station outposts whose sole purpose had been to extort tolls from ships passing through.

It wasn’t like either of the systems in question had anything else of value, after all.

“We have a standing agreement over Barnard’s Star that, so far, the USCA has honored despite the war,” Christopher said. “I’ll take a multi-star-system two-week journey over a thirty percent chance of losing a bloody ship, every time.”

“Agreed. Zunyi and her escorts will be on our way back to Tiān Jiā within the hour. Feel no obligation to rush from our system, Admiral Macleod, but I understand. Fly safe.”

“Likewise, Shangjiang Chu.”

7

CHRISTOPHER REMAINED IN HIS OFFICE, after a small toast with Reynolds to the apparent success of their sales mission, and watched as the two groups of ships slowly parted. Neither the ESS nor Zunyi was pushing the limits of their engines or even their gravity-generation systems. Full compensated thrust for Our Ness’s battlecruisers and destroyers was eighty-five MPS^2—and while Christopher suspected Chu’s flagship had an edge over that, the PLASN had chosen not to demonstrate it in the exercises.

Three ships headed back toward Tiān Jiā at sixty MPS^2, and eight headed toward the Luy 726-8 skip line at the same acceleration.

Ten light-minutes wasn’t a distance they would cross quickly—even from Tau Ceti f, it would take them thirty-one hours to make a zero-velocity-zero-distance rendezvous with the skip line, currently roughly a hundred and eighty-five million kilometers away after the first two hours of flight.

It would “only” take Zunyi twenty-eight hours to make it back to Tiān Jiā, less than nine light-minutes away with the current positions of the planet and Tau Ceti f.

It should be a quiet trip for everyone, and everything had gone right so far. He’d done his part, playing dress-up doll and the dog in the dog-and-pony show. His medals, uniform and presence helped make the sales for BAST. It wasn’t what he’d wanted from his career when he was younger, but he’d reconciled to the realities of twenty-third-century Britain long before.

Not quite enough to retire and take the cushy consulting job BAST kept offering him, but enough to let him drown some of his worries under pound notes. None of the money that flowed his way from these deals went under the table—but a commission on sales was paid to the ESS and divided up by the ancient prize-money rules of the Royal Navy.

The ESS did many other things, but JCSF command had no illusions about what Our Ness’s main role was. They made shiny examples for BAST, and BAST sold ships, guns and defenses from their example.

Christopher had reviewed the contracts involved in that. Anything PLASN ordered from BAST in the next six months would be considered related to the demonstration there in Tau Ceti, though the commission percentage scaled down with time.

Even a single battlecruiser ordered six months after the demonstration would pay the lowest rating on any of his ships a month’s salary. A mass order of gravity bucklers to update the PLASN’s entire next generation of carrier-cruisers… Well, even Christopher would notice the impact of that commission on his bank account.

If it hit on a day where he cared. Those were… getting less common, he recognized, as he grew older and money became less relevant.

But this was what his service needed, so it was the work he did. It could have been a lot less pleasant, he supposed. There were things that if he ever admitted aloud, even to his steward, he would find himself strongly encouraged to talk to a counselor. The JCSF would regard his creeping depression as an injury, one the medical division would be honor-bound to treat.

For himself, Christopher was surprisingly fine with being intermittently depressed. It wasn’t like he hadn’t participated in turning the primary striking formation of the Commonwealth into a parade force more determined to sell BAST’s products than to protect anyone.

ONE ADVANTAGE of the thirty-odd grams of silicon that lived in the back of Christopher’s skull was that he couldn’t sleep through alarms. He wasn’t entirely convinced it was an advantage, but a sequence of mild electric impulses to key nerve clusters woke him up thoroughly and with surprisingly few side effects.

He hated it, but that didn’t count as a side effect. He was still going to consider ending the career of whatever fucking idiot had pinged the Admiral’s emergency alert by accident.

“Macleod,” he barked as he opened a channel to the flag bridge. “Would someone care to explain why the emergency alert just went off?”

“Ser, we have a major skip signature from the Eridani line,” a young woman replied, her voice sounding like she was staring over the edge of a cliff. Captain Catrina Magee, the fleshy part of his brain managed to dredge up. Second Officer of his communications team and the poor bastard with the watch on the flag bridge tonight.

“China isn’t at war with the Novaya Imperiya,” Christopher noted. “People are still flying back and forth.

“No, ser… a major skip signature,” Magee repeated… and Christopher’s brain finally bypassed his grouchiness and kicked him in the duty.

“How major?”

“We’re not sure, but initial estimates suggest in excess of eighty starships have emerged so far.” She swallowed. “Protocol calls for emergency alert to all senior officers after more than ten unknown signatures in less than a ten-minute period.”

That wasn’t a few freighters. That wasn’t even a merchant convoy. That was a fleet, and the Novaya Imperiya could not be stupid enough to add any new enemies to their list, could they?

They were already fighting the unquestioned first-ranked interstellar power. Even if they were going to add a second enemy to the list, the Novaya Imperiya surely wouldn’t go after the second- ranked interstellar power.

“I’ll be on the flag bridge in five minutes,” he told Magee. “Make sure my staff meets me there—and so does the strongest coffee our stewards can find.”

“Yes, ser!” She paused, then audibly swallowed. “Should we adjust our course, ser?”

Christopher had to check the time. They’d been en route to the skip line for eleven hours, leaving them four and a half hours from their peak velocity—but they were heading away from Tiān Jiā at the next best thing to one percent of lightspeed.

“Order all ships to cut acceleration,” he ordered. “At least until we know what the hell is going on.”

IT WAS THE AMERICANS. That much Magee had nailed down by the time Christopher had dressed and reached his flag deck, but that only left more questions.

“I make it twenty-four capital ships, definitely including at least one carrier, but we can’t nail down the differences at this range, thirty cruisers and at least thirty destroyers,” Kistler reeled off.

Christopher’s Ops Officer and second-in-command looked as desperately in need of the over-brewed and almost-too-dark coffee as he did. But she was gamely pulling the data together as her team assembled it and passed it on.

“That makes no sense,” Christopher noted. “That’s more capital ships than either of the Territorial Fleets, and if the USSF Solaris Fleet has broken the blockade, we have some real bloody problems.”

“If it’s the Solaris Fleet, they’re short escorts,” Tamboli told him. His flag captain probably should have been on the bridge, but she’d inserted herself into this briefing, and Christopher figured he could use her.

“Both Territorial Fleets have three squadrons of six battleships apiece,” Christopher laid out. “The Solaris Fleet has four, plus two carriers where each Territorial Fleet has one.”

He waved a hand in a vague gesture.

“There are another dozen battleships around Sol that are administratively part of the Solaris Fleet but operate independently to provide security at the gas giants and Mars, but the International Squadron would probably notice if the Americans were penny-packeting battleships past them.”

“So, this is one of the Territorial Fleets with some extras?” Kistler suggested. “But, no, that…doesn’t make sense either. Not if they’ve got a carrier…”

“Two carriers,” her senior team lead interrupted, the Commodore materializing out of the mix of consoles like a ghost. The Māori officer gave Christopher a salute that lacked any focus—and a firm nod the Admiral knew was more representative of actual respect from the man.

“Two?” Christopher asked.

“We might not be able to ID battleships easily at this range, especially when there are so many together, but we know every American carrier backward and forward,” Commodore Atawhai Rameka told him. “There are a lot less of them. Last count had them at five President-class, and we’ve got Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan over there.”

“Well, that’s an auspicious set of bloody names, isn’t it? Couldn’t we have had, I don’t know, Nixon?” Christopher said drily. “Two carriers makes it twenty-two battleships, and I can’t see the Americans splitting off four ships instead of six.”

“We overestimated the cruiser number,” Kistler told him, reviewing a datapad Rameka had passed her. “Looks like twelve cruisers… but twenty Marine Expeditionary Vessels.”

“That’s a fucking invasion fleet,” Tamboli swore. “What the hell are they doing here?”

The pieces fell into place as Christopher considered the number of American battleships that had just shown up in a neutral star system.

“Running,” he said quietly. “Because they just hit Epsilon Eridani and bounced.”

It didn’t, in his experience, matter how quietly the Admiral spoke. Everyone on the flag bridge heard what he said, and the frozen silence rippled out from him as the meaning sank in.

“Turn the Squadron around,” he ordered into that silence. “Full acceleration; our course is Tiān Jiā.”

“Ser? Everyone here is neutral to each other,” Kistler pointed out carefully.

“That, Rear Admiral Kistler, is an invasion fleet,” Christopher told her. “One that just failed. Regardless of who is in command over there, they are smarting, they are angry, they are not thinking clearly—and they still have an invasion fleet.”

Without a further breakdown of the USSF order of battle, he couldn’t be certain who he was looking at. It was almost certainly either Admiral Chester Nimitz or Admiral Haley Parker-Kennedy, commanding officers of the First and Second USSF Territorial Fleets, respectively.

The man and woman responsible for deploying the might of the largest space force in human stars in support of the orders and objectives of the United States Colonial Administration.

A man and a woman not used to failing.

“Our ETA at Tiān Jiā is twenty-four hours, forty-five minutes,” Kistler reported. “Squadron is coming online at full acceleration.”

“And the Americans?”

“They came out three and a half light-minutes from Tiān Jiā,” the Ops Officer replied. “A bit under twenty hours for them to make zero-zero at standard thrust.”

“They won’t beat Shangjiang Chu back,” Christopher observed. “But he won’t have much time in orbit before things go to hell. If they’re going to hell.”

The odds were not great. The American fleet hadn’t quite taken up an attack formation, but they were accelerating toward Tiān Jiā at fifty MPS^2.

A lot of ships were moving. The PLASN defensive force was mostly just rearranging itself, waiting to see what the Americans did—in their place, Christopher would probably stay under the protective umbrella of the trio of orbital forts with their copies of the American sixteen-inch railguns and buckets of single-shot missile cells.

“What’s our communication time lag?” he asked softly.

Unfortunately, the course the ESS had taken toward the Luy skip line had been almost a direct course away from Tiān Jiā. He was as far away as he could be—and it was going to take eight hours just for the Commonwealth squadron to shed their velocity away from the planet.

The USSF ships weren’t on the same direct line, which gave him some leeway. His distance to them was only slightly greater than his distance to Tiān Jiā.

“Just over ten minutes and forty seconds one way,” Captain—Commodore, as a staff officer on someone else’s ship—Platell informed him. “Call it twenty-one and a half minutes round-trip lag.”

“Send a standard greeting and a polite ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ message to the Americans, please, Commodore,” Christopher instructed. “Kistler, keep your people drilling down into the sensor data.

“I want to know what ships are over there. Hell, I want to know which fleet.”

He knew Admiral Howard Chester Nimitz. The man was, well, the type to use his middle name to make sure everyone knew who his ancestor had been—but he was also probably the best Flag Officer alive in any navy.

Nimitz might start a war, but he probably wouldn’t do so by mistake.

Parker-Kennedy, on the other hand, Christopher only knew by reputation. Part of that reputation was that Nimitz had told Christopher she was a better tactical admiral than he was, which was no small concession, given Nimitz’s ego.

But Christopher knew Nimitz’s strategic brain. He didn’t know Parker-Kennedy. And he had his worries about how the best tactical admiral in the USSF would resolve what was clearly going to be a diplomatic and strategic situation.

8

DISTANCE MEANT everything felt like it was taking place in slow motion. Christopher could, basically, go take an eight-hour nap and know that the situation wouldn’t have resolved itself or even materially changed by the time he returned to the flag bridge.

One advantage, however, to being over seventy was that he found he needed a lot less sleep these days. That wasn’t an advantage to his poor staff, who operated on a ship’s day of “the Admiral is up,” but when the fecal matter was heading rapidly toward the air-distribution system, it was handy.

“I think there are transmissions between Ronald Reagan and the planet,” Platell told him. “But they’re sufficiently directional we’re not getting anything of either of them.”

“Any response to our own hail?”

“Not yet,” Platell admitted.

Christopher tried to work through his options. He didn’t know what the Americans were telling Governor Ko. He needed to know what had happened in Epsilon Eridani—and what the Americans were telling Ko Rong had happened in Eridani.

He also, however, needed something that could give him at least part of the answer.

“Platell, Kistler,” he said calmly. “I need a list of Kingdom- and Commonwealth-flagged ships in Tiān Jiā orbit.”

Like it or not, the Joint Commonwealth Space Force’s first responsibility was to the ships flying under the flags of Commonwealth nations. Christopher was honest enough to admit that the actual order went something like British government ships—Famous Five ships—Canadian, Indian, New Zealander and Australian ships, plus non-Five British civilian shipping ships—then ships flagged to the rest of the Commonwealth.

Only after seeing to the safety of that particular list did the security of the Tau Ceti System or any concern about the Chinese citizenry show up on his priorities. They did show up, of course, but he was duty-bound to see to the protection of Commonwealth ships and citizens first.

“There are ninety-six skip-capable civilian vessels in Tiān Jiā orbit,” Kistler told him. “Seventeen are Commonwealth-flagged.”

The list appeared on the main display and Christopher knew Kistler was looking at the same ship he was.

The London Financial Syndicate secured courier Mensarii.

The LFS was either the most or second-most important member of the Famous Five, depending on the day and who was asking. An amalgamation of most of London’s financial district into a single terrifyingly monopolistic behemoth, the Syndicate was one of the few entities in known space capable of organizing financing for such minor affairs as, oh, terraforming projects and planetary colonizations.

“What are the odds that an LFS secured courier isn’t eavesdropping on Ko Rong’s communications?” Kistler asked.

“Bloody zero,” Platell replied. “They are definitely eavesdropping on this call.”

“Record for transmission, Commodore,” Christopher ordered. “I’ll address them myself.”

Technically, what he needed to ask for was arguably illegal under multiple important treaties. But he needed the data to make his decisions, and with almost forty capital ships in system, he needed to make the right decisions.

“You’re live on your command, ser.”

The Admiral nodded to Platell, checked his uniform and posture in the video feed, and drew on the mantle of the history of the Royal Navy as he faced the camera.

“LFS courier Mensarii, I am Admiral Christopher Macleod of the JCSF Extrasolar Squadron,” he introduced himself, probably unnecessarily. “You can see the situation in this star system the same as I can.

“I know that the USSF Fleet and the Chinese government are communicating, and I am hoping that you are… incidentally picking up fringes of those transmissions. I am asking you to forward any fragments or snippets of those transmissions you have received.

“The situation here in Tau Ceti appears extremely delicate. I look to you to help me understand the situation and avoid missteps on behalf of Kingdom and Commonwealth.

“Thank you.”

There were, Christopher figured, almost as many regulations and charters he could lean on to demand that data as there were treaties saying Mensarii shouldn’t be collecting it in the first place. He definitely had the authority to order the courier to eavesdrop for him—a legal shield he would gleefully use to protect Mensarii’s Captain and crew if necessary.

Renown and the rest of the squadron had not yet even reached zero velocity relative to Tiān Jiā, which meant they were farther away than they had been when the Americans had arrived. Christopher had waited through the twenty-one-minute loop it should have taken the USSF to answer his coms and more. The time lag was now up to twenty-two minutes—and would peak at twenty-five when Our Ness finished shedding their velocity away from the planet.

Like most stretches of time when dealing with space maneuvers and communications, it was a twenty-two-minute loop where nothing changed. It wasn’t fair to say nothing happened—the ESS shed another hundred KPS of velocity, the Americans gained sixty-six KPS of velocity toward Tiān Jiā, and Shangjiang Chu aboard Zunyi gained eighty KPS toward his command.

The ranges were dropping, but no one had even reached turnover to decelerate toward the planet yet. But everyone, including Christopher himself, was heading there.

Except…

“Ser, we have fighter groups launching from Donald Trump,” Kistler reported. “My team makes it two attack squadrons, twenty-eight strike fighters, and they appear to be forming up on one of the battleship formations.”

“Any course diversion between the battleship squadrons? Or the landing ships?”

“Nothing so far,” she told him. “They’ve just put a quarter of one carrier’s fighters into space in a defensive bubble around four of their battleships.”

Christopher nodded slowly.

“ID those ships, please,” he told her. “Run them against the profile we have for the Iowas.”

The Iowa-class fast battleships gave up forty of the defensive autocannon and four of the missile launchers of their Montana-class predecessors—the class that had to make up the majority of the twenty-two ships of the American fleet—to carry sufficient engines and fuel to match an R-Type’s acceleration.

Escorted by destroyers and starfighters, all of which could also make the eighty-five MPS^2 of an R-Type’s standard acceleration, they would make up the more maneuverable wing of the American fleet.

“Ser, we have a response from Mensarii,” Platell reported. “Forwarding to your console.”

Christopher had activated the video before the file had even finished transferring over. The smaller screen attached to his personal console lit up with the dark-skinned face of a woman who was clearly Canadian First Nations.

“Admiral, I am Alexis Crowchild of the Syndicate,” she greeted him. “It’s hard to miss the conversation going on here, and I will be perfectly honest: I’m not sure this isn’t going to get very ugly.

“My team should have attached copies of everything we’ve picked up so far between Governor Ko and Admiral Parker-Kennedy.” She coughed delicately. “If you were to provide written orders covering any questionable listening and recording we did, I would appreciate it…but the data has been sent regardless.

“For Kingdom and Commonwealth.”

“For Kingdom and Commonwealth,” Christopher echoed, knowing she couldn’t hear him. “Platell? Did we get a bunch of files?”

“We did.”

“Good. Alstairs!”

The Chief of the Watch perked up, turning his attention toward the Admiral.

“Ser?”

“Make sure the log shows that I issued formal orders to Captain Crowchild to record and relay all communication between the Chinese and the Americans the moment we became aware of the American presence. Am I clear?”

“Yes, ser!”

The log was half-electronic, half-manual, and it wasn’t editable after the fact. What could be done, though it wasn’t supposed to happen, was to make a new entry with a backdated time stamp.

In this case, an entry to the logs that showed that Christopher had ordered Captain Crowchild to start eavesdropping on two friendly nations before she’d done it—instead of asking for her files, knowing she was already doing it.

What happened that moment, though, was that he had the recordings, and he queued them up. The time loop between the American fleet and the planet wasn’t as long as between the ESS and the planet, but it was enough that there were only a handful of messages back and forth.

The first had been sent by the USSF, probably before anyone in the Tau Ceti System had seen the light from their arrival. Admiral Haley Parker-Kennedy looked out of his screen like some kind of avenging Valkyrie forged from coal and steel, her dark blue uniform and silver stars fading neatly into her dark skin and hair.

“Governor Ko Rong, I am Admiral Haley Parker-Kennedy, commanding the United States Space Force Second Territorial Fleet,” Parker-Kennedy intoned, her gaze level and shockingly white teeth bared in what was definitely not a smile.

“My force is transiting from the Epsilon Eridani System, and I have reason to believe that Novaya Imperiya combat vessels will be following. I request and require that the Tau Ceti System stand by to provide us with the fuel and supplies necessary to allow us to secure this system against the Russians.

“The initial necessity is two million tons of purified hydrogen and rations for three hundred thousand people for thirty days. I expect contact with my quartermasters to arrange the transfers at least twelve hours before our arrival in Tiān Jiā orbit.”

The message ended, and Christopher stared at the screen in horror he could barely conceal. Parker-Kennedy had just… blithely ordered a neutral—and not necessarily friendly neutral—power to hand over their entire local military supply stockpile.

And that was assuming that the PLASN logistics facilities above Tiān Jiā even had those kinds of resources. Two million tons of purified hydrogen was… Well, it was enough to refuel an entire battle fleet. And with twenty Marine Expeditionary Vessels included in the fleet, Parker-Kennedy was responsible for at least three hundred thousand people.

He could guess Ko’s response, but her message was in his queue already. Parker-Kennedy’s terrifying image was replaced with Ko Rong’s. The tall Chinese woman would have towered over Parker-Kennedy in person, he suspected.

Still, today… both of them had battle fleets, which was what made all of this so terrifying.

“Admiral Parker-Kennedy, welcome to Tau Ceti,” Ko said in a tone that made it clear that welcome wasn’t worth the photons it had been carried on. “Per the stance of the People’s Republic of China on the Centauri-Eridani War, I must reiterate our position: we are neutral in this conflict.

“To maintain said neutrality, I require that you keep your ships a minimum of three light-minutes from Tiān Jiā. Unfortunately, per the position of the PRC and the PLASN, I must inform you that our private citizens are not allowed to sell you any supplies that may be put to combat uses.

“You are free to pass through this system so long as you do not impede our citizens or the military forces of the People’s Liberation Army Space Navy present here.”

There were many types of bravery in the world. Christopher had seen most of them in his time, though courage under fire was a rare one to be needed, let alone seen, in his time.

But the courage necessary to look at twenty-four capital ships bearing down on your planet—three times as many capital ships as your own defenders commanded!—and tell them, ever so politely, to pound sand was definitely something he could respect.

Unfortunately, while Christopher didn’t know Parker-Kennedy directly, he knew her reputation… and he wasn’t so certain he’d have taken Governor Ko’s blandly phrased refusal calmly.

The next message from Parker-Kennedy started a few moments later, and her face and voice were clearly being kept level by force of will.

“Governor Ko, the Novaya Imperiya is on their way,” she said flatly. “Your neutrality will not be respected by them. If you wish to protect your people as your oaths require, we must work together.

“Make arrangements for the fuel and supplies my fleet needs, Governor. We are better off working together than at cross-purposes.”

The videos were playing loudly enough that he knew everyone on the flag bridge heard the blatant extortion of Parker-Kennedy’s orders. Orders she was issuing to a senior official of a sovereign nation—the system governor of Tau Ceti, the sub-sovereign leader of roughly a half-billion human beings.

There were several sharp inhalations, and he glanced up to meet Kistler’s gaze as his Ops Officer looked at him in concern.

“Nice star system you have here,” she said in an exaggerated New York accent. “Shame if something were to happen to it.”

Christopher swallowed down both a grimace at the situation and a chuckle at his subordinate’s grim humor. Ko’s response was the latest message he had on his recording, sent almost half an hour earlier now.

“Admiral Parker-Kennedy, I suggest you consider your situation and your words carefully,” Ko said, her tone level and calm. “This is not American space. This is Chinese territory. China is not your enemy, Admiral, but we are also not your ally.

“If you approach this planet, the forces of the People’s Liberation Army Space Navy will engage and destroy your fleet. As a gesture of goodwill, I will permit you to cross the Tau Ceti System to the skip to the YZ Ceti System.

“If you continue on your approach to Tiān Jiā, I will be forced to order Shangjiang Chu to take the necessary steps to defend this system. You are under the eyes of all humanity, Admiral Parker-Kennedy.

“Choose wisely.”

Christopher checked the time. They should have had Parker-Kennedy’s response to that message already, but it looked like the American Admiral had needed to chew on Ko’s far more explicit threat.

“Kistler, do we have a breakdown on Parker-Kennedy’s fleet?” he asked.

“Knowing it’s the Second Territorial Fleet helped,” his Ops Officer said. “It’s still got some flex, but some numbers can’t flex far.”

“Lay it out,” he ordered, wincing as he followed through what that had to mean.

“She’s got all six Idahos available to the Territorial Fleets,” Kistler said grimly. “I’ve four of six Iowas, too—but the Second Territorial Fleet, at last report, only had two Idaho-class battleships and no Iowas.

“The other twelve are all Montana-class, which is still four fewer Montana-class ships than the Second Territorial should have,” she told him. “Plus, she has Nimitz’s carrier. I’d say the USCA gave the woman most suited to wield a hammer the biggest hammer they had.”

“So, best guess, she hit Eridani with, what? Thirty-two capital ships?” Christopher asked, adding it up in his head.

“I would guess she got Nimitz’s BatRon Six—four Idahos and two Montanas—and BatRon Seven—all six Iowas that the Territorials have.”

There were only ten Idaho-class battleships and ten Iowa-class fast battleships in the USSF, so far as Christopher knew, and four of each were in the Solaris Fleet. There were rumors that the Americans had started a crash wartime construction program in Alpha Centauri, but even modern shipbuilding techniques couldn’t assemble a quarter-million-ton starship in less than eighteen months.

In about six months, if rumors were accurate, the Territorials would add three whole squadrons of battleships to their order of battle. Right now, though, if Nimitz had moved two battle squadrons and a carrier over to the Second Territorial Fleet, he’d gutted the First.

And with careful use of the six battleships that he’d kept and a few of the light carriers they had completed in the twelve months of the war, Christopher believed that Admiral Nimitz could have faked still having most of both fleets in Centauri and the disputed systems.

Right up until five battleship squadrons and two fleet carriers punched into Epsilon Eridani. Knowing Nimitz, they probably had come from a skip line the Russians wouldn’t have expected—it wouldn’t take many eighteen-hour jumps, after all, to allow them to come in the “back door” from Teegarden’s Star.

It’s what Christopher would have done—except that if Parker-Kennedy had arrived in Eridani with thirty-two capital ships, a twenty-Expeditionary-Brigade landing force, a logistics train and commensurate escorts…

“So, worst-case scenario, how badly did they get kicked in Eridani?” he asked softly.

“Assuming they reinforced by full squadrons and didn’t pull any ships from the Second Territorial, they lost two Iowas and six Montanas,” Kistler said grimly. “Plus, probably eighteen cruisers and almost twice as many destroyers.”

There should have been a six-ship cruiser squadron screening each battleship squadron, plus a destroyer squadron for each battleship and cruiser squadron. Assuming they’d reinforced by their normal doctrine, that would have been thirty cruisers and sixty destroyers.

And there were twelve cruisers and thirty destroyers.

“And there’s one tiny, minuscule thing that no one has mentioned,” Christopher said quietly, almost whispering. “Because while I am prepared to assume a lot of things of the United States Space Force, blatant logistical incompetency isn’t one of them.

“So, where, in the name of all that is holy, is their logistics train?”

His officers fell silent as they looked at the screen and each of them followed his thoughts.

“They got mousetrapped hard, didn’t they?” Kistler finally replied. “I’m guessing at least two squadrons of cruisers got detached to cover the logistics train… and they’re gone. They’re all gone.”

“Either they got separated, forcing the logistics train back into Teegarden’s Star, or the logistics train was annihilated,” Tamboli said slowly. “They’d have… what, one collier and one tanker per two battleships or three cruisers?”

“Three colliers, three tankers per battleship squadron, two of each per cruiser squadron and one of each per destroyer squadron,” Kistler reeled off—like she had the USSF doctrine memorized.

She probably did. Christopher certainly did.

“So, we’re missing around ninety logistics ships, plus over fifty warships, from what we would expect this reinforced fleet to look like,” Christopher warned his people. “That is probably the single worst defeat suffered by any interstellar force ever.

“They are going to be smarting. And Parker-Kennedy is not known for being…”

He tried to consider the best way to phrase this.

“Parker-Kennedy is Nimitz’s hammer and has been for the last twenty years of both of their careers,” Kistler said flatly. “Each of them is very, very good at their area of expertise, and they have played off each other to turn what was supposed to be Centauri’s self-defense fleet into…that.”

His subordinate waved at the fleet heading toward Tiān Jiā.

“BatRon Seven—assuming our Iowa friends are Battle Squadron Seven—has started to diverge vectors from the main body,” one of the analysts reported. “Their vector is positioning them to block off anyone headed to YZ Ceti or Van Maanen’s Star from Tiān Jiā.”

“What does that leave open?” Christopher asked.

“They’re blocking the route to Epsilon Eridani, so that leaves the lines to Teegarden’s Star, TZ Arietus, and Luy Seven-Two-Six.”

YZ Ceti or Van Maanen’s Star were the regular exits—along with Luy 726-8—that would allow ships to head back toward Earth via Centauri or Barnard’s Star. From TZ Arietus, a ship would have to skip to either YZ Ceti or Van Maanen’s Star to head anywhere useful.

The other skip from TZ Arietus was the skip line to Teegarden’s Star, whose only other normal route was to Epsilon Eridani. That Teegarden’s Star was basically useless from a navigation perspective—there was no destination that wasn’t better served by either Epsilon Eridani or Tau Ceti, and those systems had potential help available—was why Christopher figured the Americans had used it as their back door. The Russians wouldn’t have anticipated them making a long jump into the system when everyone was still sticking to sixteen-hour skips.

“They’re maneuvering to blockade the system,” Christopher concluded. “That doesn’t sound like they’re heading home… and given that their logistics ships appear to be completely MIA and Parker-Kennedy is asking for roughly sixty percent of her fleet’s entire fuel capacity, I suspect they are in serious supply troubles.”

“What do we do, ser?” Kistler asked.

“Maintain our course back to Tiān Jiā,” he replied. “Our responsibility, first and foremost, is to all ships flying under flags belonging to Kingdom and Commonwealth. Making nice with the Yankees doesn’t even make my top ten priorities right now.”

He let his people absorb that. Christopher didn’t like the situation Parker-Kennedy was creating, and, sadly, whatever went down between the Second Territorial Fleet and the PLASN’s Tau Ceti Squadron was outside his influence or authority.

But there was no force in the universe that could or would get him to stand aside if the Commonwealth-flagged ships in Tiān Jiā orbit ran for home.

“Ser, new relayed communication from Mensarii,” Platell reported.

“Put it on the main screen,” Christopher ordered. “Let’s all see what we’re dealing with.”

Parker-Kennedy seemed more relaxed in the recording than the one previously, which somehow sent a chill down Christopher’s spine.

“Governor Ko, it appears I have been less than clear and you believe that we are at some kind of resolvable impasse,” the American Admiral said, her tone light, almost amused.

“We are not. The situation is very simple. I am at war and you possess the resources I need to prosecute that war. The long and mostly friendly history between our nations suggests that we should be able to negotiate, but instead, you have chosen refusal and threats.

“I must then repay your words in kind. You will provide the resources I have requested or I will take the resources I need. Your defenses pale against the might of the Territorial Fleets of the United States of America.

“I do not require your surrender or your submission. I require your cooperation or I will force your surrender. Choose wisely, Governor. I will have what I need either way.”

“Donald Trump just put the rest of her starfighters into space,” Kistler reported as the recording stopped. “Vectors suggest two squadrons are maneuvering to blockade TZ Arietus. BatRon Seven has split from the main fleet and is vectoring toward the Luy skip line… and us.”

“I’m guessing BatRon Seven is detaching starfighters?” Christopher asked quietly.

“Yes, ser. It looks like two squadrons are moving to every major skip line except the Luy skip line, which is getting the full attention of four fast battleships,” the Rear Admiral laid out.

Six squadrons of strike fighters—eighty-four of the tiny spacecraft—were blazing across the star system to their distant destinations. A seventh squadron was sticking with BatRon Seven, which was now definitely heading toward the Luy skip line and Christopher’s command.

An eighth squadron was sticking with the main fleet—and every fighter that had been launched so far was from Parker-Kennedy’s flagship, Donald Trump. There were another eight squadrons aboard Ronald Reagan.

Plus, the Marine Expeditionary Vessels carried an eight-plane starfighter squadron of their own apiece. Those were USMC, not USSF, but Christopher figured those hundred and sixty strike fighters would make a solid addition to the two hundred and twenty aboard Parker-Kennedy’s carriers.

“It appears we may need to make some calls ourselves,” Christopher murmured.

“I have a message relayed from Mensarii that we’re also receiving ourselves,” Platell reported. He didn’t even ask before putting this one up on the screen.

Parker-Kennedy looked almost more relaxed now that she’d committed her fleet to a course that might well lead to war.

“All starships and spaceships in the Tau Ceti System,” she intoned. “To guarantee the security of this star system against the aggression of the Novaya Imperiya of Russia and Epsilon Eridani, I am imposing a security zone across the entire star system.

“All starships and spaceships are ordered to rendezvous with the Second Territorial Fleet of the United States Space Force in orbit of Tiān Jiā. Any attempt to leave the Tau Ceti will be regarded as a sign of cooperation with the enemy and will be treated as a hostile action.

“My ships and starfighters will take the necessary measures to maintain security and prevent unauthorized passage from this star system. I repeat, all ships are to rendezvous with us in orbit of Tiān Jiā for inspection and security review.

“Working together, we can assure the security of this system from the Russian threat and avoid any accidents or potential conflicts.

“Thank you for your cooperation.”

Christopher sighed.

“Some people apparently can’t smell gasoline before they light a match,” he murmured. “All right, then. We definitely need to make some calls.”

He checked his uniform on the video screen, making a couple of small adjustments to make sure he was presenting the proper image.

“Get ready to record, Commodore Platell,” he ordered.

“I think we need to talk, Christopher,” a new voice interrupted him, and the Admiral turned around to realize that Travis Reynolds had just stepped onto the flag bridge. “Before anyone does anything foolish.”

9

CHRISTOPHER HAD LEFT no leeway in the standing orders for the Marines guarding his flag bridge: Travis Reynolds had access. Period. Otherwise, he knew, the Royal Marines would have found any and every excuse they could to bar the BAST executive from the squadron’s command center.

For the first time since writing those orders, Christopher regretted them.

“Travis, this isn’t the time or place,” he told his friend. “This is a military situation.”

“No, it is a diplomatic situation,” Reynolds snapped. “One that a military response will only aggravate. The situation is in hand, Admiral, so long as you follow the plan.”

“The plan?” Christopher asked. His voice was cold. He was surprised at how sharp the chill running through his emotions was. Reynolds didn’t understand how dangerous the path he was walking was. He’d just entered the command bridge of an Admiral in a star system hours, at best, from open conflict… and started undermining said Admiral’s authority.

“Yes,” Reynolds told him. “The plan. My plan, Christopher. The last thing anyone wants here is violence, but our Chinese and American friends have talked themselves into a mutual corner.

“It is our responsibility to play the mature adult in the room and talk everyone off the precipice. The simplest and most reliable way to do that is for us to comply with the Americans’ orders.” He raised his hands. “I know that goes against the grain, but the reality of the situation is clear: we can’t stop them, the PLASN can’t stop them, and trying is only going to get a lot of people killed.

“But if we cooperate, we encourage the civilians to cooperate and we make it clear to Governor Ko and Shangjiang Chu that they are stuck. They can stand down, plead overwhelming force to their superiors, and we can funnel money and resources behind the scenes to compensate them at the Americans’ expense while saving everyone’s face.”

Travis Reynolds, Christopher reflected, was very much a businessman. He recognized the concept of face and reputation… but not the underlying realities of honor and principles.

“You talked to Parker-Kennedy, didn’t you,” he said instead. “How?”

“Yes. And so long as we accommodate the initial request to return to orbit, she guarantees the safety of all Commonwealth-flagged shipping as well as this Squadron.”

Reynolds had no idea what he’d just admitted, but from the body language of the Marines who’d followed him into the flag bridge—Christopher’s orders said they had to let him in, but they knew he shouldn’t be there!—they did.

“I asked a question, Em Reynolds,” Christopher told the executive. His friend had just admitted to treason in the face of the enemy. Everything on the flag bridge was recorded—though as the Admiral, Christopher had near-total control over what happened to those recordings.

“We have not received any transmissions from the USSF formation. How have you communicated with Admiral Parker-Kennedy?”

Reynolds made a dismissive gesture.

“We built this ship, and we made arrangements for confidential communications,” he said. “That’s irrelevant. You have to stand down, Christopher, not do anything to make this worse.”

“Commodore Platell,” Christopher said calmly, turning away from Reynolds to his subordinates. “Find. Those. Transmissions.”

“On it, ser,” Platell confirmed. He probably already had been. Christopher’s staff understood the complex relationship between the ESS and BAST, but they also knew that what Reynolds was saying was well past the line.

“Christopher, you—”

“Travis. Shut. The. Fuck. Up.”

Christopher doubted he was going to get much time out of that. He knew his friend. Reynolds had built his career over being unstoppable in negotiation, continuing to make his points again and again—logically and charmingly but persistently.

“We can’t let thousands of people get killed over a few million tons of fuel,” Reynolds barked, his tone rising. “This is the only way!”

“Sergeant,” Christopher snapped. “Remove Em Reynolds from the flag bridge and return him to his quarters. He is to remain detained there until I order him released!”

“What the fuck?” Reynolds shouted, his usual certainty vanishing into rage. “I command this Squadron. You answer to me, Christopher, and you will obey my orders.”

“No, I don’t, and I won’t,” Christopher replied. He met Reynolds’ eyes for several long seconds, confirming that the two Marines had drawn their sidearms and were moving up to grab the executive, then he turned away from his friend to deal with the real situation.

Everything after that happened very, very quickly.

Reynolds grabbed his shoulder, yanking him backward to stop him turning away. Christopher was too shocked to do anything… but the Marines had already drawn their weapons, and they knew that the executive had just confessed to treason on the bridge recorders.

And he’d laid forceful hands on their Admiral.

Multiple gunshots rang out in the abrupt silence of the bridge. Every conversation, every report, everything suddenly vanished into a literally deathly absence as Reynolds’ hand went limp on Christopher’s shoulder.

The businessman fell, crumpling past Christopher to the deck, where he lay with a stillness that said all that could be said. The rounds the Marines’ guns carried didn’t create exit wounds; they pierced shipsuits and fragmented to avoid overpenetration.

Christopher’s memory of the nature of the bullets snapped into his head in an almost-absent and clinical manner as he stared down at the corpse of his friend.

“FUCK!”

His curse was the only break in the frozen silence. It took him at least ten seconds to look back at the two Royal Marines, weapons in hand—and they were staring at the man they’d just killed with the same shocked horror he felt.

They had done everything right. They’d also just executed a senior Vice President of one of the Famous Five, which could end not just their careers but their lives if Christopher didn’t play the cards right.

“FUCK!”

Yelling at the empty air wasn’t productive, but it was all he could do for a moment. He forced some level of calm, of equilibrium, and when he spoke, even he was surprised at how level his voice was as he stepped away from his friend’s body.

“Let the record show that I ordered the summary execution of Travis Reynolds for treason in the presence of the enemy,” he said loudly.

That was in his authority as commander of the squadron, something that BAST wouldn’t be able to argue or question—they’d try, and it would probably end his career… but better an Admiral on the wrong side of seventy than a pair of twenty-something kids who’d followed their training and done their jobs.

“Platell,” he continued grimly. “Have we located those communications?”

“Not yet, ser,” the Coms Officer admitted. “I suspect there may be hardware in the section of the ship placed at the disposal of the BAST contingent. We will need to have MPs sweep it.”

“We will need the contingent detained for our security anyway,” Christopher told Platell, not sure how he was remaining anything near calm. “Sergeant Palmer!”

The senior Royal Marine looked sick, but she came crisply to attention.

“Get the Ship’s Marshal involved,” he ordered. “You’re coordinating. All BAST personnel are to be restricted to quarters, and all working spaces assigned to them are to be swept for unknown or unauthorized hardware.

“Yes, ser.”

Christopher turned back to the flag bridge, trying to ignore the body at his feet.

“Squadron course will remain unchanged,” he ordered. “Platell, I need communications channels set up for a broad transmission to all ships in Tiān Jiā orbit. The position of Kingdom and Commonwealth in this type of situation is a matter of honor, laid out in a thousand years of tradition.

“We will assure the ships flying under our flags that position has not changed.”

He forced himself to step away from Reynolds’ body and toward his seat.

“And get someone in here to clean up the damn mess,” he ordered.

10

SETTING the camera angle to avoid any sign of the sudden violence on Renown’s flag bridge took a touch more thought than Christopher had anticipated. He barely maintained his forced calm through that process, but he fully assumed the mask of command authority as the coms team gave him the thumbs-up.

“Commonwealth shipping in orbit of Tiān Jiā, this is Admiral Christopher Macleod of the Extrasolar Squadron,” he introduced himself calmly. “I have received a forward of Admiral Parker-Kennedy’s orders and am responding as required by the Articles of the Joint Commonwealth Space Force.

“As per said Articles, I am activating military authority across all Commonwealth-flagged civilian shipping in this star system. Any ship that wishes to remain in Tiān Jiā orbit and negotiate with the USSF is more than welcome to do so, but I strongly recommend that our merchant shipping exit the area, as it has a high likelihood to become a battlespace in the near future.

“All Commonwealth shipping that leaves Tiān Jiā orbit is to route to the Luy Seven-Two-Six-Eight skip line,” he ordered. “We will rendezvous with all ships obeying these instructions and convoy you to the Luy skip line.”

That rendezvous was going to be a nightmare. Just getting the ESS into Tiān Jiā orbit would take another thirty-two hours—but getting the civilian shipping, only some of which could sustain over thirty MPS^2 for any extended period, to the Luy skip line would take fifty-eight hours.

And everything was going to go to hell in about fourteen hours when the Second Territorial Fleet reached Tiān Jiā. Chu would beat them there and face them with his full force and the defensive forts, but Christopher knew how that would end.

So did Chu and Ko, for that matter, but the Chinese Shangjiang and Governor had no choice. They could have sold the fuel to the Americans or come to some other arrangement, but as soon as Parker-Kennedy had threatened a sovereign power and demanded the supplies, she’d left them no choice.

Distance was costing him a lot. It would take over ten minutes for the ships in orbit of Tiān Jiā to hear his message and the same for him to see their reactions. Distance, time, velocity and acceleration… The hard limits of space travel.

“Kistler, get someone running the numbers on BatRon Seven,” he ordered. “If I was Parker-Kennedy, I’d keep those battlewagons with me for the main event, but she’s already separated them for the blockades, and she’s probably going to send them after the civvies.

“I need to know if we can stop them.”

Kistler gave several quiet orders and then crossed the flag bridge to stand next to his seat. There was a fastidious care to her steps, even though she wasn’t walking anywhere near where Reynolds had died.

He couldn’t blame her. He had the grim expectation that the moment he stopped, he was going to be done for a long damn time—and his best-case scenario put the civilian ships fifty-eight hours from skipping to Luy.

“Ser, should we be clearer that we can only escort the Commonwealth shipping?” she murmured, carefully pitching her voice so that no one else could hear them. Or, at least, that everyone had to pretend they hadn’t heard the Ops Officer arguing with the Admiral.

“Everyone in Tiān Jiā orbit will get your transmission. That means we’re going to have a bunch of European, African, Chinese—hell, I think there’s at least three Novaya Imperiya freighters in orbit—tagging along.

“That will piss the Americans off.”

The blood of the closest thing Christopher had to a best friend was being cleaned off the flag bridge deck behind him. His concern for the Americans’ opinion was absolutely negative.

“That, Admiral Kistler, is the point,” he told her quietly. “We are not legally obliged to escort anyone except our citizens to safety. But since protecting and escorting those citizens requires us to establish a security zone of our own, I will admit that I don’t give a damn who hides under our skirts all the way to Earth.”

“We are going to have to fight the Yankees to do that, ser,” she warned.

“I know. The odds are against us… but the mission isn’t to destroy the American fleet, Ariane,” he said gently. “The mission is to evacuate as many civilians as possible from what is on its way to being the biggest self-inflicted diplomatic crisis the Americans have seen since the Trent Affair.”

He saw her nod out of the corner of his eye, then, to his surprise, she smiled grimly.

“It’s my job to make sure you know what you’re doing, ser,” she warned delicately. “In this case, I think it’s the right move. Legal obligations be damned, ser, there are a lot of innocent people out there that we need to protect.”

“Unfortunately, the reality is that some of the innocent people are aboard the American and Chinese warships that are about to render Tiān Jiā orbit unsafe for everyone else,” Christopher said grimly.

He turned his seat to look at Kistler and saw the analyst approaching from behind her.

“Commander? You have those numbers for us?” he asked.

“Yes, ser!” The analyst gave his direct boss a swift worried look but then swallowed and laid it out. “BatRon Seven’s Iowas and destroyers can match our standard eighty-five MPS acceleration. While their current vector is partially oppositional to the course the civilians will have to take to reach the Luy skip line, they will still overhaul them before we can intercept.”

“At standard full acceleration, I assume?” Christopher asked.

“Yes, ser. To guarantee an intercept short of the civilians, we will need to proceed at maximum emergency acceleration starting within the next few minutes.”

“Thank you, Commander,” Christopher told the junior officer. He turned to Kistler.

“You know what we need,” he told her. “Let’s make it happen. Order all ships secured for acceleration and let’s go.”

His ships could, theoretically, compensate up to ninety-five meters per second squared of thrust—a bit less than ten gravities. They could accelerate at a hundred and ten, which would overwhelm the artificial-gravity systems and result in thrust gravity toward the stern of the ships.

They weren’t designed for that, but they could definitely do it.

“Yes, ser.”

He gave her a firm nod then glanced over at Platell.

“One more message, Commodore,” he told the Coms Officer. “Direct transmission to the USSF Fleet. If someone can confirm who is in command of BatRon Seven, that would help.”

“Vice Admiral Ji Pherigo,” one of Kistler’s people answered a moment later. “Except Pherigo was on Iowa herself and… Well, Iowa isn’t there, ser.”

They didn’t have solid identification on which four Iowas were still in Parker-Kennedy’s fleet, but Christopher trusted that his analysts would have been able to identify the lead ship of the class if she was present.

If Iowa wasn’t there, it would be a fifty-fifty chance at best whether Admiral Pherigo was still with their squadron. They might have been evacuated before the fast battleship went down. But they could very easily have died with their flagship.

“Well, I guess I’m talking to Parker-Kennedy,” Christopher murmured. “Ready to record?”

He faced the pickup as he got the thumbs-up from Platell’s people and gave it his flattest, calmest look.

“Admiral Haley Parker-Kennedy, I am not going to pretend to know what you think you’re doing,” he told her. “I’m not going to argue writ or treaty or legalities, because you’ve already tossed most of those out the bloody airlock.

“So. I will be frank, and I will be blunt. By the Articles of the Joint Commonwealth Space Force, I am required and obliged to provide security for Commonwealth-flagged vessels in any time of potential crisis.

“I have ordered all Commonwealth shipping in the system to travel to the Luy skip line. They will convoy there under the protection of the JCSF Extrasolar Squadron. I have neither the desire nor, as we both know, the ability to interfere in your discussions with the Chinese.

“However, if any of your ships approach within seven hundred and fifty thousand kilometers of the Commonwealth-flagged freighters leaving this system, I will regard them as pirates and destroy them.

“This isn’t a negotiation or a discussion or a threat, Admiral Parker-Kennedy. It is a warning—a courtesy since our nations are friends.”

Christopher smiled coldly at the camera and then cut the recording.

“Send it,” he ordered.

“Yes, ser.”

He turned his focus back to Tiān Jiā—and an alert cut through the ship, a two-minute warning to prepare for acceleration.

In a bit under twelve hours, Shangjiang Chu would rejoin his fleet. At some point in the two hours after that, a large number of bluffs were going to be called.

And, unless Christopher had misjudged everyone involved… nobody was bluffing.

11

RIGHT UP UNTIL the final cataclysmic clash, Christopher suspected no one actually thought it was going to happen. The four Iowas and their accompanying quartet of destroyers and squadron of starfighters were on an intercept course for the civilians—and, as expected, every civilian ship in orbit was traveling in the convoy.

Unless he missed his guess, the Commonwealth ships were forming a protective sphere around everyone else. Just in case the ESS decided to be real particular about what the Articles required them to do.

Parker-Kennedy had twenty-two battleships and two carriers to the PLASN’s eight carrier-cruisers. A three-to-one advantage in capital ships—and whatever their name might be, the carrier-cruisers outmassed the Americans’ cruisers by a hundred thousand tons and were definitely capital ships—was enough for her to take risks, but still… Sending away a quarter of her battleships was a risky move.

Both fleets still had hundreds of starfighters out in space, full strike deployments flickering through space as Chu formed his fleet up and Christopher watched it from eight light-minutes away.

He could never have reached Tiān Jiā in time to participate in the battle. In theory, Chu could have pulled his entire fleet back to rendezvous with Our Ness, much as the civilian ships were now fleeing toward the Luy skip line, but that would have left the planet with its half a billion citizens open to the Americans.

And while Christopher trusted that the Americans wouldn’t start nuking cities to force surrenders, well, the Chinese had every reason to have less faith in Admiral Parker-Kennedy’s morals.

He and the Shangjiang hadn’t exchanged a single direct word since the Americans had arrived in system. In some ways, Christopher took that as a sign of immense trust on Chu’s part, but it was also a sign that the Chinese Flag Officer knew that Our Ness couldn’t change what was happening.

Even if Christopher and his people could have magically put the Squadron into Tiān Jiā in orbit in time for the battle, twelve capital ships versus twenty wasn’t that much better a deal than eight.

“There they go.”

Christopher thought it was Kistler who’d spoken, but it could have been any one of a dozen people on the bridge who’d seen it first. The two icon clouds representing the starfighters vanished behind a series of new icons marking missile launch and gunfire.

“The battle lines are still out of range of each other for another minute or so,” Kistler said, continuing on from the earlier report. “But someone pushed the wrong bluff at the wrong moment. From this range, I can’t even tell you who fired first.”

“Almost certainly the Chinese,” Christopher guessed. “They let the Yankees get a lot closer than I would have in their case.”

Even with scattering most of Donald Trump’s fighter group across the star system to blockade skip lines, the Americans still had Ronald Reagan’s eight squadrons and the starfighters from the Marine Expeditionary Vessels.

The Chinese capital ships all carried fighters, and they’d deployed the wings from their defensive forts as well, but that left them with less than two hundred ships facing over two hundred and seventy.

As with BatRon Seven, Christopher wouldn’t have detached his starfighters from the main event… but he also wouldn’t have started this fight in the first place. And even if the PLASN starfighters had opened up the shooting, the Americans had very much started this fight.

The flurry of explosions continued, only growing as the USSF battleships came to bear, slamming missiles and light railgun fire into the mess. The point was to get the Chinese planes into position to launch nuke-tipped anti-ship missiles against the US capital ships… and none of them made it.

“Railgun fire.” The two-word report told Christopher everything he needed to know. They couldn’t pick up the weapons firing, not at this range, but they could see the results.

Parker-Kennedy had to have fired her ships’ main guns within moments of the first starfighter duel. The chaos had covered the twelve Montana-class battleships firing their paired sixteen-inch railguns at long, long range—flight times had to be more than three minutes!

But they’d fired at targets that couldn’t dodge, targets where the only real concern was not hitting the planet behind them, and Tiān Jiā’s trio of orbital forts were older than the carrier-cruisers and had much less armor.

As if any armor in the world would have stopped the eight two-ton slugs each fortress took. They launched missiles at the last moment, someone with an ironclad will waiting to make sure the single salvo they got off would have some value, but their older and inferior armor failed against the force of the strikes.

The icons for all three space stations turned red, and new icons marked the PLASN fleet breaking orbit. They wouldn’t get far out from the planet, not at the accelerations the Chinese ships could manage, but maneuver was the only real defense against railgun fire.

“PLASN are launching missiles. We knew they had more range than we did—apparently, they’ve got the Yankees beat, too.”

It wasn’t going to buy them much. Christopher wasn’t surprised to see the USSF’s response in space well before the Chinese missiles hit. The current generation PLASN missile had less endurance but more acceleration and more total delta-vee than the JCSF’s weapon.

The American missiles accelerated faster—much faster—but the delay on their launch suggested less overall delta-vee, and they had almost no starting velocity.

“Get me every detail we can on the American missiles,” he said quietly. “We’re going to need it.”

“Railgun hits on the cruisers,” Kistler reported. “They’re maneuvering, but they’ve got to stay between the Yankees and the planet. They’re all still in the fight, but I’d say at least two have been hit.”

That spoke well to the PLASN multi-layer reactive armor, Christopher supposed. The Americans certainly seemed to assume that not much was going to survive direct hits from sixteen-inch shells.

If the PLASN had ships still in the fight after taking said hits, the USSF had misestimated their enemy.

Not, though, by enough.

The sixteen-inch railgun, in its various iterations up to the MK12 700KPS version the Montanas were steadily firing at the PLASN every three seconds, had been the mainstay, the staple and the iconic weapon of the United States Space Force for a century.

The Idahos didn’t carry them. They shared a basically identical offensive weapon fit to Renown and the rest of her R-Type sisters: ten missile launchers and a spinal battle laser.

And at the ranges that laser could reach, it Did. Not. Miss.

Six Idaho-class battleships entered the range of their main cannon and aligned on Zunyi. A second later, Zunyi was gone, the Chinese flagship blown apart by a near-instantaneous energy transfer across a third of a light-second.

That was the moment when it was over. There were still missiles in space, still Chinese destroyers and carrier-cruisers in play, but while the PLASN starfighters had neutralized their USSF and USMC counterparts, that had left the undergunned carrier-cruisers trying to fight a battle they couldn’t win.

When the dust settled, two Montanas and a single cruiser were gone—and the scans suggested damage throughout the US fleet. But the PLASN force was annihilated.

“Did they even try to surrender?” Kistler asked.

“No,” Platell reported. “The US didn’t ask for surrender and the Chinese didn’t offer.”

“Some will have made it to the escape pods on both sides,” Christopher said calmly. “I suppose…” He swallowed against a suddenly dry mouth. “I suppose the fate of those escape pods in the next few hours will tell us everything about what kind of war this is going to be.”

“The Chinese won’t take this lying down, Admiral,” Tamboli said from the bridge. “Hell, I’m not even sure the people here will take this lying down, though I imagine twenty brigades of Marines will make a compelling argument.”

“The question, people, is not Will the Chinese go to war over this?” Christopher warned. “The question is Will everyone else go to war over this?”

There was a long silence on Renown’s flag bridge as his senior subordinates looked first to the battlespace above Tiān Jiā, then to the civilian convoy desperately charging toward them at three gravities of acceleration—and then to the starfighters and battle squadron Parker-Kennedy had detached to control exits from the system.

“It’s all down to what story they tell, isn’t it?” Kistler finally asked.

“Exactly. The facts? The truth? That will bring us, the EU, Africa… everybody in against the Americans.” He shook his head. “No one is going to give the Russians the time of day after the stunts they pulled to start this war. They won’t get any new allies out of this; the Americans have… added an entirely new side.”

“And if Parker-Kennedy keeps the civilians from getting out to report the truth…” Tamboli’s voice sounded sick. “They’ll spin it every which way, bring in PR firms and tangle everything up in politics and the court of public opinion for a decade.”

“Which is why she took the step of detaching a fifth of her battle line and a third of her starfighters to blockade the system,” Christopher confirmed. “Which means, people, that there is no way that BatRon Seven is going to let the convoy go.

“And we are going to convince them otherwise.”

No matter what that took.

12

“TWELVE CARRIER-CRUISERS, sixteen destroyers and three orbital forts,” Kistler reeled off. “The Americans have, at least, picked up survival pods, but we’re still probably looking at fifty thousand or so dead.”

The USSF was looking at about a tenth of that. Each of the Montanas they’d lost had carried twenty-three hundred people, but they’d only lost two of them and a cruiser.

The last key left was the civilian shipping, and Christopher shifted against the uncomfortable backward acceleration pressing him into his seat. It was still, sort of, possible to walk about the ship normally—but with one gravity pointed toward the deck and one pointed toward the stern, it was an exercise in endurance and acrobatics no seventy-five-year-old Admiral was going to attempt to manage.

“What is our convoy looking like?” he asked.

“Some of the ships in Tiān Jiā orbit were American, and others decided not to risk running,” Platell told him. He snorted. “Of course, some of the American ship captains decided they didn’t trust Admiral Parker-Kennedy very far. We have eighty-two ships burning for the Luy skip line at thirty meters per second squared.”

Our Ness was well into its deceleration period, shedding overall velocity as they flew toward the civilian convoy. They’d still put themselves between the convoy and BatRon Seven—at the passing point, the civilians would be moving faster than the warships and would ‘leave them behind’—but they’d end up catching up to the civilians with their higher acceleration.

At the key moments, though, the civilian ships would be ahead of them.

“Is anyone even trying to talk to us?” Christopher asked drily.

“Every single one of the civilian ships?” Platell replied, his tone equally Sahara-esque. “No details or problems were coming up that needed your input. Standing orders covered everything—convoy will make zero-zero with the skip line in about forty hours, we are not officially responsible for non-Commonwealth shipping, we are not going to force non-Commonwealth shipping to leave the convoy, everyone in the convoy is under the effective protection of Our Ness.”

Christopher chuckled and gave Captain Platell an apologetic half-salute.

“Thank you, Commodore, for doing your job even when the old man isn’t paying attention. Have we heard from the Americans or the Chinese?”

“No… Wait, wait, we just got a compressed pulse coming in from… Tau Ceti Iota?” The Coms Officer looked concerned, and Christopher waited while he worked it through.

“It’s under a diplomatic wrapper and Governor Ko’s personal codes. Looks like it was transmitted to Iota shortly after the destruction of the PLASN forces. The station there must have a different set of instructions to relay it to us.”

“Is it sealed or just wrapped?” Christopher asked. The former would be encrypted. The latter was basically digital letterhead.

“Just wrapped; pulling details through now.” Platell and his people worked away for a few minutes while Christopher walked a fine line between remaining focused on them, not getting bored and not thinking about certain other things going on right then.

“There is an encrypted component, but most of it is unencrypted sensor data of the incident in Tiān Jiā orbit,” Platell reported. “There is an unencrypted message for your eyes only.”

“I was expecting that.” Christopher drummed his fingers for a moment, then nodded sharply. “Forward it to my implant. I’ll respect her requested confidence.”

Unless he saw a reason not to. If nothing else, he knew that Platell would have scanned for viruses and malware before letting the files onto Renown’s systems, let alone forwarding it to a neural implant of any kind.

The chime Christopher heard was entirely in his head—and so was the icon that popped up in his vision. He had heard that there were people who controlled their neural implants entirely mentally, but they remained few and far between.

He controlled his with his watch and activated the video. He was unsurprised to be greeted by Governor Ko’s image—on a blurred background, presumably in a secure command center somewhere on the planet.

“Admiral Macleod. I would far rather speak to you in my garden in Xīn Shēnzhèn over a glass of wine than through this recorded and relayed message, but the world is what it is, and we, it seems, must live in interesting times.

“I know you have seen all that has transpired and, likely, received copies of all of Parker-Kennedy’s transmissions that could be intercepted. Some were more… precise than others, and I do not know if all of that information reached you.

“The maneuvers of your squadron, however, suggest that Parker-Kennedy’s claims of Commonwealth support are lies. That leaves me one sliver of hope for the future.”

And here came the ask. Christopher knew what it would be. He even knew what his answer was.

“Included with this message is a full copy of all sensor data available to my command center, as well as encrypted dispatches for the Party on Earth. I understand your concerns with the dispatches, and, frankly, I don’t give a fuck if you copy and decrypt them to be certain of what you’re passing on.

“But I must ask you to pass them on regardless. All of our footage, our dispatches, everything you have seen as well. I ask you to deliver it all to the Party on Earth. Zhōngguó must know what has happened here.

“All of humanity must know what has happened here. For the sake of my people, I place my evidence in your hands and rely on the honor of the Joint Commonwealth Space Force and the Royal Navy to see the truth told.”

She chuckled softly and bitterly.

“I have no prize to offer in exchange, Admiral Macleod. I only hope that you recognize, as I do, the scale of the drama that has been placed in motion. I must look to the safety of my people. By the time you receive this message, I will likely have negotiated the surrender of Tiān Jiā.

“Get your people to safety, Admiral Macleod. Deliver my message to my people, I beg you.

“History will judge none of us who were in charge here gently. Let us face our charge and bear it for the sake of our people regardless.”

The message froze and he blinked it away.

“Commodore Platell, run through the package the Governor provided,” he ordered. “Remove the message to me, but package up the rest and distribute it to every ship in Our Ness and every ship in the civilian convoy.

“It is to be delivered to every Earth government that is prepared to receive it by the first ship to make it to Sol.”

And with one order, Christopher Harris Macleod had turned a hundred ships into the harbingers of apocalypse. If even one ship got out, the American version of events there in Tau Ceti would be broken.

The truth would set them free—but in this case, the truth was also going to start an immense bloody war.

13

IT TOOK A SURPRISINGLY LONG TIME, in Christopher’s considered opinion, for the Americans to actually reach out to him directly. It was less than two hours from the end of the battle over Tiān Jiā until he’d be able to launch missiles at Battle Squadron Seven.

Yet it was almost a full hour after the destruction of the PLASN defending forces, roughly as the Extrasolar Squadron was passing the civilian convoy, before any of the Americans contacted Our Ness directly.

It was…not what he’d hoped for.

They were close enough for a delayed but live conversation, but the message was still a recorded video. The short and immensely broad-shouldered officer the video centered on wasn’t known to Christopher, either, which told him that Vice Admiral Ji Pherigo had, indeed, died with their flagship.

“I am Vice Admiral Ernest Holzmann,” the American officer told him in a broad Texas accent. “There are a number of ships in violation of the security zone declared by Admiral Parker-Kennedy behind you. Unless you want things to get awkward, you will stand aside and continue your course to the designated zone around Tiān Jiā.”

The video froze. That was it. No acknowledgement of his messages to Admiral Parker-Kennedy. No acknowledgement that the “security zone” was either piracy on a grand scale or an outright act of war against every nation with starships present.

Or that they’d just committed a blatant act of war, violating Chinese sovereignty and neutrality in an act of aggression that Christopher could not let stand. He could follow the logic chain that had led Parker-Kennedy to this nightmare, but that also meant he could see all of the off-ramps she’d refused to take along the way.

All of them would have required her to humble either herself or the United States of America, after all.

“That’s not particularly flexible or hopeful, is it?” Platell noted.

“What do we do, ser?” Kistler asked.

Everyone knew what the true next step was, Christopher knew that. The question was how much talking they needed to do to justify the fact that the Commonwealth was about to open fire on an American squadron.

“In twenty minutes, we need to open fire or we’re giving up the one advantage we have,” Christopher told his people, his tone almost conversational. “But we do have an obligation to one of our oldest allies to let them try to walk back from the edge. Record for transmission, Commodore Platell.”

He faced the camera levelly, taking his usual moment to make sure his uniform and posture were impeccable. His duty uniform didn’t allow for much in terms of medals or award ribbons—compared to the American on the camera with a row of a dozen or more, one might make assumptions about who was the more experienced officer.

Except that the single decoration Christopher was wearing was definitely associated with a combat action. He’d never commanded a starship in battle, but he’d been aboard several. He had a long list of efficiency and service awards he wore in dress uniform, but for most shipboard duty, he only wore the Distinguished Service Cross he’d earned as Tactical Officer of the L-type battlecruiser Lioness, a quarter-century earlier.

The JCSF didn’t issue an award for simply being in combat. The USSF, on the other hand, did—and for all of his wall of ribbons, Vice Admiral Holzmann either didn’t have a Combat Action Badge or chose not to wear it.

Neither option earned the man any respect with Christopher.

“Vice Admiral Holzmann,” he greeted the American officer. “We are men of action, and lies do not become us. Please do not feed me bollocks.”

He smiled thinly, suspecting that Holzmann would probably catch on to just how grotesque that particular metaphor was.

“You are in pursuit of a civilian convoy under the protection of the Articles of the Joint Commonwealth Space Force,” Christopher continued. “Your commanding officer has already committed the United States to war against China. If you attack the convoy under my protection, you will be committing acts of war against over twenty other nations, including, per the Articles of the JCSF, every member state of the modern Commonwealth.

“For over three hundred years, the Commonwealth and America have stood side by side against the rigors of first Earth and then the stars. For the sake of that alliance, that history and the honor our ancestors showed each other, I give you one last chance.

“If you do not reverse course in the next fifteen minutes, I will have no choice but to assume you intend to enforce Admiral Parker-Kennedy’s illegal blockade on the Commonwealth-flagged ships I am responsible for.

“If that is the case, I will fire on your ships the moment you enter range of my weapons. There will be no further negotiations. This is an ultimatum.

“Withdraw or be fired upon.”

CHRISTOPHER DIDN’T EXPECT Battle Squadron Seven to withdraw. He did expect another round of chest-beating and intimidation from Admiral Holzmann and was almost pleasantly surprised when the Texan clearly decided everyone had already said their piece.

“Range is two million, nine hundred fifty thousand kilometers,” someone reported.

“Estimated missile range at these velocities is two-point-eight-eight million klicks,” Kistler said. “Maximum powered range in ten seconds.”

“All ships are to fire as soon as we have the range,” Christopher ordered. “Minimum cycle time, empty the magazines.”

His destroyers only had six missiles apiece. At a full minute to reload the launcher between shots, only the battlecruisers would have a chance to see the effects of their first shots while still carrying ammunition.

But he was facing a force that had just as many capital ships and destroyers as his—and while the Iowas didn’t have the gravity buckler, their armor was five times as thick as his.

Christopher agreed with the assessment that his composite armor was about forty percent better than the Americans’ sandwiched-layer design, but they had a meter of armor with twenty centimeters of reactive armor on top.

He had twenty centimeters of composite plating with five centimeters of reactive strips on top. The buckler was his only chance of surviving—and his destroyers were in an even worse position, against the battleships at least.

If Holzmann put a sixteen-inch railgun slug into any of Christopher’s ships, that ship was probably gone. The difference between Holzmann’s assessment of what was about to happen and Christopher’s assessment of what was about to happen was that Christopher knew exactly how effective sixteen-inch slugs were against gravity bucklers.

“BatRon Seven will reach their missile range in ninety seconds,” Kistler warned. “We are in range… now.”

There was a pause, as if every gunner and Tactical Officer on eight ships was waiting for the Admiral to change his mind, and then Renown shivered slightly underneath Christopher. New icons flashed into existence on the main screen, fifty-six missiles now accelerating back toward the American battle squadron.

“Get our fighters into space before they launch their missiles,” Christopher ordered. “Let the Blackstar pilots know their priority is missile defense for the squadron—they can shoot down any American fighters that try to close, but they are not to engage in pursuits or dogfighting.”

He’d like to bring those pilots home, after all. He’d like to bring everyone home.

Against four Iowas, he had a chance. Against the four Idahos, two Presidents, and ten Montanas remaining in Parker-Kennedy’s main fleet… Well, it was a good thing they were already running for the skip line.

The sixteen Blackburn Blackstars were in space before the second missile salvo launched, getting clear of the battlecruisers before more missiles rocketed away. The starfighters formed up in a weblike pattern between the Extrasolar Squadron and her pursuers.

“Vampire, multiple launches detected,” Kistler reported. “Scans suggest they have opened fire with the railguns as well. Estimate one-seven-five seconds to railgun impact.”

“Inform all battlecruiser captains they are clear to use the gravity buckler to its fullest extent,” Christopher ordered. “Priority for the bucklers are railgun shots. Priority for the starfighters and destroyers is missiles.”

He’d fired fifty-six missiles at the American battle squadron, and the Americans had only replied with forty. There were prices the Iowas had paid to carry the same armor and main gun armament as a Montana while adding almost fifty percent acceleration.

Not that the Iowas had been using all of that acceleration. They’d held a steady seventy-five MPS^2 thrust since separating from the main USSF fleet, easily fifteen MPS^2 less than their maximum.

Of course, splitting the difference between their maximum compensated thrust and the rest of the American ships’ maximum thrust cut their fuel consumption by about forty percent. Those last few meters per second came at a high price.

Christopher only needed to look at the fuel status for his own ships to know that. They were still maintaining the hundred and ten MPS^2 emergency thrust, and they were burning through fuel at over twice the rate of their more-usual accelerations.

But Our Ness had been fully refueled by the Chinese before they’d left Tiān Jiā orbit for the exercises—and BatRon Seven, like the rest of the USSF, appeared to be desperately low on fuel.

Whatever had gone down in Epsilon Eridani, the Second Territorial Fleet had lost their logistics train before they’d managed to fully refuel. Christopher figured that the Iowas had probably spent proportionally more of their fuel in Eridani, too—he’d have sent the fast battleship squadron to try to deal with whatever had happened to the logistics train ships, after all.

And they’d lost a third of the squadron in the process, too, which couldn’t have gone down well.

Unfortunately for Christopher and his people, Holzmann appeared to have replaced any missiles they had used, and the nerve-wrackingly fast American attack missiles blazed toward his ship.

Their powered range was shorter than his and their final impact velocity lower, but their superior acceleration—a full half of a kilometer per second squared over his own missiles!—made them a nasty problem for antimissile targeting.

“Railgun-round salvo in thirty seconds. Our first missile salvo arrival in one hundred eighty.”

Everything was very calm. Hundreds of megatons’ worth of nuclear warheads were in space, hurtling toward the ships of each formation. The deaths of thousands had already been set in stone by the cold math of physics and countermeasures, but for a few more seconds, Renown’s flag bridge was organized and calm.

“We have lock on the railgun rounds. Eight incoming. Just under seven thousand KPS relative velocity,” Kistler reported. “Gravity bucklers free. Eleven seconds to impact.”

All of the math, training, analysis and projections came down to one terrifying moment and the truth of a question they thought they knew the answer to: could a battlecruiser’s gravity buckler stop two railgun rounds before they hit the warship itself?

The answer, as the next ten seconds proved out, was an unequivocal yes. Eight slugs, massing seventeen hundred kilograms apiece and coming in at almost seven thousand kilometers per second of relative velocity, collided with the gravity shears and just disintegrated. Tidal forces ripped them apart and threw the debris onto vectors that would never threaten the battlecruisers behind them.

“Clear. All rounds cleared,” Kistler reported. “So long as they’re firing double shots, per their standard doctrine, we can catch them both with the same buckler field.”

There was a grim amusement in her voice.

“I know we’d done the math, ser, and on paper, we’d rendered the railgun obsolete, but it’s still a kick to watch what used to be the king of battle hit the buckler and fail.”

More railgun rounds were appearing on the screen now, the sheer number of icons suggesting that Holzmann hadn’t been prepared to rely on his main guns’ supposed one-hit-kill ability.

“Their starfighters are beginning to engage our missiles,” one of the analysts reported. “They only broke off with one squadron in company, though, and fourteen fighters are not going to cut it.”

That wasn’t necessarily a good thing, Christopher noted absently. They only had sixteen starfighters to augment their own defenses. He had four more defensive railguns on each of his cruisers than the battleships had, but the numbers weren’t that much in the JCSF’s favor.

“Missiles in terminal approach,” Kistler announced. She’d moved across the bridge, still in contact with her team via both her implant and a headset she was wearing, but Christopher suspected she muted her microphone as she leaned on his chair—somehow still standing mostly straight despite the continuing acceleration—and murmured in his ear.

“Their electronic countermeasures are brutal, ser,” she told him. “We’re trying to get their measure, but this entire salvo is already out of direct control. They don’t have any major tricks on the railgun rounds, but I’m worried about what their missiles are carrying.”

“Get their measure,” he ordered, echoing her own words back to her. “There are over ten thousand civilians trying to flee this system. If we can’t stop BatRon Seven…”

Kistler said nothing and they both watched in silence as their first salvo ended as she’d predicted. The American starfighters took down a missile apiece—which was nothing to sneer at; his expectations of the Blackstars was half of that—and the battleships’ and destroyers’ defensive railguns took a toll of their own, but even the missiles that made it through the maelstrom were blinded and confused by jamming and decoys.

Megaton-range nukes made for a flashy fireworks show, but Christopher had been hoping for more.

“Twenty-five seconds to impact; Blackstars and railguns are tracking. We… We are having real trouble pinning down their missiles’ exact location, ser.”

“Be glad that those jammers aren’t on their railgun slugs,” Christopher told the analyst who’d spoken. It was a steady metronome now, eight slugs every four seconds, and he had to wonder just how many rounds Holzmann had fired off.

His best guess was that each of the American ships carried five hundred of the two-ton slugs—the chunks of steel were relatively cheap compared to missiles and other weapons, after all, and didn’t require the careful storage of thermonuclear warheads.

But they’d now seen over thirty salvos from the American squadron, all of which would have been fired before the first one had failed to hit. Two hundred–plus slugs should have been enough to kill Christopher’s fleet ten times over.

If the slugs had been as hard to track as the American missiles were proving, they’d be having a real bad day. As it was, the slugs relied on their lack of active energy signatures, but while they were harder to pick up in the first place, they didn’t change direction once found.

The Americans had launched sixteen fewer missiles than the Commonwealth force, but where not one JCSF missile had hit an American warship, four American missiles connected.

Damage icons flickered across the main display, and Christopher held his breath for a moment.

“Rockport, Dublin-on-Mars, Liverpool and Resolution all report single hits,” Platell said grimly after a few seconds. “All report retaining full engine and missile-launch capability.”

“And how badly did our defensive railguns just get hammered?” the Admiral asked, recognizing what hadn’t been mentioned in that list.

“Resolution is down eight railguns; destroyers have lost sixteen between them,” Platell replied after checking the coms from the other ships. There was a long, pregnant pause.

“Resolution also reports they’ve lost the main laser. Captain Champion says he expects to have it back online in ten minutes.”

“Too late,” Christopher whispered. He didn’t know if anyone heard him, but there was no time. His second and third salvos were screaming in and would impact first, but there was only twenty seconds to laser range now.

He’d needed all four lasers and now he had three.

“We got them!” Kistler suddenly barked. “Multiple hits on Illinois. We’ve got debris and atmosphere leaks—her acceleration just cut to zero!”

The quarter-million-ton battleship fell out of formation fast without acceleration. The rest of BatRon Seven was continuing to accelerate toward the ESS at the same steady seventy-five MPS^2.

“Well done, Admiral; now let’s do it aga—”

Renown lurched underneath him as the American missiles hit home. The salvos had been launched a minute apart on each side, but as the range dropped, so did the flight time, and they were hitting far closer together than that.

“Direct hits on Renown and Repulse,” Platell reported grimly. “I’ve got reports… Fuck. Liverpool just went up.”

The destroyers played a lot of roles in this fight, but it was easy to say they didn’t belong.

Especially when they were now seeing the result of Holzmann seeing the impact of the gravity buckler on his early salvos. He’d switched targets. The destroyers were harder targets, but over sixteen seconds and five railgun salvos, the American took out Liverpool, Rockport and Dublin-on-Mars.

Chatham-on-Ceres managed to survive by tucking herself in behind Renown, adding her defensive fire to the flagship’s as she desperately tried to stay alive.

“Missouri is hit,” Kistler reported. “She’s losing engine power—she’s lost engine containment!”

Fusion reactors were not, generally, prone to catastrophic failure. Warship reactors’ higher power levels meant they were more so than civilian ones, but it was still something they designed to avoid. Fusion engines, on the other hand, needed to create massive amounts of superheated plasma and fire it out the back of a ship.

Missouri’s engines had just fired said superheated plasma into the ship. Bits of battleship armor were now flying in every direction, and there was nothing left of the warship.

“Keep Chatham-on-Ceres under our skirts and have her use her guns to cover us against incoming missiles,” Christopher ordered. Captain Bachchan knew his job and was already doing that, but part of Christopher still wanted everything on the record.

In case someone tried to give the Captain trouble later, he supposed.

Even that concern flashed out of his mind as the range finally dropped within reach of his battlecruiser’s main beams. Resolution’s primary weapon was still offline. The other three battlecruisers’ lasers spoke as one, catching the battleship Kentucky in a crossfire no lesser ship would have survived.

Neither, in the end, did Kentucky—but she lived long enough to put another salvo of missiles and decoys into space, creating chaos around the two battle lines as they closed. The ESS’s focus shifted, pausing momentarily to obliterate a Nova-class destroyer with the misfortune of being on the direct line between Kentucky and Wisconsin.

Wisconsin survived barely seconds longer than her sister—but in those same seconds, a series of missiles managed to strike Repulse. The battlecruiser’s armor withstood the nuclear detonations, but her gravity buckler failed for a critical handful of seconds.

Long enough for a pair of railgun slugs to take her amidships and demonstrate why the sixteen-inch railgun had been the American weapon of choice for a century.

Within thirty seconds, BatRon Seven had gone from four of the most powerful fast battleships in the known universe, backed by four modern and capable destroyers, to one crippled battleship and two of said destroyers.

Except that while Illinois had lost her engines and fallen behind, her officers had been paying far too much attention. They now had direct control of every remaining missile, and whoever took that control was a virtuoso Christopher would have preferred to have never met.

Renown shivered around him as the missiles blazed in and his people and starfighters struggled to preserve the battlecruisers. Three times, the flagship’s hull rang like a bell, and then there was silence.

Illinois was gone. Christopher would have let her run, but she hadn’t even tried. Between missiles and lasers, the crippled battleship had never really stood a chance—but Captain Garland’s Rodney had gone with her, and both Renown and Resolution were battered to all hell.

But the pursuing American force was gone, starfighters and all. And for all of the limitations of civilian shipping, there was no way that Parker-Kennedy could catch the convoy.

“Captain Champion is reporting that Resolution has taken critical engine damage,” Platell interrupted Christopher’s thoughts grimly. “She is no longer capable of more than twenty-five meters per second squared.”

Christopher exhaled grimly. Resolution might make it out, maybe, but that was going to be a struggle for her. Effectively, Captain Champion’s ship was only going to escape if the Starfighter Commanding Officer, Second Territorial Fleet, let her.

They might. They might not.

“And Renown?” Christopher asked, directing the question automatically to Captain Tamboli.

“We have full sublight engines,” the Indian officer told him… but both her choice of words and her tone warned him.

“But?”

“We took hits to critical components of the icosaspatial impulse generators, ser,” she said flatly. “Engineering is checking, but even if we have the parts aboard, repairs are a matter of days.

“We cannot skip, ser.”

14

FOUR WORDS. Four words turned a massive victory to ashes in Christopher Harris Macleod’s mouth. His flagship couldn’t go faster than light. His other remaining capital ship was only going to reach the skip line if the Americans, now irrevocably and unavoidably the enemy, let them.

“What’s Chatham-on-Ceres’s status?” he asked.

“Her offensive munitions are gone, but her railgun magazines are at seventy percent, fuel tanks at eighty,” Platell reported immediately. “Captain Bachchan is volunteering to stay with Resolution and escort her against starfighter strikes.”

“Of course he is,” Christopher murmured. “He’s a destroyer skipper, and he and Champion are both Australian. I presume neither Bachchan nor Champion know Renown’s status?”

“Not yet, ser,” Platell confirmed.

“Captain Tamboli, cut thrust to match Resolution, please,” Christopher ordered quietly. He waited for the order to pass and the battlecruiser to ease up enough that he could stand.

Then he did just that, walking to stand directly in front of a display sized to be read in full from his seat. The entire bridge was quiet. There were a dozen conversations and necessary communications, but everyone was hushed, half-whispering as the rumor mill promulgated the harsh reality of their situation.

“Admiral Kistler,” he finally said.

“Ser.”

“You have the Level Two evacuation lists for Renown and Resolution.”

It wasn’t a question. Level Two evacuation was We’re going down fighting; who can we get to safety?

“Yes, ser.”

“Activate them. Both battlecruisers are to offload any personnel we can spare to Chatham-on-Ceres.” Christopher snorted gently. “That includes the damn dogs, in case someone asks.”

“The Level Two includes you, ser,” Kistler pointed out, her tone almost casual.

“We’re substituting you, Rear Admiral,” Christopher told her, his tone equally casual. “The Commonwealth needs a young, competent and freshly blooded Flag Officer more than they need an old show horse now. You will evacuate along with all non-critical members of the staff.

“Chatham-on-Ceres will only be able to carry that number of evacuees for a day or so, but you shouldn’t need more than fourteen hours to make rendezvous with the civilian convoy and transfer over.”

“Ser…”

“Ariane, that is an order,” he told her. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t even put an iota more energy into it. But he knew she understood.

“Yes, ser. For Kingdom and Commonwealth.”

“For Kingdom and Commonwealth. Get our people moving, Admiral Kistler.”

She gave him the single most perfect salute he’d seen in their three years of working together, then turned and strode back toward Platell’s station.

“I’ll need a communication link to Mensarii,” Christopher said aloud. He wasn’t even looking at his people. He knew they knew. Most of the flag staff were on the Level Two list. That he was refusing to go meant some of them technically couldn’t, but he suspected he’d be able to make the right arguments with anyone who got stubborn on him.

“We’ll have a live link in a few moments, ser,” Platell promised from behind him. “Then…”

“You are most definitely on the Level Two list, Commodore,” Christopher told his Coms Officer. “Link me through to Captain Crowchild and then get your ass to a shuttle.”

He raised a hand as he heard the other man move.

“One last favor, Platell,” he said. “Get in contact with the starfighters. I don’t care what machismo or other bollocks they pull out. The Blackstars will accompany Chatham-on-Ceres to the civilian convoy. They will ditch before the convoy skips, but they’ll stay in escort mode as long as they can.

“The Blackstars and Chatham-on-Ceres are the last line of defense those people have.”

“Understood, ser. We have the link to Mensarii now, ser.”

“Thank you, Commodore. Now go.”

Captain Alexis Crowchild appeared in his neural implant a moment later, the dark-eyed First Nations woman’s face unreadable to him.

“You won. What happens now?” she asked.

“We haven’t won yet, Captain,” Christopher admitted. “We haven’t won until someone gets back to Sol, which means I need to ask a favor of you. A hard one. One I don’t know if anyone will be able to properly compensate you for when all is said and done.”

There was a time lag of several seconds before he saw her response. Her face remained unreadable, but she raised her chin and looked at him like a hawk surveying its prey.

“I work for a bank, Admiral. The bank, as many would call it. We don’t do much for free… and yet I suspect I’ll be doing this for you. So, tell me.”

Christopher hadn’t packaged up sensor data for transmission himself in a long, long time, but he still knew how. He attached the records of the last few hours to the transmission and sent it winging over to Crowchild.

“I’m sending you all of our sensor data on this mess,” he told her. “I need you to deliver it to JCSF High Command in London. I doubt you’re going anywhere else, but I need you to be there… Well, yesterday would be good, but I’m thinking within ninety-six hours.”

Crowchild was silent for longer than the time lag required, but her eyes grew darker as she heard his words.

“I’m going to London,” she agreed. “I’m delivering everything I saw here and the other packages you sent to the Syndicate Board. Passing it all on to the Space Lords seems reasonable to me, Admiral.

“But ninety-six hours means taking the long jump from Luy Seven-Two-Six to Sol. I thought only warships were supposed to pull eighteen-hour skips?”

“Neither of my remaining battlecruisers is getting out of Tau Ceti, Captain Crowchild,” he told her. “Chatham-on-Ceres will have to stick with the main body of the convoy; there’s no way Captain Bachchan can abandon those ships in territory that will soon be held by a hostile power.

“Which leaves only one ship I think can make the jump. I doubt you’ve pushed it that hard before, Captain, but your ship is supposed to be capable of it. You shouldn’t be facing significant risk until you’re at a twenty-hour skip.”

If anything, Crowchild had become even more unreadable as she studied him. Before she could say anything, though, a report echoed across the flag bridge—and Christopher suspected Crowchild heard it.

“Fighters separating from the main American fleet. They’ve finished rearming Reagan’s flight group; looks like a six-squadron strike heading our way… and the convoy’s way.”

Christopher closed his eyes and nodded. That, too, was what he’d expected.

“I need you to go, Captain Crowchild,” he told her. “Hours may make the difference between the truth arriving before the Americans write a pretty lie. The truth means war, Captain, and I need you to carry that message home.

“I need you to be the harbinger of the end of our golden age. I’m sorry, Captain, but I have no choice. You have no choice.”

“No, I don’t,” she agreed. “I’ll make the jump, Admiral. You have my word. But… I can see those starfighters too. Am I wrong in thinking a single destroyer and a dozen of our starfighters might not cover the convoy?”

Christopher shook his head and met her gaze across the gap of space and time between them.

“Make the long jump, Captain Crowchild, and bear the burden of our message. You have my word that no matter what happens, those starfighters won’t reach the convoy with any missiles left.”

15

“WITH ALL DUE RESPECT, Admiral, I should throw you off the damn ship.”

Christopher sighed at Captain Tamboli as he took a seat at the communications console on Renown’s bridge and began to load in software that had little purpose on a warship’s bridge.

The flag bridge was empty. A trio of Chiefs had flanked him into the main bridge and now took seats around him, swiftly and efficiently converting the abandoned communication section into a miniature flag center.

Those three men were, like Christopher, probably too damn old for this crap. And like him, they’d given up their seats to younger personnel who had a better combination of experience and remaining “service life.”

Tamboli, on the other hand, appeared determined to go down with her ship—Level Two evacuation protocols didn’t call for the Captain to leave, anyway, which Christopher figured was something of an ugly sop to old tradition.

“You could still,” he told Tamboli as he turned back to Renown’s Captain.

There, on the main bridge, everything revolved around the ship’s CO. Christopher could see arguments for staying on the flag bridge, even with only three Chief Petty Officers for staff, but part of him had refused to be that alone.

There were less than five hundred people left aboard the battlecruiser, suggesting that people had stretched the Level Two order to include a few people who were probably on the Level One lists. Christopher certainly had.

“You are Renown’s Captain,” he reminded Tamboli. “There are generally two people aboard a given ship who can tell the Admiral to sit the hell down, and, well, we evacuated my doctor already.”

The bridge was a horseshoe-shaped space, anchored on the command chair and a small set of repeater screens for Captain Tamboli at the back and a massive wallscreen display at the front. The main display had two focuses at that moment: the main was the incoming fighter strike, six squadrons of the USSF’s latest and deadliest starfighters, and the other was Chatham-on-Ceres.

The destroyer looked like a demented cross between a porcupine and a shuttle tender. Designed for a crew of three hundred, packing an additional eighteen hundred people aboard from the two battlecruisers had proven harder than Christopher had thought.

Now all twenty shuttles from the two battlecruisers were linked to the destroyer by a mix of cables and umbilicals, feeding oxygen and power to the small craft. Chatham-on-Ceres’ own four shuttles were also in the cluster around her, with her flight deck having been converted to temporary housing for far too many people.

It wouldn’t be for long, Christopher knew. The destroyer was already on her way at eighty MPS^2, straining the poor bastards on the shuttles that didn’t have the space for gravity generators.

They’d have to pause and cycle, he suspected, rotating people into and out of the ship, but there was no risk of anything except the starfighters catching her before she reached the civilians.

There was no risk of anything except the starfighters catching anyone now. But those eighty-four starfighters would cut through one destroyer and sixteen Blackstars and wipe out the entire convoy. They’d bleed for the privilege, but they’d render everything Christopher had done so far redundant.

But to get there, those fighters were going to have to get past two battlecruisers.

“I’m not going to kick you off the ship, ser,” Tamboli told him with a sigh. “If nothing else, Chatham is already far enough away, we’d have trouble catching up, and Captain Bachchan already has all of our shuttles!”

Christopher gave the woman a grin, putting on the Coms Officer’s headset and setting one of the screens to link him to Resolution.

“Captain Champion, Resolution’s status?”

The tall blond Captain gave him a wry grin.

“Well, I have no missiles, no starfighters, no interstellar drive, no laser and half of my engines,” he pointed out. “We’re focusing repairs on the gravity buckler and the defensive railguns. My girl is back up to sixty-six autocannon.”

“It’ll have to do, Champion.” Christopher sighed. “I’m sorry this is where we’re at, Captain.”

“If we couldn’t take the joke, we shouldn’t have sworn the oath,” Champion replied. “Resolution is ready to do her duty. For Kingdom and Commonwealth.”

It was funny. The four-word sign-off had been almost perfunctory in the mouth of most of Christopher’s officers for most of the last decade, at least. And yet, today, it had weight.

“For Kingdom and Commonwealth,” he replied.

“Contact in forty-five minutes,” Renown’s Tactical Officer announced.

Part of Christopher would hope for a miracle. It was an all-too-human urge, but he knew the realities of it.

The only reason this wasn’t going to be completely one-sided was because the missiles carried by the American fighters didn’t have the range to hit them from far enough away to avoid defensive fire.

“Initiate evasive maneuvers in thirty minutes,” Christopher ordered. “Broad-zone anti-fighter fire in forty. Not much point reserving railgun slugs for tomorrow, is there?”

Both Captains nodded, calmly turning their focus to the rest of their people.

There was a calm, Christopher knew now, beyond hope, beyond despair.

“Una salus victis nullam sperare salutem.”

The Virgil quote hung in the chill air of the bridge. Christopher knew it as the unofficial motto of a few military organizations, but the quote from the Aeneid carried better weight and context.

That quote, after all, was from the fall of Troy, calling on the defenders to die amidst their foes.

“PARKER-KENNEDY CAN RUN the physics the same as we can,” Tamboli said later, as the two battlecruisers began a series of sharp randomized maneuvers. “She could have detached more starfighters, but it’s far too late now. Nothing else can intercept the convoy.

“Just these fighters.”

“So, we have a job to do,” Christopher told his two Captains. “Laser range?”

“We’ll open up in about five minutes, shortly before we begin filling space with random metal,” Tamboli told him.

“Half of my remaining engineers are buried in my lasing chambers,” Champion said. “We may have a laser in time to fire a few shots. They did tell me ten minutes, after all. Hours ago.”

“Well, they now know they have five,” Christopher replied with a surprisingly honest chuckle. “Whatever is left, gentlemen. For Kingdom and Commonwealth.”

“For Kingdom and Commonwealth.”

There was a pregnant pause before either Captain spoke again.

“However this ends, Admiral, it has been an honor to serve under your command today,” Kaveri Tamboli said quietly. “We all knew what the ESS was. This… This isn’t that.”

“No,” Christopher agreed. “But at the end of day, this is what ships were for. It has been an honor, Captains.” He looked up around the bridge. “Everyone,” he projected more loudly. “I am honored to have fought alongside you all. I am beyond grateful you are with me here.”

He smiled sadly.

“I am sorry this is how it ends, but Our Ness will not die unremembered. It takes a year to build a ship. A lifetime to build a crew. A millennium to build a tradition.”

Enough of the officers and spacers left were British to recognize the source of the quote, and even Champion nodded his acknowledgement.

“Fits, doesn’t it?” the man asked. “The evacuation will continue.”

No one even announced the moment Renown entered the range of her laser. A white line flashed on the screen and a starfighter vanished. A few seconds later, it repeated. Then it repeated again—and the railguns joined in, the twenty/five-hundreds flinging their quarter-kilo shells out at the starfighters.

“Lead starfighter elements are firing,” someone reported.

“Identify any plane that’s out of munitions,” Christopher ordered. “We leave them.”

More starfighters were dying, but the squadron commanders knew their mission. Two squadrons launched as the fighters entered their range, each flinging over twenty missiles at each of the battlecruisers.

There were no orders left to give. The railguns were supposed to shoot down missiles, but at that moment, they were targeted on the starfighters themselves. The Americans needed to get enough ships through to take down Chatham-on-Ceres and the sixteen Blackstars with her.

And it rapidly became clear that they had expected the ESS to try to defend themselves. Instead, not a single shell was fired at the missiles. Resolution’s laser came online at the last moment, slashing through three starfighters in the instant before the missiles reached her.

Or, at least, reached her gravity buckler. The two shaped gravity shears cut through space like the shield of some costumed superhero, smashing missiles aside by the handful.

But the focus was and could only be on the starfighters themselves, and Christopher shivered as explosions rocked Renown. The fighter missiles were carrying smaller nukes than a capital-ship missile, but they were still nuclear weapons. Even the high-tech armor of the JCSF’s battlecruisers could only absorb so much.

Damage icons flared across their screens, and Renown’s laser stopped firing. Resolution’s was only active for about fifteen seconds before damage threw it offline again—but they’d both survived the first missile salvo and continued to fling railgun fire into the teeth of the starfighter formation.

Over sixty percent of the starfighters had either launched their missiles or been destroyed. If the assessments were accurate—and given the reduced staffing of the tactical department, that wasn’t guaranteed—Ronald Reagan’s strike group had taken too many losses.

They couldn’t punch through the squadrons guarding the convoy. Whatever happened now, Christopher had won. The evacuation convoy would get to Luy, and Crowchild would bear the truth home.

He had just enough time to fully internalize that before it became clear that the Americans had realized it too. Every remaining starfighter pivoted as one and fired their remaining missiles. The range was short—too short.

There was no real time to get the buckler in the way. No time for Christopher to come up with a clever plan or even to consider surrender.

There was only the crescendo of nuclear fire and blackness.

CONTINUE THE JOURNEY IN PEACEKEEPERS OF SOL

Christopher’s story comes to an end. The Admiral at last finds honor in a universe where everything can be bought—and the consequence is interstellar war.

Humanity’s military might will eventually reform into the United Planets Space Force. That unity will allow them to fight a 17-year war against alien invaders.

In Raven’s Peace, Henry Wong has ended the war—and it almost cost him his sanity. But his fight for peace in an era of warlords is just beginning. Get Book 1: Raven’s Peace on Kindle or continue reading for an excerpt.

New books in this universe are coming soon! Join the mailing list at GlynnStewart.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Glynn Stewart is the author of Starship’s Mage, a bestselling science fiction and fantasy series where faster-than-light travel is possible–but only because of magic. His other works include science fiction series Duchy of Terra, Castle Federation and Exile, as well as the urban fantasy series ONSET and Changeling Blood.

Writing managed to liberate Glynn from a bleak future as an accountant. With his personality and hope for a high-tech future intact, he lives in Canada with his partner, their cats, and an unstoppable writing habit.

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CREDITS

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Cover art: M.Y. Cover Design

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PREVIEW: RAVEN’S PEACE BY GLYNN STEWART

The battlecruiser shook around him and Henry Wong recognized the dream. It was a familiar nightmare now, which helped rob it of the strength it had had months before.

“We have a grav-shield blowthrough,” a seemingly faceless noncom reported across the warship’s bridge. “That dreadnought hit us dead-on.”

“We’re going to get shot to pieces!” That figure had a face. Commander Kveta Vela wasn’t that pale and sunken-eyed in reality, though. The dream warped Henry’s old navigator into a figure of nightmare.

It fit here.

“The shield will hold,” Henry heard himself bark. With a moment of practiced effort, he separated himself from the dream-him.

He’d learned he couldn’t stop the dream, but months of therapy allowed him to disconnect from it.

The man in the center of the bridge of the battlecruiser Panther was less warped than the officers and crew around him. Tall and narrow-shouldered, Colonel Henry Wong was a beanpole of a man with short-cropped black hair, dark skin and his father’s dark Chinese eyes.

The dream didn’t distort him much as his old ship dove through the maelstrom. The figure of dream-Henry was focusing on the set of massive screens giving the bridge a view of the world around the United Planets Space Force battlecruiser.

Henry himself didn’t need to look. The arrangement of forces in the Set-Sixteen System was burned into his brain, even asleep. His perception was still pinned to his dream self’s, though, and he was dragged to it.

Set-Sixteen was a Kenmiri provincial capital, deep on the far side of the Empire from the United Planets. The Kenmiri hadn’t been expecting an attack and their defense fleet was weaker than it should have been. That fleet was still five full dreadnought battle groups and the UPSF’s Vesheron allies were getting hammered.

Panther’s grav-shields and weapons could turn the tide of that fight—but that wasn’t their mission, and the birdlike starship plunged through the Kenmiri lines.

“There,” Henry’s avatar said sharply. “That ship. Broos, confirm.”

Commander Broos Van Agteren wasn’t a normal part of Panther’s crew. He was from United Planets Intelligence, their handler for Operation Golden Lancelot.

In person, he was a squat and dark-haired man with a ready smile and a brilliant glint to his eyes. In the dream, he was a distorted goblin, every aspect of his features twisted and torn to make him into the monster of Henry’s own subconscious.

“Confirmed,” Van Agteren told him. “That’s the evacuation ship for the Kenmorad. The queen and her consorts will be aboard.”

The ship was the size of one of the dreadnoughts pounding the Vesheron ships behind Panther but lacked their devastating main guns. The evacuation ship had one purpose and one purpose only: to evacuate the Kenmorad population of Set-Sixteen if they felt the planet was threatened.

A Kenmorad breeding sect could repopulate an entire planet of Kenmiri drones in a few years. They could create more breeding sects, more drones…more Kenmorad.

The Kenmiri couldn’t reproduce without the Kenmorad.

“Ser, that’s the last one. We can’t kill her!”

Lieutenant Colonel Emil Tyson had been Panther’s executive officer, Henry’s right-hand man and lubricant who kept a battlecruiser working in the face of the enemy. The redheaded Irishman hadn’t raised any complaints on the day. They hadn’t known.

“Stand by all missiles and prep the main gun,” Henry’s avatar ordered, as if Tyson hadn’t spoken. “Vela, get us in hard and fast.”

Panther lunged across the void in a quarter of the time she had in real life. Suddenly, it was the moment of truth, the evacuation ship’s escorts making a suicide charge at the battlecruiser as Panther dove toward her prey.

“She’s the last one, ser,” Tyson repeated, the avatar of Henry’s subconscious. The one that knew what he’d done, even if he hadn’t then. “If we kill that ship, we commit genocide. We end a species.”

Henry hadn’t known the full scope of Golden Lancelot. He wasn’t sure if anyone aboard Panther had—he knew that Van Agteren hadn’t known when they fired. He suspected the Intel officer had guessed…but hadn’t realized that the breeding sect they were firing on was the last one left.

“Ignore the escorts,” dream-Henry barked. “Target the evac ship with everything. Fire!”

It had taken dozens of missiles and multiple hits from the main gun to take out the evacuation ship. In his dreams, however, there was only the single gravity-driver round that had finished her off. It flashed across space and detonated, turning itself into a shotgun blast of superheated plasma.

The Kenmorad evacuation ship vanished inside that blast, and Henry released a chunk of unconscious hope. Even separated from the dream as he’d been taught, he still hoped that it would end differently.

“That’s it, then,” Van Agteren said, the goblin-like appearance of the dream version of the man growing more grotesque by the moment. “The Kenmorad are no more. The Kenmiri will die. We are victorious!”

Henry didn’t need to look. He already knew that both the version of him in the dream and the version of him watching the dream had hands covered in blood.

Henry started awake as the dream ended. He always did. Time and familiarity had eased much of the horror of the dream, along with copious amounts of therapy, but…well. He poked at the metal band wrapped around his left arm.

MedSuite detected nightmares. At this stage in your treatment, MedSuite recommends meditation.

He sighed. The band was linked into his internal network and talking to the implants in his head and elsewhere. He had enough authority over the device now to override it and tell it to give him drugs. If he did that, though, it would probably add days to his medical leave.

Rolling out of bed, Colonel Henry Wong settled himself onto the floor of his bedroom. The apartment wasn’t much, but it at least gave him privacy. It was better than the orbital hospital he’d spent the first six weeks of his twelve-week medical leave inside.

“One more appointment,” he said aloud. The walls were bare. This wasn’t his apartment—it belonged to the United Planets Space Force Medical Division. The entire building on Sandoval did.

The ground floor of the building was shops and restaurants, like most of the not-quite-downtown area of New Detroit, Sandoval’s capital city. Above that was a floor of UPSF security, then two floors of medical clinics, then fifteen floors of apartments.

If his appointment went well, he’d finally be out of there today. Command only knew where he’d go from there—psychological casualties were notorious for being unpredictable in how long it took to return to duty, so Panther had a new Captain now.

He focused on the meditation, letting his anger, grief, horror…all of his emotions flow through him. He might have given the order for the final critical shot, but no one had told him what Operation Golden Lancelot entailed.

Henry was honest enough to admit that after seventeen years of war, he’d have signed off on Golden Lancelot. He was also honest enough to admit that he understood why the full scale of Lancelot’s objectives had been kept under wraps.

It had worked, after all. Henry had gone into psych treatment in a Space Force still on a war footing. He’d be coming out of it into a Space Force on a peacetime footing.

Seventeen years of war.

Henry Wong had started the conflict with a fiancé and a starfighter. He’d ended it a divorcé with a battlecruiser.

He barely remembered the all-too-excited younger pilot who’d greeted the news of first contact with joy.

But the world turned and people adapted. He’d adapted to a decades-long, seemingly unwinnable war.

He was pretty sure he could handle peace.

Continue reading Raven’s Peace on Kindle.

Table of Contents

Title Page

eBook Copyright

Contents

Visit Me Online

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Continue the Journey in Peacekeepers of Sol

About the Author

Other Books by Glynn Stewart

Preview: Raven’s Peace by Glynn Stewart