“It was like time shattered.”

The conference room aboard the starship Sai Kee was not quite as luxurious as the three line officers remembered from their time aboard much larger vessels, but it was also sparse and lacked distractions, which was a key advantage for this particular meeting. Jayce had been granted leave by Admiral Tucker to pursue a priority target. Before mustering her forces and settling the Raleo situation once and for all, the commander decided to get the inside story directly from the source.

Vice Admiral Charles Hughes had recovered to the point where he at least looked like he was part of Skywatch again. He wore the closest approximation of an admiral’s uniform the Master Chief could find in the ship’s stores. It helped that none of the other officers or crew present aboard the frigate were officially assigned to her. In the short time they had manned her as their more-easily-managed forward-deployed ship, Commander Jayce Hunter and the other members of her storied “recon” unit had made themselves at least temporarily at home. Yili Curtiss had engineering in top shape. Zony Tixia had overhauled the tiny ship’s communications equipment, giving her the equivalent of a destroyer’s electronic warfare capability, and Hunter herself had helped re-orient the weapons systems into something a little more efficient. Sai Kee was no longer underpowered, which was good news because captain and crew were on a mission.

Jayce Hunter personally believed most of the dangers faced by Strike Fleet Perseus and its various attached units were the result of incomplete information regarding their adversary. So she made a series of briefings with Admiral Hughes the top priority for herself and the other senior officers before another moment was invested in tracking down whatever was going on in the Raleo star system. They needed answers, and they needed them soon. There was no way either Hunter was going to tolerate reality-bending question marks while they were trying to keep humanity itself alive.

“What exactly does that mean, admiral?”

Hughes took a breath to speak. Hunter realized she needed to keep things focused and shifted gears.

“Scratch that. Let’s go back to the beginning. Dunkerque is ordered to Gitairn. Why?”

The admiral sighed. He looked weary, but the other officers and Master Chief Buckmaster knew he wasn’t as frail as he had been. “Skywatch Command briefed myself and Captain Leary before we departed. Our initial course took us to each of the key waypoints along the Reach. The plan was to make Dunkerque visible to any potential aggressors.”

“So you weren’t trying to avoid detection?”

Hughes nodded. “That is correct.”

Buckmaster leaned back in his chair and tugged at his beard. “So much for the ‘blown cover’ theory.”

Hunter persisted. “Admiral, why just the Dunkerque? If the purpose was to ‘show the flag’ as Jason believes, how would a single strike cruiser deter an aggressor?”

“You have good instincts, commander,” Hughes said with a chuckle. “I asked the same question before we departed and didn’t get much of a coherent response. There were a lot of words, but none of the admirals giving the orders were present when the right questions were asked. Those who were there didn’t have much to say. It was all very confusing.”

“The kind of confusing you get when people are trying to cover their tracks,” Zony Tixia said abruptly. “Jason said they were after us. Maybe they were after the admiral too. It would give them the perfect excuse to order Argent into the region to investigate. Once we get here, we became a target just like Dunkerque.”

Hughes nodded at Zony’s reasoning.

Jayce still had her arms folded. “I have to admit, admiral. She has a point. Argent was a target for at least two major attacks, and so were we.”

“Perseus was attacked?”

“Correct. They came after us when we were in formation at Station Nineteen. Ships started appearing out of nowhere during a long range energy weapons attack. Fury was hit hard. We almost lost the Constellation. I think whatever they were trying to accomplish at the station got disrupted by us. They took a swipe at Exeter and were driven back. Then they took out after our whole task force. When that didn’t work, they sent an even heavier force after my brother.”

“All to protect Barker’s Asteroid and one sentinel,” Yili added.

Hughes got up and stood at the display. Sai Kee’s conference had a smaller screen than Argent or Fury but it was perfectly capable of displaying the Gitairn region, complete with the asteroid field, the positions of Uniform and X-Ray Tango and Scorpion One Three.

“Flypaper,” Hughes said quietly.

“I beg your pardon, sir?” Buckmaster said.

“If I wanted to keep a task force occupied for an indeterminate number of days, how would I go about it?” the admiral asked rhetorically.

“Keep throwing targets at them,” Hunter replied.

“What does this map look like to you, commander?”

“Atwell had the ability to teleport matter from one place to the next. He phase-shifted Argent’s whole crew into some kind of matter warp,” Zony said. “We used his devices to get to the asteroid in the first place.”

“And that, Miss Tixia, is what I mean when I say it was like time shattered.” Hughes made his way back to his seat. He had a bit of extra energy, which Jayce interpreted as his zeroing in on a plausible theory. “Bart James is a powerful man. He also has an incisive mind when it comes to evaluating threats. That’s why I couldn’t understand his vociferous objections to the buildup. He saw the intelligence. We had the LRS passes over Rho Theta and the telemetry from Repeater Five. We had all the history from Prairie Grove. Our enemies lost a manufacturing empire when we forced them to capitulate at Cloud Mark. We knew that would anger all the wrong governments. We persisted and some still believe we have the advantage.”

“Cloud Mark was the cease fire that ended First Praetorian, wasn’t it?” Yili asked.

Buckmaster nodded. “One of the most one-sided ends to hostilities in living memory. Kind of like a bankrupt business. Three people enter with their wallets. Two wallets leave with their owners and the third guy gets hosed.”

“The third guy in this case being the Sarn Star Empire,” Hunter said.

Hughes nodded. “We won. That didn’t mean we had to choke them after the beating. The same officers that are now so confident in our advantage were the ones that helped engineer it. They didn’t listen to reason then and they aren’t listening now. They became what most of Skywatch calls the ‘anti-alarmists.’ They managed to drive career line officers out of the fleet by the dozens. They broke up trained crews. They lobbied to cut funding from long-standing defense initiatives so the money and the power that went with it could be diverted elsewhere.”

“Let’s take this to its logical conclusion, admiral,” Hunter said. “The anti-alarmists send you and a single strike cruiser to Gitairn for the purposes of deterring our enemies from any aggressive action along the Reach. Your ship is waylaid. My brother is sent after you. They try to take Argent out, so he calls in reinforcements and then they try to take me and my task force out.”

“That was the sequence of events if I recall them correctly,” Hughes replied.

“Doesn’t that strengthen the case for the alarmists?” Hunter asked. “A ship sent to protect Gitairn gets attacked?”

“But the admiral is one of the alarmists,” Buckmaster replied. “It helps the anti-alarmists if he’s not available to champion their cause.”

“This kind of stuff makes me dizzy,” Zony said.

“If Dunkerque never comes home, they can make up any story they want,” Yili added. “The admiral went crazy and fired on friendly ships. Dunkerque collided with an asteroid. Captain Hunter–”

Buckmaster sat up. Jayce snapped her fingers. “That’s it!” She scrambled out of her chair and moved quickly to the map. “It all came down to Scorpion One-Three.” She slid the controls horizontally and advanced the chronometer in the display until Kingsblade and Argent were on station and engaged with the second Sentinel planetary defense battery. “Silverback Seven Five Five was detected out of position by Kingsblade. It was a set up. Whoever engineered this engagement expected that ship to become the target. They may as well have had an LED on her hull flashing ‘shoot me!’”

“They probably planned for Kingsblade to open up first,” Yili said. “And she did, but Annora was in command and she fired to disable. Not destroy.”

“Then Dunkerque is destroyed by one or the other Sentinel,” Hunter continued, “and the anti-alarmists get everything they want. Hughes is out of the way–”

“And Captain Hunter is broken. They could even charge him with manslaughter,” Buckmaster concluded. “The rising star becomes a fallen man. A perfect anti-poster-boy to justify remaking the fleet in their own image.”

“By surrendering the whole Gitairn Reach? What does that accomplish?” Zony asked.

“It keeps Skywatch away from Raleo,” Hunter replied. “Where one Colonel Zachariah Atwell was hard at work trying to turn his dangerous discovery into his very own interstellar empire.”

“So the story about the chase that ended up there wasn’t just a rumor?” Zony asked.

“Constellation got it all on tape,” Yili said. “Telemetry, look-downs, sensor readings, you name it. Commander Flynn got it all. Putting high-energy probes on missiles and firing them at the planet? Genius. The man is a certifiable genius.”

“What happened, captain?” Hughes asked.

“What you encountered was best described as a psychic echo,” Hunter replied.

“The what now?” Yili asked.

“Mental energy stored inside physical objects,” Jayce continued. “You might even say living souls. That’s what invaded your mind. Tried to do the same to my brother. Started shifting objects and people from one dimension to another. Made people think they were hearing and seeing one thing when in reality they were experiencing something else entirely.”

“Who did Constellation chase to Raleo Two?” Buckmaster asked.

“We don’t know,” Hunter replied. “It wasn’t Atwell, but whoever it was, he had the artifact with him when Flynn lost contact.”

“What artifact?” Zony asked.

“Whatever allowed him to control the obelisk construct on the planet. Constellation got the only known shots of the thing before she was ordered back to base. Powers buried it all in a vault. Chances are we’ll never know.”

“But we do know someone made it to the planet. Someone who isn’t Colonel Atwell. And then he wasn’t on the planet,” Buckmaster said.

“Correct. He took the artifact through some kind of doorway under the obelisk. Not entirely sure what his objective was, but Constellation found some clues. Flynn told a story about malfunctioning engines to give his surface analysis teams time to gather readings,” Hunter replied. “He’s under orders not to talk about it, but he did tell me a highly entertaining story about hypothetical readings that indicated another time disruption.”

“He traveled through time. Great,” Yili said. “Well, at least we have all kinds of highly experimental technology to match him now.”

“Whoever this guy is, he has to be in it with Atwell. Just like the anti-alarmists,” Buckmaster said with a tone of finality in his voice. “I suppose it makes sense. The man was a certifiable dingbat. He’ll fit right in with a bunch of admirals who think wiping out two generations of line officers is the way forward. Present company excepted, of course, sir.”

Hughes nodded. “I agree, master chief. For all I know, they sent my ship out here as a practice target for their inter-dimensional weapons. They could have used their mind control against Captain Hunter or anyone in the Perseus Task Force for that matter. One can only wonder why they didn’t. It would have given them all the justification they needed if breaking the captain was their plan.”

“Battle plans have a habit of going to hell, sir,” Hunter said. “Especially when your opponent does the unexpected.”

“Well, we had better start coming up with some more dodges and weaves,” Buckmaster said. “Because if our latest intelligence is accurate, the Sarn’s next target is one we absolutely can’t afford to lose.”

“Rebecca agrees. I didn’t invite her to this meeting. I probably should have re-considered that decision, but here we are. Commander Islington believes the president is the target of the next attack,” Hunter announced.

“It’s far-fetched, but based on what we now know about the motives of the anti-alarmists, it makes a twisted kind of sense,” Yili added. “If you’re going to remake Skywatch in your own image, what better way to do so than to have one of your own in the residence on Core Prime?”

“Or, let’s suppose for a moment you don’t want to remake Skywatch. Let’s suppose you just want to hand the keys to some superior alien race and turn the Core Alliance into an insect colony?” Hunter replied. “If the president is assassinated, and civil war breaks out, whomever wants to take over can offer the Ithis and their technology as the means of restoring order.”

“If that’s their plan, then we’ve got a big problem,” Buckmaster said. “We don’t have anywhere near the forces necessary to fight our way past the anti-alarmists and get to the president in time to protect him. Even if they are working against us, they have rank and a hell of a lot of firepower.”

“And they might have Shea,” Zony added.

“Then we’re going to have do improvise, master chief,” Hunter said.

“They’ve got a huge head start. If this was their plan all along, they could get to the president and take him out with one of those teleportation devices. Or their mind control like the admiral says.”

“They could really assassinate president Baines,” Zony said in a faraway voice.

Jayce Hunter’s eyes burned. “Not on my watch.”