“So that’s it?”

“That’s it.”

Admiral Benjamin Powers was taking it all in like his protege captain. The sheer size of a fleet carrier’s decks was intimidating enough even when empty. When her squadrons were “in the house” as the flight crews put it, the sight was sobering. There were two entire squadrons of brand new F-90 fighters parked along the approach lane on Flight Six. Captain Hunter was among the few officers who were fully briefed on their capabilities. His own ship had been temporarily assigned Admiral Reed’s third formation of Superjacks: The feared 118th, known as the “Death Maidens.”

Like Vice Admiral Hafnetz’s battleship Saint Lucia, the Skywatch flagship was one of the “pure” platforms. Her only mission was force projection, and the most storied vessel in the fleet did it better than any other. Saginaw Basin. The Deeps. Richelon Approach. Prairie Rim. Her victories were almost too numerous to count. The corridor outside her primary ready room was enough to give even veteran fleet and marines pause. Its entire 115-foot length was decorated with battle stars, photos and mementos from her nineteen victories under fire. She was the “grand old lady” in the Skywatch registry, having been commissioned so many years ago she was almost old enough to be grandmother to some of her crew members.

Song of Heaven was the ship that had limped home after the beggar’s war over “Mouse Beak,” the none-too-polite nickname for the world known as Centurion Five. She lost half her fighter complement in an ugly running withdrawal from what had started out as a dispute over a freighter’s refusal to allow an inspection. Her captain, a gruff no-nonsense one-star by the name of Lou Rains, was unwilling to allow obvious and rapidly compounding violations of perimeter world shipping regulations. His insistence on going by the book annoyed a few of the system’s gray-market haulers. When it was discovered their disavowed freighter was packed to the bulkheads with illegal weapons and explosives, the fight was on. Song of Heaven literally dragged the renegade freighter back to Core Two by burning her exhausted tractor beam emitters to slag. She left the wreckage of one of her flight decks in the Centurion system and took 13 direct torpedo hits from privateer warships, but she survived. Her brave pilots, officers and crew saved the lives of nearly 2800 civilians, work crews and passengers aboard seven spacecraft.

Admiral Rains spent the rest of his life wearing the Skywatch Cross, breathing with the help of a machine and getting around in a wheelchair.

The word “reverent” didn’t begin to describe how most of the fleet felt about their flagship. Since First Praetorian, she hadn’t seen much front-line action. It turned out her legendary status was far more useful to civilian authority as both a platform from which to make bold announcements and a moving standard from which to fly flags when it was time for saber-rattling. When she was called on to launch fighter strikes in anger, it meant the Core Alliance was deadly serious. Given the size and number of the ships now surrounding her, and the fact she was on course for a forward deployment, this was one of those times.

“Three admirals on field assignments. It’s been a while since we’ve had that much brass in space, sir.”

“Walk with me,” Powers replied. He began making his way towards the open end of Flight Six, where the lightless void of space was visible beyond the carrier’s containment screens. The admiral had given Reed’s crew permission to stand at ease for the duration of his inspection. There was a lot of work that needed to be done, and having crew members dropping their tools for throwaway salutes wouldn’t do much for readiness. Powers had never been a fan of “holdups,” as he called them. According to him, being a flag officer was like being an un-arrestable bank robber. “Every damn time I enter a room, you would think I was armed with a loaded gun and a ski mask. Everyone freezes in place like I’m about to snatch their wallet. Drives me bats.”

Of course the admiral understood why activity was supposed to cease and the crew was supposed to come to attention when an officer enters a room. It was explained in basic, usually by a senior chief, that “officers give orders to crew members, and if your head is up your ass you can’t hear those orders. So you better stand up straight or you won’t have a head to park up your ass next time, able crewman. Do you understand that?!” It was good advice, but it didn’t make things any easier for officers who just wanted to take a walk.

Powers invented the unofficial 27th-and-a-half-standing-order to remain at ease, but it only did away with about half of the scrambles to attention. The one that almost broke his heart was the galley crew member who knocked the coffee maker off the counter and damn near broke it one morning at breakfast in his frantic attempts to go from meticulously cleaning the drink machine to basic-perfect attention in a split second.

“Command thinks they’re going to hit either Manassas, Siege Island or Core Seven,” Powers began. “I disagree. I think they’re going to hit all three.”

“So you’re going with the assumption that they’ve reinforced their position in the El Rey system,” Hunter replied. The first group of crew members who noticed the two officers walking towards the opposite end of the flight bay maintained their composure. They continued working on the targeting banks of the Wildcat fighter they had partially diassembled on the deck. The standing order worked. At least this time.

“If I had a ground base one hop from Core territory, that’s where I would put my heaviest assets. Based on your report, they had considerable power infrastructure in progress, correct?”

“That is correct. My chief engineer theorizes Mount Tynavu was chosen for its proximity to volcanic activity beneath the surface. The Sarn are unchallenged when it comes to geothermal energy technology. That location not only gives them almost limitless power, but it also gives them about 60 feet of nickel-iron shielding between their weapons and orbital assault.”

“My educated guess, which command calls my ‘strategic assessment,’ is that three Imperial battle groups will stage at El Rey Five. Each will bring strike fighters to bear but I don’t believe any of the three will field a true carrier. Skywatch Intelligence theorizes they are using some kind of ‘fighter tender’ technology that allows one of their lighter hulls to re-arm and re-fuel their fighters using external facilities of some kind.”

“So we still have the advantage,” Hunter offered.

“For now. The fighters that turned the Lunar Six One facility into an irradiated graveyard were faster and more precise than we imagined. That was probably their chance to get their best pilots in action. If they were trying to upset our civilian authorities, they succeeded. Even without carriers they can do all kinds of things now that were out of their reach the first time around. Force projection makes all the difference when your opponent doesn’t have fighter technology. It’s different now. We don’t know how many they have, and we don’t know where they are.”

“And that means we need anti-fighter defenses in places we’ve never had them before.”

“Correct. That’s the lesson we learned at Lunar Six One. All the dissenting voices fell silent after the distress calls were played back in the closed session of the Core Council and the automated images of floating bodies were projected on the big screens. One by one these attacks have been larger and larger declarations from the emperor to our leaders. It’s tough to imagine it takes all that plus hundreds of casualties to finally get the ‘all is well’ crowd to shut up long enough to finish a sentence.”

“Permission to speak freely, sir?”

“Granted.” Powers continued his meandering pace, doing his best to avoid being noticed by the deck crews. Flag officers often found the words of a man named Harry Truman applied to their plight, especially given the work-a-day non-com attitude about admirals. “Headquarters,” they said, “are built so we have somewhere to put the damn generals because I don’t want them scaring hell out of my men.” Truman famously opined the Oval Office was the “crown-jewel of the federal penal system.” It seemed attitudes about bosses hadn’t changed much in the intervening centuries.

“I can’t put my finger on it, sir, but it seems to me we’re being led instead of leading. When we squared off with Elder Dragon Orn at El Rey, I got the distinct impression he was being pressured as well. My question is simple: who is really doing the fighting here? Who among us really wants to start a war and with whom?”

“I’m sure you’ll agree with me this is the culmination of a plan that was set in motion many years ago, captain,” Powers replied.

“That much is clear.”

“Some people want power above all things. What they have to do to acquire it is a secondary concern. The events which followed First Praetorian have only intensified the divide between our adherents and the anti-alarmist faction at Skywatch. Now that they have the very thing they’ve been trying to provoke while protesting to the contrary, they are banking on a key weakness only the Core Alliance has.”

“You mean us.”

Powers nodded. “Admiral James and men like him have bet their entire stack on us losing ground in a Second Praetorian due to the inexperience of our line officers. There will no doubt be a sudden reversal in their attitudes a moment after it becomes too late to salvage the situation. They will feign outrage and sorrow as we give ground, and when our provoked enemies have gone far enough they will suddenly become the voices of reason and call for peace: A peace where they deftly slip into positions of power they will only relinquish with dead hands.”

“It’s that bad?”

“The only positive news I can offer you is Truman was right. At least James and his twisted disciples are confined on Core Prime and in other locations far from the fighting. They have no appetite for sacrifice or duty, captain. They are only interested in gaining ground politically, consolidating every last drop of power they can get their avaricious hands on and celebrating with a steak and expensive scotch at MacAllan’s after the news conference.”

Hunter considered the admiral’s words. Stories about men like Admiral James and the politicians he served simply did not compute for the captain in a universe where two plus two yielded the proper result. That said, this certainly wouldn’t be the first time doing or saying the right thing produced a completely unexpected result. All the officers in Jason’s generation had come of age in a world where integrity and achievement were no longer a sure thing. As it had been explained by some of his more cynical acquaintances, the people asking for value are playing a totally different game versus those of us who can actually produce that value.

The captain’s early career was a testament to that notion. It seemed that even after hard won victories, someone in a position of authority always had to intervene in order to secure credit for those who had bled for the Alliance. It was very much like playing a football game. Hunter and his comrades in arms often found themselves three touchdowns ahead with impressive run yardage and spectacular pass plays only to require a controversial call by the referee at the last minute to be credited with the win. For some, it had become just part of life. But for Hunter and the men and women who recognized the necessity of honor, it was becoming corrosive, and not just to their personal sensibilities.

If men and women were called upon to sacrifice for the greater good, then something had to be reaffirmed in exchange for what they gave up. If lives were lost and humanity gained no clearer picture of itself and what mattered, then what meaning would those deaths have? These were questions as obvious as the midday sun to most of the Skywatch officer corps, but they only drew confused looks from those who put a higher prioritiy on things other than human lives.

Ultimately, the situation was rather clear. Hunter wasn’t fighting one war. He was fighting many, and his opponents were about to come face to face with one inescapable fact: Battleship captains never surrender.

“What exactly are we up against?”

“The Sarn Star Empire is the key aggressor. They are leading a coalition of hostile star systems in a bid to capture systems along the Alliance frontier. They are relying on bloodwing strike fighters to even the odds this time. They have allied with two identified star-faring forces and have at least a loose affiliation with third group we can only guess about. The Yersians are in. They have outfitted their heaviest starships with riflecutter weapons to counter our advanced energy batteries. The Kraken have constructed a next-generation fleet using their world burner super-hull as a starting point. All of their ships are now equipped with smaller disruptors similar to the burner weapon, and they have some kind of anti-inertial drive that allows them to maneuver unpredictably.”

“What about that third group?”

“They are the same ones that hit the starship Curacao near Jenner’s star. The Proximans have more information on their capabilities. They’ve had almost a dozen contacts with these mystery ships over the last year. We’re calling them the Heretics. Apparently the cats have captured some rather bizarre quasi-religious trappings these guys have left behind. They are equipped with weapons that resemble M-Guns. Impacts from these energy weapons cause localized breakdowns in electromagnetic forces that we haven’t quite figured out yet. They are code-named ‘antiphysic’ weapons for now. Be cautious around these things. We have no idea what to expect.”

“What are my group’s orders?”

“We know our targets now, and we know what the Imperial command wants to hit hardest. Siege Island is going to end up being the lynchpin of any sustained offensive launched from El Rey. If they get a foothold in either the Core Seven system or Manassas, they’re going to hit the Shield with everything they have: ground troops, orbital bombardment, strike fighters, you name it.”

“And our mission is to deny them the spacehead.”

“Affirmative. I used up more than one of my markers getting permission for you to keep your engineer’s magic tricks to yourself for the time being. We don’t have time to get those technologies into production and we definitely don’t have enough personnel to do the training. Argent is the only ship in the fleet with working prototypes, captain. Keep her in one piece. I want conversion drive and transmatter devices in all our ships someday.”

The space outside the flight bay seemed just a shade darker than before.