2

Despite the detour to drop Jacob off at school – a detour Corporal Heimdall had taken completely in stride – Kyle arrived at Vice Admiral Mohammed Kane’s office precisely on time. The head of the Joint Department of Personnel’s aide was waiting for him and ushered him into the office at exactly ten hundred hours.

Kane, a tanned man with striking blue eyes under a plain white turban, rose from behind his desk to shake Kyle’s hand and direct the young Captain to a seat. The room was cluttered with the mementoes of a long life of service – one wall was covered in pictures of the Admiral at different ages with various people and ships, though the rest were bookshelves stuffed to overflowing. About a third of the contents were books, the remainder were paper folios with names in tiny black print. It was more paper than Kyle had ever seen outside a library.

“Welcome, Captain Roberts. I trust the flight was uneventful?”

“Still getting used to being flown around,” Kyle admitted cautiously. “I never made a particularly good passenger.”

“From your background, I’m hardly surprised,” Kane admitted. “We don’t see very many officers transfer from the Space Force to the Space Navy – most would resign after an injury of the scale you took. Are you having issues adjusting?”

Kyle somewhat absently touched his temples. He had been a fighter pilot until a close encounter with an antimatter warhead had burned out his neural implant and left him unable to fly a starfighter. Shifting into the Navy had kept him in uniform.

“I’ll never have what I had,” he said quietly. “But I am adjusting. I prefer to be busy.”

“We’ve seen what you regard as busy,” Vice Admiral Kane replied dryly. “The Tranquility system remains free, Captain, and they thank you for it. You seem to have weathered the transfer between services well.”

“Thank you, sir,” Kyle told him, inclining his head slightly as he eyed the Admiral across the cluttered old wooden desk.

“You’ve made quite an impression in the media,” Kane continued. “That’s partially our fault – we needed a hero after the opening Commonwealth attacks, and you fit the bill. The ‘Stellar Fox’ is what they call you, isn’t it?”

It was all Kyle could do not to roll his eyes in front of his superior.

“I am not fond of the nickname,” he told Kane slowly. “Erwin Rommel, after all, lost his war and was forced to commit suicide by his government. I hope for a more positive fate.”

“Our government is generally better than that,” Kane allowed. “Though I don’t know if you’ll agree after we’re done here today.”

“I serve the Federation, sir,” Kyle said automatically. Regardless of what else happened, his oath was to the Constitution and Senate of the Castle Federation.

“And in said service, you’ve put the CEO of one of our largest armaments manufacturers behind bars for a tad over sixty years,” the Admiral warned him.

“Excelsior Armaments committed treason, sir.” They had, in fact, stolen fighters from Kyle’s previous command, Avalon, before he’d arrived. Fighters that he’d ended up flying against when they’d ended up in the hands of a Commonwealth black operation.

“They did, and Max Arthur deserves every second of his time in prison,” Kane agreed. “Of course, you also put Joseph Randall’s son behind bars.”

Kyle didn’t reply. James Randall had been a rapist and a thug, but he’d become the Judge Advocate General’s star witness against Max Arthur and Excelsior Armaments. In exchange, he’d been spared the firing squad for his multiple capital offenses.

Unfortunately, between Kyle arresting James Randall and all of this becoming public knowledge on Castle, Joseph Randall had won a tight-fought election after his closest rival died in an air car accident. The elder Randall was now Senator for Castle, first among equals of the Federation’s thirteen person executive.

“Senator Randall would like to see you beached and buried,” Kane said flatly. “Absent that, he’d love to see you given enough rope to hang yourself. Others who were friends of Max Arthur – or at least business partners of the man – are in full agreement with him.

“Your partisans, on the other hand,” the head of the Federation military’s personnel department continued calmly, “think that a Hero of the Federation deserves better than a minor command. They want you given a command ‘worthy of the Stellar Fox’.”

Kyle winced. That was a lot more politics than he’d expected to go into selecting a ship to assign the most junior Captain in the Navy to.

“My impulse and preference, Captain Roberts, is to assign you to an older cruiser in one of the system defense Task Groups,” Kane told him. “One with solid fellow captains to help you learn, and a Task Group commander willing to mentor an inexperienced officer.

“But while I could withstand the pressure from either your enemies or your friends, Captain, with all sides clamoring to see you given a ‘worthy’ command, my choices are constrained, and I am left with the impulse to throw a giant finger at everyone.”

“Sir,” Kyle said quietly. “A cruiser command such as you describe sounds appropriate for my experience. I would not object to such an assignment.”

“No, but others would object on your behalf, or out of a desire to watch you fail,” the Vice Admiral replied. “I am telling you this, Captain Roberts, so that you understand that the command you are receiving is not a reward. The gold planet on your collar was your reward for saving Tranquility. This is a political necessity you’d better not fuck up.”

He presumably gave a mental command through his implant, because a moment later a hologram of a ship appeared above his desk, and Kyle inhaled sharply.

Kyle knew that ship. She’d been all over the news since he’d come home – the latest of the Federation’s newest supercarrier class. She was an abbreviated spike in space, a kilometer and a half long and almost half a kilometer high at her base. Fighter launch tubes for ten squadrons – eighty starfighters, more than his last command had in her entire fighter group – marked her broadsides, mixed with heavy positron lances and missile launchers.

She was a Sanctuary-class deep space carrier, the biggest, most advanced class of warships ever built by the Castle Federation – which meant the most advanced warships ever built by anyone.

“She won’t commission for another nine days, but it’s time her Captain got aboard,” Kane told him. “I have the paperwork here for you, Captain Roberts, and my aide will make the travel arrangements.

“I expect you take command of DSC-078 Avalon by this time tomorrow.”

Most people who ended up in the office of the head of the Joint Department of Personnel had some degree of trepidation. Vice Admiral Mohammed Kane, after all, was ultimately responsible for all discipline that didn’t fall into the hands of the Joint Department of Military Justice.

Vice Admiral Dimitri Tobin, however, had served with Kane during the last war. He’d happily arranged to insert himself into Kane’s schedule and greeted the smaller man with a crushing bear hug.

When he released Kane, Dimitri turned the chair Kane put junior officers in around and leaned against it. He studied Kane carefully, noting the new lines in his old friend’s face and the slight stoop to the shoulders that hadn’t been there six months ago.

“You, my friend, need a vacation,” Dimitri told the other man.

“Not happening,” Kane replied crisply. “I won’t pretend it isn’t good to see you, Dimitri, but I do have a war to help run. You got yourself onto my schedule for this morning – what do you need?”

“It’s not what I need.” Dimitri leaned forward, meeting his friend’s gaze evenly. “It’s what the Federation needs. We don’t have that many Admirals of any stripe, Mohammed, and we can’t afford for me to sit on my ass getting fat.”

“You got a ship shot out of from underneath you, and half a battle group blown apart around you,” Kane said mildly. “There are those who’d say we don’t need admirals who turn in performances like that – and I have psychiatrists who say you need time to recover.”

“I lost three ships,” Dimitri said flatly. “Corona, Liberation, and Tara. Two battleships, one carrier. The Imperium lost four ships, and the Factor two. The Commonwealth lost twelve and failed to take Midori. I will mourn my dead for the rest of my life, as I mourn those who died in the last war.”

He shivered, old memories rippling through his mind.

“I will also take any man who dares suggest I should have done better into a dark alley and leave them wishing they’d been at Midori instead of meeting me there,” he finished bluntly.

Kane chuckled and made a throwaway gesture.

“I agree,” he admitted. “Though we have, as always, some mouthy politicians. Mostly MFAs, the Senators are better briefed than that.”

Members of the Federation Assembly, drawn from all fifteen of the Federation’s member worlds and its three Protectorates, were the democratically elected representatives of the Federation’s people. They wrote its law and passed its budget and acted as a check on the power of the thirteen person Senate who ruled the seventeen star systems containing those eighteen worlds.

“I’m more concerned about the psych report, old friend,” Kane told Dimitri. “They worry about you tearing open old wounds – Amaranthe. Trinity. Hessian.”

“I read their report, Mohammed,” Dimitri replied. “And, yes, I know I wasn’t supposed to, but it’s amazing what a Vice Admiral’s stars open up.

“I’ll add Midori to my ghosts,” he continued, “but the psychiatrists cleared me for duty. And we both know the Federation has damned few experienced admirals left.”

“We never had many, and most of them are dead,” Kane admitted. “Are you certain, Dimitri? Let’s be honest – we expected you to lose at Midori. You’ve already delivered one victory we didn’t expect.”

“Mohammed,” the big Vice Admiral said sharply. “How bad is it?”

Kane swallowed and glanced at a paper report on his desk, its folder jet-black – marking the contents as Top Secret. The folder would contain tech that would check the identity of the user and destroy the contents if an unauthorized person tried to open it.

He leaned back and faced Dimitri, and the last of the mask dropped away. Kane looked old – well beyond what seventy years should do to a man with full anagathic treatments.

“We’re losing,” he said bluntly. “I know that’s not what the news says – we aren’t even controlling the media too much on that count, they’re focusing on systems lost. They’re quite cooperative in calling it a ‘victory’ if we still hold the system at the end of the day.

“So far as we can tell, Walkingstick’s losses in the first offensives were, thanks to you and young Captain Roberts most prominently, far higher than he expected. He expected to hit Midori with twenty-five to thirty warships, facing ten to fifteen.

“Instead, you met his twenty with eighteen and kicked his ass six ways to Sunday,” Kane concluded with some relish.

Fleet Admiral James Calvin Walkingstick had been declared ‘Marshal of the Rimward Marches’ by the Congress of the Terran Commonwealth. His new job description boiled down to ‘conquer the Alliance in the name of unifying the human race’.

“So Walkingstick has a lot fewer ships than he expected for phase two, and we have more,” Kane said after a few moments. “Unfortunately, the man is smart enough to have planned for that possibility, and he’s currently engaging in a series of hit and run raids that aren’t taking systems or even doing much damage – except to our capital ships.

“Every ship he destroys is one less mobile asset for Alliance High Command to shuffle,” the turbaned Vice Admiral said grimly. “He’s grinding us down, Dimitri. We’re recommissioning the Reserve, but… they’re still months away from deployment.”

“He won’t wait that long,” Dimitri finished grimly. “Once he’s stretched us thin, he’ll concentrate his ships and hit the systems we need to fuel our war machine.”

“Exactly.”

“So you need me,” the old Admiral told Kane. “My life is the Federation’s, old friend. Tell me what we need.”

With a sigh and a hand gesture, Kane brought up an image of a battle group. Dimitri’s practiced eye picked out a Renaissance Trade Factor Magellan-class battleship, two Coraline Imperium strike cruisers – a Rameses-class and a Majesty-class – a Castle Federation Last Stand-class battlecruiser… and at the heart of it, the immense mass of a Sanctuary-class Federation supercarrier.

“Alliance Battle Group Seventeen,” Kane said bluntly. “Being assembled around the new Avalon. It’s a multi-national force, and will require an admiral both experienced in battle and in managing a multi-national force.”

“Avalon, huh?” Dimitri said as he released the chair and walked a half-circle around Kane’s desk, studying the hologram. “That’s quite the strike force,” he continued. “What’s the catch?”

“A bunch,” Kane told him. “The Trade Factor doesn’t have a seventh-generation starfighter yet – hence them contributing a battlewagon. The Imperium does, and their cruisers are bringing the first wave of their Arrow type fighters. We’ve made sure both Avalon and Camerone have full wings of Falcons, but no one has built doctrine for Falcons flying with Arrows yet.

“Last, but not least, Avalon hasn’t commissioned yet, Horus hasn’t arrived yet, and Alliance politics mean at least your first mission is going to be glorified babysitting.”

Dimitri eyed the force. Avalon was the biggest ship by far, but the battleship and all three battlecruisers were of a similar generation – which meant of a similar size. The only difference between a battleship and a cruiser, after all, was the role. Cruisers carried fighters, though battlecruisers still had battleship-grade guns – just not as many of them as a battleship.

“It sounds like I’ll want to raise my flag on Camerone,” he observed. “Let the new Avalon get their feet under them without the Admiral hanging over their shoulders.”

“Normally I’d agree with you,” Kane allowed, “but in fact, I’d regard it as a personal favor if you did fly your flag from Avalon.”

Dimitri raised a questioning eyebrow at his friend.

“I ended up giving her to Captain Roberts,” the head of personnel for the Federation’s military told him. “The kid is good – the ‘Stellar Fox’ has more potential and more killer instinct that any other three Captains I could name, but he’s also the most junior Captain in the fleet.”

“You want me to mentor him,” Dimitri said quietly. “It’s… not my favorite task, Mohammed.”

“You’re good at it,” Kane pointed out. “Those who survive your mentorship do well – and Roberts needs the crash course, unfortunately.”

Dimitri grunted, looking at the six ship battle group again.

“My life is the Federation’s,” he repeated finally. “But you’ll owe me.”

“I don’t have any appointments left till one,” Kane replied. “May I offer lunch as a down payment?”