The enemy soldier reached out, grabbing Ward’s arm, shaking the pistol loose. The weapon fell to the ground, but the effort had caused the Kriegeri to weaken his own defenses. Ward sucked in a rasping breath, and he jammed his knife under his enemy’s breastplate, angling the blade up, driving it into his enemy’s abdomen.

  The Kriegeri didn’t scream, but he grunted deeply, and the intensity of his attacks dropped almost instantly. Ward shoved hard, throwing the soldier off of him, and he scrambled to his feet, a move accompanied by his own grunt, as the pain of his wound intensified. He didn’t think it was critical, but there was no question, it hurt like hell.

  He grabbed his pistol from the ground and gritted his teeth as he rose to his feet. He extended his arm, ready to fire at the Kriegeri he’d stabbed, but he could see his enemy’s movement slow, and then cease entirely. The knife had done the job, and Ward had lost track of how many rounds remained in his pistol.

  Not enough to waste any…

  He turned his head, checking on the other Kriegeri nearby. The soldier was facing off against two of Colfax’s Marines now, and a quick glance in the other direction told him the thin line of Marines there needed him more.

  He raced over, gritting his teeth against the pain. There were five of the Marines left, but one of them was clearly wounded, staggering, trying to stay on his feet. They were facing a small cluster of Kriegeri, one of the groups of the enemy still pushing forward, desperately trying to sustain the attack.

  Ward raced toward the melee, realizing he was oblivious to other threats. Any Kriegeri with a line of sight could have taken him out, but luck spared him, and his gamble paid off. He came up along the flank of the tiny line without further injury. He focused on the closest enemy trooper, and he fired the pistol twice, putting both shots right into the open area beneath the closest Kriegeri’s helmet. The Hegemony soldier recoiled and fell to the ground. Ward was sure he’d managed a kill shot, but he wasn’t looking when the man hit the dirt. He was in the middle of half a dozen enemy soldiers, firing his pistol, stabbing with his blade…fighting like a man possessed.

  He’d always been an aggressive warrior, but something new had gripped him, a sense of urgency he couldn’t explain. He had to save those last four Marines. He couldn’t explain why, but there was just something about them.

  About one of them.

  He took down three more Kriegeri in his wild frenzy, fighting almost purely on instinct. He was struggling to reach the five Marines—four now, a quick glance told him—and also to save himself. He was outnumbered, almost surrounded, but even as he began to lose hope, he could hear movement behind him.

  That’s either Colfax and Kendall with their people…or I’ve got three seconds to live…

  He was terrified, but his battle frenzy was stronger. He almost turned to see what was coming, but he knew if he did, he’d only provide an opening to the two Kriegeri in front of him. If there were more enemy soldiers coming up, he didn’t have a chance anyway. And, if they were friendlies, they’d know what to do.

  Then, even as he realized he was being slowly overcome by the—now three—enemies pressing forward against him, he could feel movement right behind, and on both sides.

  He gritted his teeth, an instinctive reaction to the shots, the attacks, he knew might be coming.

  But there was nothing.

  Nothing except half a dozen of his Marines on each side of him, racing forward, their assault rifles opening up the instant they cleared his own form.

  He could see Kendall off to his right, alongside three of his people, still firing, even as the three Kriegeri had dropped to the ground, riddled with assault rifle rounds from so close, their armor might as well have been a thin layer of silk.

  “Are you okay, sir?” The voice was familiar, coming from just behind him.

  Colfax…

  He almost turned and answered, but he remembered why he had come there, why he had plunged into the middle of so many enemies. He raced forward, covering the last few meters to the beleaguered group. The four survivors were standing in a short, ragged line, still firing. But the impetus of the flood against them had passed. Kendall and Colfax and their squads hit the enemy hard, and a few seconds later, a wave of Marines from the adjacent Tenth Battalion slammed into the other flank of the bulge in the enemy line. Kriegeri were grim, determined, courageous to a fault. But they weren’t invincible. As soon as it was clear their breakthrough had failed, they pulled back.

  Tried to pull back.

  More Marines were streaming to the spot now, coming from both sides. Even as the Hegemony soldiers began their retreat, they were hit from three directions. They fought fiercely, all the more so when it became clear few, if any, of them were going to escape. If they were going to die, they seemed to decide as a group that they would die fighting.

  Any Marine, Ward included, had to respect that.

  But the major had already turned away, looking toward the four exhausted, battered Marines who had somehow held back the enemy advance…for just long enough.

  He opened his mouth, about to ask them if they were okay. Then he saw colonel’s eagles on one, then on a second one. And a single brigadier’s star on the third.

  And in the center, covered in mud and blood, holding the same assault rifle every private in the line carried, stood a Marine, tall, his helmet gone, his sandy-colored hair blown back in the breeze.

  He wore three platinum stars on his shoulders. The small bits of metal were filthy, and one of them had a bent point, but battered or not, their meaning was instantly clear.

  Ward stopped stone cold, ignoring the throbbing pain from his wound. He felt his stomach tighten, tension clamping down like a vise. But it was different than the stress of battle. He slammed his pistol back into its holster, and he brought his hand up, snapping off the best salute he could manage.

  The officer nodded, and even managed a smile as he returned the salute. “Are you okay, Major? That wound looks pretty nasty. We’d better get you back to the aid station.”

  Ward was silent for a few seconds, unable to speak. Finally, he managed to get out a reply.

  “No, sir…I’m fine.” An exaggeration, perhaps, but at least he wasn’t at death’s door. For a Marine, that was close enough to fine.

  “I was worried about you, sir. I saw your party over here, right in front of the enemy breakthrough. That stand was amazing. I don’t know how you held them back long enough for my people to come up.”

  A pause, and then, “Are you wounded? Do you need anything, General Rogan?”

  Chapter Eight

  CFS Dauntless

  Orbiting Megara

  Olyus III

  Year 321 AC

  Jake Stockton climbed down the ladder from his Lighting and took a deep breath. To most people, the atmosphere on the landing bay of a battleship was far from fresh and invigorating. Engine exhaust fumes, fuel vapors, lubricants and a hundred other chemicals combined to create an air quality most people considered, if not outright caustic, at least poor.

  But to Jake Stockton, it was the smell of home. He’d been a pilot his entire adult life, and he’d spent most of the preceding childhood dreaming about flying fighters. His career had been everything he’d imagined and more, though his rank and glory had come at a horrendous cost. He’d tried many times to stop counting the number of pilots killed under his command, but somehow that exact number remained there, immovable, never failing to adjust for any increase. Whether it was a massive battle with hundreds or thousands killed, or a training accident with one lost rookie, the tally continued, a relentless reminder, a demon wedged deep in his mind that refused to allow him to forget. Ever.

  He looked around, his eyes squinting to see down to the end of the sporadically-lit deck. There were neat rows of Lightnings, all lined up and looking almost like some kind of parade ground display. It was easy, of course, to keep things neat when there was no battle going on. Fleet units had skirmished with Hegemony patrols out along the edges of the enemy-occupied sections of the Confederation, and some of the fleet’s heavies had provided ground bombardment and support to the Marines recapturing Megara, but Dauntless’s squadrons, and their mostly-veteran pilots, had been idle since the bloody fight to reclaim the capital system. Only the occasional exercise had interrupted the inactivity.

  Stockton glanced back at his fighter and he nodded sharply. He’d always found the Lightnings to be beautiful, even in their bulky bomber configurations, but his ship was set up as an interceptor, a vision of sleek magnificence to the pilot’s eyes. He’d used it to travel around from one place to another, sometimes even using it for interstellar transits. Taking a fighter through a transit point was considered dangerous, but Stockton had done it so many times, it had become almost instinctive. Besides, after all the battles he’d been in, the close calls, the ditches and times he’d been wounded, he defied the universe to kill him in something as pedestrian as a botched transit. If such an end lay in his future, he considered it the closest thing to unstoppable fate he could conceive.

  His rank as an admiral—and that was something he still couldn’t quite get himself to believe—entitled him to a cutter with escort, of course, but the fighter was a link to his past, to where he had come from, to a time, he now realized, that had been the happiest in his life.

  Any bay felt like someplace he belonged, but Dauntless’s was home, the closest thing to one he’d ever had. He knew the battleship wasn’t the original one to bear the name, and many of the memories he superimposed on her were actually from her lost predecessor. The old vessel had been smaller, and its bays had been far less ordered, cramped and inferior by any measure. But Stockton still missed her every day. She was his past, and she’d been filled with friends and comrades, men and women who were mostly gone now, sacrificed to the nearly endless conflict of the past dozen years.

  The new Dauntless had one comrade in he was especially anxious to see. Stara Sinclair wore a commodore’s starbursts now, and she was official in the position she had informally held for more than two years, the director of flight control operations for the entire fleet. She was also Stockton’s lover, and he hadn’t seen her in almost six months. His duties had taken him from one end of the Confederation to the other, monitoring the progress at the makeshift flight academies that were feeding a steady flow of new pilots to the fleet, in a wild effort to keep up with Iron Belt production of Lightnings.

  Fresh meat. Stockton knew how many of those raw pilots would survive their first battle, their first year of service. He knew it just as surely as he remembered the total death count of his squadrons. But he needed them, as many as he could get, and with Lightning production spiking up, it was going to be trained pilots that limited his strike force’s size, and not lack of hardware.

  Stockton was anxious to see Stara, to steal whatever time he could with her before duty took him away again…but first, he had to report to Admiral Barron. His longtime commander—and one of his few true friends—had summoned him, and Stockton knew well enough, that probably meant something was wrong.

  That was no real surprise. He hadn’t really expected a year’s respite after the bloodbath of the Second Battle of Megara, but as he looked back, he realized, perhaps he should have. The Hegemony forces had been savaged as badly as the Grand Alliance’s. Their power isn’t limitless. We’ve hurt them, too. Maybe badly.

  Stockton had been cocky as a young officer, prone to frequent Dauntless’s officer’s club, where he had held his own in boasting and telling war stories—not to mention developing a hell of a reputation as a card player. That had been his youth, of course, and the older officer he’d become, wise from his close brushes with death and almost crushed by his burdens, was somber, quiet, at least when he wasn’t in battle. He was grim, too, in a way he’d never been years before, the result of too much war, too much death.

  He thought about victory, an escape from the seemingly endless nightmare that had engulfed them all, and he wondered if such a thing was actually possible.

  He walked toward the bank of lifts, feeling a touch of guilt that he couldn’t go see Stara right away. Duty came first, for both of them, and his would brook no delay.

  with any luck, they’d get a few days together before…whatever was next for them all.

  * * *

  Barron stared down at his desk, silent, brooding. He knew why Andi had slipped away. He couldn’t even tell himself he wouldn’t have done the same thing in her shoes. But then the cold realization that he might never see her again kept roaring back into his thoughts. Perhaps she had sacrificed their last moments together, the fleeting sliver of time they might have shared. He’d felt flashes of anger, and then almost immediate regret for them. Above all, he wanted to believe that she would return, that they would be together again.

  But he didn’t.

  He had no reason, save for the nearly absurd level of danger in the operation she was about to commence, but he still had a cold feeling. Something would happen on Dannith, something terrible. He couldn’t drive the thought away.

  “Admiral Stockton is here, Admiral Barron.” The AI spoke in a cool, professional tone. The system was programmable, with hundreds of choices, different voices, vocabularies, pseudo personalities. Barron had found this one somehow soothing, and he’d gone with it, in both his office and his quarters.

  “Open.”

  The door slid to the side, and Jake Stockton stepped into the room. “Hello, Admiral. Reporting as ordered.” The pilot managed a passable salute, and Barron knew just how much effort it had likely taken. He returned it, most likely with no better form. He’d never been one for the formalities, not much more than Stockton ever was, and he couldn’t think of anything that seemed less important just then.

  “I could reply just as crisply, Jake, but what do you say we take the formality down a couple notches? My God, how the hell long have we known each other?”

  Stockton managed a smile, or at least a reasonable imitation of one. “Well, in fairness, you’ve been my superior that entire time, sir.” A pause. “But it’s been a long while, sir. We’ve been through a lot.”

  “Well, as your superior, I’m ordering you to cut the military nonsense, at least for now. We’ve got something to discuss, and these stars on my shoulders have gotten damned heavy. Maybe you can help me forget about them for a while.”

  “I’ll try, Tyler.” Stockton stepped forward and took one of the seats facing Barron. “So, I assume you didn’t send for me just so I could come here and tread on regs and call the fleet commander by his first name.”

  Barron nodded, managing to return Stockton’s grin. “That’s very insightful of you.” A pause, and something that almost passed for a chuckle. “The enemy is up to something, Jake, something called Project Zed.”

  “Project Zed? What is it? A new ship? A fleet?”

  “We don’t know, Jake. We’ve taken…” His voice petered out for a few seconds. “…steps…to gather more intelligence. But until then, we’ve got to do what we can to ensure we’re ready to meet whatever the threat may be.”

  “That’s not going to be easy when we don’t have any idea what we’ll be facing.”

  “No, it won’t be, but when was the last time something was easy?”

  “I’m not sure I can remember that far back.”

  The two shared a laugh, though it was hollow, carrying the unmistakable sound of gallows humor.

  “When are we heading out?”

  Barron looked back at his comrade, and his tone was deadpan. “Now.”

  The word almost echoed off the room’s walls, and Stockton stared back silently for a moment.

  “Now?” he finally replied.

  “I’m not sure where we’ll make our stand. That depends on what we discover, and where the enemy goes. But I’d like to keep them as far from Megara—and even more importantly, the Iron Belt—as possible. If we push out, challenge them closer to the frontier, they’ll have to engage us there, or risk us coming in behind them and cutting off their lines of communications. With some luck, we’ll force a fight out somewhere we don’t have crucial strategic assets at risk.”

  “It’ll also be someplace we don’t have fortifications to speak of. The whole Union border’s demilitarized by treaty, and the systems close to Dannith, the ones we still control, that is, are lightly protected, mostly agricultural worlds.”

  “The lack of fixed defenses is a negative, certainly. But making a stand out there gives us a chance to pull back if things look bad. Remember, we don’t know what we’ll be facing. Do you want to be in some vital system, with no time to react to what they send at us?”

  “No, but…” Stockton didn’t continue. He just looked down at his feet for a few seconds, and then he said, “Still, how can we possibly get the fleet ready to go now? A good third of our strength is back at Craydon.”

  “Clint Winters is on the way there now, Jake.” Barron glanced at the chronometer. “In fact, he should be arriving just about any time. He’ll be bringing the units at Craydon forward, and we’ll all meet up at Cavenaugh. It’s a centrally-located spot, close enough to Dannith that the enemy will know where we are, but far enough out from the Iron Belt and the truly vital systems deeper in.” Barron didn’t like the ease with which his mind wrote off planets with populations measured ‘only’ in the hundreds of millions as not ‘vital.’ But the cold reality was, millions of people who built spaceships and assembled weapon systems were more important at that moment than those that grew corn or harvested algae.