Faulkner nodded. “This flotilla you were talking about: I’m assuming something happened to it?”

  “And you’d be right. They’d been out there for a six-month stint and were just on their way home via the Astares system. Everything was fine, normal communications and then it just vanished.”

  “Sorry? What size of flotilla are we talking about?”

  “Five ships in total. A battlecruiser, the Antilles, two destroyers and two frigates.”

  Faulkner let the enormity of that sink in.

  “The Astares system? That used to be Yakutian territory, right?”

  “Still is,” Paige said. “They have a naval base stationed off Piatra.”

  “Did you ask them about it? What happened? There’s no way they’d have a potentially hostile mobbing through their system and not know about it.”

  “When we asked them they more or less agreed with our findings: the flotilla was there one moment and gone the next.”

  “That’s nonsense. A group that size doesn’t just disappear.”

  Paige bared his teeth in a joyless smile.

  “And, normally, I’d agree with you. So we sent out a Search and Rescue mission. That was three months ago. They covered the whole area where the ships had last been sighted - nothing. No ships, no escape pods, no debris field: nothing.”

  “What about the colonies they visited? Did you contact those as well?”

  The idea seemed not to have occurred to Paige. “Why would we do that?”

  “They’d been out there for six months. Perhaps they’d come across something. I don’t know – pirate activity, perhaps?”

  “If that’s the case, there was no mention of it in their transmissions. Then, last month, we were contacted by one of our colonies, on this side of the gate. In the Corda System, so effectively next door. They’d picked up something on their long-range scanners. And when they went to investigate they found a ship.”

  “Part of the same flotilla? A frigate, I’m guessing.”

  “The Valiant,” Paige eyed him suspiciously. “How did you know?”

  “Frigates are small. Small and fast. Patrols ahead of the main convoy. Somehow misses the initial contact, captain sees that the battle is lost and decides to make a run for it.”

  Paige’s eyes narrowed, his interest suddenly aroused.

  “Is that what you think might have happened?”

  “They may have been isolated when the main battle was joined. Say the enemy attacked from the rear. Once the chain of command collapsed and he saw that he lacked the firepower to make any real impact…”

  Faulkner threw up his hands.

  “So he made for the nearest gate. Is that what you’d have done?’”

  Faulkner gave him a look of admonishment but kept his voice level.

  “That’s not what I said, Admiral. You asked me for possible scenarios and this is one. Either he joins the fight and gets wiped out or he turns and makes a run for it. Either way, his career’s over. You said that they were picked up in the Corda system?”

  “That’s right, on the very edge of Confederation space. They’d sacrificed everything to make the jump to N-Space.”

  “No survivors?”

  “Not much of anything. The ship’s electrical systems were fried, their engines all but burnt out. Our estimates suggest that at some point they had registered a top speed of point six light speed.”

  Faulkner let out a low whistle.

  “Okay. So we’re talking 12 gees. Enough to crush everyone on board. That’s how desperate they were to get away. How did they manage to access the gate?”

  “Automated systems, most likely,” Paige sat back in his chair. “We’re still going over the details.”

  “No idea who or what they were running from?”

  “Not so far, no. Though one or two possibilities do spring to mind.”

  The Yakutian Naval League perhaps? Who else could it be? With the bulk of their fleet stationed on Piatra, destroying a small flotilla would have been relatively straightforward.

  The Admiral appeared extremely calm considering what he’d just told him. The USDC seemed poised on the brink of a major conflict and yet Paige spoke like someone taking a drink at the officers’ club. He appeared entirely unruffled by the enormity of the events unfolding around him. Almost as though he hadn’t grasped the reality of the situation. Perhaps, he was just being overly cautious. Exhausting every possible alternative before making a ruling on where exactly the blame for this lay.

  “We’re keeping the loss of the flotilla quiet for now. We’ve had to field some awkward questions but there is still an outside chance that they might just turn up.”

  Though they both knew that was never going to happen. One ship might go AWOL but never four.

  “The president is planning to make an announcement about this tomorrow afternoon. He’s very aware of the sensitivity of the situation but, at the same time, he wants to take a strong stance. We can’t afford to come out of this looking weak and yet we’re struggling to come with even basic facts. At the same time, we don’t want to go jumping to conclusions.”

  “I completely understand,” Faulkner said. “If there’s anything I can do to help.”

  Paige gave him a thoughtful stare. “As a matter of fact, there is.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Marine corporal scrutinised LaCruz’s ticket. When he ran it under the scanner it elicited the necessary green light but he still didn’t look convinced. This was the VIP section. How could a grunt like her have access to a big event like this? It didn’t make sense. And yet the ticket was clearly valid.

  A backlog was starting to build behind her.

  He fixed LaCruz with a stare before waving her through.

  The only other Marines who would be present at the ceremony would be part of the three hundred representatives from the various armed forces currently stationed on Lincoln. These would be standing directly behind the president during his speech. A backdrop of service personnel.

  LaCruz didn’t envy them their part in the proceedings. They’d have to stand for three hours throughout all the speeches - not just the president’s - with strict instructions to face forward and not to touch their faces or, in any way, attempt to draw attention to themselves.

  She knew some of the Marines who had been chosen to represent them. Supposedly, they had been picked at random but nobody was buying that. You only had to look at them to see why they’d been chosen from all the other Marines on-station. Any one of them could have filled the role of poster boy or girl for the Corps.

  LaCruz didn’t envy them though, located as she was to the right of the stage, out of the glare of the stage lights she had a much better view of proceedings. For one thing, she’d be able to see the president’s face rather than just the back of his head. She was surrounded by the families of the various service personnel onstage - many of whom were in uniform themselves.

  She’d been gifted the ticket by one of the female marines on the stage. She’d got the ticket for her sister who was got stuck on Pacific Station after her shuttle malfunctioned. LaCruz had jumped at the chance of attending. There had been nothing for her to do since she’d left the Syracuse. Supposedly, Rawlins was trying to bring a charge against her, though she’d received no notification of it and, when she contact headquarters they were adamant that they had no record of it.

  She figured it was the sort of thing that would catch up with her eventually. Rawlins wasn’t the sort to let something like that drop. In the meantime, she was eager for anything that would occupy her time and so had jumped at the chance of seeing the president.

  Every seat in the huge auditorium was occupied, every vantage point taken.

  The event was being fed live to every planet in the system. A sub-light version of events would be broadcast to the various colonies of the USDC, the United Space Defence Confederation, but that would take weeks, even months to reach its intended audience. Still, the viewing figures would be phenomenal.

  The excitement levels had been slowly building since the president’s arrival on station a few days earlier, and now things were heading to a fever pitch.

  Leland Grainger, the Governor of Lincoln, was the last person to speak before the president. He looked pale and was perspiring freely. LaCruz imagined that, other than talking to the station newsfeeds, Grainger would have very little experience of such big events. As a result, he stuck rigidly to his script, his voice becoming hoarser and hoarser as his nerves got the better of him. He seemed transfixed by the sea of floating cameras, acutely aware of the billions watching across the galaxy. It came as relief to everyone when he finally introduced the president.

  President Ezra Samuels, in direct contrast to Grainger, was the consummate media professional. He embraced the governor like a dear friend before manoeuvring Grainger around to provide the cameras with the perfect shot they’d been angling for.

  With his shock of white hair, healthy tan and piercing green eyes, the president made for quite a striking figure. He somehow managed to exude a combination of self-confidence along with a self-deprecating wit. There was none of the nervousness Grainger had displayed earlier, the president’s twenty-year career as a public servant ensured that he looked totally at home on any stage, whatever the size.

  After thanking the various dignitaries for inviting him, he set about his speech proper, talking at length about the fine work currently being carried out aboard the station before moving onto the finer details: declaring major increases in the budgets for the various armed services before announcing a new contract to build seven navy ships in the station’s shipyards.

  LaCruz thought that particularly significant considering that it would take between five and eight standard years to see the new contracts completed and the ships built. Anyone with any knowledge of how the military worked could see that you didn’t spend vast amounts of money building new ships unless you had some intention of using them.

  He talked a lot about the USDC living up to its responsibilities to its colonies, no doubt a sideswipe at the Yakutians who relied almost entirely upon technology, in the form of orbital defence systems, rather than naval patrols to ensure their ongoing safety. It was a widely known fact that those self-same orbital defences could also be turned on the planets they were purportedly defending. This, to deter anyone who might consider rebelling against their Yakutian masters.

  The Yakutian Empire preferred to keep the majority of their ships based around the five ‘home’ planets where the bulk of their power lay. Most of their colonies had been settled as a direct result of aggressive annexation. Indeed, that was partially why the Long War had started.

  No one, LaCruz included, was prepared for the next part of his speech: his announcement of the loss of the five ships in the Astares system. The crowd was hushed as he highlighted the background to the whole operation, the pictures of each of the ships’ captains being projected onto the screen behind him. Each face was bright, eager and earnest but that didn’t stop the crowd’s mood from growing increasingly sombre.

  And when he announced that the flotilla had been lost at a cost of over a thousand lives he was greeted with a stunned silence. How could this be?

  The president spoke of his efforts to reach out to the Yakutian Empire, in the hope of receiving certain reassurances regarding their involvement in the incident. That those reassurances had not been forthcoming didn’t play well with the partisan crowd.

  The news that Fleet Admiral Paige would be leading a battleship group inside the Astares system was greeted with a thunderous roar of approval. Warning bells started ringing for LaCruz when she heard that the admiral’s first port of call was to be the disputed planet of Piatra, or The Rock as it was more commonly known. The ownership of the Rock had been contested by the two sides for over a hundred years. She couldn’t think of a more provocative measure than to send a USDC fleet there uninvited.

  LaCruz checked her bracelet to see how this was playing out in the rest of the federation and was genuinely surprised by the results. The president’s approval rating had just gone through the roof. War might not have been declared, but the implications of what was happening was lost on no one. While the details had been presented as a piece of extremely well-crafted propaganda, you didn’t sail a battle fleet into enemy territory unless you were looking for a fight.

  LaCruz suddenly wished she was back at base, listening to this with the other Marines. It seemed that her time in the Corps might actually amount to something after all.

  The president’s words seemed to directly resonate with her.

  “Anyone who sets out on a military career does so in the full knowledge that at some point they are likely to be tested. Often in ways that they couldn’t imagine when they enlisted. As a student of the naval academy, I saw it in the portraits of those who had gone before me.

  “It has become a tradition for first year students at the naval academy to write and present a paper on one of the great heroes whose portrait adorns its corridors. Sometimes the stories of these great men and women are so widely known that it requires very little research on behalf of the student. These are people whose deeds are rightly celebrated across the whole of the Confederation. Schools and colleges are named in their honor, starships are built in remembrance, military tactics shaped by victories.

  “But, with the Long War still fresh in everyone’s minds, I wanted to challenge myself. I wanted to learn from the experiences of those service personnel just back from the war. Men and women whose achievements had yet to be fully recognised. Men and women whose deeds, I hoped, one day to emulate.

  “But there was one name which fascinated me more than most. Fascinated me and frustrated me in equal measure because the details surrounding his final campaign were clouded in controversy. This was a man who had failed to return home triumphant and yet neither had he fallen in battle. No, here was a figure shrouded in mystery. A man accused of crossing the line, of using unauthorised force. A man about whom the military at the time was notoriously tight lipped but who also received glowing endorsements from all those who’d served under him.

  “My teachers were not impressed by my choice and initially discouraged me from choosing such a controversial figure as the subject of my paper. There was after all no portrait of this man on the walls. He was still, after all, a military prisoner. Did his capture by the enemy rob him of his agency? My classmates at the time certainly seemed to think so.

  “But the more I read about him, the more intrigued I became.

  “Here was a man who, up until his surrender, had never engaged the enemy and not come out on top. His final battle saw him defeat not one, not two but three enemy ships, though in doing so his ship sustained enormous damage. Its hull was breached, its main weapons systems disabled and its reactors so badly damaged that three of his engines had to be jettisoned.”

  LaCruz had heard the story before -it had been part of her training at Fort Hurt - but she couldn’t deny the thrill of excitement she had on hearing it now.

  “At this point, the Mantis, was approached by a Yakutian super-carrier the Kinabatu. Realising who it was that he was facing, the captain was keen to offer his opponent terms for surrender.

  “The USDC captain at first refused. Undeterred, the Yakutian captain - anticipating the arrival of the Yakutians fleet- decided to make him one final offer.

  “If the captain would agree to hand himself over, the Yakutian would guarantee safe passage for his crew back to Earth Prime. All he had to do was to surrender himself while giving his word that he would not take his own life whilst still a prisoner.

  “I often think - when faced with difficult decisions – what would I have done in such circumstances? Answer the call to glory and go down fighting? Or, ensure the safety of my crew by giving up that most sacred possession: one’s own freedom?”

  Several voices were voices raised behind LaCruz.

  “Man’s a coward, whichever way you paint it.” LaCruz turned to meet the eyes of a tall figure in a naval pilot’s uniform.

  The president was still speaking.

  “The captain surrendered. His crew returned home. Normally, that would be the end of it”.

  The president paused, staring out over the packed auditorium.

  “When it came time for me to present my paper to the other students of the academy it caused quite a stir because here is a figure who provokes strong emotions. But at the same time his is an example which we would all do well to emulate. Here is a man who has risked everything and survived, a man who embodies so much that is best about this Confederation of ours. An extraordinary figure who has quite literally been to hell and back.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, it is my singular honor to welcome to the stage Captain Robert Faulkner.”

  Despite the view screens mounted at every corner of the venue, the crowd surged forward to get a better look.

  Even LaCruz found herself straining to see.

  As Faulkner crossed the stage with his oddly rolling walk, there could have been few watching who didn’t wince and inwardly reflect upon the cruelties that had been inflicted upon him. After all, weren’t the Yakutians a race who celebrated torture as an art form?

  There was a long pause as Faulkner slowly approached the lectern, the whole stadium seeming to respond to the man’s simple, bruised dignity.

  There was a flutter of movement behind the president and, when the cameras zoomed in to pick it up, they saw that one of the young naval officers in the background had raised his hand in salute.

  A harmless gesture.

  And, having experienced a moment of anticipated violence, everyone relaxed.

  Until the movement was repeated all across the back rows as, one by one, the service personnel snapped out their salutes.

  The hell with it, LaCruz thought getting quickly to her feet and firing off a salute all of her own. All around her, others were doing the same.