. Kirkwood eased the Mo out of its parking orbit on secondary thrusters, with Lastunen running the jets while Lundgren sat at the field engineer station. While they did so, I sat in the left hand seat of Martins’ Luna Moth, fighting down anxiety as I watched the second string driving my baby away. I had given her a fully …

However, I never had an opportunity to sell the Sky Boss on Alexander on the idea. As long as Mo was Aviation Corps equipment in the battle group, he had a say on where she went. And he had already decided to send us home. The dispatch came in an hour after we adjourned. I was still drawing up the …

. I once heard my CO, Commander Avary, say, ‘when all else fails, hold a meeting’. Maybe it was a joke, but if I did nothing, we would just continue floating here on orbit around Sebka A, waiting for something to happen at some indeterminate point in the future. That’s no way to run a ship, so I didn’t. I …

. I took one look at the video and enhanced stills from the drone and decided… I’m not the right guy to interpret these. I sent a text to Red, with the pics attached. Her nerveware couldn’t handle high res graphics, so she had to review them on a monitor. I figured it would be a little while before I …

. With my throat gone instantly dry, I asked, “Do you have any way to confirm the situation, Major?” “There’s heavy fighting in that area, Captain. We’ve been taking fire orders for less than a kilometer of that location. They seem to have halted the advance, but the old line has been overrun.” The enemy was less than a kilometer …

. Early the next day, Alexander opened up her doors and released Mo from the grip of the maneuvering braces. I gave a short burn of the port attitude jets (full on the forward and just enough on the aft to balance out the slightly higher mass to the rear. It’s tricky to go sideways when the forward forty percent …

. We tied up in the large boat bay of Fleet Carrier Alexander. While they were putting the maneuvering braces in place around Mo, I sent Gereben out to spend the afternoon in the ship’s hospital. Red and our deckhands went on spacewalk to inspect our hull. I watched the proceedings from the boat bay’s observation port. ESDF officers show …

. “Track her, Poppy!” I ordered after I saw the PTO’s couch light go red. “Joss, obey every takehold! That is an order!” I couldn’t do it myself. I was busy texting warnings to the Fleet sky boss at A[hika concerning what I was about to do to him. Things were about to happen real fast. “Understood!” “Two missiles down!” …

The Slave species called “Rednose” had nothing to do with reindeer. Like Pandas, they were named for a predilection to color their craft a certain way. In their case, without fail, the front ends of all their ships, large and small, are red. They can be much more effective fighters than Pandas, too. Fortunately, we were facing their interceptors, not …

An active outer system battle was underway when we crossed the system limit of Sebka/A[hika system, what astrophysicists call the ‘termination shock’, and became officially ‘in-system’. Actually, that wasn’t a surprise; unlike the equivalent surface navy actions, deep space battles start slowly and take weeks, if not months, because they sprawl across volumes of space that are unimaginably huge in …