Chapter 1
Zuri Mikton’s resignation letter was short, and blunt. Perhaps a bit too blunt? She was friends with a few people who would be highly disappointed in her for quitting. Given the present state of Constellar’s affairs, the nation needed experienced officers. But in Zuri’s case, she knew she wasn’t doing anybody any favors by hanging around—taking up space at a desk assignment, with precisely zero chance for advancement. Better to put her soldiering days behind her, and get on with the business of life. Let somebody much younger, and with far fewer blotches on his record, take the job.
Yet, Admiral Mikton hadn’t been able to push the SEND icon. For weeks, she’d brought the letter up every morning. Rereading its terse few sentences. Changing a word here, and a word there. Once the letter was received and acknowledged, there would be no going back. Zuri would be done. The Constellar Deep Space Operations and Defense personnel office would process her for retirement, and she’d find herself shipping back home—or anywhere else across Constellar—in civilian clothes.
What would it be like, to be a sixty-year-old military dropout, albeit with a significant military pension?
Zuri didn’t really have an answer to that question. Which is why she kept committing the letter to her DRAFTS folder at the end of every evening.
“Ma’am,” said one of the three young ensigns who worked the communications desk of Admiral Mikton’s Interplanetary Command Center, “there’s an encrypted message coming in from the Waypoint monitor, Daffodil.”
Like everyone else in the ICC, the ensign wore a pressed two-piece DSOD duty suit, with sharp creases in both the steel-blue pants—an officer’s black stripe down the exterior of each leg—and the mustard-yellow topcoat. His subdued silver rank was pinned to the topcoat’s largish oxford-style collar, but he didn’t have maroon battle stripes below the elbow, like some of the older veterans—both commissioned and noncommissioned alike. His boots were brown simulated leather, low top, fashioned spacer style, with a high shine. And what little was visible of his undershirt, at the neck, was aluminum gray. A communications branch insignia—black, to match the stripe on his pants—decorated each of his shoulders.
Zuri sat up in her chair, snapping her attention away from her mail to the main hologram suspended in the air over the heads of the ICC’s duty personnel.
“If the Waypoint security force is under attack, why didn’t our alarm system trip over?” Zuri demanded.
The ensign’s fingers flew across his keyboard. “It’s not that kind of message, ma’am,” he said. “Commodore Iakar’s code has been attached—so we know he’s authenticating it…whatever it is. The decryption warning says this is for your eyes, and your eyes alone.”
Zuri slowly leaned back in her chair. How odd.
“Send it to my workstation,” she ordered.
The ICC was shaped like a small amphitheater, with Admiral Mikton’s seat and computer console being positioned at the highest level, toward the very rear. From that vantage point she could survey the entire room, and every piece of the Interplanetary Command puzzle. But her specific seat had no one behind it—no eyes to watch over Zuri’s shoulder. She received the encrypted message from the Daffodil, using her workstation’s battle traffic interface, then pressed her hand to the workstation’s reader. A tiny stripe of blue light swept over her palm, then the battle traffic interface glowed green, and Zuri was able to read the full text of the message which had been transmitted.
Like her resignation letter, the message from the Daffodil’s captain was short, and to the point. She reread the message three times, to be sure she was understanding the situation correctly, then Zuri double-checked Commodore Iakar’s attached code. Yup. Authenticity confirmed. It was not a joke.
Zuri sat silently for a few moments, her fist at her mouth while she gently gnawed on the knuckle of her thumb. Of all the things she might have expected when she dressed for work that morning, this particular bit of news was at the very bottom of Zuri’s list.
“Watch commander,” Zuri called out, “put us on class-three alert.”
Several heads swiveled around, eyes staring up at the admiral as she looked out into the air—at the holographic representation of the star system over which she had presided, as top-most DSOD officer, for the past few years. A class-three alert was unusual. Most of the staff in the room who’d not gone on a fleet exercise had never even heard a class three being called—outside of mock drills.
“Class-three alert, is that correct, ma’am?” asked the lieutenant who was sitting at the watch commander’s station. Like the younger ensign before him, the lieutenant too lacked maroon battle stripes below his elbows.
“You heard me,” Zuri said firmly, “and transmit to Commodore Iakar that the encrypted message has been received, and understood. Since he’s short one monitor now, he’s going to have to be extra diligent about watching the Waypoint—in the monitor’s absence. We don’t want our excitement over the discovery to leave us with our pants down, should anyone try a sneak attack on this system.”
“Begging your pardon, ma’am,” the watch commander said, “But what ‘discovery’ are you talking about?”
“First things first,” Zuri said. “Bring us up to proper alert status, please.”
The watch commander dipped his chin to his chest—in acknowledgment of the order—then turned around and began typing rapidly at his keyboard. Within moments, the man’s voice was carrying throughout the ICC, as well as being broadcast to every DSOD-coded receiver in the entire system.
“THIS IS A CLASS-THREE ALERT, AS ORDERED BY THE INTERPLANETARY COMMAND CENTER. REPEAT, THIS IS A CLASS-THREE ALERT. ALL DOWNTRACE PERSONNEL AND FACILITIES ARE TO REPORT READINESS AND AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. REPEAT AGAIN, CLASS-THREE ALERT. CLASS-THREE ALERT.”
Suddenly the ICC was alive with commotion. One of the huge flatscreen status boards on the far wall flickered to life, and displayed the throbbing orange symbol for live-action alert. The hologram of the system itself—suspended in the air directly over the amphitheater, where all eyes could see it, and Zuri especially had a clear view—sparkled, as each of the DSOD’s different assets began to acknowledge the class three. Little icons closest to the ICC went from brown, to yellow, to green, very quickly. Other locations much farther away—light-minutes distant—would take longer.
Meanwhile, Admiral Mikton knew she had several jobs to do at once.
“I want to talk to the First Family representative,” she said, locking eyes with the same ensign who’d originally taken the encrypted message from the Daffodil. “Then I want somebody to give me a quick count on every spacecraft in this system that is Key equipped. Military, civilian, it doesn’t matter. If it’s interstellar, I want to know what it is, who owns it, and how to get in touch with them.”