This story takes place within the universe of Steve White’s latest novel, Her Majesty’s American, which depicts an alternate future where the British Empire takes to space, complete with a space navy and a swashbuckling spy for a hero. Vietnam veteran Steve White is the author of numerous science fiction and fantasy novels including Wolf Among the Stars, St. Anthony’s Fire, and Blood of the Heroes. With David Weber, White collaborated on Starfire series novels Insurrection, Crusade, In Death Ground, and New York Times bestseller The Shiva Option. White continued the Starfire series with several other coauthors, with the latest entry in the series being Oblivion coauthored with Charles E. Gannon. White’s solo novels include the popular Jason Thanou time travel series, with latest entry, Gods of Dawn. Steve White lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

At a distance of thirteen and a half astronomical units, Tau Ceti—a smaller star than Sol, with only a little more than half its luminosity—provided very little light. But that light was sufficient to enable Commander Ian Takeda, RSN, gazing at the viewcreen in HMSS Hawke’s bridge, to glimpse the shuttle that had departed the hollowed-out asteroid that was Washington Station.

“Here he comes, Captain,” said Lieutenant Commander Caitlin Malone, the first officer, unnecessarily.

“So I see, Number One,” said Takeda with a nod. He was a tall, slender, aquiline-featured man, the Japanese half of his ancestry manifested mostly in high cheekbones and dark eyes. He was also quite young for his rank, and Hawke was his first command. She wasn’t one of the mighty dreadnoughts of space—the first through third rate ships, in terms of the old rating system that the Royal Space Navy had resurrected from the age of sail to avoid confusion with modern wet-navy ship types—but rather a Benbow class fifth rater, suitable for cruiser-type duties. But Takeda hadn’t yet outgrown a thrill of pride whenever he saw her, with her sleek aerodynamic lines suitable for atmospheric transit, and the flag that adorned her flank—the Union flag of the Britannic Federal Empire.

This story is the grand prize winner of the fifth annual Baen Fantasy Adventure Award. The award recognizes the best original adventure fantasy short story in the style of fantasy greats like Larry Correia, Mercedes Lackey, Elizabeth Moon, Andre Norton, J.R.R. Tolkien, and David Weber, and was given at the GenCon convention in Indianapolis. David VonAllmen is a winner of the Writers of the Future contest, and his short fiction can be found in venues such as Daily Science Fiction and elsewhere. He lives in St. Louis.

The Chained King. Flaming Goat. Moon of Day.

Jane pinched the squares of heavy paper hard enough to turn her fingertips white. She’d finally drawn the hand of cards that would end her years of searching.

Or she’d drawn the hand of cards that would damn her to a lifetime of sorrow. She couldn’t say which it’d be just yet.

“Make your play, Indian woman,” the graying soldier across the table grumbled, just loud enough to be heard above the string quartet playing in one corner of the saloon.

Dr. John Lambshead is a retired senior research scientist in marine biodiversity at the Natural History Museum, London. He was also the Visiting Chair at Southampton University, Oceanography, and Regent’s Lecturer, University of California. He writes military history and designs computer and fantasy games. Lambshead is the author of swashbuckling fantasy Lucy’s Blade, contemporary urban fantasy Wolf in Shadow, and coauthor, with nationally best-selling author David Drake, of science fiction adventures, Into the Hinterlands and Into the Maelstrom.

Every schoolboy with any interest in space opera knows two things: the first is that it is absolutely de rigueur to have your heroes buzz around in FTL ships of some sort, and the second is that it takes an infinite amount of energy to accelerate a mass to light speed because said object increases in mass with additional velocity until that mass itself becomes infinite.

This has led space opera authors to devise all sorts of clever side-steps to travel faster than light without accelerating mass to light speed. An early solution was E.E. "Doc" Smith’s inertialess drives, an idea later reused by well-known writers such as Robert A. Heinlein, Larry Niven, and Alastair Reynolds as well as in Rick Priestley’s 40K miniature game. It’s an idea not without issues. A photon may have a theoretical mass of zero at rest but it surely has momentum when it gets underway—all of which means that an inertialess space ship would bounce back like a super-ball if it collided with a photon. As there are quite a few photons knocking around in space, a trip in an inertialess starship would be a bare-knuckle ride to beat everything else in the cosmic fairground.

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