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Table of Contents

About the Author

Copyright Page

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FOR DAD.

I think you would’ve liked this one a lot.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to my lovely wife, Kim, for keeping me going these last few years. The road’s a little twisty but I think we’ll like where we’re going.

My first-draft readers helped me to make this a better book.

So, my thanks to Cormac, Luke, Darrin, Chris, Chris, Ryan, and David. You guys rock.

A special thanks to my agent, Richard Curtis, and my excellent editor, Jen Gunnels, for their hard work in bringing this project to fruition.

And, finally, thanks to Alex and Hannah for sharing my appreciation for nerd culture. It’s a lucky man whose daughters read Lovecraft.

For heathen heart that puts her trust

    In reeking tube and iron shard—

All valiant dust that builds on dust,

    And guarding calls not Thee to guard—

For frantic boast and foolish word,

Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!

        —Rudyard Kipling, “Recessional”

1

New Perth, Caledonia System

Lieutenant Sikander Singh North leaned forward in the shuttle’s right-hand seat, eager to catch his first glimpse of the light cruiser Hector. The shuttle climbed slowly into low orbit, only four hundred kilometers above the feathered white cloud tops and gray-green dayside of New Perth. The white glare of Caledonia’s sun illuminated dozens of freighters and tugs going about their business in the planet’s busy approaches. Sikander quickly spotted the huge mass of New Perth Fleet Base—hard to miss, really, since the orbital structure was the size of a small city—and narrowed his eyes, peering in turn at each of the ships moored to the station’s long arms. To his disappointment, the hulls of the Aquilan warships all looked the same at this distance; he felt he should have been able to spot his new ship as easily as he might pick out a pretty girl’s face from a crowd. He’d certainly spent enough time memorizing every detail of CSS Hector’s lines and armament over the month and a half since he’d received his new assignment.

Beside him Petty Officer Second Class Robert Long, a pilot in Hector’s Flight Department, smiled. He’d guessed exactly what Sikander was doing, and he pointed out the docked cruiser for him. “Left-hand side of Fleet Base, sir, the second berth from the top. We’ll be there in just a minute. ”