He lurched to the side, taking some of the weight off his aching left leg. Then he glanced down at the small display on the console. The array of neatly aligned dots told him what he needed to know. His squadrons were formed up perfectly, a testament to the Alliance’s high standards of training…and perhaps to the fact that Commander Vennius had scoured the fleet for veteran pilots to transfer to Invictus’s squadrons. Junus had never seen so many ace pilots assigned to one ship before. There wasn’t a man or woman in his force that hadn’t seen at least two or three battles, and many could match his own dozen. The elite of the Alliance’s fighter corps was here, and he was determined to see them live up to their reputation.

He looked down at the throttle, unused for now as he allowed the AI to pilot his bird. There were notches on the side, carved roughly into the otherwise smooth steel. Twenty-three of them, one for each enemy fighter he had destroyed, and enough to rank him in the Alliance’s top tier of aces. It was a vanity, he realized, to mark his kills like that, and even a greater one to transfer the notches to his new ship. But he’d done it anyway, as he suspected most of his people had. You could sometimes teach a pilot wisdom and patience, but you could never completely take the bravado away.

And if you could, you’d take his soul with it. And then he would be useless…

He stared down at his com unit. It was utterly silent. No chatter, no status reports. The orders were clear. Total radio silence until he was sure the enemy had detected his fighters.

Which will be soon anyway…

He glanced down at the positional display. His squadrons were almost halfway to Santis, close enough for the enemy’s active scanners to pick them up. It was only a matter of time.

What would happen then was the real question. His birds were moving at high velocity. They’d been accelerating steadily since Invictus’s catapults had launched them, and now they were moving at roughly one point five percent of lightspeed. He had a decision to make—Commander Rigellus had given him two options. Hit the enemy at high speed, making one blindingly-quick strafing run, or decelerate as his birds approached, slowing down to engage and destroy any fighters the enemy launched, followed by a sustained attack against the enemy vessel.

Junus wouldn’t make that decision, though, he knew. Not really. The Confeds would. If they were slow to respond—as all the intel reports suggested they would be—he would sustain his velocity and try to reach the enemy battleship before it could deploy its defensive fighters. A strike like that could be devastating, even though his squadrons would get only a single pass.