Vindictus had somehow made it to point blank range and, even more miraculously, her main guns had still been operational. Kat closed her eyes for a few seconds, remembering the moment she’d given the order to fire, the feeling she’d had as she saw the great pulsar cannon split down the middle, her laser batteries tearing into it. Success. Victory. Though earned at the ultimate cost. Vindictus sat under the guns of the forts after the destruction of the pulsar cannon, its weapons silenced, its engines torn to scrap, and Kat had known her ship was doomed, that her people would all die. Then it happened.

The ships, the vanguard of the Alliance fleet, the great battleships her impulsive maneuver had saved…they came whipping around the other side of the moon, and as each vessel moved into the clear, it opened fire, targeting the fortresses, blasting them to atoms.

Kat remembered sitting in her chair, waiting for death. She’d known her position was hopeless, that the cost of saving the fleet had been the loss of her ship and crew. But Vindictus held, somehow it stood firm despite all the enemy forts could throw at it. Her vessel had been blasted almost to bits, its reactors shut down, its weapons gone. But the twisted hull of the great warship still stood, hanging on just long enough, providing emergency life support to the half of her crew who had survived to that point.

She savored the images…watching the fortresses die. One first, and then, seconds later, the other. They died under the relentless assault of the fleet. They died as the Alliance warriors pressed forward, fighting with all they had, struggling to rescue Vindictus and the great heroes aboard who had saved them all. And Vindictus and those left in her crew had indeed been spared. Kat’s ship had been as good as lost, blasted far beyond repair, but in the end it was saved from final destruction, and half its people survived. Though it would never fight again, Vindictus’s name had entered the Honoreum, the hallowed records of the Alliance military.

Now she was back on Palatia, paraded around, hailed, shaking hands and being put forth as the ideal Alliance warrior. She detested the addition of role model to the list of her duties, but she knew her place, and her obligation was to serve however she could. Kat questioned things quietly sometimes, but she was a Palatian Patrician, and obedience and devotion were bred into the very cells of her body. It was in her to question herself, but never to rebel against what she was.