“Farewell, Captain Tyler Barron. My regards, and my respect to a fellow warrior. Join your people, and fight the war that is like to come upon you. I ask but one thing of you. If, in the fullness of time, our people do become allies…know that my spirit rides to battle with you. For it would be an honor to serve at your side and not against you. Good fortune to you, and to all who serve you.”

With that the screen went dark, and Tyler Barron sat long, staring at the blackness where his enemy had been moments before.

*   *   *

Kat had stood while she addressed Captain Barron. He’d been a worthy adversary, an opponent a true warrior could only respect, and she had treated him as such. But now she sat down. Invictus’s bridge was a smoke-filled wreck, most of her officers dead. Wentus was still alive, though he was mortally wounded and barely conscious. She wasn’t sure how many of her people were still alive in other sections of the ship. A significant number, no doubt, though she was sure hundreds were already dead.

Now that she’d cut the com line, she sat down. It was odd that amid the destruction and defeat, the disgrace and the shadow of death upon her, she should still have a fleeting thought once again about how comfortable her chair was. She almost laughed.

She reached down and pulled up the mini tablet she kept in the compartment next to her seat. She flicked her finger across it, and it lit up, displaying a photo. A young boy and girl. Her children. She ran her fingers over their images, and she felt strange, her eyes moist, wet with tears.

Alliance warriors don’t cry…

But for all the forcefulness of her thought, all the decades of training and indoctrination, the discipline bred into her soul, she could feel the tears streaming down her cheeks. She didn’t cry over her imminent death, nor even the realization that she would never see her children again, though that tore at her like knives slicing through her heart.

No, it was none of those things that had broken her. It was the realization that her children would follow her example. They would be raised as the next generation of the Regulli, as heirs to the family tradition of service and unswerving devotion to duty. They would be just as she had been. Even if they had questions, doubts, they would bury them and follow their orders. They would fight…and they would likely win glory. Until one day each came to the pass she had, the final defeat. The thought of her children staring into the same abyss yawning before her was the final blow.