He really shouldn’t be aboard this ship, he thought cheerfully, and StateSec General Headquarters back on Nouveau Paris would probably be irritated when it learned he was. He was officially assigned to command the Shilo Sector, which meant overseeing the deployment of all the sector’s people’s commissioners, intervention battalions, spacegoing security detachments, and all the billion-plus-one other details involved in riding herd on so many different star systems in the Committee’s name. And to be fair, he enjoyed the responsibility and authority which were his. But there were times when it could get deadly dull, and the best a sector CO this far from the front—or the Capital Sector—could realistically hope for was that things would stay so quiet no one on Nouveau Paris even noticed he was out here. If the capital did notice him, it would almost inevitably be because he’d screwed up in some spectacular fashion, since, by definition, no one ever noticed the places where things went right. Which meant that those who wished to be promoted still higher in StateSec’s hierarchy sought to avoid postings to places like Shilo like the very plague.

Thornegrave had recognized the danger when Citizen General Tomkins invited him to a personal meeting at GHQ and begun by describing his new assignment as “not flashy to the untrained eye, maybe, but critically important to the war effort. The sort of post where we need the best man we can possibly find—which was the reason we immediately thought of you, Prestwick. I can call you Prestwick, can’t I, Citizen Major General?”

Unfortunately, his best efforts to evade Shilo had failed, and he’d been stuck here for close to two T-years while men and women junior to him were promoted past him. There hadn’t seemed to be anything he could do about it, either… until, that was, Citizen Major General Harris (no relation to the defunct Legislaturalist clan of the same name) had been obliging enough to drop dead of a cerebral hemorrhage. Thornegrave had never wished the woman any harm, and to be fair, his initial reaction had been one of dismay. But that had only lasted long enough for him to realize that the projected expedition to Seabring was inarguably a two-star command. And since he’d been the only SS two-star available…

He chuckled gleefully at the thought of his coup. He supposed it could be reasonably argued that the Shilo Sector was also at least a two-star command… and the one to which he had been assigned. But that was the point. It could be argued either way, and he was the senior officer on the spot who had to decide the argument. And so, regretfully, he had concluded that Seabring’s proximity to the front, coupled with the reported refractory attitudes of its citizens, gave it priority over a quiet sector a light-century and a half from the nearest fighting. That being the case, there was no way he could justify remaining in the safety of his formally assigned billet, which had left him no choice but to turn Shilo over to his exec and take command of the Seabring expedition. If Citizen General Tomkins disagreed, he could always tell him so… in about six and a half months, when the reply to Thornegrave’s first report from Seabring got back to him from Nouveau Paris.