New Frontiers

The Expansion Wars Trilogy

Book One

Joshua Dalzelle

©2016

Kindle Edition

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to real persons, events, or places are purely coincidental; any references to actual places, people, or brands are fictitious. All rights reserved.

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Edited by Monique Happy Editorial Services

Prologue

The euphoria of victory following the news that the Terran Starfleet had eliminated the Phage threat and had, effectively, won the war didn’t last long. The celebration gave way to a hangover that left the leadership of the Terran Confederacy’s individual enclaves feeling snappish and demanding answers. More specifically, they wanted a scapegoat. Someone they could point to and shout to their respective electorates, “Those are the people that caused this! Blame them, not us!”

Exacerbating this was the loss of a centralized Confederate leadership structure. The capital planet, Haven, had been destroyed in the war, along with most of the administrative bureaucracy, a sizable chunk of the Senate, and CENTCOM’s orbiting fortress: Jericho Station. The elected leader of the Confederacy, President Caleb McKellar, could not be confirmed as being on Haven when it was lost so the entire civilian government seemed to be left in the lurch, unsure as to what their next move should be and most too afraid to even suggest something in the hostile political environment.

As if that wasn’t enough, CENTCOM had also clammed up. Fleet Admiral Marcum, who was also the CENTCOM Chief of Staff and second in command after the President, refused to provide complete details of the campaign until they resolved questions about the civilian leadership of the organization. This left the press, and the less scrupulous politicians, free to invent their own narratives. Among the most popular of the early theories was that a rogue starship captain, Jackson Wolfe, had ignited the war when he’d panicked and fired upon an alien ship in one of the Frontier systems.

The story of Wolfe’s bumbling exploits almost took hold and was close to becoming a “truth” in the collective consciousness of humanity, but then there was a massive leak from within CENTCOM. Since the organization was still temporarily headquartered at the New Sierra Shipyards, and the facility had been hastily upgraded to make room for all the new tenants, pinning down who had leaked the sensitive information proved to be almost impossible. The tech crews hadn’t even been able to find out how the secure servers had been accessed to pull so much classified data, much less transmit it off the orbiting facility.