"It's a legal order, Commander," the captain said, looking defeated. "I'll do it if you can't."

"Transmitting codes now," Easton choked out.

A few of the ships had managed to get their emergency systems up and running, and a few weak lights could be seen on the visual-spectrum sensors. On the main monitor above the bridge's large windows, a composite image of the drifting ships was displayed in real-time so the ESA admiral had a clear view of multiple nuclear warheads ripping into his taskforce. The destruction was absolute. As the light of the last fire faded, Admiral Xiao and Commander Easton wept aloud, both refusing to look away.

"That hatred you now feel for me, Admiral? Now you have some small inkling of what I've felt for you since I lost my family," Carson said, his voice hard. "When you're awakened by the nightmares of what you've just witnessed, remember it was you who came here to attack us, and it was you who drew first blood with the atrocity of Odmena."

"They deserved a warrior's death," Xiao said through the tears.

"They deserved nothing more than what they received," Carson said.

3

"Holy shit."

"That's what I said when I saw the report," Pike said. "I know Carson. Worked with him a couple times. This isn't his usual MO. He's normally a surgical instrument."

"And this happened on one of Celesta's ships? What a fucking mess." Admiral Jackson Wolfe tossed the tile with the mission debrief onto his desk.

Jackson was getting a personal briefing from a CIS Agent—who just happened to be one of his closest friends—and he'd just watched the sensor feeds of another Agent destroying an entire taskforce after they'd already surrendered and were helpless. He, more than most, understood the ugly reality of war, but he was also a lifelong spacer through and through, and seeing the Alliance crews killed without need didn't sit well with him.

"Director Perez isn't happy. At all," Pike said. "It'll also be a nasty black eye for the Stark administration. This is the sort of shit the anti-war crowd loves to parade around to make it look like we're the aggressors."

"Most of the anti-war MP's within the Fed Parliament are on the payroll of the ESA one way or another," Gillian Wolfe said from the floor where she and her two children played a game.

"Or they're not on the payroll of our prime defense contractors…but want to be," Jackson said to his wife.

Jackson had been put in command of a highly classified strike force made up of five destroyers that had been built using the leftover Valkyrie-class hulls. The program had been decommissioned after the Nemesis had been built and, in a post-war economy, had been dubbed too expensive and unnecessary. The CIS had swooped in to collect the hulls before they could be recycled and had them transported to a deep space black site where crews finished the construction in secret.

The CIS then pulled in Starfleet in order to vet and transfer crews to the new ships and get them prepped for battle. The new class, dubbed the Super Valkyrie, had capabilities that wouldn't be seen on mainline warships for many, many years. The strike force had been activated and deployed for one reason alone: the apprehension and capture of Admiral Vadim Kohl, the ESA commander responsible for three antimatter bombs being set off over the planet Odmena.