He made a chopping motion to the com officer to let her know he was finished.

"You probably made a few screen operators on Xinjia piss themselves, sir," Barrett said. "Now, we get to see who will respond first, them or Kohl."

"Kohl will suspect a trap with only five ships down there," Jackson said. "He'll begin to try and spot what he assumes will be the rest of our forces out here in the outer system. If we're really lucky, he'll use radar."

"We're not usually very lucky, sir."

"Don't I know it."

* * *

"Arrogant Earther," Kohl snarled as Wolfe's message played for the second time.

"Message definitely came from the ship we've identified as the Saber," Captain Russo said. "Sensor operators confirm the ships are the same type our forces faced in System B-1171."

"It's him," Kohl said. "Even after his loss at Odmena, he still flies in with undeserved swagger." Russo raised an eyebrow at that comment but said nothing. The truth was that Kohl had been routed by Wolfe at Odmena. Kohl was now trying to rewrite history, painting himself as a bold, decisive tactician who hit the planet—even though that had been an accident—while Wolfe was too timid and indecisive to make the hard decisions it took to win. Russo hadn't actually been sure if that had been clever image rehab or frightening delusion.

The captain had served under Kohl for some years but, in truth, he was a CIS Agent who had been sent in to keep an eye on him when he popped up on the threat map. Everything had been going well, right up until his handler had been burned and he'd been cut off from the CIS completely. He'd been put in under deep cover so his name wouldn't show up in any normal asset audit. Without the handler providing his intel and confirming his status, he'd been written off as lost.

For the last few years, he'd tried to derail Kohl as best he could without getting himself tossed out an airlock when they did a deep dive and found out his service record was forged. After the sociopath had accidentally detonated those antimatter charges over Odmena, Russo had hit one of the lowest points of his life. He'd never felt such guilt and self-loathing before and, before too long, he contemplated sucking on the end of his pistol to end it all.

Then something odd happened. As Kohl himself was on the ropes for the wholesale slaughter of civilians by his forces, he also hit a low point and needed someone to turn to. That person ended up being then-Commander Vincent Russo. During Kohl's drunken, rambling commiserations, he let Russo deeper and deeper into the shadowy cabal he worked for, letting him peek behind the curtain at the group that would one day rule over all humanity.

As he was led further into Kohl's inner circle, he saw new purpose. He cataloged everything, keeping a log of the cabal's activities and assets as best he could with the hopes of one day being able to transmit it back to the Federation. He could reach out with Kohl's Bluebird device whenever he could get access, but the system could barely send strings of simple text and was ill-suited for what he needed. Now that Wolfe's ships were here, however, he had some interesting new options.