"Impact of first target in ten seconds," OPS called out.

The first Shrike, having already ignited its final booster stage, slammed into the target with such ferocity it actually went out the other side of the small ship before the warhead detonated. The second missile must have hit something denser inside the structure as it slammed into the aft of the ship, the detonation ripping the vessel into a dozen pieces that went spinning away.

The rest of the battle—if it could even be called that—was inevitable. One missile lost guidance and shut down before impact, safing its warhead so it could be retrieved later. All others hammered into their targets, decimating the enemy force in a matter of minutes. In the aftermath, only two of the targets were left intact enough to even bother taking a closer look at.

"Coms, tell the Gladius to approach the most intact target with caution and take high-res scans of the wreckage for Admiral Wolfe," Risher said. "Report to the Saber that all known targets have been destroyed."

"The admiral sends his congratulations, sir," the coms officer said. "He said, 'a damn fine job.'"

Risher just smiled tightly and nodded. All targets destroyed, no damage or casualties to the taskforce…a damn fine job indeed.

14

"Eight of the ten Feng-class stealth ships have been destroyed, sir. Somehow, the ships under Wolfe's command were able to approach without our ships detecting them. All eight were destroyed in less than five minutes."

"That was eighty percent of our total compliment of stealth ships and six years of work down the drain," Councilman Makov sighed. "What the hell is Wolfe even doing there? Goddamn that man!"

Makov was on the Alliance Defense Fleet's newest command ship, Ascendency. The command ship concept was an anachronism from the very early days of space-going navies that had been long ago phased out. The newly minted Alliance Defense Fleet, the umbrella organization all ESA military assets now fell under, had brought it back not to command fleets of ships in battle, but to manage civil matters during communication blackouts on a planetary scale.

Councilman Makov had seen to the commission of the six ships in the class while Councilman Chan had done his job in the Alliance Council to push through the creation of the ADF. By selling the entire Council on the new military command structure, the governing body of the ESA had unwittingly transferred the entire military apparatus to a cabal laying the groundwork for conquest over the Federation since the beginning of their so-called Expansion War.

The Federation may have defeated the ESA's alien partners, but the war with the Darshik had cost them dearly. The Darshik alliance had been Chan's idea and, in the end, likely won the war for the ESA before it even started. A depleted and weary Federation fleet was now in no shape to repel the numerically superior Alliance forces.

The only wrinkle in the plan had been trying to figure out a way to get the Council to take that last step and officially declare war on the Federation. It was a bridge too far for most of them and, in the end, Chan had decided waiting for them to act was too unpredictable and time-consuming. Instead, he and Makov had adjusted their plans, using Vadim Kohl's atrocities at Odmena as a distraction and simply took the Council out of the equation. By the time they realized their power had been usurped, it would be too late to do anything about it.