"Go get ‘em," he said before shutting off his terminal and leaving his office for the bridge.

* * *

"This is the target, Admiral. The planet Brabus and home to the Federation Starfleet's largest training complex."

"Thank you, Captain," Admiral Kohl said, barely glancing up at the main display that showed an extreme-range view of the unremarkable blue and green planet. Brabus was like most military-owned planets in that it had a few densely populated cities that existed only to support the bases that had been installed. The rest was either unspoiled wilderness or given over to mining or training grounds.

Kohl noticed most military planets also seemed to be better taken care of from an ecological standpoint. Perhaps it was just the small populations or because, by the time these planets were colonized, most of human heavy industry had been moved into space where they could belch out noxious fumes, caustic byproducts, and radiation with impunity.

Brabus was one of the new planets the Federation had received from a species called the Ushin in exchange for using their military to defeat the Darshik, their mortal enemies. During the conflict, dubbed the Expansion War due to all the new, virgin planets the Federation had received as payment, it had also come to light the ESA had been helping the Darshik in their fight against the Federation. That fact had cast the die and put the ESA and the Federation on an inexorable collision course.

"You may proceed with the operation," Kohl said, straightening up from the large tabletop computer display he'd been working at.

"Aye, Admiral," Captain Russo said grimly.

Brabus wasn't heavily defended, but there was a sizeable Starfleet presence in the inner system Kohl didn't wish to waste his ships and crews trying to overcome. It would also be damn near impossible to determine which of those ships were simply training vessels for the advanced graduates and which were armed patrol ships, so he'd be forced to spend precious munitions on both.

A wasteful proposition when his target was only a specific segment of the population: the crews training for the Modular Constructed, Mission Scalable Deployment System, or Mickeys for short. It was a new generation of starship that both confused and frightened the Alliance leadership. The enemy had pumped so much resources and manpower into the program they obviously saw it as a war-winner even if the Alliance analysts didn't fully understand it.

What they did understand, however, was that no ship was worth the alloy it was forged from without a trained, competent crew. While their intelligence service couldn't locate where the ships were being staged, they were able to discover where the crew training took place.

CENTCOM had helpfully consolidated them all on Brabus while they underwent accelerated training on the new ships. The Alliance didn't need to destroy the ships to deny them from the Federation, they could just take out the crews and set them back long enough that it would completely nullify the Mickey threat. By the time the Federation propped up a new training center and found new crews, the war would already be over.