Instead, Conner found himself choosing vengeance over everything else, and focusing on giving Admiral Gracen the best tech people he had, those who would know how to take everything they found and turn it into a weapon to use against the murderers of the human race.

Tachyon specialists, anti-matter and quantum physicists, and the people who knew the most about devising new and unholy ways of killing as many things as possible in the shortest time possible. He had a lot of those to pick from, and this was possibly the first time that he’d ever been truly happy about that fact.

He wasn’t being entirely altruistic, if you could call assembling what he personally hoped would become the greatest lineup of potential mass killers in the history of the planet altruistic. He’d slipped his wife and daughter on the list. They were already being hustled to an evac point, along with their security agents and their families. He expected that would keep them both quiet and loyal to their charges, or he hoped it would.

He grabbed a bottle of antacids, downing a half dozen and crunching on the chalky tablets as he went back to work. He figured that his stomach would either burn out or stop working entirely from either the stress or the influx of acid neutralizers. But in a few days he wouldn’t need to eat anymore anyway, so screw it.

Why did I want this crappy job in the first place?

He knew the answer to that, actually. But right now wasn’t the time to bear on the deficiencies of a system that got him elected to an office that he, in all candid honesty, probably never should have been allowed anywhere near. He had the job, he had important things to do, and they were going to get done before it was too late.

They had to.

For once in his life, he was going to do try to do the right thing, even though he’d be damned to hell if he knew what that was. Everything else could just go swing.

Eric Stanton Weston stomped onto the bridge of the Odysseus, his rage blotting out any sense of wonder he might have felt upon seeing the wraparound vista that surrounded the command and control of the impressive ship. He was focused on the center console and the admiral sitting there, and his mind was nearly seeing red after what he’d been told.

He was still in armor, though he’d stowed his rifle and his helmet somewhere behind him. Probably with Bermont, he supposed. He vaguely remembered the lieutenant trying to calm him down, or at least slow him down. Neither had worked, though it had taken some time to get a straight answer out of the Canadian trooper as to where he could find the bridge.