CHAPTER TEN

Priminae Ranquil System, Forge Facility—One Month after D-Fall

AMANDA GRACEN WAS known to be a patient woman. It wasn’t that people had that general opinion of her. It was a documented fact. You could make admiral and be somewhat rash, but you didn’t get assigned to the keyhole position in the Confederation’s orbital defense network if you weren’t a rock.

For all that, however, here in the middle of an alien facility, situated inside the photosphere and near the radiative zone of a giant type A star, she found that her patience had worn thin within the first few days of arriving.

The Priminae facility was . . . amazing, astonishing, impossible, and any number of other descriptive words that failed her every time she looked out of the shielded viewing areas to the solar storms happening a few hundred thousand kilometers away in every possible direction.

Situating a construction facility inside a type A star was pure insanity, even if they hadn’t originally planned it that way. The fact that the Priminae had done just that, and then made it work for them, had completely blown her mind.

For about two days.

Since then, all she could think of was what was beyond the roiling flames of plasma, beyond the gravity well of the Priminae star, a few hundred light-years away and either dead or under siege.

Gracen knew that she wasn’t the only one either. Every human on the station, plus the crew of the Big E, the NACS Enterprise, felt the same. This wasn’t their place, but there wasn’t a damn thing any of them could do about it as things currently stood. They didn’t have the ships or the firepower to do anything productive to help Earth.

That knowledge just made things all the worse.

She was the highest-ranking authority of any type from Earth, and that put every decision on her shoulders. With the security situation at home—that is, there being no security at home—she’d made one of the hardest decisions of her career. She had agreed to a technology exchange that would never have happened, not in a million years, if not for the fact that the Earth was facing genocide.

Transition technology was classified so top secret that outside of the ships themselves, there was no single place you could steal it. Technically, she was now a traitor to the Confederation for giving it to a foreign power. That alone could conceivably get her shot, but handing over tachyon waveguide technology as well?

If she were wrong about how serious the situation was, if the Confederation somehow pulled their own bacon out of the fire, well then, they’d invent a way to shoot her slowly.