Space Station Unity One, Earth Orbit

► Eric Stanton Weston watched the door close and waited a few seconds to be sure that the departing man was gone before turning to the admiral and speaking.

“I’ve heard about him,” he said, referring to the man who’d just left the office. “His crew took down three of the Block’s big supercarriers, the submersible ones.”

“Four,” Admiral Gracen said calmly. “Captain Passer’s reputation in military circles almost matched yours. He would have been given the Odyssey command if you weren’t such a hot-button topic with the press.”

Eric chuckled softly. “I’m not sure how to feel about that.”

“Neither is the admiralty,” Gracen informed him. “Frankly, most of them wish they’d just retired you and put him in the hot seat from the start.”

Eric nodded slowly, unsurprised by the fact but more than a little shocked that she was telling him about it so bluntly.

“What about you?”

“What about me?” Amanda Gracen asked with a delicate shrug of her shoulders. “I’m hardly one to cry over spilled milk, not even if it was spilled all over my home planet.”

Eric grimaced. He supposed that answered that.

“In reality, I doubt he’d have done much better,” she said after a moment. “Possibly he would have done far worse. You know, as I do, the Drasin were moving in our direction anyway. Maybe they’d have stopped with the Priminae; maybe they wouldn’t have. If they hadn’t, and if we weren’t warned about their arrival ahead of time and didn’t have allies to call on . . . Well, I think we got off lightly.”

That wasn’t something Eric would argue with. He was well aware of just what would have happened if the Drasin had landed on Earth without the entire military community standing ready to blow every last one of them back to the dust from which they came. One Drasin could become ten, and ten a hundred, in just hours. Give them days and they’d chew the entire world out from under your feet and leave you orbiting the Sun as a loose formation of giant spiders.

A very loose formation.

“Captain Passer has his orders, and now you have yours,” Gracen said, handing him an electronic flimsy.

Eric accepted the clear plastic sheet, thumbing the biometric scanner automatically as he shifted the flimsy around so he could read it. The dispatch sheet was largely things he was already aware of, of course. The rumor mill was only one of the many things in human space these days that traveled faster than light, but it was still the fastest of the bunch.

“So, back to Priminae space,” he said finally.