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cabin, aboard the Republican Naval Ship Nitro, and surveyed the warships of Battlecruiser Squadron Six through the screen on the bulkhead. Halvorsen’s deep blue eyes focused on the nearest battlecruiser moored in space, the RNS Phoenix. At two-times magnification, it easily fit into the space between his massive thumb and forefinger. The Phoenix ’s twin, the Chou-Roon, was out twice that distance, and looked more to the colonel like a faint star than an Osiris-class heavy BC—the pride of the fleet and, as it happened, that of BATRON-6 too. Massing 152,000 tons, and with a beam length of 553 meters, Osiris-class battlecruisers were nearly twenty percent larger than their older Mandrake-class cousins, with almost half again the throw weight in missile tubes. And BATRON-6 was fortunate enough to have two of them among its six total elements.
    Halvorsen’s gaze drifted upward, past Hold’s partially eclipsed and heavily cratered moon, to a patch of space occupied by two aging Mandrake BCs: Kearsarge and Rio Grande. Kearsarge was the closer of the two warships. He placed his palm against the simulated viewport, which winked to life and confirmed his identity. He drew a perimeter around the small warship and spread his hands until the Kearsarge nearly filled his screen. To an untrained eye, Kearsarge looked like just another warship. In the colonel’s estimation, the vessel had outserved its usefulness, particularly when measured against an Osiris. Fewer docking lights roughed out the vessel’s hull. Only three bays meant fewer LACs to ferry his Marines around, and fewer lifeboats to evacuate the hundreds of souls aboard her should the worst happen. Halvorsen shuddered at the thought.
    RNS Izumo was the sixth and final element of BATRON-6. The newly retrofitted Mandrake BC was on its shakedown cruise out beyond the Kuiper belt and not due to report in for another week.
    At that particular moment, Halvorsen’s astrophobia decided to make itself known. The colonel began to pick at the seam of his regular-dress navy-blue trousers. He forced himself to stare into the void several minutes more, though every fiber in his body longed to turn the screen off and turn on every light in his cabin. Being aboard ship, out in the drink, confused his internal compass, and on occasion made him nauseous. He’d settled on a small admission of weakness by leaving his desk light on when he slept. That and he’d seen the ship’s doctor, who’d prescribed astrophobia patches, or “A-patches,” to help him get his deck feet while in space. To his knowledge, none of his officers knew about it, not even the first sergeant, and Halvorsen planned to keep it that way. He made a mental note to slap on a fresh A-patch before he left his cabin. Seeing the aging Mandrake battlecruiser out there reminded him that man had tamed space with metal, that a warship’s many fail-safes made interstellar travel nearly as safe as landlocked living.
    Too bad our elected officials didn’t give us the hulls we needed.
    The Senate Uniformed Services Committee had approved the Osiris-class battlecruiser to replace the Mandrake. The appropriations bill had gone to the Senate floor only to be amended and sent down to the House of Planets, and then cut in half by a hastily formed coalition of Socialist Reformers and Neo-Isolationists. The end result was typical. The Navy got left with one-third of its requested warships, and a half-kept promise to modernize and extend the life expectancy of the aging Mandrake BCs.
    Halvorsen grunted. That was some son-of-a-broken-promise. The Mandrake is a good ship, though, tough, a real scrapper. A thin smile crossed his face, and then worked its way up to his eyes. She’s not pretty—that’s for sure—but she’s got some pleasant surprises under her skirt. System-jumps hard too, like my alpha unit on my homecoming night after a long dip in the pond. If you