Snippet – Stolen Glory (Morningstar II)

Prologue I

From: The Rise and Fall of Leo Morningstar. Baen Historical Press. Daybreak. Year 307.

What can one say about Leo Morningstar?

How can one describe a dancing moonbeam? How can one catch lightning in a jar? How can one describe the innermost thoughts and feelings of a person one has never met? How long can a writer extend a sentence, how purple can he write his prose, before the editor tells him that it is nothing more than blatant padding to disguise the fact he doesn’t have a clue and his incredibly long run-on sentences are mountains of nonsense that most readers will tune out before they get to the reveal?

And how can a writer keep his editor from cutting the above paragraph?

Leo Morningstar was born in Cold Harbour, on Daybreak, the child of Senior Crew Chief Davis (who was awarded the Navy Cross by then-Captain Sullivan and took the name of his ship in thanks, as was and remains customary) and Hoshiko Davis, the daughter of two immigrants who earned citizenship and became a teacher. His father enjoyed the patronage of Grand Senator (Admiral) Sullivan, and a combination of this patronage and extremely good test rests ensured that Leo Morningstar was able to enter the Naval Academy at sixteen. He was a brilliant student, who became class valedictorian three years out of four (owing to a quirk in the system, the four years of academy training were required as four different establishments)  and would have probably become valedictorian for all four years if his first year hadn’t been marred by a brutal confrontation between himself and then-Senior Cadet Francis Blackthrone whom Leo nearly beat to death after the older student insulted his mother. It was only through the direct intervention of his patron that Leo was not summarily expelled in disgrace.

The incident did seem to teach him a little prudence, according to his class reports, and he was on track to graduate at the top of his class. Indeed, his desperate plan to save the lives of his peers after a training exercise turned devastatingly real ensured his promotion to lieutenant, if provisional, and a glittering career. His progression came to an abrupt halt, the night before graduation, when he was caught in bed with Fleur O’Hara, the wife of Commandant O’Hara.

This posed an unprecedented dilemma for his superiors. If they demoted him now, after completing his training, and denied him the right to make the formal valediction speech, it would trigger a political crisis. His patron would demand answers, and there would be no good answers they could give. It would be a very public scandal, one that would call into question the academy’s independence from planetary politics. On the other hand, they couldn’t allow him to serve as the valedictorian either, let alone go on to take the promised slot on a front-line combat starship. His actions were a severe breach of the honour code and could not be allowed to go unpunished.

Deputy Commandant Horace Valerian hit on a solution that paid more credit to his head than his heart. Instead of demoting Leo Morningstar, he gave him an unprecedented promotion to Lieutenant-Commander and assigned him to RSS Waterhen, an outdated starship with a very hands-off captain, so hands-off, in fact, that he served almost no time on his vessel at all. Leo would be the de facto commander of Waterhen, during her assignment to a far-distant sector, and no matter the outcome – they thought – there was no way in hell he would ever trouble them again. So far from Daybreak, his chances of being noticed and gaining further promotion would be very slim. It was a neat little solution. Leo’s patron could hardly object to Leo being promoted and Leo himself could hardly refuse the assessment. And it provided a cover story to ensure he wasn’t on the academy grounds when the time came to give his speech. Leo was, in fact, put on a shuttle to Waterhen shortly after being given the news. It was generally assumed he would never be seen again.

Leo was not best pleased, when he arrived on Waterhen, to discover a very unhappy ship indeed. The crew were the dregs of the service and the nominal captain was even worse, spending most of his days in the pleasure dens rather than doing his job. He was not, however, trained to give up, and working with the few genuinely decent crewmembers (and abusing his absent captain’s command codes) he worked hard to bring his new command up to par. Waterhen would never be a front-line combat starship, as she was too outdated to serve in any major deployment, but she would be an effective anti-pirate ship. When she jumped out, and started her long voyage to the Yangtze Sector, Leo had at least some reason for confidence. Being so far from Daybreak would allow him to operate without supervision, giving him a chance to use unconventional tactics to defeat the pirates and convince the locals of the value of being part of the Daybreak Republic. Or, as they knew it even then, the Daybreak Empire.

The sector was in turmoil when Leo arrived. Some worlds had been forced into the republic and chaffed under its rule, complaining of the lack of rewards for their submission. Others remained isolated, or plagued by pirates and insurrectionists; it was hard, almost impossible, for the newly-appointed Governor Steven Brighton to make any headway, as he lacked any real naval support until Leo arrived. Bringing order to the sector would be a challenge to any lesser man, but Leo gritted his teeth and got to work. Through a series of daring operations, he destroyed or captured a number of pirate ships and took control of a pirate base, giving him the nucleus of an auxiliary fleet to patrol the spacelanes and make life difficult for the pirates. It was far from perfect, as he acknowledged himself, but it was a start. He also earned the admiration of Gayle Bridgerton, the daughter of Deputy Governor Hari Bridgerton, and they became lovers.

It was also a threat to a local consortium, led by Hari Bridgerton, that had been conspiring against the empire. Their plan had been thrown into disarray by Leo’s arrival and his bid to actually do his duty, forcing them to launch an attack, gambling they could capture or destroy Leo and his ship before it was too late. Their plan came very close to success, as Gayle was one of the conspirators and she was able to lure Leo away from his ship. but Leo was able to turn the tables and – through a brilliant and innovative tactic – destroy the enemy ship. Hari Bridgerton was apparently killed; the fate of his daughter remained unknown.

Leo had good reason to be pleased with himself, as his reports winged their way back to Daybreak. He had defeated a serious threat, put together a small squadron that could keep up the pressure on pirate operations, and proved that Daybreak was in the sector to stay. But all of his accomplishments were thrown into jeopardy by the arrival of reinforcements, commanded by Commodore Alexander Blackthrone, uncle to Lieutenant-Commander Francis Blackthrone, who had good reason to hate Leo’s guts …

Prologue II

“I can’t believe you got away with that,” Cadet Judy Singh teased. “What were you thinking?”

Leo smirked. The navel combat simulator was the most complex system known to mankind, the most realistic depiction of naval combat outside actual live-fire exercises. It had taken him weeks to even begin to get to grips with the sheer complexity of the system and his instructors had been at pains to assure him, and the rest of the cadets, that it was nowhere near as complex as serving in a real Combat Information Centre. There were no communications breakdowns, no speed of light delays, no subordinates who misunderstood your orders and did the wrong thing at the worst possible time. Leo had questioned the value of such a system and had been told they had to learn to walk before they could run, to understand how to handle the mock combat under ideal conditions before facing the fog of war and all the other little problems that made the simplest things difficult in the real world. And then he’d had his head handed to him by an officer who had commanded an actual deep-space engagement. It had been embarrassing.

His lips twisted at the memory. Losing to an experienced opponent was one thing, but it hadn’t been remotely a fair fight. Or so he’d thought. He’d actually lodged a protest when he’d been told he’d have a heavy cruiser, crammed with missiles as well as energy weapons, and his opponent would have a destroyer, barely armed with anything more than outdated missiles and popguns. The odds had been so heavily in his favour that he’d almost been embarrassed to step into the training simulator, knowing it would make him look like a bully. Or a coward. And then he’d lost the engagement, so decisively it had made him a laughing stock for several days afterwards. Sure, he’d had the firepower, but his opponent had known all the tricks. In hindsight, he should have rammed the destroyer with his heavy cruiser. It would have been a less embarrassing defeat.

“You had the edge on paper, Cadet Morningstar,” Instructor Griffin had said, afterwards. “But in practice, the victory will always go to the officer who knows his enemy and knows himself.”

Leo had taken the lesson to heart, after being forced to write no less than three after-action reports to explain his defeat. The instructor had known the capabilities of both ships and tailored his attacks to take advantages of weaknesses and blind spots, deploying his far more limited drones and other pieces of equipment to get close to the heavy cruiser’s hull and tear it apart at point-blank range. Leo couldn’t help thinking he’d deserved his humiliation, that if he’d played the engagement a little more carefully he would have won … not, he supposed, that he would have been able to enjoy his victory. On paper, the odds had been ludicrously in his favour. He might as well have been a grown man beating up a toddler. What sort of monster would applaud that?

He grinned. “It worked, didn’t it?”

Judy snorted, her lips wrinkling in a manner Leo would have found cute if he hadn’t been so tired. “Barely.”

“It worked,” Leo repeated. It wasn’t the sort of tactic he’d have cared to use in a real engagement, if only because there were too many things that could have gone wrong, but they’d been strongly advised not to even think about it. It hadn’t taken him long to realise they hadn’t been ordered not to try it. A loophole … small, he conceded, but there. “And if the OpFor CO had been a little more careful, the trick wouldn’t have worked.”

His lips twisted into a smile. He had no idea who’d been played the OpFor CO commander, but he’d been so convinced of his victory that he hadn’t even bothered to come in on a random vector. Perhaps he’d just wanted to get it over with, because he’d advanced towards the planet on a least-time course, something that had given Leo plenty of time to get his ships into position and power down his drives. The vessels had looked like holes in space, practically undetectable on passive sensors, until he’d hit the switch and opened fire at point-blank range. The OpFor CO had been caught completely by surprise, not even managing to get a single shot off before his ships had been blown away. Leo had no idea who’d been in command, on the other side, but he was going to get one hell of a lecture from his superiors. If the engagement had been real, it would have been the most one-sided victory in space-navy history.

Judy pointed a finger at him. “That won’t work twice.”

Leo shrugged. “Probably not.”

He followed her into the refectory, where the rest of the first-year cadets were eating before the next set of lectures and training exercises. They had been told it would only get harder, as they passed through the four-year training course … Leo winced inwardly, noting a handful of cadets who were likely to drop out before the exams at the end of the year. The instructors were good at spotting promising cadets and helping them overcome their early fumbles, but there were limits to how far they were prepared to go. Leo knew, without false modesty, that he was amongst the best. He also knew he was incredibly lucky to be anywhere near the academy. If he hadn’t had a prominent patron, the odds of him entering the academy would have been very low. He would have had to join the navy as a crewman and then become a mustang.

Which is far from impossible, he reminded himself. Quite a few officers, famed in song and story, had started their careers as simple crewmen. You just need the dedication to succeed.

A hand fell on his shoulder. “Morningstar!”

Leo tensed as he spun around. Senior Cadet Francis Blackthrone was everything Leo detested wound up into one, a dashingly handsome young man who had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth. The Blackthrone Clan had been amongst the original founders of Daybreak and they never let anyone forget it, certainly not the current generation who had no deeds of their own to their name. Francis’s name had been down for the academy since birth and there had been no question that he’d attend, something Leo would have sold his soul for. He had often wondered, as the older cadet hazed the youngsters, if Francis had actually wanted to attend. But the price for being a Blackthrone, it seemed, was upholding the family tradition of naval service followed by a political career. Whatever else could be said for a clan that had a habit of honouring the letter of the law while blithely subverting the spirit, they did ensure their children earned their citizenship. The only other option was disinheritance. A far worse fate than death.

Francis glared. Leo had often wondered if the young man had had his face reshaped into something that was a little too handsome to be true, the picture-perfect young officer with lantern jaw and stern features that could have stepped right out of a holomovie. It was odd to see such an expression on such a face, as if it wasn’t quite equipped to sneer properly. And he’d never liked Leo. Leo himself hadn’t been so concerned. Francis was a bully, like far too many lads he’d met at Cold Harbour, and most bullies were cowards at heart. The others, at least, hadn’t hidden behind rank and family name.

Leo loathed bullies. But he’d give them that much.

“What were you thinking?” Francis clenched his fists, his voice so loud the entire refectory heard it. “Why?”

Leo hastily ran through a mental checklist. What had he done? He’d showered at First Call, made his bed as per regulations, eaten a health breakfast and gone straight to his first lecture. He hadn’t even seen Francis for the last few days, and while the senior cadet was supposed to inspect the dorms he wasn’t supposed to do it until the end of the week. Perhaps he’d decided to do it early … no, there was no way the inspectors would let him get away with it. They gave Francis and the other seniors some leeway, but not that much.

He pasted a blank expression on his face. “This cadet requests clarification.”

Francis looked as if he was about to throw the first punch, a severe breach in regulations. “You tricked me!”

“I did?” Leo was honestly perplexed. He hadn’t had time to think about Francis and even if he had, pranking a senior cadet was asking for trouble … oh. “You were the OpFor Commander?”

“You tricked me,” Francis repeated. “You …”

Leo had to fight to keep his smile off his face. He hadn’t known Francis was the OpFor Commander, and the possibility had never crossed his mind, but … oh, that was glorious. Francis wasn’t a trained instructor, someone who might make a plausible mistake to see if the cadet noticed the window of opportunity and fired a salvo of missiles through it, and his mistake had been a honest one. Leo almost wished he’d been a fly on the wall, when the instructors pointed out in agonising detail precisely how badly Francis had screwed up. If he’d launched a single drone along his flight path, or realised his ships had already been detected and bringing the active sensors online wouldn’t make the situation any worse, he’d have won a pretty much effortless victory. He could have made Leo look a fool if he timed it just right … and even if he didn’t, Leo would still have put his ships in a bad position, effectively checkmating himself. It would have been an utter disaster. The instructors didn’t normally strike their cadets, but they might have made an exception for him.

“You should have been a little more careful,” he said. It wasn’t the smartest thing to say to a senior cadet, who had plenty of ways to make Leo’s life miserable, but it was true. “If you turned on your active sensors …”

Francis purpled. Standard tactical doctrine was to keep active sensors offline as long as possible, if only because their activation would tell the enemy where to aim, but Leo had already had a good idea where to point his guns. The ambush wouldn’t have worked so well if Francis had come to the same deduction and altered course, avoiding engagement and winning the match without so much as firing a shot or forced Leo to alter his own position before it was too late.

“You son of a whore,” Francis thundered. “You …”

Leo stilled, ice prickling down his spine. “I beg your pardon?”

“Your mother is a whore,” Francis snapped. Two bright red spots appeared on his cheeks, a reminder he’d been humiliated beyond words. Losing a simulated engagement to a junior cadet with just over nine months in the academy wasn’t unprecedented, and the instructors wouldn’t hold it against him, but losing in a manner that owed much to his own foolishness was a very different story. They wouldn’t let him get away with it. “She was screwing Sullivan and …”

Leo saw red and hit him, driving his fist hard into Francis’s chest. All cadets were required to take classes in martial arts, and Leo knew he was good at them, but he’d learnt most of his lessons on the streets. Neither polite words nor submission worked on a bully, a man so degraded he saw the former as a hint of weakness and the latter a confession. It was one thing to be insulted himself, to have everything from his uniform to his performance dissected in great and mocking detail, but his mother? His mother had raised him and his siblings alone, after their father had died in the line of duty, and an insult to her could not be tolerated. The idea she might have been cheating on her husband, his father …

Francis doubled over, gasping in pain. Leo brought his knee up hard, slamming it into France’s face. He felt the older cadet’s nose break, his body tumbling over and crashing to the floor. Leo kicked him as hard as he could, knocking Francis out. The darker part of his mind noted that it might have been a relief, almost a mercy. Francis had been in terrible agony. And he’d deserved every last bit of it.

Leo clung to that thought, afterwards, as the redcaps led him away, as the staff explained that only the direct intervention of his patron had saved him from expulsion. Leo had never felt particularly sorry, although he had learnt to control his temper a little better. Francis was too great a fool to have planned to let Leo throw the first punch and then beat the shit out of him, but someone a little smarter might certainly try. He paid as little heed to Francis as possible for the rest of the year, watching – and concealing his disgust – as Francis graduated a lieutenant. His family had to have arranged that for him, Leo was sure, perhaps in hopes of turning him into an asset in their endless struggle for power. Leo told himself, as he started his second year at the academy, that it didn’t matter. The odds were good he would never see Francis again.

In that, he was dead wrong.

Chapter One

Under other circumstances, Leo would have enjoyed the flight to RSS Pompey.

The battlecruiser was an awesome sight, a gleaming dagger against the stars and the blue-green planet below. Her lines were long and sleek, a stark contrast to the blunt outline of a battleship or the crude and functional lines of Waterhen. The designers had been allowed to let their imaginations run riot for once, crafting an starship that looked like a sword, ready to be drawn in the defence of the republic. Or for its expansion. Leo had believed firmly, only a year ago, in the mission, but now – if he were forced to be honest – he knew the galaxy was a messy place. There were no simple answers to the crisis that had provoked the Great War, and the rise of Daybreak, and there never would be.

He felt his heart sink as the battlecruiser grew closer, his mind torn between admiring her lines and the blunt, icy message that had summoned him to her. The battlecruiser was the flagship of a task force sent out to reinforce the naval presence in the sector, something he would have greeted with untrammelled delight if he hadn’t known the squadron was commanded by Commodore Alexander Blackthrone. Leo didn’t know for sure how the commodore was related to Francis Blackthrone – the Blackthrone clan was easily the most complex in the republic – but he would be. There was no one with a Blackthrone name who wasn’t one of the Blackthrones. The name belonged to the clan and the clan alone.

The pilot glanced back. “Sir, they’re requesting permission to take remote control.”

Leo shrugged. It was an insult, technically, but he didn’t blame the battlecruiser’s commander for being wary of a shuttle, no matter what IFF codes it was using. The trail of treachery that led all the way up to the sector’s Deputy Governor was undoubtedly alarming, if only because a man in that position could have easily obtained all kinds of information and access codes that should have been restricted to Daybreak personnel only, then forwarded the intelligence to his allies amongst the stars. Leo’s heart clenched painfully. Deputy Governor Hari Bridgerton was supposed to be dead, and his daughter too, but Leo feared Gayle was still alive. She was smart and adaptive and she’d pulled the wool over his eyes quite thoroughly, to the point he hadn’t had the slightest suspicion she was anything other than a young woman seeking escape from a humdrum life until it was too late. In hindsight …

Bad rolls of the dice are inevitable, he told himself, sternly. His instructors had pointed it out again and again, when the cadets had started training in earnest. No commander was ever-victorious and no career was ever unmarred by a mistake, one born of ignorance or simple misunderstanding. The trick is to pick yourself up, learn from your mistakes, and keep going.

He scowled. He would see Gayle again. He was sure of it.

The shuttle rocked, slightly, as the battlecruiser took control. Leo didn’t need to look at the pilot to sense his unhappiness. They were well within communications range, the time delay so minimal it was barely measurable, and yet something could easily go wrong. The officer on the battlecruiser, flying the shuttle from a distance, didn’t have the feel for the controls or the craft itself that its real pilot had, nor was he in any real danger. Leo shrugged, putting the thought aside. Compared to all the other problems, the issue of who was flying the shuttle was decidedly minor.

He watched, coldly, as the shuttle levelled out and flew towards the docking hatch. Up close, the battlecruiser’s lines were marred by weapons ports, missile tubes and sensor arrays … a handful, he noted thoughtfully, looking decidedly out of place. The designers had left room for a piece of gear that would change the face of warfare, from what he’d heard at the academy, but – like so many other pieces of promised hardware – the new tech had failed to materialise. Leo had heard a great deal of speculation, from superluminal energy weapons to actual force fields, yet … he shrugged. He’d believe in such silver bullets when he saw them. He’d read Superiority. It was required reading at the academy. If it had been required reading elsewhere, a great many problems might have been avoided before it was too late.

A dull clunk ran through the shuttle as she mated with the docking point, followed by a low hiss and a faint flicker in the gravity field. Leo was almost relieved they’d been steered to the docking port, although it boded ill for his personal future. The idea of facing a welcoming committee of officers would be daunting at the best of times, and right now he was both a junior officer and a commanding officer. The navy was supposed to have protocols for everything, but he didn’t think there was a welcoming procedure for that. Probably. The commodore had clearly decided to dodge the issue completely. Leo didn’t blame him.

“Good luck, sir,” the pilot said.

Leo nodded, feeling a lump in his throat as he stepped through the opening airlock. He had no illusions about why he’d been promoted and sent to the sector, a knife in the back cunningly disguised as a reward, a poison pill he’d had no choice but to swallow. It would have been easy to sit in his cabin and sulk, or lose himself in the pleasure dens, or even join Gayle when she came to him … but he’d known his duty. He’d determined to make something of himself and … he’d done well. He knew it.

The inner hatch hissed open, revealing a figure Leo had hoped never to see again. Senior Cadet Francis Blackthrone was as handsome as ever, with holovid star good looks Leo was sure were the result of gene-splicing and cosmetic face-sculpting. He was blond, with bright blue eyes and a face that managed to give the impression of both youth and maturity, wearing a dress uniform that was carefully tailored to show off his muscles without revealing any bare skin above the wrist. He was a Lieutenant-Commander now, Leo noted, with two stars on his collar … two starship assignments. Francis was four years older than Leo, and he’d graduated a Lieutenant three years ago, but that was still a surprisingly rapid advance. Or perhaps it wasn’t surprising at all. Francis was a Blackthrone.

And I can hardly talk about rapid advancement, Leo thought, wryly. His promotion had set records, and would probably cause no shortage of raised eyebrows if he’d been sent to a regular duty station. It took him three years to do what I managed in a day.

Francis met his eyes. His face was stern, but there was a hint of fear in his expression. Leo found it both reassuring and deeply worrying. Francis had always been a bully, someone who had lorded it over the plebs, and like most bullies he was a weak man at heart. Leo was mildly surprised he hadn’t found a way to extract revenge on Leo for beating him within an inch of his life, although the combination of shock and fear of Leo finding him in a dark alley one day had probably stayed his hand. Or he’d been biding his time. A strong man could acknowledge when he’d been beaten and move on. A weak man would risk everything just to tear his enemy down.

He might have more time in grade than me, but we’re still the same rank, Leo thought. He can’t use his position to put me in my place any longer.

“Morningstar,” Francis said. His tone was as snooty as ever. Leo made a mental bet with himself that Francis didn’t spend any time with the enlisted men. The battlecruiser was big enough to have a private mess for officers, and Francis certainly wasn’t the kind of person to get his hands dirty if it could be avoided. “Commodore Blackthrone is waiting for you.”

Leo saluted the flag, silently relieved he didn’t have to salute Francis, and allowed the older man to lead him through a maze of corridors. The battlecruiser was surprisingly sedate, for a ship that had just completed a long voyage, something that puzzled him. The crew should be lining up for shore leave … it was rare, almost unknown, for a crew not to be given leave after such a long voyage. Perhaps the commodore was feeling paranoid. Leo didn’t blame him for that either. The sector was nowhere near as peaceful as Leo had been told, when he’d left Daybreak. He dared not assume the attempted revolt was over.

Francis stopped, outside a hatch. “You may enter.”

“Thank you,” Leo said.

He had the satisfaction of seeing Francis twitch, just a little, before the hatch hissed open. The commodore’s office was surprisingly bare, for a scion of one of the greatest families in the republic, decorated only by a large family portrait and a painting of a heavy cruiser spitting missiles at an unseen target. The artist was talented, but clearly had only the vaguest idea of the cruiser’s design, drawing missiles erupting from tubes that simply didn’t exist. And yet, it was very dramatic. The only other display in the chamber was a holographic starchart, showing the local sector. Yangtze was surrounded by a handful of tactical icons. The rest of the stars looked deserted.

“Morningstar,” a cold voice said.

Leo straightened to attention, kicking himself mentally. He had been a de facto commanding officer for too long, without any real superior. Even Governor Brighton hadn’t had authority over him, the navy protecting its independence from colonial governors with the same determination it showed in its endless quest to wipe out pirates, terrorists and insurrectionists alike. Leo’s orders had noted he was to work with the governor, not for him. There was clearly a great deal that had been supposed to be passed down as he worked his way up the ladder …

“Lieutenant-Commander Leo Morningstar, reporting as ordered,” he said.

Commodore Alexander Blackthrone looked very much like an older version of Francis, although his gaze was sharper and his hair starting to turn grey. It was a vanity in its own way, a sign of age and experience … and a maturity that kept him from having his body rejuvenated completely, to make him an old man in a very young body. There’d be nothing wrong with his physical health, Leo was sure. The navy wouldn’t tolerate a flag officer who couldn’t handle the pressure, and it had no shortage of places it could send someone who couldn’t be easily dismissed.

“Leo Morningstar,” Commodore Blackthrone said. He held a datapad in one hand, his eyes skimming down the opened file. “Why were you promoted so quickly?”

Leo winced, inwardly. On one hand, his promotion was genuine. It could hardly have been otherwise. But on the other, there was no way such a promotion – given to someone still in the academy – would go unremarked. Questions would be asked, and very unfavourable conclusions drawn. It would be hard enough for an officer on active duty to be confirmed in his new rank, whatever the reasons for the promotion, but ludicrous for a raw cadet. He might have been a Lieutenant, and on track to graduate as one, yet a Lieutenant-Commander? Absurd.

He found himself honestly unsure how to respond. The truth had been carefully buried, hidden away behind a mountain of bullshit. Deputy Commandant Horace Valerian had excelled himself, putting together a picture that would go unquestioned, at least long enough to get Leo well away from Daybreak. The hell of it was that Leo’s own actions had brought his earlier promotion under scrutiny. If he’d sat on his rear and done nothing, rather than trying to do his duty, there wouldn’t have been any reason for anyone to look into the matter. If he hadn’t done his duty …

“I did extremely well at the academy, sir,” he said, finally. “The Deputy Commandant thought a merited a promotion and a new assignment.”

“To a rattletrap of a ship and a sector so far from civilisation they think a ship is something that floats on water,” Commodore Blackthrone said, dryly. “I read the file very carefully, Morningstar. I read it and I noticed all the questions it left unanswered, starting with the obvious issue of just why they promoted you and then assigned you to a death trap.”

Leo felt stung. “Waterhen is not a death trap, sir.”

“She is an outdated ship on a long-range patrol,” Commodore Blackthrone said. “Hardly the sort of ship I’d assign someone I wanted to see promoted, Morningstar. My nephew was assigned to a modern battleship, before he came here.”

Francis, Leo thought, coldly. The Commodore is his uncle.

“So tell me,” Commodore Blackthrone said. “Why were you assigned to Waterhen?”

Because they caught me in bed with the Commandant’s wife, Leo thought, feeling a flash of hot anger. And they wanted to bury the scandal, so they gave me a promotion and a duty assignment that would take me a very long way from Daybreak.

“The Deputy Commandant said it would give me a chance to make a name for myself,” Leo said. It was technically true, if misleading. But he didn’t want to land Fleur in any more hot water. If she could repair her marriage, more power to her. “I believe I have succeeded.”

“Quite.” Commodore Blackthrone held his eyes for a long moment. “I am sure he will be very proud of you.”

His tone suggested otherwise. Leo wondered, suddenly, just how much he knew about the scandal. There had been no Blackthrones on staff, as far as Leo could recall, but that was meaningless. The Blackthrones were amongst the most powerful patrons in the republic, with a web of clients that stretched all over Daybreak and beyond, all the way to the outer colonies themselves. If Commodore Blackthrone had wanted to get the truth, he probably could find someone on the academy’s staff who would fill him in. Leo groaned inwardly. No matter what happened, it was going to be a nightmare if the truth ever came out.

“I have also read your reports,” Commodore Blackthrone continued. “Your conduct in this sector has been decidedly mixed. On one hand, you conducted a very effective anti-pirate campaign which culminated in the capture of a pirate base and the defeat of a rebel attempt to seize Yangtze, but on the other you repeatedly displayed a degree of immaturity, perhaps born of your relative inexperience, that came very close to getting you killed. Your stunt with the Q-Ship was marginally justifiable, but leading the mission to seize a pirate ship was insane.”

Leo tensed. “If you are referring to the incident on Yellowstone, I was caught on the ground and there was no time to arrange for anyone to take my place.”

“You should not have risked your life,” Commodore Blackthrone said. “You were the commanding officer, in a dangerous situation. Your place was on the bridge.”

“There was no time to return to the ship, and no way to do it without being detected,” Leo pointed out. Boothroyd had said the same, and far more bluntly, but Leo still felt he’d made the best of a bad set of choices. “And it worked.”

Commodore Blackthrone smiled, humourlessly. “You also displayed several other errors of judgement,” he said. “You recruited marines without any vetting process, or indeed anything more than basic training. You recruited spacers as naval auxiliaries without clearing it with the authorities. You overthrew a planetary government without good cause and …”

Leo started. “Sir, I …”

“Please don’t interrupt,” Commodore Blackthrone said, the very mildness of his tone turning Leo’s blood to ice. “Worst of all, you allowed a young woman to seduce you … a young woman who turned out to be a rebel, perhaps even the rebel leader.”

“There was no clue,” Leo said. “It wasn’t until afterwards that we realised how closely she and her father, and the rest of the rebels, were working together.”

“It was a planned seduction,” Commodore Blackthrone said. “And you fell for it.”

Leo couldn’t deny it. “Yes, sir.”

“And that let you get lured into an ambush, and then forced into a knife-range engagement with a much heavier starship,” Commodore Blackthrone continued. “You trusted the wrong person because you were sleeping with his daughter.”

“There was no reason to expect treachery on such a scale,” Leo countered, stiffly. “And we had no reason, either, to expect the enemy would have ships that could stand up to us.”

“And you still have no idea where those ships came from,” Commodore Blackthrone said. “Correct?”

Leo scowled. His analysts had combed through the wreckage as well as every record they could find, trying to put together a trail leading back to the mysterious backers. They’d drawn a complete blank. The money didn’t appear to have come from Yangtze, and the ships themselves certainly couldn’t have. But where had they come from?

He gritted his teeth. “Yes, sir.”

“Which is a problem that will now bedevil my intelligence staff,” Commodore Blackthrone continued. “Who gave the rebels those ships and why?”

He went on before Leo could outline his list of suspects. “You have done well for yourself, and lived up to Valerian’s faith in you. However, it is clear to me that you require more seasoning before you can be entrusted with a command, a formal command, of your own. This sector is becoming more important to the Republic and you can no longer be allowed to play at being a fleet commander out here.”

Leo felt his heart sink. “Sir?”

“Accordingly, Lieutenant-Commander Blackthrone will be transferred to Waterhen as soon as possible,” Commodore Blackthrone said. “I trust you will make his assumption of the post an easy one.”

He smiled, coldly.