From the watching small roof-dome of the captured Eclipse Dread, humanity’s cradle looked peaceful, glowing, and impossibly fragile.
Three hundred and eighty thousand miles below, the blue marble of Earth rotated with calm majesty against the velvet backdrop of the cosmos. Encircling the Moon’s sunlit equator, the newly forged ring of the Shattered Pearl glittered like a diamond collar. He reflected the distant solar rays in a breathtaking ribbon of silver and mother-of-pearl radiance. Across the night hemisphere of the home world, the lights of ten thousand cities glowed with untroubled bright glare, fully unaware of how close they had danced to the edge of extinction.
At Earth-Moon Lagrange Point 1, the silence of the void was broken by the arrival of humanity’s fleet.
Three massive Federation battlecruisers—their silver-steel hulls gleaming under the sun, their prow-mounted rail cannons held in the passive salute position—slowed down smoothly along the approach vector. Shuttles carrying building battalions, trauma relief teams, and holding specialists swarmed toward the captured dreadnought to secure the disarmed void-spark core.
Standing on the bridge of the flagship to receive them was Arthur Vance.
He had removed his heavy tactical helmet. That let the cool, filtered air of the command deck wash over his face. His dark hair was messy and unkempt. His eyes were dark with the tiredness of five in a row days of nonstop trauma surgery and zero-gravity combat. But his stance was as straight and unbending as a forged stiletto.
