It is a Bellitran League fleet that finds them in the end.

  Long-range sensors detect the first folding of space, necessarily distant from the gravitational pull of Calder, the gas giant that Scoria orbits. Like a kicked ant-nest, the colony’s war council springs into motion.

  Major Zheng, a sixteen-year veteran of the Colonial Defense Force, stands in the colony’s command bunker, his dark, narrowed eyes reflecting the holo-cast at the center of the room. The dwarf star of their system, Echoin, and its five planets, Calder the largest among them, rotate in a pool of darkness. A blinking cluster of red is the only sign of the coming invasion.

  The low ceilinged room is crowded, though Zheng barely notices the lack of personal space anymore. CDF personnel chatter alongside colonists—the separation between military and civilian having long since blurred—as those in the bunker coordinate with their entrenched surface-side compatriots. The colony’s shield hums into a standby mode at an exorbitant cost of power, surface to orbit batteries pivot upward, minefields go live, and auto-turrets rotate on the grey windswept outskirts of the colony, their primitive AIs single-mindedly primed to kill.

  Zheng’s civilian counterpart, elected by a unanimous vote of Scoria’s councils, looms beside him. Her name is Volkova, and her title is Commandant.

  Zheng was thick-set before he arrived at his posting on Scoria less than three years ago—unlucky timing, that—with a slight paunch spilling over his cinched CDF belt, but a strict caloric intake along with the moon’s extra gravity have turned extra fat into weight-bearing muscle. Volkova, though, she was born here, and she is as tough as they come, even among the Scorian miners. A circlet of tattoos spreads across her dark, bald head, a Scorian tradition signifying various mining and engineering accomplishments that Zheng still hasn’t fully grasped. She rolls her broad shoulders beneath a black engineering-corps uniform and considers the tactical holo-cast alongside Zheng. He may be wearing the grey uniform of a CDF major, but she’s the one who’s actually in charge here.

  “Well?” Volkova asks. She doesn’t even glance at Zheng, but simply stares at the cluster of pulsing dots in the center of the ‘cast.

  Zheng makes a small gesture with his hand, and the view of the Bellitran Fleet expands, twelve ships in all.

  “Their fleet appears to be a mixture of Trixilii and Gorn ships. Those three are Harbingers.” He gestures again, and a muddy image of three green, sharp-angled ships magnifies on the display. “They’re about equivalent to our heavy cruisers, though faster and with less shielding. Each ship has its own Trixilii nest. The blood-thirsty little avians are probably disappointed there aren’t any Fleet ships here to peck at.”

  Zheng side-glances at the emotionless Volkova. In the two and a half years he’s known her he’s never seen her crack a smile. Not that he’s very funny. But at least he makes an effort.

  He silently sighs and pans to the other cluster of ships.

  “Some more Trixilii escorts, a couple of destroyers… of course, the Trixilii will never land here with their hollow bones. This is what we’ll be dealing with, here. The Gor.”

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  A different cluster of ships zooms into view. Where the Trixilii ships looked like birds of prey, as if mimicking the Terra-like ancestors of those who pilot them, the Gor ships are blunt nosed and dull, like fat tadpoles.

  “Two planetary assault ships. Each generally carries a complement of two Gor legions, or about ten thousand warrior-castes each, along with their little parasites.” Zheng clears his throat, restraining himself from more gallows humor concerning the hopelessness of their situation. Four damned Gor legions, God have mercy.

  As a CDF officer, he was given intelligence briefings by Fleet on the races he might plausibly encounter during his various deployments. The Gor are among the elite shock troops of the Bellitran League, bred for killing, suicidal in their bravery. He’s seen a vid of a Gor assault warrior shrug off a missing arm like it was a torn fingernail and almost get the better of a personal Sec-suit after. He considers the Gor ships, wondering at what point they’ll start injecting themselves with their ritualistic battle drugs. Apparently they have orgies before battle. Or was it after? Probably both. Zheng tries to push the thought from his mind.

  Then there are the little Vories, who have a symbiotic relationship with the Gor which dates back to their homeworld, before they were conscripted as the Bellitran League’s warriors. While the Gor are the size of your average steroid-addled ape, the Vories look like small cats, with each little familial group laying claim to its own Gor. The Fleet research into the strange nature of that relationship is inconclusive, but one of the few Bellitran League uprisings occurred when the Bellitrans tried to pry the Gor and the Vories apart in an ill-advised attempt to improve combat efficiency.

  They had not liked that at all.

  Of course, Volkova knows all this. Against Fleet protocol, all the intelligence of their likely invaders has long since been shared with the civilian leadership; Zheng and the other small cohort of Fleet and CDF officers have made peace with the court-martials for which they would now eagerly stand.

  Zheng strokes his chin, the image on the holo-cast pulling out again to encompass the colony’s star system. Well, at least it isn’t an Ursox Fleet out there, or the Ir’lani. Zheng feels an involuntary shudder at the thought of encountering either of those species, though for different reasons. He’s always had an odd aversion to spiders, which is not an ideal phobia when fighting the Ursox. As for the Ir’lani, a suicide tablet would be far preferable to the mere chance of being captured alive by the bastards. Perhaps two tablets, in fact, just to be safe.

  “Hail incoming, Commandant,” a meaty lieutenant growls. “Visual along with audio. Shall I bring it up on the central ‘cast?”

  The talking in the bunker diminishes to a few whispers, and Volkova steps closer to the holo-cast.

  “Bring them up,” she says calmly, as though she were merely about to review a mining-tool schematic.

  The holo-cast flickers for a moment as the connection is established.

  Zheng shuffles away from Volkova, watching the ‘cast with the rest of the bunker. He doesn’t expect to see a command-caste Bellitran, the aliens who are truly in charge of the armada, though there is likely one of the cosseted monsters on each of the ships. No, none of those massive creatures would deign to debase themselves in direct negotiations with a puny outpost such as Scoria. It’ll probably be the Trixilii Admiral, or maybe one of the other League’s races, some officer from the Fleet equivalent of their diplomatic corps.

  What he sees instead lands like a gut punch, making him gasp along with everyone else in the bunker, save perhaps Volkova.

  From the blue light of the holo-cast, a human face appears.