If anyone should be tired of war, then it should be the Confederation and Fleet Admiral Tyler Barron! Having to continually fight off the Union and then going to Palatia and fight those guys, the younger Captain Tyler Barron certainly learned his trade by fire, literally. Fortunately, he has survived and become the most competent Fleet Admiral to exist in the history of the Confederation, even surpassing his Grandfather. Now, it looks like it’s time to die!
After having survived the war with the Hegemony, Fleet Admiral Barron finds himself allied with his former enemies. While the Confederation didn’t actually win the war with the Hegemony, they did gain a gigantic starship in taking the Colossus away from the Hegemony as a war prize. Yet, even that huge and powerful warship won’t help in this coming battle. The Highborn are the new enemy and they are superior in every way to even the Hegemony. That puts the Confederation on the third tier of advancement behind both of these civilizations. Yet, as allies, the Hegemony has freely shared much of their tech with the Confederation. They know it will be needed in the coming conflict with the Highborn.
The Highborn are an unknown enemy. They have been around before, but it was in the very distant past and no one living now knows anything about them. Andi Barron, the former Andi LaFarge, but now wife of the famous Fleet Admiral Barron, is on Megara, capital of the Confederation. She’s with their newly born daughter this time staying out of harms way, for awhile anyway. She had found in her previous life as a Badlands scrounger a set of memory chips. These chips had been in a folder entitled, “Highborn”, which didn’t mean anything to her at the time. Yet, now that the same name has come up as their deadly enemy, Andi needs to find those chips and see what they contain. Hopefully it will be something to assist her husband and his allies in the new war. But, those chips are in ancient Empire and badly damaged. She has to enlist one of her old friends to see if she can recover any useable data and then get that information out to Tyler. See might just be going back into harms way after all.
The Highborn commander has started this war on his own initiative. He’s not done as well as his highers wanted so they sent some additional assets to him, but that’s all he’s going to get. Still, his fleet is now massive; far deadlier than the combined fleets of the Confederation and the Hegemony. The Highborn ships have a strange force field that prevent good target locks and they seem to make their ships fade in and out of existance. They are also huge warships, even larger than the Hegemony battleships which already dwarfed the Confeds largest warship. And now, that fleet is headed for Calpharon.
Fleet Admiral Barron doesn’t believe that his forces and those of the Hegemony can defeat the Highborn in this battle. But, he doesn’t know if his counterpart, Commander Chronos of the Hegemony, has the courage to withdraw and fight another day if things go really bad. Chronos has children and his superior, Akella, on Calpharon and he won’t abandon them. So what does that mean for this alliance. Is this the final battle? Will Fleet Admrial Barron stay and fight to the last warship? Why would he when he could withdraw and go back to Confederations space and rebuild. Except, no matter what Barron does, the Highborn will eventually turn towards Confederation space and then end that civilization for good.
There are some significant deaths in this battle. Characters we’ve been with for a long time, finally run out of time, or so it seems. Another great story, but it’s not over yet!