And the saga continues. After finding themselves locked into the Confederation proper, Admiral Jack Romanoff and his battleship, the *Delta Orionis*, a.k.a. the *Hunter*, have their work cut out for them. They had not planned on getting back to the Confederation core, but they also couldn’t let defenseless civilian starships fall to the Locust so they did what they were supposed to do and that was attack through the gate and kill the Locust. Unfortunately, the gate was destroyed, but not only had the Delta Orionis made it through, but the *Scorpius*, command by Admiral McKinnon was with them. It didn’t take long for these two powerful warships to wipeout this contingent of Locusts.
Now, they had new plans to make. And there’s one thing you’ll notice in every one of these books is that Admiral Romanoff and his fellow leaders do and that is plan their next steps. They meticulously sit down and discuss thoroughly everything everyone is going to do in the next operation. These people have more meetings that I could stand. Yet, as vast as space is, it does take some time to travel from one place to another so I suppose they are using their time wisely. And the results usually turn out in favor of Admiral Romanoff and his warriors, usually!
They decided that since they have no quick way back to the cluster in which they came from, they might as well start their war against the Poseidon Group. But first they need a base of operations that can support to huge battleships. They also have two spy ships, one built by Patrick, the mysterious assassin from the Kingdom and another one they captured from the Kingdom fleet sent to spy on them. These two ships are almost impossible to detect and they have also built some undetectable cruisers and starfighters. So, where do they think they can operate from without causing too much attention from the turncoats Confederation Navy or the Poseidon Group. That place appears to be the planet Faust.
Faust is a heavily populated planet that is not directly in the Confederation proper. It’s on the periphery and fortunately can be shut off from the rest of the Confederation by attacking and destroying a few quantum gates. They need to do this to ensure a couple of things. One is to stop the inflow of more Locusts and their Tardan controllers. It seems that there are a lot more Locusts in this region of space than they anticipated. Additionally, these Locusts are not responding to the codes that they had previously obtained and used back in the other cluster. So, until they got the new codes, they were just going to have to destroy these Locusts as they met them. Second, they needed to ensure no more Confederation Naval forces came into this sector of space. Admiral Romanoff didn’t want to destroy the Navy that he had been part of, but he couldn’t tell which Commanders had been replaced by Poseidon Group traitors or were patriots working under difficult conditions. The fewer Naval forces he had to encounter, the better.
So, it was to Faust that he turned and began executing their plans. Taking the planet would be difficult since it did have a Naval presence and they had been building some advance oversized antiproton beam weapons. Those weapons could definitely put a hurt on either the *Delta Orionis* or the *Scorpius*. But with the two powerful battleships working together, they should be able to take them out and might do so just using the very stealthy spy ships. The other problem Admiral Romanoff had was that he didin’t want to destroy any more of the infrastructure of Faust than he had to because it may have to be used to fight off a future attack by the mysterious Kingdom.
Plans were made and actions began while the *Delta Orionis* waited for the *Scorpius* to returned from a scouting mission. But, the *Scorpius* suddenly appeared way too soon and was going way, way too fast in an unusual direction in this system. The also couldn’t get any comms out of the *Scorpius* which added to the puzzle. Romanoff directed the *Delta Orionis* to go meet with the *Scorpius* and was shocked when he got within visual range. He was finally receiving a message from the *Scorpius* but it was sent by Rear Admiral Ann Walker, the Executive Officer, from the secondary bridge. Just knew this was going to be bad news just by looking at the *Scorpius*.
Well, things just get started in this book and there’s definitely a lot more to do. Whether Admiral Romanoff has the assets to accomplish anything is still in question. I honestly don’t know where this story is going now but I feel it’s going to be a much longer journey. Book 14, “Lightning Strike”, is available for pre-order on Amazon and should be available by 26 May 2024.