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He was as ready to retire as Hawke was, perhaps even more so.
    At ninety years old, Commander Nathan Schultz had about thirty more years of combat and military experience than Hawke had.  He was good at what he did, and that is fight wars, but he was tired of what he did too.  He planned on telling the Colonel just that.  Granted, if anyone else but him were to try to talk to the Colonel the way he usually did, they’d probably have their walking papers before they were done, along with maybe a court martial for insubordination, since military law still applied to PMC’s.  But Nathan was just a bit over what some would regard middle aged, and he found that he had no patience with candy coating his words so as to not offend anyone.
    As it was, he had just stepped off the shuttle from the shipyard where all the navy personnel had inexplicably stopped shuttling supplies into the Heaven’s Gaze , and would not provide any kind of explanation as to why.  The idiots left about thirty pallets of frozen goods to thaw right there on the docks.  He lodged an official complaint with Naval Command, but knew it wouldn’t yield any results.  No, the complaint would be shuffled and reshuffled in virtual stacks of electronic reports of like nature from other PMC’s, and most likely would only receive the most cursory attention before being put back on the pile to be dealt with later, by someone else.  By the time they received any response, Nathan would likely be dead of old age.  Nathan was flexing jaw muscles in frustration by the time he had reached Hawke’s door, and took it out on the door by pounding on it solidly.
    “Come.” Hawke’s voice echoed through the door. Opening the door and stepping inside, Nathan saw a tired looking Hawke sitting at his desk, a hand absently rubbing his head as he leaned back in his chair and looked at him.  Nathan noticed the stress lines around Hawke’s eyes and knew something was up.  The colonel looked as tired as he felt.
    “You were right.” Was all Hawke said.  Nathan snorted, and took a chair across the desk from Hawke.  That was no surprise.  They both knew something was up.  No, it was more than that, otherwise the shuttles would still be loading supplies onto Heaven’s Gaze , and he wouldn’t be here instead of overseeing the loading operations.  Hawke sighed heavily, and then leaned forward into a sitting position as he tapped a few commands into the holographic keyboard of his terminal.  In response, the holodisplay pulled up a file, which Hawke then had projected in the air above his desk.  Using his hand, he flipped the image around so Nathan could read it.  Nathan quickly saw that the file was a composition of Naval reports.  The reports listed Navy frigates, transports, supply ships, and asteroid mining barges.  The list went on at length, each ship listed as destroyed or missing.  Nathan forgot his troubles at the shipyard for a moment as he took a closer, more detailed look at the report.  The method of destruction for the ships seemed to bear evidence of the same kind of energy signature, though that isn’t saying much.  It could simply be residual energy from their weapons, from a nebula they travelled through...anything.  There were no survivors in each case, except one.  Even the lifepods had been destroyed.
    “What is this?” Nathan asked curiously.
    “This is a compilation of reports detailing ships that have been destroyed in the Farstar Sector.  Until they got their hands on a survivor, the Navy didn’t even know what was going on, but now we know it is a ship.  We now believe that the same ship, over the course of two months, has destroyed all of the ships listed in these reports.” Hawke replied.  Nathan’s eyebrows shot up.
    “Two months?  That many ships?” Nathan asked in disbelief.  Hawke nodded his head, a grim expression on his face.  Nathan understood.  A lot of innocents died, in some cases women and children.  In