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gently. Villeneuve didn’t seem to hear her, and then someone shoved her back.
    She recognized Commodore Anderson about half a second after twenty-five years of martial arts training kicked in and dropped the big logistics officer to the ground with a resounding thud.
    That got everyone’s attention, a circle of space appearing around her and allowing Admiral Villeneuve to turn his gaze on her.
    “Captain Bond?” he asked slowly.
    “Sir, Tornado has eight interface drive shuttles aboard,” she told him crisply. “If everyone can calm down , we can send the civilians to Orbit One on the torch shuttles and have all of the Space Force officers back to their ships in under ten minutes.”
    Villeneuve’s gaze flickered to where Anderson was groaning to his feet, but even the man Annette had just floored was looking at her with a degree of surprised respect—and hope.
    “Make it happen,” the Admiral ordered. “I’ll stay aboard Tornado .”
    “With respect, sir, your place is on Orbit One,” Annette told him quietly, stepping closer to the Admiral as she gestured to Kurzman to start corralling people. “Someone has to take overall command of Earth’s defense. You can’t be at the tip of the spear—and we both know Tornado has to be the tip of the spear.”
    For a moment, the senior uniformed officer of Earth’s defenses looked rebellious, but then Villeneuve sighed and nodded.
    “You’re right, of course,” he confessed. “I’ll coordinate the civilians and be available by communicator until I’m in Command.” Villeneuve glanced around. “I’m placing you under Harrison’s command, with Alpha Squadron. She’ll have her orders by the time she’s aboard Challenger .”
    “Yes, sir,” Annette told him. “We won’t fail you.”
    “I’m not worried about you failing me,” Villeneuve said quietly. “I’m worried that we’ve already failed Earth.”
     
    #
     
    Annette reached her bridge as the last of the interface drive shuttles exited the launch bay. That part was done on chemical rockets, not even fusion thrusters, to keep the mothership safe. Once the shuttle was a kilometer or so clear of Tornado , their smaller drives turned on and they whisked away at forty percent of the speed of light.
    Their courses amidst the cluster of warships in high earth orbit were very carefully calculated. Each flight between ships lasted seconds at most. They were spending more time docking and offloading passengers than they were flying at full speed.
    Beneath the fleet, rapidly dropping away toward Earth and the geostationary orbit of Orbit One, Earth’s largest space station and the Space Force’s command center, were the old-style shuttles that had originally brought the Captains. It would have taken forty-five minutes or more for those ships to get their passengers home.
    Ahead of the rest of the shuttles was the one carrying Admiral Villeneuve, pushing the limits of what its artificial gravity could handle to get the Admiral to the command center before everything came apart.
    “What are our visitors doing?” Annette asked as she dropped into the command chair at the center of the horseshoe-shaped bridge and put on her command headset.
    “They spent five minutes sorting out their formation and started heading our way,” Harold Rolfson, now Lieutenant Commander Rolfson and her tactical officer, reported. “Definitely interface drive ships, but either their tech is behind ours or they’re taking it slow. Inbound at point one cee.”
    “Any idea on the size?”
    “Dark Eye is trying to resolve, but the sensors weren’t built for that,” Rolfson told her. The new rank had put the man in Space Force blue working fatigues, but so far they hadn’t managed to convince him to trim his shaggy red hair or beard. Annette had quietly squished one complaint from a regular Force officer already.
    “They were built to sweep everything within a hundred light-years, not give us shiny pictures of ships inside