検索キーワード： "Michael Stewart" SF

After two years, the collapse of the Terran Commonwealth has finally slowed. With communications networks rebuilding, the Successor States are beginning to look to the future—but for some of these states, that is a future to be forged in fire and conquest. With warlords leading fleets into their stars, the newborn Weston Republic has called for help from every Successor State they could find. Now, James Tecumseh, founder of the Dakotan Confederacy, finds himself fighting shoulder to shoulder alongside Imperator Walkingstick—the man he blames for the fall of the Commonwealth itself.

Captain Kyle Roberts delivered one of the Castle Federation's few victories in the early days of the war. Even losing his ship in the process didn't prevent him from being elevated as the hero - the "Stellar Fox" - his country desperately needed. His status with the public demands a worthy command, and he finds himself on the bridge of the federation's latest supercarrier and headed to the front lines of the war. But the navy sees his promotion as a public relations stunt.

When a minor trade partner sends the Castle Federation a desperate call for aid, they have few resources to spare from their all-consuming war against the Terran Commonwealth. Unwilling to be seen failing their allies but able to spare only a tiny force, Castle sends a hero to command the task group: Captain Kyle Roberts, the Stellar Fox. Beyond the Rimward frontier of the Federation and its allies, little is as it seems. The pirates are being armed by an outside force, and the politics of these worlds is made deadlier by their poverty.

For two years, the Castle Federation and the Alliance of Free Stars have stood against Marshal James Walkingstick of the Terran Commonwealth and his mission of conquest. Battles have been won and lost, worlds have died, and soldiers like Admiral Kyle Roberts have been forged on the anvil of war. But the Alliance cannot win. The Commonwealth has more worlds, more ships, more soldiers. They claim their victory is inevitable. That history is on their side. Refusing to accept the Commonwealth's future, the Alliance embarks on a do-or-die mission to end the war in one strike.

Rear Admiral James Tecumseh barely survived his last mission against the Alliance of Free Stars with his reputation and life intact. Under a cloud of suspicion, he has been assigned to a quiet sector far from the front of the Terran Commonwealth’s war with the Castle Federation and its allies.