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the bridge.

ONE: HUMBLE BEGINNINGS

    Drop Commander Tyco Hale inherited very little from his family. Not money, not land, not even a potentially profitable berth on a spacegoing prospecting vessel. They had been poor workers on a satellite colony, cut off from the inner rim and left to the mercies of the authorities. Tyco had left home at eighteen with the clothes on his back and a small talisman bracelet of his home world around his wrist, the kind inner rim tourists purchased on vacation and lost carelessly, long before reaching their home worlds. The clothes were long gone, replaced by a long line of regulation service uniforms, but the talisman remained, wrapped tightly around his skin where it had stayed through twelve long years, eight official campaigns, and an endless tally of unofficial actions.  
    He had kept his other inheritance as well, passed down to him from his father: hope.
    It was in his name, given to him by a man who looked at the sky, at the deafening, intermittently pitch-black silence of outer space and saw possibility, not doom, and new worlds beyond the horizon. And so he gave his son the name of one of the early, great astronomers, and hoped for a better future he could not provide.
    Now, at age thirty, eleven years after the incident on the Conrad , Tyco had met that future: in stasis, in transit, in the sullen, quiet light years between assignments, and most of all, in the hollow, uncaring eyes of the bureaucrats who decided his fate. He had seen the galaxy, and several others beside, and he had seen little to support his father’s dreams. He had joined the Orbital Tactical Legion with an eye to staying at the leading edge of those dreams, rolling back the frontiers of the galaxy with the firm hope of finding something good there, something noble and new. He had given twelve years of his life to the Legion, many of them in stasis, in cold space, shuttling between one objective and the next. Thrusters and the gravity engine had cut down significantly on the time debt needed to reach the outer planets, but they had not eliminated it completely. OTL deployments were nearly always urgent, but the distances were great. It was common to find that units had deployed only to find they had reached their strategic objectives too late, finding them abandoned or overrun. Often, they arrived just in time, to tired faces and dire situations. They were never early.  
    To some, including Tyco's father, the star systems were a tranquil sea, a peaceful demonstration of the vision and cooperation that man could achieve. After twelve years in the Legion, Tyco knew better: the surface might be calm, but dark, angry currents roiled beneath it, threatening always to break out into full-scale storm. In countless shadow wars, he had seen the true weakness and fragility of the peace, and the high cost of keeping it in line. After twelve years of fighting, he could say with grim certainty that the universe would never be so large it couldn’t be contained by the small-mindedness of those who oversaw it.  
    If you asked him, now, what the odds of his mission’s survival were, he would tell you zero. It wasn’t that he was a pessimist, or that he was used to failure. Nor was he exaggerating: the odds of reaching a coordinated landing zone from low-earth orbit were next to zero, make no mistake. Doing that, and then regrouping into an effective fighting unit was even more improbable. Effecting coordinated assaults after that, with all the inherent logistical difficulties that presented, was, quite simply, ludicrous. And doing all that in hostile territory, behind enemy lines, that wasn’t worth considering.
    But that didn't mean he hadn’t done it, time after time. He just knew, with every jump, that he was being sent to his death. That the people giving the orders knew that. And, more than that, that they didn’t care. In spite of that, his inheritance – hope – remained, and it sparked anew every time a new