Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen

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It was a good day on the military transfer station orbiting the planet Sergyar. The Vicereine was coming home.

As he entered the station’s Command-and-Control room, Admiral Jole’s eye swept the main tactics display, humming and colorful above its holo-table. The map of his territory—albeit presently set to the distorted scale of human interests within Sergyar’s system, and not the astrographic reality, which would leave everything invisible and put humans firmly in their place as a faint smear on the surface of a speck. A G-star burning tame and pleasant at this distance; its necklace of half-a-dozen planets and their circling moons; the colony world itself turning below the station. Of more critical strategic interest, the four wormhole jump points that were its gateways to the greater galactic nexus, and their attendant military and civilian stations—two highly active with a stream of commercial traffic and scheduled tightbeam relays, leading to the jump routes back to the rest of the Barrayaran Empire and on to its nearest neighbor on this side, currently peaceful Escobar; one accessing a long and uneconomical backdoor route to the Nexus; the last leading, as far as forty years of exploration had found, nowhere.

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