Commander Elias Quist, a Mars officer seconded to the Rim “for the duration of the mission,” expects a six-week exam cruise with a fleet of junk ships, cadets, and old-timers recalled from retirement. Then the engineered civil war between Earth, Mars, and the Rim erupts, the real navies burn in harbour, and the training fleet at the system's edge is suddenly the last formation the Rim can still manoeuvre. Quist rises one funeral and one detachment at a time, from fifth in command to the man who must plan the last stand.
This is military SF measured in people, not tonnage — do-more-with-less ingenuity, found family forged in drills and funerals, and a creeping wrongness at the system's edge, in the vein of Battlestar Galactica (2004). It ends in a stand that saves people, not territory.
The Books
Book 1
Forty-One Hulls
Six days to a live-armed review, then a six-week exam cruise to the outer stations. Fail either, and forty-one hulls go to the breakers. Quist has to write a plan a fleet this slow can actually fly.
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Book 2
Built Anyway
Fourteen minutes into a fight that should have run six, the ready racks read forty rounds, thirty-one, nineteen. The enemy's own unencrypted traffic files the Reserve as attrition posture, not offensive capability. The mills will have to answer that.
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Book 3
What the Record Had Room For
Ballast's coffin comes in at full burn, no throttle-back, and something forty seconds behind it. Three compartments bolted to the caravan's deck hold the whole of the Rim's government, waiting on a number Quist has written down twice.
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Book 4
Ragged and Bright
Corran stood down its militia, opened its collars, took the terms. Six days later Corran was gone. Every direction left on the chart is also the war, and the evacuation's seven legs run straight through it.
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