One Good Soldier

time with my great-great-grandchildren, sir. Apparently, I have thirty-seven of them.' Joe wasn't sure, but he thought he actually saw a tear in the CHENG's eye. 'I hate retirement parties.'

'Well, by damned you will have one, sailor, and that is an order. We'll make a point of it when we get back from the outer system.' The admiral slapped Benny's shoulder. 'But you are still leaving us in a serious bind.'

'No CHENG, sir.' The XO nodded in agreement. The gruff Marine went straight back to his normal gridiron hardassed self. 'Got to have a CHENG.'

'I'm aware of that XO. But who could do the job?' the admiral asked no one in particular.

'If you ask me, sir, I think Buckley here would make a good CHENG someday,' Benny said and turned to his assistant chief engineer with a big smile. 'Maybe if he were put to work being the CHENG, he wouldn't have enough time to go about tearing up the Engineering Room every time he turns around. And it might make him a little more reluctant to fry himself with X-rays every chance he has a decent excuse to.'

'Buckley, you up for it?' The admiral looked Joe square in the eyes, but Joe didn't falter a bit. Well, his mind was racing, his heart was racing, and his stomach was in knots, hard U.S. Navy knots, but he didn't hesitate to answer.

'Aye, aye, sir!'

'Wait a minute, Admiral. There is a problem with that,' the XO interrupted again.

'What's that, Larry?'

'The Blair has an O5 as their CHENG. We can't have a lower-ranked officer as our CHENG than she does. That just wouldn't be fitting, Admiral.' Joe glanced at the old marine only slightly, since he didn't want to take his eyes off Admiral Wallace, but he couldn't tell from the glance if the XO was serious, joking, or just being an ass. But that was usually the way it was with General Chekov.

'You're right, Larry.' Rear Admiral Upper Half Wallace Jefferson turned and picked up something from his desk and handed it to Joe. 'Open it, son.'

Joe opened the little box and found a silver leaf and two melding fabric patches. Each of the patches had three gold stripes at the bottom with a single gold star above them in the middle of the patch. The smaller of the patches was for the collar of his UCU jacket and the larger for his shoulder. Joe didn't say a word.

'Congratulations, Commander Buckley.' The admiral offered Joe his hand.

'Take care of her, Joe.' Benny slapped his protege on the back. 'Or should I say CHENG?'

Chapter 9

July 1, 2394 ADRoss 128, Planet Five, a.k.a. Arcadia, 40,000 Kilometers above New MegalopolisFriday, 3:09 PM, Frontier City Standard TimeFriday, 11:09 AM, Earth Eastern Standard Time

The Separatist flagship wasn't like the previous warships of the Separatist fleet. The ships used in major battles at the Martian Exodus and at the Battle of the Oort had been retrofitted cargo haulers. The haulers were large, even bigger than the U.S. supercarrier class ships, but they were still old reconfigured cargo ships that had been turned into makeshift warships. The fact that the old haulers were, well, old is what led the U.S. forces to refer to them derogatorily as 'rust buckets.'

The Separatists had been updating and building new weapons since they had moved from Mars to the Tau Ceti system twelve years ago. There was some intelligence that suggested that the Tau Ceti colony had been in on the Separatist movement all along and perhaps had been developing mecha, weapons, and even the new line of battleships for them. It was unclear who had retrofitted the previous generation of ships for them, although Tau Ceti was the most likely candidate. It was possible that the Separatists had retrofitted the ships in space somewhere deep in the outer parts of the Sol System. After all, they had managed to build a small moon-sized QMT teleport facility in the Oort Cloud right under the U.S. military's nose. And then they managed to plan an exodus of over thirty million citizens from the Sol System to the Oort facility and then on to Tau Ceti.

In twelve years, the thirty million Separatists, along with