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Ensign Year 3
Paperback
Series: An Officer of the Union Space Fleet, Book 3
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 16 2026
Pages: 180
Weight: 0.40
Height: 0.41 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
A colony has voted to leave the Union, and worse, to ignore physics.
A drifting gravitational anomaly is on a six-week track to cross Halen Colony's star system. The math says it will shift Halen's orbit by enough to render the planet uninhabitable inside a season. Halen's biosphere will not survive what is coming.
Halen's elected council has voted that the math is a fleet manipulation. They have voted to secede. They have voted to refuse fleet evacuation, fleet assistance, and fleet ships in their orbit. Tin-foil hats abound.
The Providence has been ordered to fix the orbit anyway, with or without permission. The window is six weeks. Any solution requires the colony's cooperation, which they have voted not to give.
Montgomery Hale is going to the surface with the diplomatic team. Helm on the ship, field officer on the ground. A possible promotion to Lieutenant Junior Grade looms, and his performance on this mission will be a deciding factor.
Montgomery is also not who his service jacket says he is. He never went to the fleet academy. The record that put him on this ship is a forgery he built when he was seventeen, sitting on the floor of a station corridor with everything he owned in a bag. Captain Price has suspected it from the day Montgomery came aboard and has chosen not to ask.
On day three of the Halen mission, Price asks Montgomery how you move colonists who have decided not to be moved. It's the kind of question a captain asks a junior officer when he's already decided the junior officer has the answer. The answer lives in the part of Montgomery's life that isn't on file.
Montgomery can answer as the orphaned colonist kid he was--someone with street-smarts that understands the mindset of the conspiracy theory-embracing colonists. Or he can keep the lid on and watch a colony get cooked by physics nobody on the ground believes in.
An Officer of the Union Space Fleet, Book 3. No apocalyptic wars. No galactic wars. Just a kid trying to save a planet that doesn't want to be saved.Also from
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