The Hidden Victory: Shadows of Aurora — Book 2

Four years after the events of The Dark Between Stars, the war is over - officially. Unofficially, someone has been very busy. Captain Edward Brackenbury takes command of Valiant, the Royal Anglo Navy's most advanced reconnaissance cruiser, and returns to the frontier with orders to investigate a nominally neutral corridor that has quietly swallowed fourteen convoys over the past year. What he finds inside the Rho-Seven debris field - a concealed installation, a long-range strike weapon approaching operational readiness, and a layered patrol disposition that should have made any visitor invisible - is the answer to a question the Confederacy did not know it had been asking. The intelligence is extraordinary. Getting it home is the second problem. Someone inside the Confederacy's own planning layer has been feeding information to the other side for sixteen months. The standard transit route is watched. The standard communication channels cannot be trusted. And the weapon is six weeks from deployment. Against this, Brackenbury has his crew, his ship, and four years of thinking about a single opponent who has never quite done what anyone expected him to do. The Hidden Victory is a novel of deep-space reconnaissance and cold intelligence work - of passive sensors and careful deductions, of the patience required to understand a dangerous mind, and the specific kind of victory that leaves nothing to celebrate and everything worth protecting. Fans of Patrick O'Brian, C.S. Forester, and the cerebral tradition of science fiction military fiction will find in Captain Brackenbury a commanding officer worth following into the dark.