The Treasure of Lei Fong Wu

Chapter Fifty-Nine

THE RELENTLESS -33:50

Sinclair couldn’t take his eyes off of the great ship.

He had always had a passion for military history, far more than the mere professional interest of most of his peers. While nearly everyone else on the Bridge of the Relentless merely saw a whopping big but decrepit warship, Sinclair saw a ghost of history made incarnate. It was as if the Merrimac or a Roman trireme had suddenly appeared in orbit for his inspection.

She was only about a third of the size of one of the Dortmunder-class Alliance cruisers – about the size of a Holloway-class battleship – but after looking at the thing all these hours, he couldn’t swear that the Sun Tzu in top form couldn’t stand toe-to-toe with the best the Alliance had to offer. Even excepting the three big lasers – some of the biggest ever built – she was an impressive beast, pocked with fighter bays, bristling with gun emplacements, and festooned with missile batteries.

But the ornate style of the ship was far different than the austere, sterile look of the Alliance architecture. Alliance ships were designed to intimidate, ideal for keeping a lid on the inevitable Outer Rim rebellions. The Sun Tzu was designed to impress a foe with her lethal magnificence. She was the ship of a conqueror, not a peacekeeper. She was one of the last of the great warships built by independent planetary governments, back in that wild time where every dipshit moon in the galaxy insisted on planetary sovereignty and the right to oppress its people and invade its neighbors as they chose. Not soon after she was decommissioned, the Alliance had seen to most defense needs of its members. There was no need for such impressive doomsday weapons such as the Sun Tzu under the Alliance. She was the last of her kind in so many ways.

He tried to insist to himself that it was awe of the vessel that had kept him in the command chair all this time, staring at it. Sinclair did not like to admit to himself that he