The Aether: At Ease by F. R. Edwards

The Aether: At Ease

Grohl and Spike are finally home. Thirty-one years aboard the Ebon Fang, and now — retirement. Slow mornings. A desk that isn't his. An estate that doesn't need saving. It should feel like peace.

It doesn't, not entirely. Because two power points just vanished from the Republic's most decorated warship, and forty years of Skorrn doctrine says a fleet without them is a fleet worth testing again.

Fleet Intelligence has fourteen engagements and four decades of data proving the Skorrn have never once brought a war to civilian ground. They're wrong. While analysts defend a pattern that no longer holds, drop ships are already descending on settlements that were never built to be battlefields — and the people living in them are the ones who have to prove the fourteen-engagement record obsolete, in real time, with whatever they managed to get built before the concrete finished curing.

At Ease is about what happens when the men who spent their whole careers being the reason an enemy stayed away finally step back — and about the people who have to hold the line while the fleet remembers, too late, that some doctrines only look permanent right up until they aren't.