The Aether: Erin's Command

Fenrir, hunter class, faster than anything the fleet has ever put a crew on — and Erin barely has time to learn her name before the ship, and the testimony sealed inside her chain of custody, becomes the one thing standing between a corruption case years in the making and the powerful men trying to bury it a second time. A rear admiral with everything to lose has taken a cruiser group dark and is running an illegal picket sweep with one objective: make sure Fenrir never arrives to testify. His captains think it's a training exercise. It isn't. And somewhere below the horizontal plane every fleet officer has been trained to watch, a ship no one expects is closing the distance at a speed no specification admits to. While Erin learns what it means to hold a command — her crew, her judgment, her name on the orders instead of someone else's — her father and uncle are quietly running out of reasons to stay. Thirty years of service, one battle group, one ship. The proceedings that have consumed a year of their lives are finally closing. And closing them means letting go of the bridge that has been the center of the world since before Erin was born. Erin's Command is a story about what it costs to become who you were always going to be — and about the people who have to step back so you can.