General Alan Stirling looked at the display again and frowned. As the commanding officer of the entire active portion of the Arcadian Defense Force, he was used to things going wrong, but more often in a bureaucratic manner. A pissing match between two or more of the Corps that made up the Defense Force was more common than suddenly losing contact with two of the Aerospace Corps aircraft and the entire satellite network. Today's problem looked like it was something altogether more serious. Stirling could see himself reflected in the polished display surface of the briefing table. A stern, gray-haired visage met his gaze with tired eyes. In his mind's eye, Stirling could still see himself as a young man, his tightly curled hair black, his mahogany face unwrinkled, his eyes eager. Alan Stirling had been born on Earth, in the west-African nation of Ghana, but he'd been a child when his family had made its way to Arcadia in the late 2040s, driven by increasing hostility to their Kassena heritage by Ghana's majority Ashanti population.
