The Flames of War Spread Even as the clash on distant, desolate Zhogalgan winds down, the spark it has ignited now threatens to set entire star systems aflame. Now Corvanite Lieutenant Ulric Bannon leads his special tasks phalanx on a deep reconnaissance on an alien world to discover Zolarian plans… while elsewhere, on an airless moon, Zolarian First Sergeant Cul Draven faces savage war against a Corvanite client-state that has launched an offensive in the wake of the Zhogalgan confrontation. Corvan and Zolah. Two great powers hurtling toward war… … but the real enemy may be the mysterious alien operatives manipulating the conflict from the shadows. *** Prologue Space seemed to twist, and with a burst of bright blue Cherenkov radiation, a blunt cylinder appeared in the Gamma Corvi 822 system. Cone-shaped drive nozzles at the aft end flared white, pushing the starship toward the distant world that the humans called Zhogalgan at just over one otuchan gravity. The light of that burst of Cherenkov radiation would reach the planet and the human starships that now dominated its orbitals within sixteen of the humans’ minutes. The starship would reach it much later than that, though at its current acceleration, it