The Independent Command

THEY'RE SWARMING FOR THE KILL . . .
AND WE ARE THE PREY!

Everybody knows how despicable the alien Fibians are. Allies of the fanatic Mollie rebels against the human Commonwealth, they show no mercy, they have no remorse, and they find human flesh delectable—at least when served live. Fielding a gigantic starfleet against Earth and its colonies, they march like the giant spiders they resemble through humanity's nightmares, and soon they will march across its devastated worlds.

When the captain of the starship Invincible is incapacitated after a Fibian attack, only Peter Raeder—former fighter pilot, starship flight engineer, and unorthodox hero of the war against the Mollies—can be entrusted with command of the ship. His mission: to track down the alien raiders who took out his captain, and then to start hitting the enemy behind the lines.

It's a suicide mission, and Raeder knows it . . . until the fortunes of battle drive him deeper into alien space than he'd ever intended to go, the Invincible too damaged ever to return home. There he discovers that the monstrous Fibians may not be monsters after all . . .

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

James Doohan was an engineer, and later a captain of artillery in the Canadian Army and was wounded on D-Day. He "sat out" the rest of the war flying reconnaissance over enemy lines. After the war, he taught and practiced acting, appearing in over 4,000 radio and TV programs, as well as films and Shakespearean production. When his friend Gene Roddenberry created Star Trek, he wrote the part of Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Scott, Chief Engineer of the Enterprise, to fit Doohan's real-life persona. Doohan stepped into the tailor-made role of "Scotty," and the rest is history. Now his career takes a new turn with this fast-moving adventure series conceived by Doohan as a science fiction expansion of his personal career as an engineer and pilot in World War II.

S.M. Stirling is the coauthor, with Anne McCaffrey, of the #1 genre bestseller, The City Who Fought. With David Drake, he is the author of "The General" novels, a popular military SF series. Stirling has also done the top-selling military SF collaboration with Jerry Pournelle, Go Tell the Spartans and Prince of Sparta, and is the author of the highly successful "Draka" alternate history trilogy recently published by Baen in one volume as The Domination. He has recently edited a shared-universe volume set in the same universe, Drakas!

Illustration by David Mattingly
Cover design by Carol Russo.

Hardcover
Paperback

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

First printing, November 2000

Distributed by Simon & Schuster
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New York, NY 10020

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: 0-671-31951-5

A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
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Typeset by Windhaven Press
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Electronic version by WebWrights
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The FLIGHT ENGINEER series:

The Rising
The Privateer
The Independent Command

BAEN BOOKS by S.M. Stirling

The Draka series:
The Stone Dogs
The Domination
Drakon
Drakas! (anthology)

With David Drake:

The Forge
The Hammer
The Anvil
The Steel
The Sword
The Chosen
The Reformer

With Jerry Pournelle:

Blood Feuds
Blood Vengeance

The City Who Fought
(with Anne McCaffrey)

The Ship Avenged

The Rose Sea
(with Holly Lisle)

Snowbrother

Saber and Shadow
(with Shirley Meier)