Richard Fox is the winner of the 2017 Dragon Award for Best Military Science Fiction or Fantasy novel. He's best known for The Ember War Saga, a military science fiction and space opera series. His writing draws extensively from his experiences in the United States Army, where he served two combat tours in Iraq and was awarded the Bronze Star, Combat Action Badge and Presidential Unit Citation. He lives in fabulous Las Vegas with his incredible wife and three boys, amazing children bent on anarchy. His latest novel from Baen is Men of Bretton.
Data Rod I-37
A man’s palm adjusted a camera bulb before pulling away to reveal a mop of greying curled hair. The palm returned and futzed with the angle until the fuzzy feed resolved into a rail thin man with tired eyes sitting in a room laden with data slates and holo maps of dead interstellar nations.
“System, note date and location. This is Francesco Muston of the Umbrian Coalition Scholarship Foundation,” the man said. He sat up straighter, frowning at something, then reached for a brush and tried to tame his unkempt hair. “System, apply my usual filter and recut with my usual introduction.”
A faint chirp sounded.
“Again, this is Francesco Muston and I’ve just now come into ownership of a critical piece of the historical record concerning the Hegemony Collapse of 2658. I want my initial, unvarnished, reaction to the record as my generous patron from the Bayraktar Group insists on undiluted content for his records while I am allowed more leeway when it comes to peer review submissions. While I have paid for . . . numerous . . . copies of already established records and outright forgeries, my source of this document makes frequent trips into post-Hegemony territories and has delivered reliable information in the past. I do hope to make my own fact finding journey once the security situation improves, though that’s been an aspiration for many years, and warfare between factions has gone from a simmer to new conflagration as of my source’s latest field report.”
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