Chapter 238: The General Who Did Not Know
General Hadrian Kest stood in his opulent office in Bastion One. He looked out the wide, reinforced glass window toward the southern horizon.
He felt a deep, genuine sense of satisfaction.
Three weeks had passed since he had ordered the Capital fleet to drop anchor and enforce a total grain blockade on Bastion Seven. Three weeks of tense, quiet political warfare.
And he had been entirely right.
The blockade was working. Intelligence reports from the neutral Bastions confirmed it. Lord Commander Helion Goldmane's city was starving.
Their rapid expansion program meant nothing. They could build a hundred clearing towers, but towers could not grow winter wheat fast enough to stop a famine.
Kest had looked at the brutal mathematics and made the correct call. He had talked the war-hungry Hawks in the Senate out of launching a preemptive strike.
