Orphan Brigade by Henry V. O'Neil

was confusing enough all by itself, starting with the very human tendency to see it as a front line when it was no such thing. If seen from far enough away, it certainly did appear as a barrier between the approaching Sims and the inhabited planets, but it was by no means a cohesive defensive belt.
    Mankind might be fighting the Sims for the habitable planets in a vast but limited region of space, but that zone was constantly shifting because the planets themselves, and everything around them, never stopped moving. Sim fleets had appeared out of nowhere many times during the war, all without Step technology, and so Olech Mortas had trained himself to think in terms of threats that could come from any and every direction. Among its many benefits, the room helped him to maintain that orientation.
    â€œTake me to Platinus,” he ordered, and the void whirled in front of his eyes. Flashes of light that could have been comets or distant suns, the sensation of flying, long stretches of pure blackness hammering home the distances in humanity’s war with the Sims. At one point the entire room flickered red, just for a moment, and a mechanical voice announced that he had crossed the CHOP line. The acronym was originally a nautical term indicating the boundaries between fleets at sea, but the CHOP line in this conflict was of even wider import. It marked the beginning of the military’s jurisdiction in space, and the coalition government had established numerous laws with extraordinary penalties for crossing the boundary without authorization—­both ways.
    Once again Olech experienced the impossible deceleration, before a single habitable planet in one of the many solar systems of the war came into focus. Only a few years earlier it had been designated UP-­2716. UP stood for Unoccupied Planet, and the four digits that followed were selected at random for reasons of information security. The Sim enemy might not be able to comprehend or even form the sounds of human speech, but they understood numbers, and so the four digits identifying a planet in the war zone followed no set order. When the Sims had landed on UP-­2716 it had become EP-­2716, Enemy Planet 2716, until the landing of human troops had changed it to CP-­2716. Contested Planet 2716.
    When the Force had triumphed there, CP-­2716 had become Secured Planet 2716 or SP-­2716. Only after a planet was secured did it receive a name, and this one had been called Platinus because of the vast deposits of minerals vital to the war effort that had been discovered there.
    They’d also found other resources that would be highly valuable once the war was over, and so Platinus was one of the planets that received Olech’s special attention. Force-­supplied information suggested that nothing unexpected was happening there, but the Chairman relied on other indicators to provide a more accurate picture. Much of the status feeds he could call up were provided by agencies he didn’t completely trust, and so the reports from his network of informants were added into the display as well.
    As could be expected, Force efforts to extract and exploit war-­specific minerals were going full bore. However, data provided by Olech’s supplementary sources showed that development of Platinus as a colony was far ahead of other planets in the war zone that had been conquered much earlier. Excessive numbers of troops were based there, and Olech’s spies had already tipped him off that settlements were being mapped out by the army corps that owned that region of space.
    It was an old-­fashioned land grab that would have done justice to the worst of the colonial powers of Earth’s rapacious history, and it was not easy to prevent. Despite Olech’s best efforts, several alliance planets had managed to create corps-­level units composed entirely of their own citizens. The commanders of those organizations frequently saw themselves less as