Serengeti

Black Ops - the intelligence arm of the Meridian Alliance Fleet came calling with an offer Henricksen couldn't refuse: a ship - an entire squadron of ships, actually - and crew to command. A chance to get back to the stars. Too bad he didn't ask more questions before accepting the assignment. Too bad no one told him just how dangerous this particular skunkworks project was. They call the ship the RV-N: Reconnaissance Vessel-Non-combat, Raven for short. A stealth ship - fast, and maneuverable, and brutal as hell.

It was supposed to be an easy job: find the Dark Star Revolution Starships, destroy them, and go home. But a booby-trapped vessel decimates the Meridian Alliance fleet, leaving Serengeti - a Valkyrie class warship with a sentient AI brain - on her own, wrecked and abandoned in an empty expanse of space. On the edge of total failure, Serengeti thinks only of her crew. She herds the survivors into a lifeboat, intending to sling them into space. But the escape pod sticks in her belly, locking the cryogenically frozen crew inside.

For 53 years Serengeti drifted, dreaming in the depths of space. Fifty-three years of patient waiting before her Valkyrie Sisters arrive to retrieve her from the dark. A bittersweet homecoming follows, the Fleet Serengeti once knew now in shambles, its admiral, Cerberus, gone missing, leaving Brutus in charge. Brutus who's subsumed the Fleet, ignoring his duty to the Meridian Alliance to pursue a vendetta against the Dark Star Revolution.