Santiago de Cuba, the second-largest city on the island of Cuba, had undergone a radical transformation. Since the Continental Covenant had effectively choked the life out of Havana, Cuba’s primary port, this city had become the frantic heart of Spanish maritime power and logistics. In this war, it was the pivot upon which everything turned.

“By our estimates, his host should have struck north and reached the banks of the Mississippi by now,” Admiral Antonio de Oquendo noted, his finger tracing a line on the charts.

“Then we must prepare to sail our fleet northward from here,” replied Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of Olivares. He stood with his arms crossed, his gaze fixed on the map. “We must be in a position to support the Infante Ferdinand the moment he calls.”

The two men stood in a shaded command room, the humid air of the Caribbean heavy around them. Olivares fell into a brief, pensive silence before continuing. “We have yet to hear from the Infante, but… his capability is beyond reproach. Throughout the Seventeen Years’ War, whether in the Low Countries or the German territories, he has never once tasted the bitterness of defeat. He is a man of certainties.”

The Count-Duke’s confidence was not misplaced. No matter what grotesque steel wagons or underwater explosives the Continental Covenant boasted, there was a fundamental gap in military pedigree that could not be easily bridged. The Covenant’s people had never endured a struggle on the scale of the wars Spain had waged for centuries. Spain was the sun around which European geopolitics orbited; its history was a chronicle of brilliant commanders and relentless tactical evolution.

Infante Ferdinand was the crown jewel of that history. He had crushed the English, dismantled the Dutch, and broken the armies of Sweden, Denmark, and the Protestant princes of the Empire without ever yielding a single victory to his foes.

Olivares was not foolish enough to be careless against an unknown opponent, nor did he harbor the naive expectation that Ferdinand was immortal. However, logic dictated a high probability of success. Even in the event of a setback, it was unthinkable that the Infante would go down easily.

Thus, their primary concern remained logistics: how to effectively support a massive land army plunging into the heart of a continent with their naval strength.

“Admiral Oquendo, perhaps it is time to mobilize our ‘Great Ships’?”

“They would be of little use in supporting a land campaign,” Oquendo countered with a shake of his head. “Were they not forged specifically to counter the gargantuan iron vessels of the Covenant? Those precious ships are our trump card; we should reserve them for the decisive naval clash…”

Crash!

The sudden uproar caused both men to flinch. The heavy doors of the meeting room were flung wide without so much as a knock. A soldier, disheveled and gasping for breath, stumbled into the room, his eyes wide with a frantic terror.

“Ugh… a dispatch… no… My Lords…”

Olivares clicked his tongue in irritation, opening his mouth to deliver a sharp reprimand for the man’s insolence and lack of composure. But the soldier spoke first.

“The Infante… Ferdinand… he has suffered a catastrophic defeat.”

The reprimand died in the Count-Duke’s throat, leaving him staring with his mouth agape.

“Defeated?” Oquendo managed to ask, his voice cracking. “To what extent?”

The soldier stood frozen, his eyes darting between the two powerful men. The silent, lethal pressure emanating from Olivares and Oquendo seemed to scream: Tell me this is a joke. Tell me I misheard you, or you won’t leave this room alive.

The messenger stammered, unable to find his words. The silence stretched until it was unbearable.

“Was it an open-field engagement?” Oquendo barked.

“Where… where did he retreat to?” Olivares added, his hands trembling.

“Did he… did he even manage to retreat?”

“Was he captured? And the army? What of the sixty thousand?”

The pressure finally broke the soldier’s resolve, and the truth spilled out in a ragged torrent. “The vast… the vast majority of the army has been taken prisoner. And the Infante… he is among them. He has surrendered.”

A deafening silence descended.

The two men looked down at the tactical map they had been annotating. The arrows they had drawn—arrows representing the inevitable triumph of Spanish arms and the dismantling of the Covenant—stared back at them like a mockery. In a heartbeat, their entire reality had been reduced to scrap paper.

But the loss of a map was the least of their problems.

“How… how could this happen? Aaaaaagh!“

Olivares lost his composure completely, slamming his fist onto the mahogany table. No one could offer him an answer, for they all knew what this meant for the future.

The sixty thousand men Ferdinand had led into the wilderness were the backbone of Spain’s power in the West. They were the veterans of the Seventeen Years’ War, combined with nearly the entirety of the colonial forces of Nueva España.

With that host gone, Nueva España was a hollow shell. If the Covenant chose to strike now, the path to Mexico City lay wide open and undefended.

“We… we must… stop them…” Olivares whispered, his teeth chattering with a rhythmic, metallic sound. He was living his most vivid nightmare.

But the question remained: How? Their land forces were gone. How were they supposed to stop an advancing tide with nothing but shadows?

Admiral Oquendo, feeling a cold nausea rising in his throat, forced himself to maintain a shred of professional calm. “They… they will not come by land, Count-Duke.”

It was a statement that required no great military genius. To march from the Chesapeake to Mexico City by land was a trek longer than the distance from Paris to Moscow.

“They will come by sea,” Oquendo continued, his eyes sharpening as he processed the threat. “They will sail from the Chesapeake, through the Gulf of Mexico, and land at Veracruz. And from Veracruz…”

“They will march straight for Mexico City,” Olivares finished.

“Precisely.”

The two men met each other’s gaze, swallowing hard. The objective was now agonizingly clear.

“Launch every scout ship we have,” Olivares commanded the messenger, his voice a low, shivering rasp. “Monitor the Covenant’s fleet. Track every movement.”

They had to watch. They had to block. They were no longer the conquerors, the masters of the offensive.

They were the hunted.

“And the Great Ships,” Olivares added, turning to Oquendo. “Bring them out of Cartagena immediately, Admiral.”

“Count-Duke…”

“I am placing my faith in you. We no longer have the luxury of caution.”

***

“To end this war… we must invade immediately.”

The Continental Covenant was bound by the doctrine of a Just War. They could not initiate a conflict for mere national interest or unprovoked conquest. Their wars had to be acts of self-defense or service to a higher cause, much like the Liberation of Florida.

“You know as well as I do, My Lord,” Raleigh whispered, his voice a dry rasp. “This is not a war of our making.”

Sir Walter Raleigh—or ‘Dolly,’ as he was affectionately known in these private quarters—coughed a harsh, hacking sound. I reached out and gently rubbed his back. He spat into a handkerchief, then looked up at me, his eyes burning with a lingering, fierce intelligence despite his frail frame.

“They were the ones who started this. Their greed led them to invade us, ready to spill innocent blood for the sake of their pride. Therefore, we must be the ones to end it.”

He gripped my hands with his skeletal fingers. “Do not hesitate. We will win. If we plant our banner in Mexico City—if we dismantle Nueva España and shatter their hegemony once and for all—then, and only then, will there be peace.”

I looked back to see the Admiral and the rest of the cabinet nodding in solemn agreement. I squeezed Raleigh’s hands. “Your counsel… even now, it remains our North Star.”

Raleigh offered a faint, tired smile. His eyes drifted shut, heavy with a final, peaceful exhaustion. He gave a single, slow nod, then slipped into a deep sleep.

***

We filed out of Raleigh’s room and immediately convened the council.

“Baron Raleigh is correct,” Oitotan declared. He leaned heavily on his cane, puffing on his pipe. “Repelling them is a temporary measure. Unless we seize them by the throat, these invasions will never cease.”

“I find myself in agreement,” Eleanor added. She reached over and swatted Oitotan’s back, gesturing for him to extinguish his pipe. “We have lived under their shadow for decades. Now that we finally have the strength to strike back, we would be fools to squander the opportunity.”

Thomas Hewitt scrawled notes into his ledger, squinting through his spectacles as they caught the afternoon sun. “I agree as well. We may not be able to purge them from the Americas entirely, but if we demonstrate our absolute power, we can finally sever this long, bitter cycle of enmity.”

“The justification is ironclad,” Manteo noted, looking out the window as he fingered his own pipe. “The liberation of the natives, the abolition of slavery… and now, a response to their unprovoked aggression. It is our turn to deliver the blow.”

As the surviving ‘Apostles’—the founding fathers and elders of the Covenant—reached a consensus, the rest of the cabinet followed their lead. Oitotan cleared his throat, and the formal vote began.

“All those in favor of the invasion of Nueva España, raise your hands.”

One by one, the hands went up.

“I remember the days of Spanish rule over our lands,” a Floridian representative, a former slave, declared. “I will ensure those days never return.”

“For liberty!” a Californian added, his voice ringing with the spirit of an entrepreneur. “We will crush those who seek to obstruct our right to prosper!”

“The Mainline Republic will ensure every munition and supply reaches the front with unprecedented speed,” a representative from Omaha promised, already calculating the logistical contracts.

“The time has come to end Habsburg tyranny on this soil,” an Israeli representative stated, his face a map of scars left by the ‘National Savior Army.’

The representatives from the Wabenaki, Iroquois, Shawnee, Shoshone, and Illinois—groups not directly touched by the recent fighting—raised their hands with solemn expressions, caught up in the rising heat of the moment.

It was unanimous. I raised my hand as well, and Oitotan offered a sharp, satisfied grin.

“The Cabinet has spoken,” Oitotan announced. “Admiral, prepare the Great White Fleet. We sail for Texas immediately.”

“Understood, Chairman.”

Texas was our staging ground, the place where General Mansfeld and the bulk of the Covenant’s land forces were stationed. We would transport them across the gulf and strike deep.

“Our objective is Veracruz,” Oitotan confirmed. “The primary throat of Nueva España. After decades of waiting… it is finally our turn. They had best be prepared.”

December 1588. That was when Vicente Gonzalez had first led his men to raid the settlement of Croatoan. For nearly sixty years since, the Spanish had watched us, threatened us, and hated us.

The day of reckoning had finally arrived. Everyone could feel the fire in their veins. This day would be etched into the stone of Covenant history. The day we finally seized the hilt of the blade.

The long wait was over.

***

“The enemy is approaching, Admiral.”

Antonio de Oquendo swallowed hard, realizing that his long vigil was nearing its climax. He stood upon the deck of the largest wooden warship ever constructed. And she was not alone.

The San Mateo. The San Marcos. The San Lucas. And his own flagship, the San Juan.

The four vessels, named after the Evangelists, were of such a staggering scale that they felt less like ships and more like floating cathedrals of war. While their massive weight made them agonizingly slow—a fatal flaw in any other context—they were deemed a necessity to counter the rumored behemoths of the Covenant.

We cannot lose.

Oquendo forced the rising dread from his mind, his eyes narrowing as he scanned the horizon. Infante Ferdinand might have failed on land, but that was a soldier’s story. Spain was, and always had been, the mistress of the waves. Today, her fleet was at its absolute zenith.

Hundreds of cannons bristled from the tiered decks of the four Great Ships. The moment the enemy drew close, a storm of iron would erupt from those tiered batteries, shattering the Covenant’s ‘toys’ into kindling.

Behind him lay the uninhabited keys at the tip of the Florida peninsula. Ahead lay the deep blue of the Atlantic. To reach the land forces in Texas, the Covenant fleet would have to run this gauntlet.

After days of waiting, a cry came from the crow’s nest.

“Sails! No—smoke! The Covenant Navy is in sight!”

Black dots began to pierce the seam of the horizon. Oquendo’s veteran crews moved with practiced, lethal efficiency, bringing the ships into a tight battle formation. They were a coiled spring, ready to unleash hell the moment the range was closed.

“Hold your fire,” Oquendo commanded. “Wait until they are well within the grasp of our batteries.”

A suffocating, tense silence fell over the Spanish line. There was only the rhythmic slap of waves against the massive hulls. As the black dots grew into silhouettes, the silence became a physical weight. Soon, the distance would close, the silence would shatter, and the ocean would turn red with the work of iron and flesh.

It was about to begin. Here, they would hold the line. They would save Nueva España. They would preserve Spain’s Atlantic hegemony. The curtain was rising on a battle that would be sung of for—

Splash!

A cold, sudden silence smothered the air. The tension that had been pulled taut as a wire snapped instantly, like a rubber band stretched past its limit.

All it took was the sound of a single, distant splash.

“What… what was that?”

In truth, the Admiral knew. He had seen the geyser of water erupt a few hundred yards ahead of his bow. But his mind refused to process the reality of it. The enemy ships were still so distant they were barely visible through a telescope. It was an impossibility—

KRA-KOOM!

“Aaaagh! The main deck is hit!” “Take cover! Down! Get down!”

Denial was no longer an option. Oquendo was forced to face the brutal truth.

“How…” he stammered, staring at the distant horizon. “How can their cannons reach us from there? Return fire! Fire back!”

But it was a futile command. The Spanish shells fell hopelessly short, splashing uselessly into the sea kilometers away from their targets.

A weapon that could strike while the enemy was still a mere speck on the horizon. That was the power of the Covenant’s ordnance.

Can we truly win this?

Anxiety began to take root in Oquendo’s chest, a cold weed that he desperately tried to trample. No. Our Great Ships are fortresses. We will not break. Their puny fleet will be crushed—

As the Covenant ships drew closer, a new silence fell over the San Juan. Oquendo’s eyes bulged.

“It… it’s impossible,” his adjutant whispered, his voice trembling. “We… we were told our ships were the largest in the world…”

Approaching through the haze were vessels that seemed to defy the laws of perspective. They were many times the size of the San Juan, looming like moving mountains of iron. They belched thick, black columns of smoke, advancing with a terrifying, mechanical indifference.

They were the Behemoths of the new world.

And as Oquendo watched, paralyzed, the sky began to rain iron.