Author's note: This work is ten years old. I had written it without bothering to ask David Weber or Steve White, but it was set during the period chronicled in 'Insurrection'. I based it on a premise only briefly glanced at by those authors.
Whenever a civil war starts, you have a brief period at the start where the officers of your military are faced with a choice. Go with your heart, or go with your orders. The basic premise for this came from the movie Ironclads, where a junior enlisted man broke up the powder train to destroy the Newport News dockyard, later used to rebuild what later became CSS Virginia Of Monitor and Merrimac fame. His reasoning was simple; that people he knew and liked might be killed when the powder destroyed the dock.
In Insurrection, a captain named Li Han placed her ship between two superdreadnoughts and other ships that might have been rebels, defying them to kill her.
What I considered was this: what if an entire battle group at the start of that war refused to merely blast the 'rebels' as ordered? Then instead of going over to the rebels, they returned, and told their superiors they would refuse this patently illegal order?
In real life, what would happen is the military would expend a few rounds of ammo on each of them, and go on as if these idiots were secondary.
But what if they didn't get that chance?
If that intrigues you, read on.
Redemption
"A navy is essentially and necessarily aristocratic. True as may be the political principals for which we are now contending they can never be practically applied or even admitted on board ship, out of port, or off soundings. This may seem a hardship, but is nevertheless the simplest of truths. Whilst the ships sent forth by the Congress may and must fight for the principles of human life and republican freedom, the ships themselves must be ruled and commanded at sea under a system of absolute despotism."
(John Paul Jones in a letter dated 14 September 1775, directed to the Naval Committee of the First Continental Congress.)