Eternity's Mind (26 page)

She also needed to find the answer she feared most—why the shadows had managed to penetrate
her.

 

CHAPTER

42

ZHETT KELLUM

Finding the abandoned equipment at the fringes of the Osquivel system brought back memories for Zhett. For many years before the Elemental War, clan Kellum had run shipyards in the rings of Osquivel, but when the EDF started cracking down on outlaw Roamers, the Kellums abandoned their shipyards and moved up to the dark cometary cloud. There, unseen, they had broken down huge quantities of comet ice, teasing out rare ekti. After the war, when cloud harvesting became safe and viable again, the Kellums had shelved their cometary operations, which were no longer cost-effective. All the mothballed equipment had just been hanging there for decades.

Zhett smiled as their borrowed ships flew in. The sensor screens detected the drifting vessels, temporary stations, and battered ekti tankers that had been in cold darkness for twenty years. Unmonitored, the components of the former industrial complex had wandered apart, and some facilities had suffered damage from bumping into drifting cometary fragments. But for the most part the ships and equipment seemed intact.

Zhett dispatched a crew to skim around in broad search patterns and map the locations of the primary assets. When large ships were found, Patrick sent survey and salvage crews aboard to reactivate the life-support and power systems. Before leaving Newstation, Del Kellum had used part of the loan he'd received from the treasury to buy a stockpile of power blocks, with which the teams restored the equipment to operational levels.

“It was certainly a different mindset back then, if we could afford to just dump all this stuff here,” Zhett mused. “I guess it wasn't financially feasible to move and repurpose it.” To her, the large dark ships looked like long-lost treasures wrapped in a sense of nostalgia.

Patrick said, “It's a junkyard.”

“Not junk, boy.” Del sounded indignant. “We left it in cold storage. And because it's of Roamer manufacture, I bet most of the ships and equipment are perfectly serviceable and ready to go.”

“I can manage one of them,” Kristof said brightly, “if you'll let me.”

“We'll consider it,” Patrick said, “but you need to work your way up.”

Though Toff had never been a particularly good student, preferring hands-on work to studying, they had planned to send him to Academ, but as soon as this possibility arose, the young man had, with much pleading, convinced them to let him work directly in the operations. Patrick was skeptical, but Zhett knew the value of Roamer work, especially when founding a new business.

“Once we're up and running and making money,” she said sternly to Toff, “we're going to get a Teacher compy. You
will
do daily lessons and you
will
score high enough that you don't make me regret this decision.”

“I will. I will!”

More importantly, this would be a way for Marius Denva to get back to work and prove he could return his life, and their operations, to normal. Though shaken, Denva was mostly recovered from the black nightmare of being stranded inside the shell around Kuivahr. After the Ildirans returned him to Newstation, Zhett, Del, and Patrick were astonished to learn of his rescue. The entire distillery crew had been sure he had died in the shadow attack.

“I just took a little longer to get away from Kuivahr than the rest of you did,” he said, trying to brush aside their concerns. “Next time, I promise I won't lag behind. Once was enough.”

He had surprised Zhett by signing up again to work with the Kellums. As a Roamer, Denva's skills were adaptable to whatever industrial operations Del got into his head, and the survivor was treated with awe and respect by the rest of his crew. At his request, Zhett did everything she could to treat him the same as always.

Since they had all worked with Denva before, Zhett was glad to have him supervising the new crew, which included most of the distillery workers who had escaped from Kuivahr.

Zhett promised to give him a raise, as soon as they had any money.

Now, with a broadband comm playing the background chatter, Zhett listened to the crew discussions and heard a new excitement in their voices. They were still terrified of the Shana Rei, with good reason, and they knew nothing was safe, but they were
Roamers
and eager to start harvesting ekti again. It seemed to be in their blood.

“We rounded up fourteen viable units, Del,” Denva reported, already deep into the new job. “We might have to spend a week or two duct-taping systems, recharging power blocks, and making them all functional again, but we'll get it done.”

“Take days instead of weeks, by damn,” Del said. “We have plenty of exosuits and temporary life-support systems. Once we get the engines patched and running, we can do the interior decorating while we shepherd the equipment across space to the nearest bloater cluster.”

“That's the next question,” Zhett said. “We have to find one that hasn't been claimed. Where do we set up our extraction operations?”

As soon as the ekti rush began, scouts had scoured the Spiral Arm in search of the drifting nodules. Bloaters were not easy to detect in the dark spaces between the stars, but numerous clusters had been found and were already being harvested by clans that had been much swifter out of the gate. It seemed the clusters were more common than anyone had suspected. Zhett just needed to find one for clan Kellum.

Not far away, visible through the main bridge windowport, Zhett watched a set of lights wink on as a primary ship was reactivated; some distance off, another set of lights came on as an abandoned tanker came online.

“That's two,” Denva transmitted. “Proof of concept. I've got crews aboard seven others, working and fiddling. I expect we'll have more activated within the hour.”

Toff cheered. Zhett chuckled. “Yes, this just might work. Our Guiding Star is shining bright again.”

“It was always there,” Del said. “We just took a few too many detours.”

“Then let's be practical about this,” Patrick said. “We have to claim a bloater cluster before we can set up shop and start our operations. Zhett and I will go hunting.”

“I want to go along, too,” Kristof said.

“Maybe. But only if—” Zhett turned to her father. “Watch baby Rex? It's a grandfather's job.”

Del adored the toddler. “I'll raise him to be a Roamer. I might even have the boy managing a project by the time you come back.”

“It shouldn't be too long,” Zhett said. “I know where to start looking for our first bloaters.”

 

CHAPTER

43

GENERAL NALANI KEAH

When her battered ships limped home from Relleker, General Keah wasted no time rallying the troops throughout the LOC. “You're all going to have to get your butts in gear—right now!”

The attack on a major Confederation colony was not news she wanted to keep confidential. Through Nadd, she had sent telink reports to green priests aboard her deployed patrol ships, and she placed CDF headquarters on maximum alert. As the
Kutuzov
returned to the complex in the dispersed rubble of the Moon, she transmitted her message to high command. “The threat affects everyone, and I want to announce this on all public channels on Earth. We need each person in the solar system to know what might be coming.”

First Officer Wingo was hesitant. “You could start a panic, General. Is it wise to tell the public how vulnerable our planets are?”

“As opposed to letting them think we're all perfectly safe, with nothing to worry about?” She snorted. “In an emergency, there is no benefit to keeping secrets. You think the black robots and the Shana Rei are spying on us? They won't give a damn what we do or don't do. No, better to tell our people all of it, Mr. Wingo. Release our images of Relleker so that everybody can see the bugbots tearing apart our Manta cruisers and then hitting a beautiful world. If it makes Earth's population lie wide-awake at night, then at least they won't be caught sleeping if an attack comes. I'd bet on vigilance over ignorance any day.”

Showing its battle scars, the
Kutuzov
arrived at the military complex. When the faeros had shattered the Moon and sent a hail of destructive fragments throughout the solar system, it had been a terrible disaster, but what happened at Relleker was worse.

During the retreat, her CDF engineers had worked through all the quick fixes they could make, and the
Kutuzov
and the surviving Mantas were functional by the time they got home, but Keah knew that “functional” wasn't the same as being battleworthy. At the LOC, her Mantas claimed spacedock repair facilities, and General Keah rallied construction crews to complete the necessary work on a round-the-clock schedule. “As little downtime as possible—it's imperative to get our warships back online and ready to fight.”

Eighty Manta cruisers were stationed at Earth, ten of which were just finishing scheduled maintenance. The Juggernauts commanded by Admirals Handies and Harvard were fully crewed and ready, but the two officers remained in their station complex in the main lunar fragment. Admiral Haroun seemed more restless now that he'd seen action during the crackdown on Rakkem. It had woken him up. He stayed aboard the
Okrun,
ready.

After docking the
Kutuzov,
she marched into the headquarters complex to meet with high command. “I'm not going to sugarcoat this for you all. Sit down, buckle in, and have a look at what we're up against.” She forced her line commanders to watch the consolidated footage from Relleker. The devastating engagement had lasted less than an hour, although at the time it had seemed like a hellish eternity.

She watched their expressions of alarm and disbelief; several of them—thankfully—looked hungry for revenge, while others seemed on the verge of panic. Silently, she noted which ones those were. Though she had watched the images over and over, she still felt a chill to see the hundreds of thousands of bugbot ships swarming around Relleker, sterilizing the planetary surface, closing in around every evacuating spacecraft including three of her Mantas, while the Shana Rei hexes disrupted all the cities on the planet.

“To the best of our knowledge, there are no survivors,” Keah said.

Admiral Handies said, “But those robot warships … there must be thousands of them.”

“Close to a million,” Keah said. “We analyzed the images on our flight back.”

An unannounced visitor was escorted into the briefing chamber. He was a pale-skinned, bald man who looked quiet and unassuming: Deputy Eldred Cain. “This is far worse than I feared, General.”

Deputy Cain, who had once served and then betrayed the Chairman of the Terran Hanseatic League, had administered Earth for the Confederation since the end of the Elemental War. A competent leader, Cain had reached the level of his ambitions and was perfectly content in his role.

Ignoring the other officers in the briefing, he shook Keah's hand and took a seat beside her. He said firmly, “Now we are all going to watch that record again from start to finish.”

Admiral Harvard said, “We've just seen it, Deputy. It's an hour long, and we should get started on our strategy sessions.”

Keah knew what Cain was suggesting, though. “No, Admiral. The Deputy is correct. The first time through, you all watched in shock. Pay closer attention the second time, see what we could have done differently and learn from the encounter—otherwise those people died for nothing.”

She replayed the images, hoping for some insight or revelation. When she saw Admiral Handies avert his eyes, she nudged him and made him watch. Once the images were finished, General Keah stood. “There, plenty of incentive. It's time for the CDF to get its act together.”

“But what more can we do against an enemy like that, General?” Admiral Harvard sounded distraught.

“Everything—and I'm open to suggestions beyond that.” She turned to Cain. “Mr. Deputy, I'm going to visit Dr. Krieger's manufacturing stations and inspect our sun-bomb production. Would you care to join me? I'm driving.”

Leaving the senior command staff flustered and uneasy in the LOC headquarters, she and Cain took a CDF in-system shuttle to the smaller lunar fragments and free-floating metallic spheres that comprised the weapons-manufacturing facilities devoted to sun-bomb production. Meanwhile, assembly lines on Earth were pumping out laser cannons even faster than they could be installed on the CDF ships.

Keah studied the output database and gave a grim nod. “I do not intend to be caught with my pants down again, Mr. Deputy.”

The pale-skinned man responded with a wry expression. “I don't believe you
intended
to be caught with your pants down in the first place.” She grunted to acknowledge the poor joke as she docked the small craft against Krieger's main facility. Cain continued, “We have determination, we have equipment, we have all the funding we could reasonably need. It's not resolve we're lacking, General, but effectiveness.”

“Give me a million sun bombs, and I'll be pretty damned effective.”

“Dr. Krieger is working on that.”

The weapons scientist was delighted and energetic—perhaps overly energetic—when he greeted them inside his facility. “We're ready for your inspection, General. I know you'll be pleased.”

The primary sun-bomb factory was anchored to the surface of a lunar fragment far from the denser cluster of LOC operations. From that vantage, Keah could see the operational lights of four other drifting facilities spaced far enough apart so that if an unfortunate accident detonated a sun bomb, the shock waves would not destroy the remaining facilities. She couldn't afford to have a clumsy chain reaction wipe out their best chance again.