for us. Now we had to decide which star system to strike.
-9-
Several days later, I took the Aristotle , a former Lokhar cruiser, and the Maynard Keynes , a scow of a Jelk freighter. Diana had given me her worst vessel, not that I could blame her. Unfortunately, the engines broke down after the sixth jump.
Going through a jump gate took its toll on the passengers. Flu-like symptoms struck just about everyone, even our android. It also produced wear and tear to the equipment.
Thus, for three days, all my engineers and N7 struggled on the freighter’s propulsion systems, trying to get it mobile again. Luckily, this was an empty system. There was no one to give us grief. It had a brown dwarf for a star and burnt-out husks for planets. None of the worlds contained atmospheres. Most were ice-balls with particles of nickel-iron and rock.
On the third day, Ella Timoshenko found a drifting body on her scanner. It turned out to be a Lokhar soldier in wrecked powered armor.
“How long do you think he’s been adrift?” Ella asked.
I shrugged. I didn’t know and didn’t care. The raid weighed me down with responsibilities and worries. This wasn’t anything like joining Prince Venturi before on Indomitable . There hadn’t been any choices last time. The Kargs would break into our universe, and that would be the end of life as we knew it. Here, I could make good choices and bad ones. The wrong decisions would mean the end of the human race. Talk about piling on pressure. I felt the weight of past and future generations squeezing me down.
Finally, the Maynard Keynes could move again. The endless work had left our engineers exhausted, though. I let them rest and kept the two starships where they were. Soon enough, everyone would have to work at peak efficiency.
I lay on my cot, staring at the ceiling. If you guessed that I was having second thoughts, you’d be right. I didn’t mind raiding the Jelk Corporation. That wasn’t the problem. I wondered about scale, though. This would solve our dilemma in a pinprick fashion. We needed strategic answers.
Alliance with the Jade League, full-bore military and economic assistance, would have made a world of a difference to what we planned. That’s what I’d originally thought I had been buying with the agreement to put one hundred thousand assault troopers into harm’s way. It turned out I’d been a fool. Despite the few automated factories they’d brought, the Lokhars had snookered us, and I didn’t like it.
With my fingers laced behind my head, I told myself I had to rid all thoughts of squeamishness from my heart. This was like a lioness with a den full of cubs. She went out and killed a baby gazelle or slew the mother and let the baby starve to death. I wasn’t in some airy-fairy tale where the universe played paddy cake with the Marquis of Queensbury Rules to guide us. This was the law of tooth and claw, survival of the fittest, baby.
What did that mean? It meant I had to play this as ruthless as I could. I hadn’t come to another race and laced their world with nukes. The tigers and, in a way, the Jelk had come and done it to us. Now, we scrambled for any advantage we could eke out. If I failed, humanity sank out of sight, never to lift its head again.
So be it. I would do whatever—
A knock at my hatch startled me. I swung my feet off the cot, stood and pressed a button. The hatch opened and N7 stood there with rolled-up star charts in his arms.
“Do you remember you wanted to look at these?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said, having completely forgotten. “Let’s take a gander.”
For the next several hours, N7 and I pored over his charts. He knew a lot about this region of Jelk space and our target the Demar star system.
It had an “O” Spectral Class Star, a bluish-white furnace that burned at 30,000 Kelvin on the surface. The system lacked any terrestrial planets. In fact, it only had one Jupiter-sized gas giant. The moons of that Jovian world were
-9-
Several days later, I took the Aristotle , a former Lokhar cruiser, and the Maynard Keynes , a scow of a Jelk freighter. Diana had given me her worst vessel, not that I could blame her. Unfortunately, the engines broke down after the sixth jump.
Going through a jump gate took its toll on the passengers. Flu-like symptoms struck just about everyone, even our android. It also produced wear and tear to the equipment.
Thus, for three days, all my engineers and N7 struggled on the freighter’s propulsion systems, trying to get it mobile again. Luckily, this was an empty system. There was no one to give us grief. It had a brown dwarf for a star and burnt-out husks for planets. None of the worlds contained atmospheres. Most were ice-balls with particles of nickel-iron and rock.
On the third day, Ella Timoshenko found a drifting body on her scanner. It turned out to be a Lokhar soldier in wrecked powered armor.
“How long do you think he’s been adrift?” Ella asked.
I shrugged. I didn’t know and didn’t care. The raid weighed me down with responsibilities and worries. This wasn’t anything like joining Prince Venturi before on Indomitable . There hadn’t been any choices last time. The Kargs would break into our universe, and that would be the end of life as we knew it. Here, I could make good choices and bad ones. The wrong decisions would mean the end of the human race. Talk about piling on pressure. I felt the weight of past and future generations squeezing me down.
Finally, the Maynard Keynes could move again. The endless work had left our engineers exhausted, though. I let them rest and kept the two starships where they were. Soon enough, everyone would have to work at peak efficiency.
I lay on my cot, staring at the ceiling. If you guessed that I was having second thoughts, you’d be right. I didn’t mind raiding the Jelk Corporation. That wasn’t the problem. I wondered about scale, though. This would solve our dilemma in a pinprick fashion. We needed strategic answers.
Alliance with the Jade League, full-bore military and economic assistance, would have made a world of a difference to what we planned. That’s what I’d originally thought I had been buying with the agreement to put one hundred thousand assault troopers into harm’s way. It turned out I’d been a fool. Despite the few automated factories they’d brought, the Lokhars had snookered us, and I didn’t like it.
With my fingers laced behind my head, I told myself I had to rid all thoughts of squeamishness from my heart. This was like a lioness with a den full of cubs. She went out and killed a baby gazelle or slew the mother and let the baby starve to death. I wasn’t in some airy-fairy tale where the universe played paddy cake with the Marquis of Queensbury Rules to guide us. This was the law of tooth and claw, survival of the fittest, baby.
What did that mean? It meant I had to play this as ruthless as I could. I hadn’t come to another race and laced their world with nukes. The tigers and, in a way, the Jelk had come and done it to us. Now, we scrambled for any advantage we could eke out. If I failed, humanity sank out of sight, never to lift its head again.
So be it. I would do whatever—
A knock at my hatch startled me. I swung my feet off the cot, stood and pressed a button. The hatch opened and N7 stood there with rolled-up star charts in his arms.
“Do you remember you wanted to look at these?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said, having completely forgotten. “Let’s take a gander.”
For the next several hours, N7 and I pored over his charts. He knew a lot about this region of Jelk space and our target the Demar star system.
It had an “O” Spectral Class Star, a bluish-white furnace that burned at 30,000 Kelvin on the surface. The system lacked any terrestrial planets. In fact, it only had one Jupiter-sized gas giant. The moons of that Jovian world were
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