After Ptoro, Tasia and her Manta crew received a generous furlough from the EDF. Not since the disastrous battle at Osquivel had she been given so much time off from military duties. But there was a limit to how much rest and recreation a person could stand!
And Tasia had no place to go. She had companions in the EDF with whom she worked, but she considered none of them close friends. There had been no one since Robb Brindle.
Though discretionary space travel was limited because of ekti rationing, as an EDF officer Tasia was welcome to any available seat aboard an outbound spacecraft. She would have liked to go back to the frozen moon of Plumas and the water mines run by her clan. She hadn’t seen her brother Jess in ages, had heard no word from the Tamblyn family in the better part of a year. She did not know what was happening among the clans. But since Roamers kept the locations of their facilities secret, she could not simply hitch a ride on a normal Hansa transport to Plumas, or Rendezvous, or any obvious Roamer destination.
Given the choices, she decided to stay in the Earth solar system.
She made several more inquiries—as subtle as possible—to track down her missing compy. EA had gone off on her secret mission to warn Osquivel, using independent problem-solving routines to find transportation. Tasia could not make too much of an outcry about the compy’s disappearance, however, since EA had been performing an unofficial assignment at the time.
Because Roamer compies contained a great deal of information about the scattered clans, they each had internal security programming that would protect the data—at the expense of the compy itself. Tasia should have taken comfort from this, but EA was valuable, and beloved . . . and missing. Unfortunately, despite her best efforts, Tasia could still do nothing about it, and she found herself alone with plenty of time on furlough.
She was most intrigued by the fleet of heavily reinforced “rammer” ships the EDF had started to build in the asteroid shipyards, so she requisitioned an intrasystem shuttle to go see the thick-hulled behemoths being constructed. Since a trip to the nearby shipyards did not require an Ildiran stardrive, she easily received clearance for her visit.
The scheme might have a chance of succeeding, if the rammers could emulate what the Ildiran Solar Navy commander had done at Qronha 3. According to reports, Adar Kori’nh had led forty-nine warliners on suicidal crash courses to wipe out hydrogue warglobes. And there had been no sign of drogues there since that devastating raid.
Seizing the opportunity, the Hansa had dispatched a cloud harvester to Qronha 3. The first shipment from the skymine had already arrived, and others were soon to follow. Tasia was amused at the pride the Big Goose showed at producing its own stardrive fuel, since Roamers had been doing it for generations. The new cloud harvester was far less efficient than Ross’s Blue Sky Mine, but it was the best the Hansa had at the moment. Sullivan Gold’s shipments could not possibly keep up with the demand of the EDF or the Hansa, but at least it was a gesture. . . .
The rammer-ship construction zone was a bustle of activity. As she flew in, she admired the complexities of the operation, the gigantic floating scaffolds and open warehouses in space where constructor pods and workers in engineering suits puttered about, assembling the vessels.
It reminded her of Del Kellum’s shipyards. Of course, Roamer shipbuilders working together without military bureaucracy would have been able to do a faster and better job. She always felt a smug pride in the clans, compared with the bloated and cumbersome Hansa.
Oddly enough, though, the regular Roamer ekti shipments were late. Her fellow Eddies looked to her for an explanation, as if Tasia could interpret clan behavior, but she had been cut off from the clans for so long that she had no idea what was happening at Hurricane Depot, with Del Kellum’s cometary skimmers, or at any of the other ekti facilities. She’d even heard rumors that Speaker Peroni had declared an embargo against the Hansa . . . but that didn’t make any sense, and no official news release had come from the Chairman. She was sure there must be some obvious explanation.
Tasia cruised her shuttle around the massive armored warships and imagined how each one would strike a single, deadly blow against the warglobes. Looking at the skeletal frameworks of the rammers, she could see that they were generally similar to a standard EDF Manta, but stripped down, with few amenities for a human crew. These rammers were little more than self-propelled hammers to crack open the crystalline shells of warglobes.
So far, the Klikiss Torches were the only absolutely reliable weapons the humans had used against the hydrogues, and since Tasia had successfully delivered her weapon at Ptoro, other gung-ho officers wanted to do their part. Chairman Wenceslas and King Peter had already authorized another three Torches to be used on gas-giant targets. . . .
More than anything else, Tasia wanted to strike against the enemy aliens, again and again. It would be months yet before these rammer vessels were completed, their structural spines and reinforcements inlaid, the massive engines installed. But she hoped to be there, volunteering for the mission, as soon as they were ready.