Admiral Zaskar didn’t need to think about his answer. “Then the next enemy ship we encounter will smash us,” he said. A slight exaggeration, but a pardonable one. “We will lose everything.”
He rested his elbows on his chair. “Askew told us that the convoy’s destruction would be enough to make them abandon the sector, allowing us to retake control,” he said. He had his doubts about that too, but he couldn’t say them out loud. “If he’s wrong . . . we need to start considering other options.”
“We have a duty,” Moses insisted. For once, his words lacked conviction. “What if . . .”
Admiral Zaskar cut him off. “We have the tools we need to colonize a whole new world,” he said. “Given time, we could return to the sector and liberate Ahura Mazda from the unbelievers.”
“But . . .” Moses shook his head. “But . . . what if we leave our brothers under enemy rule? What will happen to them?”
“What will happen to them if we get smashed?” Admiral Zaskar tried to sound reassuring and failed. “If we lose our ships, the war is over. We have a duty to survive.”
“And yet, we would be abandoning our brothers,” Moses protested.
“We would have no choice,” Admiral Zaskar said. “If we lose our ships, as I told you, the war is over.”
Moses scowled. “What do you propose?”
“We transfer most of our captured goods into the freighters,” Admiral Zaskar said, as if he hadn’t spent weeks considering the possibilities. “We take everything we can, then destroy the rest. This base gets abandoned, as does Sword of Righteousness. She’s in no state for anything but the scrapyard. The prisoners who refuse to go with us get left behind on the base.”
He nodded towards the starchart. “And then we fly well away from explored space,” he added coolly. “A few hundred light-years ought to be sufficient. We find a suitable world, set up a colony, and rebuild.”
And I’m making it sound easy, he reflected. It was not going to be easy. The task of settling a habitable world would change them, for better or worse. Standards would slip, then be loosened . . . and it would be hard to tighten up again. A very long time will pass before we’re ready to return home, and by then we will no longer be the same.
“And our brothers will be left behind,” Moses said.
“Yes, but they will remain faithful,” Admiral Zaskar lied. Some would, he was sure, but others would abandon the Theocracy without a second thought. “And we will return to save them.”
“As you say,” Moses said. He hesitated, as if he didn’t believe his own words. “God is with us.”
“I’ll start the preparations at once,” Admiral Zaskar said. “We’d need to transfer everything to the freighters anyway, if we were going back home, so we might as well do it now.”
“Very good,” Moses said. “But we will wait to see what happens before we abandon our homeworld for decades.”
Centuries, more like, Admiral Zaskar thought. Human expansion had slowed in the past hundred years or so, after the UN had fallen and Earth had become a dead world, but he had no doubt the Commonwealth would begin expanding again soon. They may stumble across us before we’re ready to encounter them.
He considered, briefly, heading farther away. It seemed a good idea, but he had no idea just how far his ships could go. Their drives had been pushed to the breaking point. A few hundred light-years might be the upper limit, particularly in uncharted space. He really didn’t want to run afoul of a hyperspace storm or something worse.
“We can wait,” he said with the private thought that he could probably rush everyone into leaving once the ships were ready. “But when the time comes, Your Holiness, we will have to leave. And we won’t be able to look back.”
“I understand,” Moses said placidly. “God is with us. He will not let us down.”
“I think we’ve seen everything we can, at least at a distance,” Patti said. She looked up from her console. “There’s no way we can tighten our readings up.”
“Not unless we go closer,” William added. They’d pushed their luck as much as they dared. The enemy wasn’t running active sensor sweeps, but he was fairly sure they’d seeded local space with passive sensor platforms. The slightest hint of his ship’s presence might set off alarms right across the system. “I think it’s time to call for help.”
He studied the enemy superdreadnoughts for a long moment. The enemy crewmen were actually trying to repair the ships, even though they didn’t have a shipyard or even a mobile repair vessel. He would have been impressed, he admitted freely, if he hadn’t been so sure the ships and crewers needed to be destroyed. The Theocrats would return to Asher Dales one final time if Kat Falcone and the Royal Navy didn’t get them first.
And there’s no way to tell if they’ve replenished their missiles or not, he thought. The Theocrats could have been stocking the base for years, although he had to admit the possibility was unlikely. At first, their leadership had never considered that they might lose the war. They might already have rearmed their ships.
“We could put a couple of stealth probes next to their hulls,” Patti suggested. “They’d never see them.”
“Too great a risk,” William said. He had every confidence in stealth technology, but he was also aware of its limitations. They didn’t dare alert the enemy to their presence. “I . . .”
An alarm sounded. “Report!”
Patti checked her console. “A single ship, dropping out of hyperspace,” she said. “Warbook calls it a Class-VI courier.”
“She’s well away from us,” William mused.
Tanya coughed. “Do we know where she came from?”
“Class-VI couriers are used just about everywhere,” William said, understanding the real question. “The Theocrats used them. They’re about as anonymous as you can get. There’s no way to know where she came from or who’s inside without capturing her.”
He looked at Patti. “Take us out of here,
