“Shit,” Kat Falcone said.
“This world needs help, Admiral,” Millicent told her. She waved towards the marines, who were digging a well. “We need help, not . . . not penny-pinching.”
“That may be difficult,” Kat Falcone told her. Her voice was flat, emotionless. “This may just be the beginning.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ASHER DALES
“The station isn’t on the verge of falling apart,” Commander Patti Ludwig commented after the engineering crews had spent two days inspecting every last inch of the orbiting station. “I don’t believe it.”
William nodded in agreement. The station was clearly marked by signs of slapdash construction and maintenance—there was no point in trying to pretend that someone other than the Theocracy had built it—but was surprisingly intact. Whoever had been in command must have been smarter, or simply more knowledgeable, than the average Theocratic commander. Maybe they’d been exiled for daring to know more than they should about engineering, he speculated silently. Or perhaps they’d simply forced themselves to learn when they realized that their life depended on everything working right.
“I checked the computer core,” Lieutenant Jennifer Flowers said. “It’s primitive, by our standards, but it can handle everything. We probably don’t even have to replace it.”
“Not at once anyway,” William said. “But we will have to replace it eventually.”
“Agreed,” Patti said. “Who knows what they might have done to it.”
William winced. There were literally billions of lines of code inside a modern computer core. The Theocrats could easily put a backdoor into the system that would allow them to take over, or simply turn off the life support, at a moment’s notice. He doubted that any of the crewmen would be able to remove it, even if they’d realized that the backdoor was there. The Theocrats probably believed computers to be magic. And even if there wasn’t a backdoor or hidden virus planted within the system, there was a good chance the system would fail anyway, sooner or later. He didn’t think they’d have bothered to keep up with the latest system patches.
He scowled as he surveyed the command center. The station was large, but most of it consisted of storage compartments and a lone fusion core that was nearly thirty years out of date. There wasn’t much room left for everything else. He was used to living on starships and space stations, but he couldn’t help thinking that the crew would have been on the verge of going insane before they’d been killed. Tiny compartments were one thing; a complete lack of entertainment was quite another. They’d worked, prayed, and slept . . . without even a hint of anything else. It made him wonder precisely how the locals had managed to take the station. Getting up to orbit alone should be impossible without clearance.
Maybe the enemy sensor network failed at a crucial moment, he thought. Or maybe they were distracted.
“We can proceed, I believe,” he said. “We’ll leave a small crew on the station, for the moment, but we can’t go any further until the freighter arrives.”
He nodded to his subordinates, then strode off the command deck and down the corridor to the airlock. The station was easily large enough to allow the destroyers to dock comfortably—it had been designed to handle much larger freighters—but he hadn’t been inclined to take the risk until the station had been checked thoroughly. Even though it was safe, or as a safe as a piece of Theocratic technology ever got, he wasn’t keen on docking his ships. The station was a sitting duck. A single nuclear missile would take it out, along with any vessels that happened to be docked at the time. Losing a sizeable chunk of his squadron like that would be extremely embarrassing.
Tanya was waiting for him when he returned to Dandelion, looking edgy. She’d been in charge of giving his crewmen a couple of days of shore leave, something he thought she’d embrace, but she didn’t seem to be enjoying her homecoming. It made William wonder if she’d try to book a flight back to Tyre the next time a freighter passed through the system. It would take months—there were no regular services flying through the Gap yet—but she could do it. Hell, she could probably trade free legal advice for passage. Freighter captains were permanently fretting about winding up on the wrong side of the law.
“William,” she said, “is the station usable?”
“For the moment,” William told her. “That was a bit of a surprise.”
Tanya had to smile as they headed down the corridor to his office. “They told me that the station was in good condition,” she said. “And besides, beggars can’t be choosers.”
“True,” William agreed. Richard Barrington was a rich man, richer than William had appreciated at first, but there were limits. He wasn’t nearly as rich as Kat’s family. “I’m sure the station will survive long enough for us to replace it with a modern installation.”
“Or even one that works perfectly,” Tanya said. The hatch hissed open as they approached, allowing them to walk into the office. “Father wanted to know when you’d be ready to start exercises.”
“Today, I think,” William said as he sat down. He keyed his console, bringing up the in-system display. The system looked empty, although he knew that could be completely meaningless. The entire Royal Navy could be hidden within the system and he’d be none the wiser, as long as the starships kept their drives and sensors stepped down. “I’ve sent Primrose to survey the outer edge of the system, but she should be back today.”
Tanya lifted her eyebrows. “You think it needs to be done?”
“Our navigation charts are badly out of date,” William said. “And if we fly into a gravitational eddy we didn’t know was there, we’ll be lucky if we only get kicked back into realspace.”
He shrugged. An encounter with an eddy wasn’t too likely to happen, but an ounce of prevention was better than a pound of cure. Besides, Barrington presumably didn’t want to make life difficult for anyone
