“Six launched,” Sergeant Bosca finally reported. “Or they got blown out of the hull in the explosion. The rest are still here, but they’re all empty.”
“Gods-damn it,” Dunstan muttered. Even if those six pods had been full to the last seat, Danae had lost at least two-thirds of her crew instantly.
“I’m not picking up any pod transponders at all, sir,” Lieutenant Mayler said from the tactical station. “Neither are the drones.”
Dunstan shook his head slowly.
“Sergeant Bosca, check the command deck for survivors, then go through the rest of the hull as far as you can access it safely. Then gather your team and return to the ship.”
“Aye, sir,” Bosca replied in a clipped voice. The marine sergeant was the most experienced person on the ship aside from Dunstan. He’d seen the war from start to finish in the front lines of battle. Dunstan knew that he and Bosca had come to the same conclusion. But six of the pods had launched, and if there was even the faintest chance that someone had survived, they would scour the area until they found the pod or exceeded the maximum time of the crew’s likely survival because that was what Danae’s crew would have done for them.
“XO, send an update to command. Boyer, lay in a patrol course, standard expanding ladder search pattern. Mayler, run the drones out as far as they will reach and still give us telemetry. We’re doing a maximum power sensor sweep as we go. Warm up the point defense as soon as the marines get back to the airlock. I don’t want us to get caught with our overalls down like Danae. Let’s find our people if they’re out there.”
“Yes, sir,” the AIC crew replied, even the ones he hadn’t addressed directly. Dunstan leaned back in his chair, and the sudden weight on his chest felt like they had already lit the drive and pushed it to the gravmag compensator’s limit. They would look for the pods from Danae, but he was certain they wouldn’t find any. The new breed of pirate that had cropped up in the last year had taken to destroying escape pods to eliminate witnesses. He doubted that whoever had the means and the motive to destroy a cruiser with all hands would show its pods more mercy. He knew that Danae was dead, and so was her crew. Whatever ship had ambushed her was still out there, and if they could do this to a light cruiser, there were few ships in the fleet that were safe. And that did not include old workhorse frigates that had been a bit long in the tooth a decade ago already.
“And XO? Increase pod drills,” he added. “One per watch cycle.”
Nobody in the AIC voiced dissent.
CHAPTER 7
IDINA
The Gretian police headquarters looked exactly like the impersonal technocratic monument to efficiency Idina had expected it to be when she was first assigned to the JSP. It was all glass and polished stainless steel, white walls and floors. Even the workstations were white, all the furniture seemingly from the same manufacturing line. There wasn’t a mismatched chair in the building.
“Maybe I shouldn’t come into the room with you,” Idina said to Dahl, who was striding down the hallway with her. They were both in their regular bodysuits now—dark-blue JSP color for Idina, green-and-silver Gretian police for Dahl—and it felt good to spend the rest of the day out of armor. The atmosphere in this place had changed over the last few years. At first, the Gretian officers had resented the supervision of the JSP troopers. Then they had settled into a long détente of grudging cooperation. But since the indiscriminate bombing three months ago that had claimed the lives of Gretians and Alliance troops alike, Idina noticed no more frowns or scowls when she walked these hallways. Now she even got acknowledging nods and occasional smiles from the Gretians.
“Why would you not?” Dahl asked.
“I’m a foreign occupier. He’ll just get all worked up again.”
“And that is exactly why you should be in the room,” Dahl said. “It will make him angry. And emotion sometimes overrides the part of our brains that acts as a safety catch for our mouths. You know how young men are.”
An incoming message made Idina’s comtab chirp, and she flicked a projection into her field of view to check the contents.
“JSP tracked the inventory chip and the serial number of the gun,” she said to Dahl.
“Does it give us any clue how he got his hands on it?”
Idina read the brief database entry attached to the message, then swiped the projection away to close it.
“It was issued to a brigade corporal who died in battle. On Pallas, at the start of the Gretian invasion.”
“Huh,” Dahl said. “Pallas. So how did it get all the way to Gretia and into the hands of a local juvenile, after all this time?”
Idina thought about it, and there was only one likely conclusion that fit the data. If the brigade had recovered the weapon with the body of its owner, they would have reissued it to someone else, or taken it out of the inventory if it had been damaged beyond repair. Either way, there would be a database entry attached to the asset tag to document the transfer. But its service history ended with that of its last sanctioned user.
“Some Gretian Blackguard took it home,” she said to Dahl. “As a war trophy. Or to sell it on the black market.”
“That would be in violation of military regulations,”
