“Drones going to active mode in three . . . two . . . one. Drones are on line and active, sir.”
In the space ahead, all around the spot where the computer had placed the marker for the emergency beacon, sensor echoes started popping into existence, first dozens and then hundreds. Dunstan’s dread increased even before the AI had analyzed the data and labeled the new contacts in the color that stood for INERT/BALLISTIC. The debris field was a hundred kilometers across and still expanding.
“Give me an optical feed,” he said, even though he already knew what he would see.
Mayler brought up another overlay and expanded it. The AI stitched the feed from the drones together into a cohesive image that reminded Dunstan of the internment yard carnage they had witnessed firsthand three months ago.
The debris field was a hundred kilometers across and still expanding. Whatever had happened to the light cruiser Danae had been sudden and catastrophic. Some of the bits and pieces careening through the darkness were recognizable as shards of laminate armor, still wearing the titanium-gray paint layer that was standard on RN warships, but much of the rest looked like the result of a high-velocity collision between a small space station and an asteroid. When the optical sensors picked up the first unmistakable floating bodies, Dunstan let out a low sigh. He had seen lots of dead sailors during the war—some of them in one piece and looking like they were merely sleeping, some torn to bits so thoroughly that only the shredded remains of pressure suits clinging to them identified them as body parts, some just reduced to dissipating clouds of viscera and body fluids. But most of his crew had not been in active service in the war, and this would be their first exposure to the realities of death in space combat. It was an unforgiving environment even when nobody was shooting at you.
“Bosworth, contact fleet command and let them know we’ve reached the crash buoy location, and that we have spotted a large debris field. Transmit our telemetry data and tell them to send whatever recovery teams are in the area. And we’ll be on station awhile, so ask for some extra guns out here. Whoever did this may still be in the neighborhood.”
“Aye, sir,” Bosworth replied.
“Any word from the Oceanians yet?”
“They have a corvette on the way, but it’s still six hours out.”
“So it’ll be all us for a while. Run out the drones for max coverage. I want early warning if someone’s trying to sneak up on us.”
“Aye, sir.” Bosworth was tight-lipped and slightly pale, and the temperature in the AIC seemed to have dropped several degrees in the last few minutes.
“What do you think happened here, sir?” Boyer asked.
“I have no idea yet, Boyer. If they ran into that stolen fuzzhead cruiser, they would have gotten off a contact report. And I can’t imagine there’s a pirate out there with enough firepower to just blot one of our light cruisers out of space like that. Not if the crew was alert and awake.”
“Danae’s Point Defense System is better than ours,” Mayler said. “And they have twice the missile tubes we do. Had,” he corrected himself with an unhappy shake of his head.
Dunstan looked at the optical feed composite from the drones again. At this distance, the resolution of the imagery was still too low to make out fine details, but some of the floating objects looked like bodies in vacsuits. If the ship had blown apart so suddenly that the command crew never had the time to send a warning or distress signal, the chances were slim that anyone had made it to the escape pods. But Minotaur would be looking anyway, because that’s what Danae’s crew would do for them if the roles were reversed.
“Thirteen minutes to turnaround, sir,” Boyer said.
“Very well. As soon as we turn, go active on all sensors and take us toward that crash beacon. Let’s hope some of them made it out alive.”
CHAPTER 3
IDINA
The patrol gyrofoil hung in the summer sky above Sandvik, its rotors churning the hot air. Idina looked at the temperature readout on the flight control screens. It was a sticky thirty degrees Celsius outside, and the cabin’s environmental controls kept the inside at a much more agreeable twenty-one degrees.
“I’m not sure I could ever get completely used to the weather on this planet,” Idina said.
“Is it too hot for you, Sergeant?” Captain Dahl asked. “I can turn the climate down a few degrees.”
Idina’s Gretian police partner was watching the screen projection in front of her, which showed a magnified high-resolution image of the city streets a thousand meters below the gyrofoil. The surveillance hardware on these prewar police flyers wasn’t as good as military gear, but even from this altitude, Dahl could still zoom in on an individual closely enough to read the text on their comtab screen if she wanted.
“It’s not the heat,” Idina replied. “I don’t mind the heat. It’s the seasons.”
“I keep forgetting they do not have those on the other planets. What is the weather like on Pallas?”
“Cold. Windy. Ten, twelve degrees on a warm day. But it doesn’t matter much inside the mountains. It’s always eighteen degrees underground. This place?” Idina gestured at the view of the Gretian capital outside the gyrofoil’s large observation windows that had tinted themselves almost fully to keep out the sun. “I’m on my third tour here on Gretia, and it still feels unnatural. One month you need heaters in your armor, the next month you need coolant packs.”
“And in the spring and autumn, sometimes you need both on the same day,” Dahl said, smiling, without taking her eyes off the display.
After the May bombing in Principal Square, the weekly protest marches had abated gradually as the Alliance and the Gretian police had cracked down on mass demonstrations, and the heat of the summer had all but suffocated the rest. But for the first
