Galactic Thunder by Cameron Cooper (best book club books txt) 📗

avoiding caffeine?” I asked. “And why not just ask for decaffeinated? Or would that be too telling?”

Lyth made a soft sound. He’d figured it out, too.

Calpurnia’s face worked. “You’re pregnant?” Hurt oozed from her. She looked at Lyth once more and her misery doubled.

Juliyana didn’t look at any of us. Her chin stayed up, her eyes shielded, giving nothing away.

“It’s his?” Calpurnia asked, her voice rising.

Juliyana nodded.

Calpurnia got to her feet, staring down at Juliyana. Her chin looked even more delicate now.

I held my teeth together, fighting the powerful need to point out to Calpurnia that I had warned her about the dangers of staying for a conversation to which she wasn’t invited. There was no need to rub it in.

Calpurnia stalked away, all the bounce and energy in her stride gone.

I got to my feet. “You two should talk,” I said to Lyth and Juliyana. Lyth looked like he’d taken a blow, too, but deep in his eyes, happiness lurked.

Juliyana sighed. “And this is why I didn’t say anything,” she pointed out. “Because suddenly, it’s a drama and everyone is running around beating their chests.”

“It is dramatic,” Lyth shot back. “It is a child, Juliyana.”

I picked up the datasphere that Calpurnia had brought over from the Penthos, and took it to the bridge, to prepare for the teeny hop over to the location that Juliyana’s data suggested was one the Blue guys had staked out.

Juliyana would work with us, now, instead of fighting us every step of the way. She’d delivered her sting and while Lyth would have to deal with that on a personal level, we could all get on with the business at hand in the meantime.

We had a hook to bait.

—28—

We moved over to a gas giant orbiting around a red dwarf. At first, I didn’t want to go through the fuss of setting up cables and molecular tunnels between the three ships, but it was simpler than using the shuttles—for everyone else, at least. I stayed on the Lythion. I refused to pull myself out into a cold vacuum. I didn’t care how old the tech was.

“It entrenches us,” I’d pointed out. “We can’t break away and run if we need to.”

“They’re fast detach cables,” Sauli pointed out. “Controlled by Lyssa and the two AIs, who follow her lead, now.” For Lyssa had sorted out the other two non-sentient shipminds within a few hours of meeting them. “At the first sign of alert, cables can be loosed, and the exterior hatches battened down in seconds. You’re just being ornery, Danny.”

I glared at him but didn’t protest after that.

We settled into waiting, in relative comfort. Well, the Lythion was comfortable. The Omia was a palace with jets, so no one was hurting, over there. I’d never stepped aboard Juliyana’s ship, so I didn’t know what the level of comfort was like over there. As a converted crescent ship, she was probably cramped, but that was Juliyana’s morale problem to deal with.

While we waited, I had Lyssa run scenarios, based upon analyses of the footage we’d taken of the Blue guys, their ship’s performance and any hint it gave us of their battle strategies.

“We don’t have nearly enough data for this,” Lyssa pointed out as we moved about the map room display, watching the scenarios play out. “The way they reacted to us could be an anomaly. They could normally react in ways we’ve never seen.”

“It’s all we have,” I told her. “But once we’ve extracted what we can from the footage, we start dreaming up wild possibilities and running them through the simulator, too.”

It was something to pass the time, at least. Jai came over some days to see what we’d come up with. Sometimes, Lyth leaned against a wall and watched. He didn’t talk much and I left him alone.

Five days later, I called everyone over to the board room for a quick face-to-face. I sweetened the inconvenience by mentioning we would also be eating. The Lythion’s printer files were unedited originals, massively oversized for a normal ship’s data storage, but the Lythion had plenty of room for data. When Lyth had still been the shipmind and first emerged from his isolation in the bowels of Badelt City, he had refused to swap the printer files for the minimized spacer versions which printed food “indistinguishable” from full files. He’d remained stubborn about it, despite every station we called in on assuring us it was the best thing we could do for our shipmind, and for ourselves, and that everyone was doing it.

But there was a difference in the food the edited files produced. It was hard to pin down why they were not the same, for the taste seemed right. They just failed to satisfy in some way, although they were nutritionally sound, and spacers did live on the stuff without long term consequences. So far.

Ships who had only the edited, miniature files mostly put up with food that wasn’t quite right. They could get original files from the nearest station…at a price. Bootleg copies were as bad as the miniaturized files, if not worse. These days, most ships didn’t have the cash to spare for the originals.

So the offer of a meal from the Lythion’s stores was enough incentive to get everyone around the picnic table, their heads down as they concentrated on their plates, while the mild Alpine sun shone.

Over where the pine trees were not shading the ground, a shallow sandy depression had been formed and all five parawolves lay in the sun, well fed and half-asleep. They strongly contrasted each other—silvery black against golden brown, beside white and grey, and pure white.

I let everyone around the picnic table concentrate on their meals until they slowed. Then I said, “It’s been five days. How long do we sit here before we declare that the blue guys aren’t interested in us?”

“Or haven’t noticed us, yet?” Juliyana replied. Her tone wasn’t challenging. She was merely raising a possibility. For the last