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

the motherships, and to get you back, if I could, although I was still trying to decide how to do that when Juliyana’s beacon blipped at me. So I hurried closer, and saw the shuttle trying to bust through some sort of barrier and Juliyana’s beacon was on the shuttle. The barrier wasn’t molecular, it was too strong for that. So I opened fire just around the edges of the shuttle, then it broke through, so I fired a shot through the gap before it closed up.”

Jai rested his hand on her shoulder, for she was using her avatar to tell us her story, while we all sat about the big table in the diner. It was a very crowded table, even extended in size. He smiled at her. “Only you, with your exceptional reaction times, could have managed it. Thank you.”

Lyssa grinned. She didn’t bother trying to fake a blush. “Right after the shuttle escaped, I fired on the other two motherships to stop them from shooting at you. The mothership you came out of didn’t fire a single shot. Once I got between you and the ships, the other two motherships jumped away.”

“They abandoned their wounded,” I said, with a grimace of distaste.

“Their wounded ship and the cargo,” Jai said softly, thinking hard. “It shows a callousness I’ve rarely come across.”

“And is that callousness just the slavers, or is everyone like that, where they come from?” Marlow added.

That was a thought that left all of us uneasy.

Barely twelve hours later, the first of a small armada of ships emerged into real space just off our starboard. It was the Omia.

—37—

That system and sub-section of space got very busy for a few weeks after that.

Unlike the valiant captain of the Ige Ibas, who’d had the forethought to delete his ship’s systems and prevent the slavers from learning all about us, the slavers on the wounded mothership left us a small mountain of data and information to mine for details about them and their people.

Once we had established that the ship’s orbit was degrading and that the ship was therefore helpless, three of the ships which had responded to the Omia’s call for help who were atmosphere-capable had risked getting close enough to grapple the mothership, drag it out of the gravity well and park it in space.

Then we rolled up our sleeves and tried to figure out how to rouse the one hundred and forty-four sleeping prisoners. The best medical experts, with Fiori amongst them, decided that the prisoners had to be taken back to a full medical facility before trying to wake them. The shuttles were detached from the mothership, loaded into freight bays and jumped away.

The patients on the Lythion were also transferred to a medical transport and taken to the clinic on New Phoenicia. Fiori went with them.

Scientists, historians, anthropologists and a dozen different interest groups swarmed over the mothership. We learned that none of the slavers had survived, but not because of the fire. Lyssa’s volley had blown out the weak corridor side of the shuttle bay, and the ship had suffered explosive decompression. We found slavers without helmets and others with no suits at all. The few who happened to be wearing their full suits we figured were on duty when the explosion happened. But their suits were designed to use ambient atmosphere when it was available, and even though they had switched to suit-air only, they didn’t have enough air in the suits to last for long. They were the only slavers to die of asphyxiation.

The bodies were shipped to the Laxman Institute, for Arnold Laxman had offered to autopsy them to see what we could learn about their physiology that might help us with the unconscious former prisoners, and also learn what was different about them that let the cryogenic shells work on them, but not on us.

There were a thousand questions we all wanted answered yesterday.

After a month in the quadrant, I’d had enough. I called everyone together for dinner, and asked Jai and Marlow in particular to be there, for the pair of them were in the very thick of all the discussions about humankind’s history and what our future might be, holding their own among all the planetary governors, mayors, prime ministers and more who had headed out to see for themselves the first sort-of-alien ship we’d ever come across.

Even Kristiania was elbow deep in the political discussions, for if there was a spokesman for Darius Star city at all, she was it. She was also the president of the Shipping Guild, who had a very strong interest in making sure none of their registered ships disappeared.

Dalton was coopted by Jai and Marlow to work as their chief of staff, which was mostly a matter of diplomatically telling people they could not have “just ten minutes” with either of them. I understood why Jai had tapped Dalton for that, when I found out. He would have pissed off dignitaries within an hour. I would have lost my own temper long before the first hour was done.

The area of space over the gas giant was as busy as Triga ever got, and Triga was still considered the physical center of the known worlds. Jai asked the captain of one of the bigger ships, a former Ranger carrier, to act as local traffic control and assign emerging areas, jumping lanes and hand out clearances, before someone arrived blind and emerged where another ship was already parked.

It was as busy and chatty and populated as home…and I wasn’t even home.

So I set up the dinner and everyone turned up. I had Lyssa build the boardroom into a luxury restaurant with a star dome that showed local space, with its intriguing ribbon of stars from the next arm of the galaxy over from ours. I even put on a dress, although it itched under my arms.

It was a very good night, with a minimum of friction considering the strong personalities