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  "We understand, Engirisk," Sklisk answered. He'd spent time in Engirisk's school and knew the operation of the machine. It had often sparked his imagination of a greater life, living beneath the warm sun. He knew it to be Engirisk's prized possession and the gravity of the moment weighed on him.

  "Baelisk and Boerisk will be cared for should you not return," Noelisk said, leaning his broad snout onto Jaelisk's so their foreheads met.

  "You bring comfort in trial," she responded.

  "Go quickly, my friends," Engirisk said. "The Kroo Ack were driven back but they will return very soon."

  Sklisk stowed the weapon he'd been given in a pouch that ran along his side. Engirisk's machine was more difficult to stow, as it was fragile and could not withstand the rigors of scraping through rock passages. With Engirisk's help, he strapped it to his stomach.

  Jaelisk flicked her tongue, its vibration communicating her desire to move. Sklisk found no further reason to hesitate and fell to the ground, digging his claws into the stone as he propelled down the unfamiliar passages that led to the above.

  As they skittered forward, he stopped only long enough to test the markers left behind by the people's scouts. A map of taste markers had been provided and he knew they were in for a long run.

  "Why does he insist on calling them Kroo Ack," Jaelisk asked, still agitated from the meeting.

  "That is their ancient name."

  "We give them honor by using it. They are simply bugs. Food," she said.

  "You speak truth," he said, not wanting to rile her further.

  "I will feed on fresh Kroo Ack under the moons of our ancestor's homes. I will sing death to these Kroo Ack who threaten my family and my people," she said, twisting through the passages.

  Sklisk flicked his tongue in acknowledgement. Both he and Jaelisk were adept with the warrior's staffs. The bug warriors had difficulty striking low targets and were also vulnerable to an up-striking Piscivoru. While he’d never engaged with the bugs, he had talked at length with the scouts that often cleared the passages and collected foods.

  "I taste the above," Jaelisk said after a long run. "Let us refresh before we enter. We cannot know when we will next rest."

  The scent of the above was thick within the passage and intensified with every arm’s length they traveled. Taking Jaelisk's suggestion, they stopped. Each drew on their water pouch and bit off a small portion of the bug warrior's shell they'd brought. Sklisk relished the sweet taste of the shell as it cracked and crumbled under the fantastic pressure of his bite.

  "We go, Jaelisk," he said. "Do not hesitate. I am with you and we will prevail."

  With caution, the couple climbed the final two hundred meters to the surface and onto the side of a mountain overlooking a deep valley. Even with only the light from the three moons overhead, Sklisk had to lower the unused second eyelid to shield against its brightness. The weathered rock was cold against his belly and he searched the vertical face for bug warriors but found none. Engirisk had taught that the bug warriors could not traverse a vertical surface, but he would leave little to chance while in Jaelisk's company and on such an important mission.

  "Did our people really build all of that?" Jaelisk's voice held awe, something Sklisk had never heard from her before. He followed her gaze into the valley below them. Tall rectangular structures dotted the landscape, some seemed to stand as high as the side of the mountain where they rested.

  "Engirisk says many thousands of cities like this were filled with the people," Sklisk said.

  "It feels like a dream," Jaelisk said. "I cannot understand how this could be."

  "The Kroo Ack came and killed the people. Engirisk said we did not know of Iskstar's power over the Kroo Ack. He says if our ancestors had, they would have defeated this enemy."

  "I will see Engirisk's machine," Jaelisk said. "I will listen to its instructions."

  "We were to wait until we reached the city," Sklisk said.

  "There is no enemy near," Jaelisk said.

  Sklisk blinked agreement, pulled the machine from its pouch, and tapped the clear surface as he had learned in school. A dim glow indicated that the machine was operational.

  "Hold the reading pad so that it points at the city," a disembodied voice instructed.

  Jaelisk pulled the machine from Sklisk's hand and pointed it at the city, with the screen showing upward.

  "Do not be that way, Jaelisk. I attended school. You did not," Sklisk said. "Bring it back so you can look at the flat part with your eyes."

  "That is stupid. I followed its instructions," she said, handing the device back to Sklisk.

  Sklisk accepted the machine and turned it so the screen faced them. A glowing arrow appeared on the screen and pointed into the center of the city. Without further instructions the pad zoomed in on the location and showed a low building that had substantial plant life growing out of it.

  "Kroerak technology is capable of locating signals of this device. It is advised that you power down and evacuate the immediate vicinity. Please move to location identified before powering up again."

  With nothing more to say, the device turned itself off.

  "Kroo Ack will find us?" Jaelisk asked.

  Just before a horrific crashing sound, Sklisk sensed several large objects streaking toward the mountain face to which they held fast. Something struck no more than arm's length above their heads and the entire mountain shook under the impact. From nowhere, long spikes had embedded themselves into the mountain. A moment later, the wall they clung to shattered beneath their hands. Instinctively, Sklisk grabbed for the crumbling wall. The face of the mountain, however had broken off and with the dislodged slabs of rock, he tumbled toward the darkened valley below.

  Chapter 3

  Crack in the Armor

  "Are those new armor-glass ovens?" I asked as Marny, Tabby, and I arc-jetted across the two-hundred meters of open space separating Hornblower's aft section from Petersburg Station. My eye had caught a row of new machinery on the bottom side of the station.

  "Merrie is up to eight kilns and still can't keep up with demand," Tabby said. "Did you know she hired four more full-timers from the York settlement?"

  "Not surprising. Her revenues went way up over the last five ten-days," I said. "Really that's true for all of Petersburg. Mom and Katherine are killing it."

  The progress on Petersburg Station had continued at an incredible rate under the command of my mother, Silver Hoffen, and her partner, Katherine LeGrande. Once just an oversized, shoe-shaped hunk of iron and silicate, the asteroid had undergone countless hours of refitting over the last three stans (Earth standard years). We had hollowed it out and transformed it into a modern space station. I say ‘we’ in the most generous sense. While I might have put the right people in charge, I had little interest in building a station, mining, or anything else that kept me from sailing.

  Even so, the transformation of rock into station had been a win-win, as every meter of iron removed was turned into the highly profitable steel products now managed by Merrie and her husband, Amon. Almost equally valuable, the silicate, generally just waste on most mining operations, was utilized in the manufacture of armor glass. Back in the Milky Way, armor glass was an inexpensive commodity. In the Dwingeloo galaxy, however, our glass was cutting-edge and a much stronger product than anything else available. As a result, our glass ovens operated at full capacity, every meter of product spoken for even before it cooled.

  "You're going to need to give Munay a command," Marny said, obviously still thinking about our recent conflict.

  "Are you psychotic?" I asked. "You just dressed him down in front of his old crew. It had to be humiliating. That's all they're going to talk about. If anything, I think we just made him an enemy."

  "No, she's right," Tabby said. "Munay's a natural leader – his crew stayed loyal to their mission even when they were sure it was going to be their last."

  "Look, I'm not the one who just blew him up!" I said. "For frak sake
, Marny accused him of mutiny. I was the one in damage control, trying not to let things get out of control."

  "You did good, Cap," Marny said, unperturbed. "And thanks for the promotion to Executive Officer."

  First to reach the station's air-lock, she sailed through the translucent pressure barrier. Grabbing a long bar on the bulkhead, she twisted around so her feet met the deck as she passed through into full station gravity of .7g. I smiled as I recalled how clumsily she had operated in zero-g when we'd first met.

  "XO?" As usual, I had missed something. Tabby and I set down in the brightly painted hallway behind her.

  "I wondered when you would get to that." Tabby turned to Marny, pulling her helmet off and freeing her long, amber braid.

  "You don't mind?" Marny asked. "It was either you or me."

  "Hah! Appreciate the vote of confidence, but that's not my style," Tabby said. "I'd have knocked Munay's block off back there."

  "You did plan to let me know, though, right?" I asked. I wasn't really surprised by the exchange as Marny had always been my XO if not in title, in practice.

  Tabby slapped my butt. "I think she just did, Sweetcheeks."

  Passing through a hard air-lock door, we'd entered on the Promenade level where many of the station's activities took place. In addition to the meeting room where we were headed, the level included workout facilities, a running track, pod-ball court and most notably, a water feature. On one end of the huge space, a waterfall cascaded down the rock face, emptied into a stream that ran next to the central corridor, and ended in a pond that held the station's reserve water. Seeded by our Norigan friends, lush aquatic plants thrived along every inch of the park-like space, providing both a spectacular visual attraction as well as helping to filter and clean the station's water and atmosphere.

  A splashing sound caught my attention as Jester Ripples' bulbous head broke the surface of the reclamation pond. With a powerful thrust of his flat wide feet, he swam across the water, jumped onto the deck, and ran toward us. I held out my arms so he could climb up and wrap his spindly legs around me, as was his custom.

  "I thought you were working on Intrepid with Nick," I said. "How'd you get here so quickly?"

  "Jester Ripples and Nicholas James arrived only 240 seconds before Liam Hoffen," he answered. "Nicholas James said it was okay for Jester Ripples to swim until Liam Hoffen arrived. I attempted to convince Nicholas James to have his meeting within the cool waters of promenade, but Nicholas James did not believe it was a good meeting room."

  "He's stuffy like that," I said, rubbing a finger along the soft, red fur on the ridge over his eyes. To look at the aquatic little alien, most would think his skin covering was frog-like – that is, rubbery. Oddly, even though Jester Ripples’ epidermis was shiny, the texture more closely resembled cat fur.

  "Nicholas James is annoyed that the engines of Intrepid were destroyed. He complains of the expense in replacing them," Jester Ripples said. I could hear the tension in his voice. Conflict with enemies was something Norigans were fine with, however, conflict within the family was not acceptable.

  "He sure is," Nick said, as the four of us entered the meeting room. "The engine you lost will cost forty million to replace. And the one you broke beyond recognition, about half that."

  "You know as well as I do that we didn't have much of a choice. They had Jonathan and Sendrei. It's hard to put a value on our friends’ lives," I said.

  He wasn’t done with me. "If you'd recovered the pieces, we might have been able to rebuild them."

  "I know. I'm sorry," I said. "Getting home was pretty high on our priority list."

  "I believe we have a solution." I had to blink twice to believe what I was seeing. The sentient collective we called Jonathan had just walked into the conference room. The unbelievable part was that I knew his body had been destroyed on the Kroerak Cruiser. Since then, the fourteen-hundred-thirty-eight sentients that made up the collective we called Jonathan had been residing within the cruiser's circuitry.

  I stepped forward to embrace Jonathan, but my arms passed through empty space. "What in Jupiter?"

  "Ah, yes, Liam," Jonathan answered. "As we are no longer within humanity's jurisdiction, we have unburdened ourselves from the confines of the human-looking shell with which you identify our beings."

  "A hologram?" I asked.

  "A reasonable perceptive leap," he said. "We were not comfortable within the Kroerak ship. I tasked the industrial replicator within Nicholas's manufacturing plant to create this vessel. It was a simple matter to add a holographic projector to maintain the familiar visage. Your desire to embrace us was confirmation that our decision was appropriate."

  "So, you believe if we can't touch you, we won’t think you're real?"

  "Touch is secondary only to visual perception for most humans," Jonathan explained patiently. "If you were neither able to see or feel us, we believe it would strain our ability to communicate effectively."

  "Which model did you go with?" Nick asked.

  Instead of describing their current form, Jonathan simply turned off the projector that displayed the image of a meter-and-three-quarter-tall human male. Floating at about chest height was a fist-sized black sphere. Atop the sphere, sat a mini version of Jonathan with his legs hanging off the side. "We find this form to be efficient for life aboard the station. We have also produced a humanoid form as well."

  "You suggested there’s a solution to our engine problem?"

  We moved to sit around the table that was centered in the room.

  "We have been in contact with Thomas Anino. We described the issues related to Intrepid's engines and he has transmitted plans for a replicator hive capable of manufacturing the requisite parts," Jonathan said.

  Thomas Anino was the inventor of the Trans Location technology that allowed travel through fold-space, greatly reducing transit times over vast distances. That particular invention was also what had allowed the Kroerak to find Earth. Generally, I viewed Anino as a benefactor, but I maintained a wary distance. He tended to think of us as his employees instead of partners.

  "Hive?" I asked.

  "It is an invention of Thomas's own design," Jonathan said. "We will first utilize the manufacturing replicator on the surface of Zuri to produce a Class-F industrial replicator. This achievement will require significant capital investment, which we have estimated to be within Loose Nuts' capacity. With this new replicator we will improve by four hundred percent the manufacture of both construction and stevedore bots."

  "How does that get us engines?" I asked. We currently had a single industrial replicator that was Class-E and it was capable of creating many of the parts required to repair one of Intrepid's engines. It was, however, nowhere near big enough to actually manufacture the engine.

  "It's a cart-and-horse problem. We don't have enough capital to build the replicator hive yet, but by increasing our output, we'll be able to bring on revenue at a much faster rate," Nick said. "Jonathan, when did Anino do this? I just talked to him yesterday and he didn't bring it up."

  "Perhaps you have forgotten. We possess a crystal that keeps us in direct communication. We formulated the plan upon entering this room. The replicator's plans are still being transmitted," The crystals Jonathan referred to were quantum communication crystals able to instantly transmit vibrations from one crystal to its twin, even between galaxies.

  "I'd have thought it would take more effort to convince him to give up a hive replicator," Nick said. "That is worth more than five Intrepids."

  "Thomas has placed restrictions on its use."

  "That's more like it," I said. His statement confirmed a bias I had regarding Anino. He was always first in line to provide just enough to get us into trouble, but never enough to make us comfortable.

  "As you know, a replicator hive could cause a significant imbalance of trade in this region," Jonathan said. "We share a belief with Thomas that, given free reign of a hive's manufacturing capacity, Loose Nuts would attract much
unwanted attention. We fear this may have already occurred with the stevedore and construction robots."

  I started to speak but Nick cut me off. "That'll work, although I'm more worried about the type of attention we're attracting with a Kroerak cruiser sitting off our station than I am with a surplus of package handling robots."

  "This was also discussed," Jonathan said. "Our commentary is not meant as criticism."

  "We know," I said. "It's more than a little annoying to be held back."

  "Thomas has made it clear that capital acquisition is critical and that we should facilitate prosperity," Jonathan said.

  A knock at the door drew our attention and our main big-ship pilot, Ada, poked her head into the room. We'd been sailing with Ada Chen for what seemed like forever, having met when her mother's freighter had come under attack by pirates. Arriving too late to prevent her mom’s death, we’d managed to find Ada’s life-pod among the debris. We hadn't originally intended to bring her on as crew, but it turned out she was a great fit for our team.

  "We're meeting in here?" she asked with a bright smile.

  "Come on in." I motioned to her and was surprised to see Greg Munay close on her heels.

  "We're just waiting on Sendrei," Marny said.

  Sendrei hustled his large frame into the room, closing the door behind him. "I'm here."

  "Are you sure you want me here?" Munay looked straight at Marny, his voice carrying a slight edge.

  "You were right when you pointed out that we need you, Greg," she replied calmly. "In this room, rank is set aside. We will talk freely."

  "You embarrassed me in front of my crew," Munay complained. "It was unprofessional to dress me down like a boot."

  "Good, let's get this on the table," Marny said. I watched as all the other people in the room, besides Jonathan and Tabby, suddenly discovered an interesting spot on the table in front of them. "First, some ground rules. As of today, I am XO. As such, it is my responsibility to enforce discipline. Don't confuse my invitation to speak your mind as weakness, Greg. Today, in front of crew, you refused to acknowledge chain of command. I'm confident you would have severely enforced discipline if that had happened on any of your ships. Am I wrong?"