But Tom Rom kept coming after her.
She could dodge the largest fragments, and DD helped her by scanning ahead and identifying intercept courses. The smaller rocks, though, proved the most troublesome and damaging. The Proud Mary was constantly pelted by a hail of sand and gravel, which wore down the shields.
“We are sustaining damage, Orli,” DD reported.
“I can tell. If we ever find some safe haven in the asteroid field, you’re going to have to complete the repairs yourself—I won’t be able to.” Then Orli caught herself, realizing what she had said. “All the instructions are in the database. Upload them into your personal memory now, so you have the full background as a starship mechanic.”
“That would be a useful skill, Orli, but I hope you help me do the repairs.”
“Just upload the skill module.”
That would also give DD all the specs he needed to trigger a power-block overload in the Proud Mary when it was time. That would vaporize everything, including the compy. Maybe she would tell him to exit the ship before it blew up. He could remain functioning on an airless asteroid… like a castaway on a deserted island. No, Orli wouldn’t do that to DD.
She swerved around another asteroid, dove among three that orbited around a common center of mass, then changed course abruptly. Tom Rom’s ship was bigger and faster, but that wasn’t necessarily an advantage here. She burned a great deal of fuel, but managed to stay ahead of him in the cat-and-mouse game.
She always had the option of just ramming into an asteroid now—and she would do it if Tom Rom got too close. She studied the screens, looked for any traces of his ship. She had left him behind at least five minutes earlier.
She kept leapfrogging from one asteroid to another. Finally, as she pulled around to the dark side of a potato-shaped rock, she found a cozy crater where she could set the Proud Mary down, a place where DD could repair the ship.
Or a place where she could die.
ONE HUNDRED AND FOUR
GARRISON REEVES
When the job-transfer approval came in from his LOC supervisor, Milli Torino, Garrison wasn’t surprised. His skill set qualified him for much more than debris-survey flights along the Moon’s old orbit. He had decided it was time to do more than just “run around in circles”—and all the damaged CDF warships crowding the repair docks now fundamentally changed the orbital complex. There was work to do.
With the unexpected threat of the allied Shana Rei and black robots, the Confederation was in a tense state, gearing up for a possible, yet incomprehensible, war. Everyone at the Lunar Orbital Complex, both civilian and military, had seen General Keah’s report about the devastating shadow cloud at Plumas—stunning destruction inflicted upon the CDF, the Solar Navy, and Roamers alike.
But for Garrison, the shock and sadness struck closer to home. The deaths of clan Reeves had hit him hard—Dale, Sendra, even his father—and made him think of lost possibilities and diverging courses in life. He should have tried harder to find common ground, to talk his father out of his impetuous decision to fly to a space city in the middle of nowhere… but changing Olaf Reeves’s mind would have been like altering the course of stars, and that had never been within Garrison’s ability.
Even so, the knowledge made him assess his own situation. Elisa always had enough ambitions for both of them, while Garrison remained content with his job at Sheol so he could be with his wife and son, choosing family success over career or financial success. For years he had focused on escaping his backward clan, running away from rather than toward something. After losing his wife in the bloater explosion and sending his son off to Academ, he had withdrawn, convincing himself he was just recovering.
But he was taking too damn long, and it was time he opened his eyes and looked for his Guiding Star again. So he applied for a transfer and a promotion at the LOC. Even though his prickly supervisor had never given him particular kudos, barely even noticed his performance among the LOC crew workers, she approved his transfer within a day.
After Plumas, numerous battered battleships now overloaded the orbiting shipyards, industrial processing facilities, and the military training yard. The damage was extensive on the battleships, particularly to Admiral Haroun’s Juggernaut.
Scientists combed over the marks left by Klikiss robot weapons as well as the bizarre shadow creatures that no one seemed to understand. They hoped to find clues that would allow them to develop new defenses or weapons. King Peter and Queen Estarra were heading to meet with the Mage-Imperator to retrieve plans for ancient Ildiran weapons that might prove effective. Garrison thought they might be better off turning the Roamer genius Kotto Okiah loose on the problem in Fireheart Station.
Now that the Confederation was facing a new enemy, the CDF’s operational mission dramatically changed. Even if he had not asked for a new assignment, Garrison would have found himself doing other work, since mapping and shepherding lunar rubble was no longer going to be a high priority.
Torino assigned him to a metals-processing station where he supervised a crew that manufactured spare parts needed for the repair work. It was a typical Roamer operation, run mostly by experienced clan members. He had no trouble overseeing their operations because they were Roamers and knew what they were doing.
Thanks to his efficient coworkers, Garrison easily did his job, and the station produced the needed Manta spare parts faster than they could be installed. Now that the routine ran smoothly, he was surprised when Milli Torino pulled him from his duties one day and assigned him to escort Deputy Eldred Cain on a tour of the LOC shipyards and industrial facilities.
“I can certainly show him around, ma’am, and give him all the details he needs, but I don’t have any protocol background.” Cain was possibly the most important man on Earth. “Perhaps you’d be more suited—”
“I couldn’t agree more, but I have many duties that keep me busy,” she said in a clipped voice. “Besides, Deputy Cain requested someone with hands-on experience, preferably a Roamer.”
Garrison understood. Torino very much wanted the job, but Cain had turned her down, which put him in an awkward position. Elisa would have agonized over the politics of it all, but Garrison just said, “I’ll do my best.”
His supervisor looked intense, as if blaming him for something. He knew that Milli Torino was recently divorced, and apparently it had not been pleasant. From his few meetings with her, Garrison couldn’t imagine that the marriage itself had been pleasant either…
She said, “Emphasize how dramatically we’ve stepped up production in only a week. I want him to know that we’re ready for full-scale ship assembly, should the CDF need to go into emergency operations. And as soon as we receive the Ildiran sun bomb plans, our weapons engineers are ready to duplicate them.”
“I’ll do that, ma’am.”
During the day-long tour around the sprawling orbital complex, he found Deputy Cain to be an intelligent, soft-spoken, and interesting individual. In the Prodigal Son, they flew from facility to facility visiting the various operations. Garrison briefed Cain on how the metals were extracted from the lunar rubble field, how the Roamer operations (particularly his own team) produced components that the military ships needed for repair. Cain seemed comfortable with Garrison’s knowledge and his apparent disinterest in politics.