A Forest of Stars - Kevin J. Anderson [17]
Suspecting that this mission might have unpleasant consequences, Kori’nh had already dispatched Tal Zan’nh on a make-work assignment. The Adar would dirty his own hands with this task, but he saw no need to involve his protégé, the son of the Prime Designate…
After the shuttle had docked, the pilot stepped out, looking flustered. Behind him the Dobro Designate scanned the empty bay like a predator. The Designate’s clothes were drab and serviceable, without lace, finery, or colorful strips of self-active energy film. He was a working man, with an assignment and a mission.
Seeing the commander waiting for him, Designate Udru’h turned gruffly to the shuttle’s pilot. “You are dismissed. The Adar will take us where I direct him.”
The pilot looked uneasy, but Kori’nh nodded his permission. “Apparently the Designate and I will require privacy. No doubt he has certain orders for me.”
Three years earlier, he had been sent here to Dobro for the express purpose of mating with one of the captive human females, a green-skinned woman from Theroc. Kori’nh could not understand why she was being held among the Burton descendants, nor was he allowed to ask about it. He had not relished his union with the woman. It had seemed…dishonorable. Yet it had been his duty, an indirect command from the Mage-Imperator himself.
He dreaded what the Designate would order him to do this time.
After he took the cockpit controls, Kori’nh remained silent, not even offering minor conversation. Designate Udru’h gave him coordinates that took the shuttle away from the orbital lanes toward the fringes of the Dobro system. A skein of icy moonlets and asteroids looked like a pile of planetary ingredients that had been swept under the rug—too diffuse to be an actual asteroid belt, each piece too small to be considered a planetoid in its own right.
“We have concealed it out here. A perfect place,” said the Designate. “Even so, we must be cautious.”
Uncomfortable with the prolonged mystery, Kori’nh said, “Please explain yourself, Designate. What are we seeking?”
“Our aim is not to seek, but to hide, and thereby ensure continued secrecy.”
Kori’nh dwelled on the words as the shuttle drifted into the ice-studded, rocky debris. He heard a hiss of dust particles and tiny pebbles impacting their shields. Ahead, his scanners detected a darkened shape that looked decidedly artificial, a construction not of Ildiran design.
“As you can see, Adar, we have left too much evidence behind. There is always a risk it could be found.”
A huge, antique spacecraft.
Fascinated by Earth military history, even when it was not relevant to current assignments, the Adar recognized the bulky, squarish lines of an immense star-crossing vessel larger than five Solar Navy warliners. The construction design seemed wasteful, a ship that relied upon brute force rather than finesse. It was shaped like a tall building, topped with industrial processors, collectors, and refineries; it looked as if it had been uprooted and hurled into space like a brick. Now the big vessel was dark and shadowed, stained with the scars of ancient storms and encounters, like a ghost ship, haunted and drifting without its crew.
Kori’nh noted the symbols on the fuselage; these bulky engines could achieve only a fraction of lightspeed. It would have taken centuries to cross the gulfs of space…and yet the brash humans had flown the old generation ships anyway. “Bekh! Is that…the Burton?”
In the cockpit, the Designate looked scornfully at the immense vessel. “The Solar Navy escorted that thing here to Dobro. At the time, we’d intended to let the humans settle with our splinter colony here, two races joining together. The Designate even took a human woman, the Burton ‘s captain, as his wife.
“But other humans…did not adapt well to the situation. Before any formal contact was made or delegation sent back to Earth, the human woman was assassinated, and the grief-stricken Designate was forced to crack down, to impose