A Forest of Stars - Kevin J. Anderson [181]
Zhett rebraided her dark hair, then zipped into her warm tunic. From a locker she grabbed a full environment suit and boarded one of the grappler pods. She and her father headed out into the battlefield debris with the other scavenger vessels. Dozens of small vehicles began to emerge from crater hiding places, eager to get back to work.
Zhett sat comfortably in her grappler pod, manipulating the vehicle’s articulated arms as if she were flexing her fingers. Piloting the little pod was second nature to her. She and her father drifted apart, both of them hunting for treasure among the debris.
The ruined Eddie warships lay strewn about in space—a rich harvest for the resource-hungry gypsies. Sparkling mists of frozen atmosphere hung like chill puffs of breath. A single Juggernaut drifted, gutted and devoid of life signs. In such a large ship, the bulkheads must have sealed off some sections, protecting a few crew members; but the hydrogue blasts may well have wiped out all life-support systems. Some escape tubes had ejected, presumably to be rounded up by the fleeing EDF battleships, but in the stampede of retreat, many had been left behind.
Zhett bit her lower lip, frustrated with traditional Roamer caution and secrecy. What had it gained them here? If she and the others hiding in the Osquivel rings had launched quickly enough, they might have been able to rescue some victims. By now, it was probably too late to help anyone.
She coded in the private channel to her father. “Don’t you think the Eddies will come back and retrieve their damaged ships, Dad? Or at least take home their dead?”
“They’ve been scared badly, my sweet. I don’t expect to see them back anytime soon. If so, they’ll assume that the drogues dragged the wrecked warships down into the clouds or destroyed them.”
Zhett was surprised the Earth military would be so willing to abandon fallen comrades. But the hydrogue battle had not been a typical engagement. The routed humans had barely escaped with their lives. If they’d stopped to gather their dead, then none of the Eddies would have gotten home.
Zhett thought of how many Roamers had perished when their skymines were attacked and destroyed by the hydrogues. Her own mother and little brother had been killed long ago in a dome-breach accident. Even as an eight-year-old girl, she remembered the funeral: wrapping each of the thirty victims in embroidered cloth, then launching the bodies on a long trajectory up out of the ecliptic, where they would drift forever, true Roamers carried along by the vagaries of gravity and their own Guiding Stars.
Now the hunting grappler pods dispersed among the dead ships, assessing the situation, scanning for distress signals or active lifetubes. The Roamers could take these wrecks one by one—dismantle them or rebuild them, depending on the damage to their structures. Kellum’s shipyard engineers could always learn new technologies from the advanced EDF military systems. Even the ruined hulks themselves would be a wealth of raw metals and electronic components to be cannibalized.
Zhett and her father had already discussed how soon they would reconstruct the Osquivel shipyards. Clan Kellum couldn’t hide forever.
The Roamers had escaped initial detection here, but if the Eddies did return to mop up, these shipyards would be painfully obvious to the Big Goose. And after their resounding defeat, the Earth military would no doubt respond with true vitriol, looking for scapegoats—especially if they saw how the space gypsies had scavenged the ruined ships.
Still, no Roamer could let so much raw material go to waste.
Several alien warglobes had also been damaged or destroyed, but most of the debris had tumbled into the cloud depths, and Zhett did not intend to drop into the skies of Osquivel to investigate. But if she could get her hands on a drogue vessel, imagine what the Roamers could do with it…
As she maneuvered her pod, she documented the EDF derelicts, noting which ones