Hidden Empire - Kevin J. Anderson [196]
Accompanied by a group of picked loyal workers from the Plumas water-extraction facilities, Jess took several industrial ships loaded with all the resources and equipment he would need. These volunteers had known Ross, had worked for Bram Tamblyn, and would follow Jess's every instruction. Once his uncle Caleb had learned what he meant to do and told the work crews, no force in the universe could have prevented them from helping him.
Now, the mismatched vessels rendezvoused at the edge of the Golgen system, out in the icy veil of the Kuiper belt of comets high above the ecliptic. From there, they could look down on the bright spotlight of the gas giant.
Murderous aliens lurked somewhere deep within those lemony-tan clouds.
Jess thought he could sense his brother down there, along with the ghosts of all those who had been slaughtered aboard the Blue Sky Mine. Had the skymine offended the aliens somehow? Or did the enemy simply see Roamers as insignificant insects to be squashed and then brushed aside?
So far, the Roamers knew of five skymines that had been obliterated, with all hands lost, on scattered and unrelated gas giants. The attacks were unprovoked and merciless...and thus far unpunished.
Many uneasy Roamer clans had already pulled their independent skymines from other gas giants, driving them up out of the atmospheres and mothballing them in planetary orbit. Ekti production had dropped to a fraction of what it had been before the attack on Blue Sky Mine. The Terran Hanseatic League had not yet felt the squeeze, but Jess was certain that Chairman Wenceslas and King Frederick already understood the impending shortages of starship fuel. This crisis had to be resolved soon.
He opened the communications channel in his small ship. All of his volunteer workers listened in from their own vessels. "My brother died down there on Golgen. So did members of many of your clans. By the Guiding Star, now it's up to us to do something about it."
He drew a breath. Jess had not rehearsed his speech. "Roamers are not a violent people. We don't have an impressive military force or weapons of mass destruction. But we are not to be trifled with. We will resist these enemies and avenge our lost family members. Not one of us can shrink from this task. I certainly don't intend to."
Growling oaths and muttered cheers came over the communications link, fierce determination that smothered an undercurrent of fear.
"Lucky for us the universe provides its own weapons," Jess said. "We're going to use them."
The system was surrounded by an arsenal of cometary shards, giant balls of ice that he would convert into bombs. Back on Plumas, he had already analyzed precise mappings of the Kuiper belt, projecting millions of cometary orbits and simulating the results of perturbations. He found more than a thousand candidates, any one of which would rain incredible destruction onto Golgen.
Jess had an intuitive feel for celestial mechanics and orbital maneuvers. He had always been particularly good at navigation and Roamer "stargames," looking at constellations from different perspectives and backtracking to place the viewer on an objective map of the Spiral Arm. When he was younger, he'd liked to look at the maps, often with Tasia, and imagine different places where he'd never gone, exotic worlds or galactic phenomena that could not be fully appreciated through small images on a screen.
Today, Jess gritted his teeth and stared at Golgen's celestial cartography for a different purpose entirely. The ponderous and inexorable paths determined by celestial mechanics often took centuries, and he eliminated most of the alternatives, selecting only those comets that could be dropped in steep hyperbolic orbits, massive cannonballs carrying enough kinetic energy for an impact equivalent to a thousand atomic warheads. Eighteen outer comets were viable projectiles.
His Plumas commando crews—everyday water miners, pump specialists, and ice engineers—carried automated reaction thrusters that would dig out and hurl