Horizon Storms - Kevin J. Anderson [101]
“Maybe I can’t believe you’re taking me out for a ride.”
“Consider it an educational experience. We’re tired of you Eddies being so clueless.” While he searched for an appropriate retort, Zhett sarcastically unbuckled her restraint strap, clicked it into place again, and spoke with exaggerated care. “Watch me if you’re having trouble. Slide this end in until it clicks. Pull on the strap if you need to tighten it.”
Fitzpatrick threw himself into the copilot seat. “EDF flyers are competent enough that we aren’t paranoid about safety restraints.”
“Ah, so you must have hit your head too many times during hard landings. Too many unpredictable things can go wrong. You may as well prepare for the ones you can.”
She activated the pod’s controls, and the hatch hissed shut beside him. It reminded Fitzpatrick of a coffin lid…or the lifetube in which he’d been sealed until Zhett retrieved him. “Aren’t you afraid I’m going to overpower you and steal this ship?”
She raised her eyebrows. “Fly away in a grappler pod? That’s awfully ambitious of you. How many centuries do you think it’ll take to reach the nearest Hansa planet?” He bit his lip, scowling. “Besides, if you think it would be so easy to overpower me…well, you’re welcome to try.”
She lifted the pod from its docking platform and backed out of the small vehicle station. She rotated them in place and flew into the rubble of Osquivel’s rings with a casual ease. He looked out the front windowport. “Where are we going?”
“I want to show you our facilities, give you an idea of how much work we’ve put into this complex—though I sense you’re not a man who’s easily impressed.”
“Certainly not by anything Roachers can do.”
Her dark eyes flashed with anger. “Nor are you a man given to exaggerated displays of respect or appreciation.” She spun the pod around in a stomach-lurching three-sixty, then followed it with two barrel rolls.
Fitzpatrick held on, but didn’t give her the satisfaction of squawking or complaining. He’d been through worse—slightly worse—during EDF training. As she cruised up out of the ring plane, Fitzpatrick stared at all the bright points, thermal plumes, jets of exhaust, and waste rubble spreading out from processing facilities.
The spacedock structures were exposed now, several of them holding partially completed Roamer vessels. These operations were a dozen times more extensive than anything Fitzpatrick had imagined. “But our whole battle group came here to fight the hydrogues. Why didn’t we see any of this?”
“Because Eddies aren’t terribly observant, and because we did a bit of camouflage ahead of time.”
“All these stations and habitation complexes and industries…I expected a couple of old decommissioned cargo containers and a shuttle or two.”
“You don’t know the half of it, Fitzie. The Big Goose always underestimates us.”
“Don’t call me Fitzie.”
“We’ve got five primary spacedocks and ship-assembly grids, four main habitation complexes, seventeen office outposts, twenty-three roving smelter factories, and eight stationary fabrication plants that take processed raw metals and form them into components. I can’t even tell you how many separate storehouses, equipment lockers, food caches, or spare-parts hangars there are, not to mention sunside greenhouse domes and hydroponics chambers.”
He pressed his face close to the grappler pod’s window, counting bright spots in Osquivel’s rings that were clearly not natural debris. How could we have missed all this before? “What’s your population here? I thought Roamers were just…you know, a family at a time, a handful of people.”
She took one hand off the controls. “There you go again, Fitzie. We’ve got prospectors and geologists who run through the rings searching for resource rocks, then teams of ore-crunchers move in to break it all down. Crews to run the smelters. Then there are extruders and fabricators, along with debris haulers—that’s ‘garbagemen’ in Eddie terms. Truckers to haul material from place to place. Maintenance workers, troubleshooters, shipbuilders, vessel designers,