Horizon Storms - Kevin J. Anderson [28]
“You complaining?” Her eyes glittering with determination, Tasia clasped her hands together. “In a minute they’ll have other things to worry about than chasing after us.”
Ptoro looked so harmless down there, so uninteresting. She wished this could have been Osquivel, as payback for what the drogues had done to the EDF there. She felt the familiar hollowness at the thought of Robb and all the other EDF casualties. Hell, she even missed the obnoxious Patrick Fitzpatrick III. She’d always wanted the spoiled bastard to get his comeuppance…but from her, not the drogues.
“Anchor points in position, Commander Tamblyn,” Zizu announced.
“Open the conduit. Let’s send them a present.”
Rossia relayed the instructions through his treeling. He kept his large eyes closed, as if he didn’t want to see what was happening. Everyone on the Manta’s bridge waited in silence. The rest of the escort ships sent queries, but Tasia didn’t answer them. Not yet.
The green priest looked up. “It is done. Yarrod reports that the wormhole is opened and the neutron star is gone.”
Tasia brightened. “On its way. Fire in the hole.”
She looked at the huge gray planet, but saw no change. As soon as the neutron star arrived, fusion fires would begin deep within, but the initial shockwave would rush up through layers of the atmosphere faster than thunder.
Tasia packed all the vengeance she could squeeze into her low voice. “Go on and burn.”
Chapter 12—PATRICK FITZPATRICK III
He never grew tired of voicing his frustration. “Damned Roachers!” Patrick Fitzpatrick had repeated it often since he’d recovered from his injuries in the hydrogue attack—several times daily, in fact.
Inside the big, echoing asteroid chamber that Del Kellum’s people used as a storage facility, burly Bill Stanna commiserated. “Yeah, I signed up to fight drogues. Didn’t know I was gonna waste my time held hostage by space trash.” Though dedicated to the EDF, Stanna had no sophisticated specialties, no particular skills the training sergeants could identify. He was just a regular grunt, willing to do what he was told and ready to fight. “I’m not gonna do any more work for them.”
Fitzpatrick sat stubbornly on the hard stone floor, combing his reddish-blond hair back in a never-ending attempt to keep it neat, even under these circumstances. “Damn right! And don’t think you have to, Bill.”
Though he was tall, Fitzpatrick had an average build. Owing to his good breeding, he had handsome features and a strong jaw, but his nose was a little too sharp. His forehead showed a permanent crease between his hazel eyes from too many skeptical or disapproving frowns.
“They can’t force us to work,” said Shelia Andez, a weapons specialist who had survived in a lifetube when her Juggernaut was destroyed over the Osquivel rings. She paced the claustrophobic room, looking at the haphazardly stacked crates of supplies. The rest of the EDF hostages had been sent out on other make-work details, and most of them were also refusing to cooperate. “Isn’t there a Geneva Convention or something? If we’re prisoners of war, the Roachers have to follow certain standards of treatment.”
Fitzpatrick felt disgusted. “Even if there was an agreement like that, they probably couldn’t read it.” Stanna burst out with loud laughter, as if this was the funniest thing he had heard in a long time.
“When we don’t do the work, our captors simply have the compies do it,” said Kiro Yamane, a cybernetics expert. He was a bit of an odd duck because he wasn’t a formal member of the Earth Defense Forces. Yamane was, however, a genius with an intuitive knowledge of robotics after working under Swendsen and Palawu in the compy-manufacturing centers on Earth. He had signed aboard the Osquivel battle fleet so he could assess the performance of the new Soldier model. “I can’t tell you how angry it makes me to see them use our sophisticated compies for…for grunt work.”
“Better them than us.” Stanna plopped down next to Fitzpatrick. The two men stared at the crates they were supposed