Of Fire and Night - Kevin J. Anderson [1]
The Roamer clans found other ways to survive. Cesca's father Denn Peroni helped establish an independent trading base at Yreka, a colony cut off from all Hansa support and defenses. Denn also traveled to the Ildiran Empire and met with the Mage-Imperator to reopen trade, once again bypassing the Hansa.
In the rings of the gas giant Osquivel, Del Kellum and his lovely daughter Zhett ran a complex of Roamer shipyards. The EDF had recently lost a tremendous battle with the hydrogues there, and among the debris of the battlefield, Zhett found a small intact hydrogue derelict; her father immediately called the brilliant Roamer scientist Kotto Okiah to study it. Kotto learned enough from the derelict to develop a new weapon against the hydrogues: "doorbells" that would blow open a warglobe's hatches. With his doorbells Kotto rushed off to Theroc, the likely target for the next hydrogue attack.
The Roamers also rescued a handful of EDF soldiers whose lifepods had been left behind by their fleeing fleet, as well as many sophisticated new Soldier compies, which were reprogrammed and put to work in the Osquivel shipyards. Zhett helped nurse the POWs back to health, paying particular attention to surly Patrick Fitzpatrick III; because of the hostilities between the Roamers and the Hansa, the POWs could not be sent home. Fitzpatrick and his comrades, including Dr. Kiro Yamane (a specialist in Soldier compies), searched for a way to escape. While romance grew between Fitzpatrick and Zhett, Yamane found a way to make the Soldier compies go berserk in the shipyards. As part of an escape plan, Fitzpatrick lured Zhett to a romantic rendezvous, tricked her, and stole a ship to get away while the Soldier compies created a diversion. The compies, far more destructive than Yamane expected, systematically detroyed the Roamer facility.
Fitzpatrick's powerful grandmother Maureen was a former Hansa Chairman. After hearing that her grandson had been killed in action at Osquivel, she rallied the relatives of other fallen soldiers and flew to the ringed gas giant to establish a memorial. She was shocked to stumble upon the extensive hidden Roamer shipyards, now thrown into turmoil because of the unleashed Soldier compies. During a tense standoff, Fitzpatrick appeared and then angered his grandmother by speaking on behalf of clan Kellum; he brokered a cease-fire by giving the EDF ships the hydrogue derelict Kotto had been studying. As EDF ships took the POWs back home, Zhett and the other Roamers slipped away. Fitzpatrick doubted he would ever see her again.
General Lanyan, the frustrated commander of the EDF, wanted to make an example of someone. With dwindling recruits, he had no choice but to produce huge numbers of Soldier compies (all of them carrying Klikiss-robot programming modules) and to distribute them across the fleet. He was pleasantly surprised when a deserter--Branson "BeBob" Roberts--came to Earth bearing two survivors he had rescued from a devastated Hansa colony. The survivors, a girl named Orli Covitz and an old man named Hud Steinman, told a wild tale that marauding Klikiss robots and Soldier compies had destroyed their settlement. General Lanyan sent a team to investigate these preposterous claims, but he was much more interested in court-martialing BeBob for desertion.
The trader Rlinda Kett called in all her favors to help BeBob, but it did no good. The trial was a sham, and BeBob's sentence was a foregone conclusion. To their surprise,