Ep.#6 - "Head of the Dragon" (The Frontiers Saga) by Ryk Brown Page B

begged him not to go, but Tug knew it had to be him. No one knew how to fly his ship better than he. No one knew how to use the interceptor’s strengths to quickly get out of trouble. More importantly, none of them knew the Takaran system as he did. This was his home. It was where he had been born and raised. It was where his father, his father’s father, and all their fathers before them had lived since the time it was first settled nearly a thousand years ago.
    That was a very long time ago, and Takara had changed drastically under the rule of Caius the Great of the house of Ta’Akar. His world had once been a beautiful and peaceful world. It had been a beacon of hope that had united the worlds of the Pentaurus cluster only a hundred years after the great migration had ended. The worlds of the cluster, with the help of Takaran ships, had managed to work together to better the lives of all the worlds within the cluster. They had even begun to branch out and help the worlds outside the cluster, including the Palee, who had been under threat by the Soo-Dani.
    Tug tried not to think about how Caius had corrupted and destroyed his homeworld. Such thoughts could only distract him from his mission. Instead, he spent his time plotting and planning the various ways the Aurora and her jump drive could be used to take down the mighty Ta’Akar empire and restore his home to its former glory. That was where his energies needed to be directed, just as they had been for the last forty years.

    * * *
    “Captain on deck!” the guard announced as Nathan entered the compartment that had been set up as the main intelligence room and had come to be known as the ‘intel shack’. As expected, no one even looked up from their consoles. There were too few individuals qualified for such work, and those few were too busy analyzing all the comm signals, images, and thermal scans that had been brought back by Tug to be distracted with the formalities of rank. That was fine with Nathan, who never much cared for such formalities, although he did understand the need. He knew that neither Tug nor Cameron—both of whom were hovering over the display table in the center of the room—approved of his disregard for such protocols. However, they both knew that things would eventually change—if they survived the current crisis and actually made it out of the Pentaurus cluster once and for all.
    “Glad to see you made it back safely, Tug,” Nathan stated as he stepped up to the table and patted Tug on the back. “That was one long recon flight.”
    “Indeed it was,” Tug agreed, “but I believe it was worth it.”
    “What did we learn?” Nathan asked, turning his attention to the various images displayed on the table.
    “It’s still too early to be sure about anything,” Jessica warned, “as we’ve only just begun to analyze the data. It will take hours for us to decrypt and sift through all the comm signals he recorded. It may even take days.”
    “Recruit as many people as needed,” Nathan ordered. “We don’t have days.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “We got very lucky, Captain,” Tug explained. “The position of Pallax was such that I was able to get extremely clear images of the Avendahl in the orbital shipyards.” Tug tapped the image on the table and it enlarged to reveal a remarkably clear image of the massive battleship from above and slightly to her port side. “You can clearly see that she is already running on internal power from the zero-point device.”
    “How can you tell?” Nathan wondered, staring at the image.
    “She only has a few backup power umbilicals attached,” Dumar explained, “not nearly enough to power the entire ship.”
    Nathan looked at the thermal scans of the ship next to the visual image. It showed the same time code. There were not the usual large red balls in the center of the battleship’s profile. “She’s too cool to be running on fusion or anti-matter reactors,” he commented