Hot, Cold, and Gray (Honor of the Fleet Book 4) by Felix R. Savage

Author:Felix R. Savage [Savage, Felix R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AETHON
Published: 2026-02-10T00:00:00+00:00

[ 31 ]

Siegn looked Sy Lankfjord up in the Venus Station database. The information available was sparse even by the database’s standards. The owner of five ramscoopers, Sy lived on Earth Level. Of course he did.

Siegn sent him a t-mail, saying that he hoped to tap Sy’s diving experience for the scoopship reconnaissance missions. He got no reply.

In the days following, Hurt led daily reconnaissances into the clouds. The Orkanger was being repaired, but they still had four scoopships in flying condition. Siegn and Dhzowl continued to serve as ship’s intelligence officers, sometimes on the Trondheim, sometimes on other ships of the wing. They found nothing. No more attacks occurred. The crews’ hair-trigger sense of expectancy dulled into a mood of futility.

Siegn saw no more of Kelvin. He must’ve decided that the extra money wasn’t worth it. Siegn couldn’t blame him.

In their scanty free time, Siegn and Dhzowl were kept busy as unskilled labor on the construction crew. Brown and her colleagues had started work as soon as the Jessamine South’s cargo was unloaded. Part of that cargo had been flatpack rhombic dodecahedrons. Long known to be the most efficient form factor for microgravity habitats, rhombs could be formed into contiguous clusters of varying sizes.

The construction crew worked fast. They dismantled the Jessie’s cargo decks and used them as a framework for the new habitat, facing the other way up, since the bergship was now hanging by her tail from the dock. Within just a few days, organic-looking clusters of aluminum facets sprouted all over the Jessie’s thrust plates and interior thrust frame, as if giant crystals had formed in the icy cavern of the hold.

It was the most basic of habitats. Inside the rhombs, the noise of the life-support machinery followed you everywhere. Off-gassing chemicals gave people headaches. It was either too hot or too cold, depending on whether you were near a vent or an exterior wall. But everything worked. It was Martian, and it was theirs.

On the seventeenth of March, Siegn and Dhzowl moved out of the storage lockers into a new berth in the port cluster of rhombs. The clusters all connected up inside, but their berth—which doubled as the new CID office—was far away from the main functions of the habitat. If the rhombs were a planet, they would’ve been living in a remote village.

That suited Siegn. The remoter from Commander Hurt, the better.

On his first night in the rhombs, he unwrapped a soysage for supper. Dhzowl had gone to the mess hall. Siegn couldn’t be bothered to make the long trek through the goosenecked passageways. Chewing, he scrolled through the station news feed on his new computer without reading it.

Almost a month had passed since the loss of the Rio and Madeleine Cusp, and they were no closer to tracking down the culprits, let alone the missing ships. The ventilation fan in the ceiling rattled like dice, sighing out barely warm air. This was an outside rhomb; the life-support readout over the hatchway helpfully informed him that the temperature in the cubic was 14°.

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