The Road to the Stars by Adam Gaffen

Author:Adam Gaffen [Gaffen, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-09-14T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

“It looks like a junkyard.”

“That’s what it’s supposed to look like.”

“At least they’re nearly done with the recovery.”

“Did you fire that CEO?”

“Oh, Marie? Yeah. Gave her a nice fat bonus for getting the job so well underway, then told her that we appreciated all her years of hard work, blah, blah, blah, and eased her out the door.” Cass smiled at the memory.

“Who did you promote?”

“Dogfish. Richard Percoco, I guess I should call him now that he’s in charge.”

“How did he take it?”

“He’s not thrilled about having to run the company; he appreciated the bump in pay, though. I told him to find two or three competent assistants and push the work off on them, so he can ‘lead from the front’, as it were, and keep diving.”

Cass and Ken were on their way back from Diana after another flight. This latest one was four days’ duration, and may have finally satisfied Dr. Roberts to certify her warp drive as being fully ready for mission use. Cass was perfectly happy to use the transporter, but Kendra insisted they use a Wolf to return so they could do an aerial survey of the recovery project.

Once the sealant problem was solved, it was a quick matter to raise and recover the wrecks. All of the frigates had been raised by the end of the first week; none of them would be suitable for conversion, but they would provide excellent cover for the real operation. After that, the pace had slowed as they became more selective in their salvage. The next ships raised had been the heavy and light cruisers, being the ships they had thought most likely to survive conversion in a usable state. Then the destroyers were raised; some of them were large enough to be useful, while the others would be good for decoys.

At this point, only the two aircraft carriers, the Ford class U.S.S. John F. Kennedy and U.S.S. Doris Miller, and the various auxiliary ships remained to be salvaged. While the two carriers were certainly large enough to handle the necessary conversions, they had the insurmountable problem that they were designed as aircraft carriers. By necessity, large sections of the superstructure were open to the air; this introduced an untenable weakness, making them unsuitable as any sort of spaceship. The auxiliary vessels, being oilers, hospital ships, and the like, were also deemed unsuitable.

But that would work just fine. Between the frigates, the carriers and auxiliaries, and the ships that they simply screwed up on, there would be plenty of work going on at all times to keep the Union’s attention.

“Ken?”

“Cass?” When Cass didn’t answer immediately, Kendra turned to her wife and repeated her prompt. “Cass?”

“Honey, I was wondering.” She fell silent again. Kendra just waited. When Cass finally spoke, she sounded hesitant, something Kendra didn’t hear from her often.

“Is this weird?”

“Is what weird?”

“All of this! My god, Kendra, six years ago we were just a couple in love, we weren’t even engaged! And everything happened with Derek

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