To End in Fire - eARC by David Weber & Eric Flint

Author:David Weber & Eric Flint [Weber, David & Flint, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction, Space Opera, Military, Action & Adventure
ISBN: 9781982125646
Google: XpM6zgEACAAJ
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2021-10-05T04:00:00+00:00

L’Ouverture Station,

Torch Planetary Orbit,

Congo System.

Ruth Winton swiveled in her chair as someone knocked softly on the frame of her open door. Ensign William Howe stood there, with a slightly wary expression.

“Sorry to bother you, but…”

His voice trailed off, and Ruth felt a bit guilty. She knew she had a reputation for being a tad abrupt—well, more than a tad, maybe—when people distracted her while she was concentrating on something. But in this instance, she was actually grateful for the interruption. In the absence of anything interesting to analyze—or anywhere to go, or anything to do, or anything that wasn’t intensely boring—she’d been reduced to playing Galaxy Conquest on her computer. Admittedly, the magnificent system with which she’d been provided made Galaxy Conquest rather more interesting and challenging than it might have been otherwise. But she was on her third round of conquest as Minette the Merciless.

Which meant even that was approaching the dread territory of boredom.

“Come in, Bill.” She gestured to a nearby chair. “Sit down. What’s up?”

“Well…” He sat in the indicated chair. “I’m sorry to bother you, Your Highness, but—”

“Oh, for God’s sake! How many times do I have to tell you to leave off the damn royal protocol? I answer to ‘Ruth’ just fine.”

Then she felt guilty again. He was only trying to be polite, and the fact that she was bored and had been cooped up on the station forever was no excuse for snapping at him. Even if she did wish people wouldn’t waste her time and theirs with pointless formalities.

“Sorry,” she said with genuine contrition. “I didn’t mean to snap at you. And for the record, by the way, the proper appellation if you really feel the need to go all formal is ‘Your Grace.’ ‘Your Highness’ is reserved for royal scions in the line of succession.” She flashed him a smile and he smiled back. “So what’s up?”

“We were trying to track down the cause of a malfunctioning—oh, never mind.” Howe waved a hand. “It’s complicated, and not really relevant. Anyway, we found something in one of the PNE ship’s computers that…Well, it’s kind of weird, really.”

“Weird how?”

“Weird in that we have absolutely no idea what it is, what it’s for, or why it’s there at all. It’s clearly an executable of some sort, but it doesn’t seem to do anything. As far as we can tell, it isn’t attached to anything, and it doesn’t show up in any of the manuals or operations guides.”

“Really?” She swiveled back to her computer, banishing Minette the Merciless’s all-conquering armada to a saved file. “Which ship?”

“The Toussaint. But she’s not in active service yet, so she may be in your records under her old name—the PNES Cerberus.”

Ruth nodded. It didn’t take her long to find the ship and log into its central computer net.

“Show me what you’re talking about,” she invited, pushing back in her float chair to let Howe reach her keyboard.

He slid his own chair into the space she’d freed, and she watched as he started working his way through the net.

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