December
Page 45
*
The December approached Earth around half past three in the morning. There were considerably less Drevi ships floating about. Ted wasn’t entirely sure where the Koleans had taken the ships they’d captured, or the hundreds of soldiers who had been on those ships. It wasn’t as though they had any sort of detention facility nearby.
Ted was still a little woozy from whatever Doctor Tramm had injected him with to stabilize the new lung, and he struggled to focus. Now wasn’t the time to take a nap. He took a few controlled breaths like the doctor had showed him, trying to coax the lung into behaving. He hoped the stress he was putting himself under wouldn’t cause it to malfunction.
“Is everything with the ship looking okay, Bea?” Trell asked the young woman as she came onto the bridge, holding a report on the PD in her hand.
“Amazingly, yes,” she said, looking over the document once more. “There was some lag in the computer so I fixed that, and the engines tend to run a little hot once we hit a certain speed, but it’s not something to worry about yet. I assume you accessed the hard drive? What was on it?”
“You can take a look if you want,” Trell said, pointing to the files on the screen. “But they’re pretty grisly.”
“Those motherfuckers,” Bea whispered as she processed the horrors on the drive. “That one... about the forced recruitment... reminds me of...” She turned to Ted, cutting herself off, but he still saw the pain in her eyes, leaving him to wonder what had happened to her. “I hope you’re planning on doing something about this.” She sounded angry and determined.
“I am,” Ted said. “We’re going to access the military’s official newsfeed and have it show the troops some of that evidence. But we need to figure out how to tap into it.”
“I know computers. I bet I could figure out how to navigate theirs,” Bea said.
Vandoraa nodded. “I’ll help you.”
“Why don’t you two get on that?” Ted asked, nodding in the direction of the computer table.
“It’s going to be tricky since we can’t just replicate the technology. But I’ll see what I can do,” Vandoraa said. “I had nothing to do with broadcasting, so my knowledge in that area is pretty limited.”
“I can’t imagine it’s that different from ours,” Bea said. “There are only so many ways to send a signal. But there’s no way we’re going to be able to do this remotely. We’re going to have to go down there and handle the equipment ourselves.”
Vandoraa nodded, and they got to work.