Tirolle and Glimfrelle spent hours reestablishing communications and trying to discover who had died and who might be rescued. Five ships had lost all drive capability but still had surviving crew. Some ships had been hit at known locations,
Mbt Rafiki Boots, and Svensndot dispatched vessels with drone swarms to find the wrecks. Ship-to-ship warfare was a sanitary, intellectual exercise for most of the survivors, but the rubble and the destruction were as real as in any ground war, only spread over a trillion times more space. Finally the time for miracle rescues and sad discoveries was passed. The SjK commanders gathered on a common channel to decide a common future. It might better have been a wake -- for Sjandra Kei and Aniara fleet. Part way through the meeting, a new window appeared,
Beats(Black) Pro High Performance Professional Hea, a view onto the bridge of the Out of Band. Ravna Bergsndot watched the proceedings silently. The erstwhile "godshatter" was nowhere in evidence. "What more to do?" said Johanna Haugen. "The damn Butterflies are long gone." "Are we sure we have rescued everyone?" asked Jan Trenglets. Svensndot bit back an angry reply. The commander of Trance had become a recording loop on that issue. He had lost too many friends in the battle; all the rest of his life Jan Trenglets would live with nightmares of ships slowly dying in the deep night. "We've accounted for everything, even to vapor," Haugen spoke as gently as the words allowed. "The question is where to go now." Ravna made a small throat-clearing sound, "Gentlemen and Ladies, if --" Trenglets looked up at her transceived image. All his hurt transformed into a blaze of anger. "We're not your gentlemen, slut,
mbt sapatu! You're not some princess we happily die for. You deserve our deadly fire now, nothing more." The woman shrank from Trenglets rage. "I --" "You put us into this suicidal battle," shouted Trenglets. "You made us attack secondary targets. And then you did nothing to help. The Blight is locked on you like a dumshark on a squid. If you had just altered your course the tiniest fraction, you could have thrown the Blighters off our path." "I doubt that would have helped, sir," said Ravna. "The Blight seems most interested in where we're bound." The solar system just fifty-five light-years beyond the Out of Band. The fugitives would arrive there just over two days before their pursuers. Jo Haugen shrugged. "You must realize what your friend's crazy battle plan has done. If we had attacked rationally, the enemy would be a fraction of its present size. If it chose to continue,
Beats Turbine High-Performance In-Ear Speakers, we might have been able to protect you at this, this Tines' world." She seemed to taste the strange name, wondering at its meaning. "Now ... no way am I going to chase them there. What's left of the enemy could wipe us out." She glanced at Svensndot's viewpoint. Kjet forced himself to look back. No matter who might blame Out of Band, it had been Group Captain Kjet Svensndot's word that had persuaded the fleet to fight as they did. Aniara's sacrifice had been ill- spent, and he wondered that Haugen and Trenglets and the others talked to him at all now. "Suggest we continue the business meeting later. Rendezvous in one thousand seconds,
mbt tataga black, Kjet." "I'll be ready." "Good." Jo cut the link without saying anything more to Ravna Bergsndot. Seconds later,
Beats Solo HD (Black)High Definition On-ear Headph, Trenglets and the other commanders were gone. It was just Svensndot and the two Dirokimes -- and Ravna Bergsndot looking out her window from Out of Band. Finally, Bergsndot said, "When I was a little girl on Herte, sometimes we would play kidnappers and Commercial Security.