Accord of Honor Read Online Free PDF Page B

interplanetary ships to pair off. And we were both teenagers, out doing our apprentice cruises. The lure of zero-gee sex was enough to tempt anyone to experiment, so in general there was no rules against it so long as the job got done and no one got hurt. Kel and I shipped out together several times and got very close. Maybe too close. We were starting to talk about becoming partners officially – which would guarantee we’d ship together every time. We were full of daydreams about shipping out to every human station in the solar system together, hitting them all one by one.
    But Dad found out and pitched a fit. I was yanked off flight status and given a choice: go to Earth for college and grad school without contacting Kel again, or she lost her job.
    I wasn’t even allowed to say goodbye.
    That was six years ago. I had kept my promise to never contact Kel again, and I knew in my bones that so long as I did, Dad would keep his end of the deal. He was infuriating, but he never broke his word.
    It had taken me two years to stop dreaming about her at night.
    And now she was ‘lost’. Maybe dead, maybe taken. The bottom of my stomach felt like it had dropped away, and just kept falling.
    I realized my hands were shaking, and Dad was watching at me. Gauging my reaction. He nodded.
    “I saw the list, too. I didn’t tell you. Wasn’t sure how you’d handle it.”
    “And?” I said through gritted teeth.
    “Still not sure. Christ, Thomas. You spent six years at Harvard and never even found anyone to date there, not even once.” I wasn’t shocked he’d been monitoring my personal life, but it raised my anger another notch. “You were still mooning over that girl. Still are, from the looks of you.”
    “Why the hell do you care?” I asked.
    “There’s too much at stake here, Thom. I could use you, but only if you have a level head. I’m not sure that you do.” He looked away.
    I started to reply, but six telltale warnings all went off at once. I put thoughts of Kel away – for now.
    “Dad...”
    “I see it,” he said. He started punching numbers into the console.
    “We’re being pinged,” I said. “Radar, lasers, god knows what else. Is this your reception committee, I hope?”
    “Yes,” he said simply. He punched another couple of keys, I saw he was transmitting something. Then the alarms all went dead at once. Whatever sensors had been giving us the once-over had stopped.
    “Give me flight control,” he said.
    I took my hands off the console. Now I could see the source of the pings – a mass of girders, hab modules, and solar panels off there in the distance. We were slowing down steadily but still closing fast. A free floating station, out in space, nowhere near any planet. This had to be the Special Projects site.
    It was hard to describe the base. The whole thing was painted a matte black, so it didn’t reflect light well and thus didn’t stand out much from the darkness around it. The radar was barely picking up anything at all, even as we drew close. It wasn’t until we were under a kilometer away that I realized what I was seeing. It was a dry-dock – a ship manufacturing station. And it looked to me like there were two ships in the berths.
    I looked at Dad without saying a word, but he must have felt my questions burning. He changed the radio frequency and said, “Hit the floods as I fly by, eh? I want to see how we’re doing.” A second or two later, floodlights splashed onto the two ships in the bays, and I got my first good look.
    The first was a ship I’d seen before, tons of times. It was our standard hauler class freight ship; we’d had that class in service for ten years now. It was basically the same ship I’d commanded when the pirates attacked. There was something odd about this one though. The cargo area didn’t look right. I dialed up the resolution, zoomed in, and saw there were some attachments here and there that changed the ship’s profile slightly. Something Dad