Mia stood in Valetta's observation deck, mournfully looking through the glass as she watched the MNS Fantasia, the her husband's former flagship (assuming he was still alive) and her best friend's command, being carved into hull panels and spare parts.
They'd been working on the hull for some time. The Bretonians used an unusual method to cast their hulls back in those days, apparently; one of the consulting engineers from Corsica had reverse-engineered the process and apparently it was already being applied to parts of the half-complete Dreadnought hull in the northerly regions of Omicron-85. Now the hull was almost completely gone from the nose to halfway past the cylindrical heavy gun capacitor amidships; it was a mess of wires and a partially disassembled skeleton from thereon in, the central fusion core's torus ominously floating upwards out of the ship as a hazmat team moved in to deal with the two radioactive fission cores used for power generation and life support (they'd been shut down and cooled, but the fuel rods had to be removed and relocated individually). In three more days the ship would be gone; her Heavy Mortar and twin Infernos would be used to arm the new battleship Santa Veruna; the anti-aircraft guns would go to the Dies Irae; the primary turrets, outdated, would be cannibalized for parts and then melted down. Her engine - not Fleet standard anymore, but valuable because of the Positron injector, would be sent to Corsica to serve as a testbed for similar systems for use in performance enhancers in the new AQS drives. They were saving the keel, apparently, for potential use in a new modified Dreadnought that was supposedly being planned according to a rumor told to her by the dock shift manager, for 820.
No, she wouldn't be around to see that. She didn't think she'd be around Malta for a long, long time, she thought, as she brushed a bang - short, she'd had it cut yesterday - out of her face. Malta wasn't home for her after that.
Apparently she'd died. Poison, Claire had said, an assassination by a group of filthy miners aimed at sending Outcast forces into disarray long enough to push them out of Tau-23. That had failed, of course, because she wasn't the only competent Maltese commander (far from it), but needless to say she'd been shot into the black hole, as was customary for flag officers (as opposed to a fighter pilot, who would be placed in the graveyard by Carinea). And the temporal anomaly left over from the warp drive experiments back in the heady days of the original 101st science thinktank had apparently spat her out, eighteen months younger and as good as new. Except for the tingling. It came and went, but it was incessant, and whenever it happened she started to see glimpses of things. Strange, strange things. She had glimpses of faces, faces she'd never seen before, and sometimes she'd start to get premonitions (which were usually correct). It was strange and unnerving.
"Inbound vessel, moving to moor." The computer had chimed in overhead. "All units, be advised, the Interspace Liner Red Royale is inbound for moor. Please be prepared to provide it with fuel and all necessary replenishments."
Uncle Benjamin's ship wasn't supposed to be in orbit for some time. This was curious. She drifted over to the hatchway to investigate.
Quote:Quick comment - we thought that Panzer was the Leader, Swift. -Agmen
