TWmBSmF25

==Chapter 25 - The Wind at my Back, Stars at my feet==
Colleen system...
The fight at Haven let a few Blood Spirit dropships escape Honor, and the destruction of the two battlewagons let a few more slip through...but they had nowhere to go, there were no jumpships waiting in the outer system for Blood Spirit refugees.
and now, Sam Diamh knew which Clan they'd used fifty percent of the thermonuclear torpedoes saving from the madness of mass murder...for a time.
"Do any of you actually know how to live out here?" she faced a group of them on her boat-deck, representatives, a few Trueborns too old to serve in regular roles, a few who'd managed to survive the massacres and wrest some kind of order among the refugee ships.
''
"Live?"
"We don't have backup coming, John." she said, "We arrived in this system by some sick miracle with helium tanks down two bars pressure and half a fuel tank left for thrust. do any of you know how to survive in the deep black long-term?"
"I have two hundred of our people crammed into a cargo dropship!!" one of the Merchant-Caste captains looked frightened. "We're going to run out of-"
"Yes, you are, if you don't know how to survive in the deep black." Samantha told them, "My nearest allies are a thousand lightyears away, it'll be months at best before they can get here, and that's if they find out where we are. Your enemies, thankfully, are weeks away from being able to send backup, but weeks are shorter than months, and I'm not inclined to rescue dead people-how many actual spacers are in your convoy?"
"Founder...you've only slowed them down, haven't you?"
"Well, if we can't get you to safety, yes." she said, "But god-dammit, I'm a Coast Guard Officer and I'm sworn not to do that, just like I can't up and abandon you to your fate. MY job is to keep your people alive until help can come."
"Will it?"
"I don't know, but I have to work on the assumption that it will, because the alternative involves sitting in the head and eating my sidearm." she snapped, "I have actual spacers in my crew, we'll start with setting up burrows in the outer system-temporary shelters to take the load off, begin ice-mining and recycler protocols, establish greenhouses, burrows don't take that long and they've got a benefit."
"What is this 'benefit'?"
"They're hard to see." she said bluntly. "If you're hard to see, and dispersed, you're hard to kill, you can preserve your people and survive until we can find a way to get your colonists safely out of here and away from your many enemies...we don't have a lot of time, ladies and gentlemen, it's only a few weeks transit from the Kerensky Cluster to here, and that second battleship got off a signal to their home-base, these being Clannahwallah, that means they're going to send more."
She sighed, "We also need a means to contact survivor enclaves and arrange evacuation routes, at least for as long as my ship lasts...which isn't going to be long, because we're already through a significant number of nuclear torpedoes, warhead bombs, and fighter munitions, eventually we'll run out and we'll be down to bitty little laser cannons and harsh language."
"We will owe you a great debt, if you save us, why are you bothering?"
"Because it's who we are. I could not sit back and watch a people being annihilated by lunatics." she said firmly, "Even strangers. We saw enough of Genocide against the Word of Blake. There's a solemn vow and it seems to flow through time, a promise that always seems to get forgotten, 'never again'. Midshipman Ngo will hand out plans and inventory lists, you will need to apportion resources among your ships and we've got some surveys of the outer ring systems and asteroid belts from our own efforts to refuel. I'm going to need volunteers to set up burrows and life support stations, and volunteers to make trips to the bottom of the two gravity wells for supplies and to lift as many of your people as possible out before the Star Adders come back."
Amanda met the eyes of each dropship captain as she handed him a precious folio of hard-to-replace paper.
"How long?" a woman asked her.
"Until you no longer live in fear." she answered, "Until you are truly free. I'm sorry, I wish we could have brought a whole division of ships, we'd kick them all the way back to Strana Mechty for what they did to your people, but this is the best we can do."
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