rose up and people started visibly to die, Hope’s faith seemed to be comforting him.But navigator Cohl, staring ahead at the combat zone, was closed in on herself.The Claw was a greenship, a simple design that was the workhorse of Strike Arm; millions like it were in action all around the war zone. Its main body was a bulbous pod containing most of the ship’s systems: the weapons banks, the FTL drive and two sublight drive systems. From the front of the hull projected three spars, giving the ship the look of a three-pronged claw, and at the tip of each prong was a blister, a clear bubble, containing one of the Claw’s three crew. For greenship crews, nobody else mattered but each other; it was just three of them lost in a dangerous sky — Three Against the Foe, as Strike Arm’s motto went.Pirius knew there were good reasons for the trifurcated design of the greenship. It was all to do with redundancy: the ship could lose two of its three blisters and still, in theory anyhow, fulfill its goals. But right now Pirius longed to be able to reach through these transparent walls, to touch his crewmates.He said, “Navigator? You still with us?”He saw Cohl glance across at him. “Trajectory’s nominal, Pilot.”“I wasn’t asking about the trajectory.”Cohl shrugged, as if resentfully. “What do you want me to say?”“You saw all this in the briefing. You knew it was coming.”It was true. The whole operation had been previewed for them by the Commissaries, in full Virtual detail, down to the timetabled second. It wasn’t a prediction, not just a guess, but foreknowledge: a forecast based on data that had actually leaked from the future. The officers hoped to deaden fear by making the events of the engagement familiar before it happened. But not
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