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Instead, more than three hundred years later we’re all still on one damned colony planet which we share with mankind’s worst enemy.” His voice was full of a barely controlled fury.
Even Shael quailed before this onslaught, but she came up fighting. “That’s simply not true. She only just escaped the command center with her life, when she blew up the transmitter core. Her sub-captain betrayed them. She was little more than a vagabond until she reached Arlinn, and the people recognized her as queen.”
The tall man shrugged. “She could hardly tell the truth, could she? As for being a vagabond . . . well, let’s rather say she was a promiscuous little tramp. She didn’t much care where she got or where she dumped her offspring. You, boy, have the look of her command-center lover. The same Sub-Captain Fisher she blamed it on, poor sod. Anyway, what I’m hunting are sections of the supposedly blown-up transmitter core from the starship’s control center. Fortunately, it was made to be virtually indestructible. The sections were just scattered across half the continent. This is one of them.” He held up Keilin’s pendant again. “If I can gather enough of them, then we can take them to the backup Compcontrol in the second landing command center,