Shepherd's Crook: Omegaverse: Volume 2 by G.R. Cooper Page A

began, “what’s even more predictable than trying to be unpredictable?”
    He waited for a moment, but Eric remained silent.
    Kato shrugged, then answered himself.
    “Being predictable by being predictable.”
    Kato shrugged again, and smiled even more broadly.
    Then he cut off communication.
    Then The Last Ronin fired. A full broadside.
     
     

Chapter 10
     
    Duncan had sat in the control room of his station, the Shepherd’s Crook, watching the space battle unfold on his front doorstep. As the Westy had begun speeding off toward the Lagrange jump point, dragging the new ships in tow, the Shepherd Moon had entered the station through the ‘back’ door; the hangar door on the opposite side of the station. After docking, Duncan raced to the control room to view the chase almost in its entirety.
    He had been, he admitted to himself, thrilled with the fight that the Westy had displayed throughout the chase. He’d been genuinely impressed. He’d also been genuinely baffled by the response of the attackers. At any time after they’d jumped in, the eight of them, arrayed around and chasing the Westy, could have quickly overwhelmed and destroyed it.
    His bafflement turned to shock as the Westy actually reached the jump point, unscathed, and gone into hyperspace. That shock, however, quickly turned to understanding as he saw a torpedo firing from an uncloaking battle cruiser. The Westy, hit by the torpedo, returned to ‘normal’ space and was rocked by an extremely fast series of shots from several of the battle cruiser batteries. The destroyer then rolled, smoking, for a few seconds before a complete broadside from the cruiser obliterated it. Shortly thereafter, the attacking group began jumping out of the system.
    “I don’t know who these enemies you’ve made are, Eric,” he muttered, “but I’m pretty sure I know how you made them,” he smiled, remembering his interactions with the acerbic martinet.
     
    Duncan brought his email queue up on the control room’s main screen; he’d received notice of a new message. It was from the interior designers of his new, Kepler 22B, apartment. They were already done. He was surprised. “That was fast,” he thought.
    He left the control room and, after the destination prompt, went through to his new pad.
    “Wow,” he muttered, looking around. Instead of a blank, white rectangle, his apartment was now much more interesting. Next to the window-into-space that he’d installed, and facing it, was a sunken, horse-shoe shaped, deep brown leather couch. The top of the couch seat was level with the mahogany clad floor. The couch surrounded a round, copper fire-pit.
    “Light the fire,” he said, and the pit sprang to life with a blue gas flame. The couch took that entire part of the room; it was as wide as the room and, thus, the window. It looked like it would hold fifteen or twenty people.
    He looked behind him, to the wall opposite the window. It was now taken up by a floor to ceiling, wall to wall, backlit fishtank; judging by the inhabitants, salt water. He looked closer at the fish. Improbably small great white sharks, no more than six inches long, shared the water, benignly it seemed, with other deep sea inhabitants of a similar scale. A single, foot and a half long blue whale surfaced near the ceiling, blew, then plunged underwater chased by a pod of tiny dolphins. Duncan smiled. He could watch this thing all day long.
    He looked to the front wall. On either side of his entrance, a series of black and white cityscapes hung. The first an oblique view of, he thought, the Chrysler and Empire State buildings in Manhattan. Another was a dizzying top down view from what he presumed was the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. He didn’t recognize the others. He would have thought them incongruous in the setting of a space station; but they worked. At least, he thought they did.
    That was it for his front room, but, he thought, apart from a place for me and my friends to sit and some