The Orphan Alliance (The Black Ships Book 3) by A.G. Claymore Page B

changed that equation.
    “Look, guys,” Frank held up a hand. “It’s not that hard to
beat a military schedule when you’re used to building commercial vessels.
There’s none of the usual bullshit where some casino manager is telling you
that the carpet needs to be redone because the pattern doesn’t look right when
you walk in from the promenade.” He grinned. “I love working for the military.
As long as the crew doesn’t fall out when you turn, they don’t give a damn
about how it all looks.”
     “We caught ‘em just in time,” Kale insisted. “If you
hadn’t beat the schedule, we would have been the newest subject world of the
Dactari Republic.”
    “And the Dactari would be dying of plague along with us.”
Frank leaned back in his chair and grinned. “Who knows, we might have wiped
them out entirely. The cure doesn’t work on them like it does on us.”
    “So you’re working on the cure here?” Tommy asked.
    “Oh yeah.” Frank nodded. “Some of the researchers who caused
it are the ones who make the cure. This is a government facility that does
R&D and prototype production on new warships, but we had a cop suddenly
show up here with his family and a handful of scientists about two years ago.
The scientists were trying to reverse engineer Midgaard longevity and they
pretty much succeeded.”
    “So that’s where they got their hands on the organelles,”
Tommy said.
    “Huh?”
    “The bacteria we found in the plague victims are a variant
of an organelle belonging to the race that built our ship,” Tommy explained.
“Somehow, the Midgaard must have gotten their hands on it.”
    “So the Midgaard didn’t come by it naturally?” Frank looked
down at his coffee, picking it up and taking a long sip of the hot liquid. He
set it down with a satisfied sigh. “There’s a problem with our vaccine, a two
percent chance of the retrovirus mutating in your body and attacking the
bacterial phase of the inoculation.
    “They’ve set up a lab here, where it’s relatively secure –
rot monkeys can’t swim or operate boats – and we’ve been taking shuttles out to
whatever enclaves we can find to inoculate them.”
    “Then this is ground zero for the cure,” Tommy said quietly.
    “And for rebuilding our defenses.” Frank’s voice grew
serious. “We’ve built three new Hussar class ships so far and two more are
almost ready to lift off the graving docks.” His pride was obvious as he
talked. “They can dance circles around any other ship we’ve ever built, and
they’re all assembled by retrained plague survivors.
    “When we find a group that’s too small to make it on their
own, we usually bring ‘em back here.” He waved a hand at the window behind
them. “That building out there has one of the world’s largest collections of
Dactari training capsules. Half the pods we captured at Mars are in there. We
take anyone older than fifteen and give ‘em a job. There’s a sixteen-year-old
girl here that’s made some amazing break throughs in
the field of pitch drives.”
    “It’ll get pretty damned crowded here if you keep that up,”
Kale muttered.
    “Not really,” Frank grinned. “Most of the folks we bring
back get other training. We make ‘em into steelworkers, electricians, computer
programmers – whatever we need to take a plant or a mine on the other side of
the world and get it running again.” He started to raise his mug again and
stopped halfway. “Oh yeah, anyone we send back out also gets the memories of a
couple of special forces operators that work security here.”  
    “You’re colonizing the planet.” Tommy thought of his sister
and aunt on Guernsey. “I know of a couple of recruits you could use. Especially
my half-sister, Deirdre Kennedy. She was half-way through a masters at…”
    “Any relation to Dr. Jan Kennedy?” Frank cut in, an eyebrow
raised inquisitively.
    Tommy’s mouth was still open from his interrupted sentence,
and it just stayed that