Lanyan feared that all this cheering and celebration amounted to little more than whistling past a graveyard.

89: JESS TAMBLYN

89JESS TAMBLYN

Jess’s heart still ached with cold anger, but now that he had decided what action to take, the freedom gave him a giddy sense of relief. He had never seen the Guiding Star so clearly in his life; he knew exactly what course he must set.

Jess did not intend to inform the Roamer council of what he was doing—not Speaker Jhy Okiah, not even Cesca Peroni. He had seen the squabbling and panic and indecision in the recent clan gathering at Rendezvous. They would only muddy the water.

No, this would be his personal retaliation, for good or ill. His uncles on Plumas had approved—raspy Caleb Tamblyn had even insisted on coming along—but Jess made it clear that he must be in charge. It was his clan’s business, his responsibility … his revenge. And afterward, there would be no one but himself to blame.

Accompanied by a group of picked loyal workers from the Plumas water-extraction facilities, Jess took several industrial ships loaded with all the resources and equipment he would need. These volunteers had known Ross, had worked for Bram Tamblyn, and would follow Jess’s every instruction. Once his uncle Caleb had learned what he meant to do and told the work crews, no force in the universe could have prevented them from helping him.

Now, the mismatched vessels rendezvoused at the edge of the Golgen system, out in the icy veil of the Kuiper belt of comets high above the ecliptic. From there, they could look down on the bright spotlight of the gas giant.

Murderous aliens lurked somewhere deep within those lemony-tan clouds.

Jess thought he could sense his brother down there, along with the ghosts of all those who had been slaughtered aboard the Blue Sky Mine. Had the skymine offended the aliens somehow? Or did the enemy simply see Roamers as insignificant insects to be squashed and then brushed aside?

So far, the Roamers knew of five skymines that had been obliterated, with all hands lost, on scattered and unrelated gas giants. The attacks were unprovoked and merciless … and thus far unpunished.

Many uneasy Roamer clans had already pulled their independent skymines from other gas giants, driving them up out of the atmospheres and mothballing them in planetary orbit. Ekti production had dropped to a fraction of what it had been before the attack on Blue Sky Mine. The Terran Hanseatic League had not yet felt the squeeze, but Jess was certain that Chairman Wenceslas and King Frederick already understood the impending shortages of starship fuel. This crisis had to be resolved soon.