“Question, Commander.”
“Yes, Kah-Tu?”
“What are your anticipated casualties on this mission?”
“If the assault proceeds according to plan without unanticipated resistance, we expect to survive the mission with no more than seventy percent casualties.” No one said anything else.
CHAPTER THREE
Zur accompanied me as I rode the shuttle flyer to the Technicians’ portion of the colony ship. Actually, I realized, the term “colony ship” was a misnomer. The reality of the situation was that the colony was actually a collection of smaller ships traveling in close alignment without any physical connection between them. Although they theoretically could be joined together to form one massive unit, and each new module was designed with that purpose in mind, the fact of the matter. was that they had not been so arranged since shortly after the Empire relocated its population into them. Each massive module was a self-contained, stand-alone unit. When it was necessary to form a new colony ship, orders were simply issued for certain modules to set a new course, and there would be two colony ships where before there had been-only one. How many such colony ships there were currently in the Empire I neither knew nor cared.
The modules that composed the Technicians’ portion of the ship were easily distinguished from the others on the screen. They were the ones that were solid discs as opposed to the rings that were the Scientists’ and Warriors’ modules. I had never known the reason for this until the first time an occasion arose necessitating a visit to the Technicians’ section. Once there, it became obvious. Unlike the Scientists and Warriors, who worked and trained in the centrifugal-force-simulated gravity of rim-module, the Technicians did much of their work in the near-zero gravity that existed at the center of the module. In fact, certain subcastes of Technicians, such as the pilot of our shuttle craft, the transport pilots, and the heavy construction workers, were specifically bred for zero-gravity work and spent the majority if not all of their lives in that condition.