Troy Rising 1 - Live Free or Die (59 page)

“Born of Winter?” the Admiral said.

“For the warriors of Illium were those most powerful and fell,”
Tyler said.
“They were those born of winter.
Rough translation of a fragment they think is part of the original Iliad cycle.”

“I'll take that,” the Admiral said.

“And you can have it,” Tyler said. “The alternate translation is that they were cursed.”

EPILOGUE

The
Starfire
drifted amongst the residue of the battle, so powered down as to appear as nothing more
than more scrap, as 'Per L'Eternita' played on the speakers and Tyler nursed a snifter of
Centennial and a Cuban.

Paws
and
Myrmidons
picked among the shredded ships, searching for survivors, moving the scrap into a more
manageable configuration, salvage crews doing a survey to see what was still useable and
what might as well be melted down for the fabbers.

Tyler had turned off the news after one glance. For the first time, Earth had emerged
unscathed from a battle and the masses of people who would never set foot in space were
dancing in the streets. There was, for a few minutes, nothing but praise for the
Troy
and SAPL and even LFD. It pissed him off. Soon enough the mobs would be calling for blood
again. Mobs were mobs, whether they were called hooligans or activists or pundits. They
just followed the latest fad, the latest mood. They never looked at the future. They
feared the sky.

The
Troy
had shrugged off the incoming fire and even if it had lost its own fighting ability, that
was just a matter of completing Phase One.

But if the enemy had fired all those thousands of missiles at Earth, some of them, many of
them, would have gotten through the defenses. Senator Gullick had a point. Earth's
defenses were on the wrong side of the gate.

Twenty thousand tons of osmium.
Well, that was just a matter of infrastructure.

He stubbed out his cigar.

“Pilot. Set course for the gate. Destination Wolf 359.”

“Aye, sir.”

Time to visit the Night Wolves.