“They probably are getting treated and inoculated or whatever, like we did,” Erzo said with a shrug. He bobbed back and forth, sitting on his tail like it was a seat.
“We should be meeting them,” Olmed said.
“We will, when it’s time,” Phares replied, picking up his cup of ale.
Their patience was aggravating.
“She’s pretty,” Erzo said, gesturing to the new Terran Empire’s queen that was prominently displayed on the hologram.
“For royalty,” Phares added.
“What’s wrong with royalty?” Erzo asked.
Phares shrugged. “Doesn’t really have much to do with us, does it?”
Phares wasn’t wrong. Since when did royalty care what was happening in the ore mines? Only that they got their orders fulfilled. “Your thoughts make sense,” Olmed said.
“Can’t hold someone’s birthright against them,” Erzo said.
“No, I suppose not.”
Olmed looked past the hologram to a display on the wall. He should keep that in mind, about not holding one’s birthright against them.
If Dhomhes wasn’t a Gol-Vett, he might have been a friend at some point. They’d run across each other in the past a few times, but never in ways that were spoken of. The Kantenan social structure didn’t allow for a lot of mixing of the people. One did their job, then they went home.
They stayed among their contemporaries.
Probably a bigger reason that Dhomhes wanted him to go look for this thief. Maybe he worried that he would be known.
Olmed, on the other hand, was less likely to be recognized beyond being of Kantenan birth.
He didn’t know how this was going to play out, but he was going do his best.
His gaze ran over the holograms projecting news.
An asteroid field was on the display.
Not just any asteroid field.
One of theirs. “What is that?” Olmed said, gesturing to a display on the opposite wall. Surely he saw it wrong.
Phares turned. “Is that one of our mines?”
He turned and crossed to the hologram. Olmed followed him, so they could get a closer look.
“That’s Aster 5,” Phares said.
That was the location that a lot of the instabilities had been happening lately. There was also a lot of mining there because the usable ores were high.
Though Olmed had never heard them referred to anything but coordinates before. “What? You named them?”
“Doesn’t matter that he did,” Erzo said. “We can make fun of him about it later.”
Phares growled.
The asteroid broke into chunks, an explosion lighting up space until the air burned out.
Debris scattered. Bombarded their residential ship, the Stonebroke.
