Read Accord of Honor for Free Online

had been tinkering with, no doubt.
    The engines were huge – easily twice the size of the standard ion drives that class should have. So that ship could hit some serious acceleration – probably more than a crew could survive for long. Could hit, if the drives were functional. I could see that they were either still being installed, or were being overhauled. Hard to tell which, but a lot of plating and some of the innards were missing, and I could see a suited crew out there working away, torches blazing.
    The “spine” of the ship looked normal – a single conduit running from the engines to the command capsule in the bow. Wide enough to pass a few people, or a large chunk of cargo or engine part down. The spine had some exterior mods, though. Normally, there would be two rings of couplers on the spine, four couplers per ring, each supporting one large cargo container. Those containers could be disengaged from the bridge or manually from inside the spine, which made it easier to pick up and drop off cargo. Instead, this ship had disks where the cargo containers should have been. Each disk was pretty big, a hundred meters in diameter or so. They intersected the spine perpendicularly, so a gentle spin around the spine’s axis would create an artificial gravity there. They looked a bit like the units used to transport cattle, horses, or other large livestock that didn’t do well in zero gravity. There were some odd round ports on them, but my eyes were drawn instead to the teardrop shaped command and quarters area at the bow.
    The command capsule looked perfectly normal – except for a pair of what could only be turrets mounted above and below. Two barrels per turret of some sort of large bore, high velocity weapon.
    Weapons. In space. I looked at Dad. He was studiously ignoring me, which meant of course that he was carefully watching my reaction. I knew I had to have paled once I saw those guns. This ship was modified for combat, which meant those round hatches on the disks were probably some other sort of weaponry.
    Then the other hangar came into view. It housed a ship the likes of which I’d never seen before. This had to be a totally new class. Rather than the engine, spine, command unit design common to most freight ships, this craft was built more like a hammerhead shark. The bow area was large, and wider than the bulk of the ship, with a flattened top and bottom, but rounded outer edges. The frame wasn’t a skinny rail like the first ship. It was perhaps a hundred meters across and half that in height. Round ports stuck out like sore thumbs in regular intervals down the side I could see. The engines were larger than the midships as well, sitting huge and hulking in the rear.
    This ship had the look of a predator. There didn’t seem to be any room for cargo. And if those round ports were some sort of weapon, like I had assumed with the first ship, then this one looked like it had over a dozen. I saw more of the small turrets like the ones mounted on the first ship, this time both fore and aft. It was hard to believe. Here was that ship ‘built for war from the keel up’ that Dad had been talking about a few hours before. Right before my eyes. But the ship sitting there was a death sentence for my father and everyone who had worked on it.
    “They’ll execute you,” I said in a quiet voice. Of course he had done this. Why hadn’t I seen it before? It wasn’t in his nature to step aside when he believed something needed doing. No matter the personal cost. Or the cost to others around him.
    He nodded. “That’s certainly possible, if the enemy doesn’t do the job first.”
    “So you’re going after them. In that.” He nodded. “How long have you been planning this?” I asked.
    “Really? Since they signed the damned Accord,” he replied.
    “That long?”
    I wasn’t even in school yet when the Lunar Accord was signed, but the history of the Accord and the war that led to its signing was a mandatory