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jumpship
where the smaller transports all attached within the exterior hold and were
encased in the big ship’s IDF, making their piggyback ride into the star
effortless as they floated in place and were attached to the jumpship’s
superstructure by flimsy pylons that never would have been capable of the
stresses of the ship simply turning to starboard without the IDF holding them
all in place.
    Donn stayed in his quarters reviewing the data that
Davis had sent him for several hours before transferring over to the jumpship
and indulging in the sanctum there, splitting his time between training and
data analysis as he waited out the journey back deeper into Beta Region where
he was going to pick up a few old friends and make some new ones along the way.
    This mystery was a huge one, and he wasn’t about to
tackle it alone.

 
 
    4

 
 
    October 2, 2552
    Vannsep System (Beta
Region)
    Leerbot

 
    The Rover -class
jumpship braked against the Lacvamat planet’s gravity well, coming out high
enough to avoid the orbital blockade of the avian race’s warships that had the
quarantine still firmly in place. The jumpship was only three times the size of
a Star Force heavy cruiser and fell within the ‘scout’ family, with the
exception that the rovers were armed warships designed to function as both
transport and escort for personnel transfers when a full warship wasn’t an
option…and with every one needed on the front the rover had been the obvious
choice of transport for Donn and his adhoc team, given that they didn’t know
how many different worlds they would be needing to visit.
    He’d picked up his ride at Iona along with a third of
his crew, two of which were medtechs, four Archons that he personally knew, two
more that he didn’t but that were insystem with skill sets he wanted, three
Kiritak crewers and a Human Captain for the rover, and an eight member special
ops squad from the Kiritas. The others he had accumulated at two other stops
enroute to Vannsep , including a Knight he’d come across
accidentally while in a spaceport, who was transitioning back to Earth for
extensive medical work on battlefield injuries…including a severed arm.
    Donn had gotten permission to pick up a regenerator in
Iona, so having that with him he grabbed the Knight and added her to his team
while giving the 7 foot tall woman as many foodstuffs as she could eat over the
following days with the regenerator using the additional biomass to slowly
begin regrowing her arm and mending her other battle damage. Star Force now had
tech to regrow limbs that didn’t require a regenerator, but those devices were
huge and located almost exclusively on Earth or elsewhere in the Solar System,
requiring transport back ‘home’ to deal with such injuries save for a handful
of very expensive medical ships that were floating around the ADZ that could
accommodate the same.
    The regenerators were reserved for special
circumstances and this Knight had gotten wounded in the wrong place at the
wrong time with none available. Had she been critically wounded she would have
been moved to the closest planet with one, which would have been Horizon in
Iona that had four…or now three since Donn had borrowed one. Given that she was
stable she’d been assigned to recovery work on Earth, which would have involved
recalibration training for the new arm and an overall break from combat to
reset herself .
    After two minutes of talking with Galia Donn knew that
wouldn’t be necessary and had pulled her into his squad, realizing that
mentally she was good to go and would rather get back into some sort of action
rather than sitting back on Earth while others were still fighting.
    She stood beside him on the bridge, a full head taller
with both warriors outside their armor as they looked at the mass of Lacvamat
warships corralling the orbital infrastructure traffic into very tight lines,
but it appeared that they were letting some traffic come and go up here