Chapter 44

Dear Will,

My letters leave you breathless? I'm not supposed to be doing that. I mean, I know I leave Violet breathless, but then again she's so beautiful inside and out that I'm always breathless around her. I can't imagine how I won her love. I know from talking to Erica that she feels the same way about Bree. It's hard to fathom ever wanting that to change.

I had to giggle a bit about your superior reading your mail. I can't imagine what she didn't want distributed. This isn't a case of loose lips sink ships. After all the Sa'arm don't appear to read at all, and even if they did, how would they be able to understand English? But I guess it's probably almost habit for some people. Sergeant Powell has told me a few tales about the level of secrecy that was imposed before the president's speech. He is amazing. The man was an army private the day of the speech, and was part of one of the first pickups. He is officially assigned to a training and breeder colony somewhere deep behind the front lines. He is also one of the most experienced marines when it comes to training others to handle pickups, so he spends a great deal of time training new recruits. Some of the stories he tells me about the actions of men and women on colony transports are sickening. I just couldn't treat someone that way, but you are right about how some sponsors start to see anyone who isn't a sponsor as subhuman.

My family will never see me feel that way. In fact they go out of their way to show that they aren't. Larry started it, but now every adult in the family has started learning tank maintenance and cleaning. Meiling and Katya have promised that when the tank is sitting at the base it will shine. They say that they are proud to be ours and they want others to know it, so they have started looking for ways to ensure that. I found that the bag of seeds we brought includes a huge quantity of flower seeds and even two dozen rose saplings. Well I guess they are called bareroot plants. Meiling and Bree are hoping we can plant them in front of our new home.

John and his new friends love the situation. They have been showered with love and affection from all of the adults. Phoebe is really starting to blossom. I'm sure part is having regular meals, but she also loves the attention. Erica and I insisted that she start to study, which he hates. She should be able to get a high CAP, but I'm not sure she will. The fact that her parents abandoned her left her with some serious issues.

I've said before I like your descriptions of Lily. She seems to be very grounded. Don't let her get away with insisting on being leashed all the time. One thing I learned from Louisa is that if you want to be in charge you have to be able to say "No" and mean it. Erica and I have had more than a few sessions with her where she talks about what she's seeing in the pod and how to improve things. We then go to briefings and listen to other sponsors spending hours complaining about how their concubines won't listen or do anything. We'd offer to have Louisa teach them, but we're nervous about the possible outcome.

We are down on our planet, and that was an adventure.

First when we arrived at Wadi, we jumped in and found that there was a battle going on in the system. Erica and I asked that one of the walls of our pod show us what they could. It seems that three Sa'arm cruisers were escorting some kind of hive scout. It was definitely too small to be a true hive sphere, but the AI provided some comparisons that made it clear that it was built to the same blueprint, but a much smaller scale.

Anyway we could hear people running in the halls screaming that we were going to die when the captain told us to shut up. There was a Confed Battlecruiser in the system and it would make sure we could land safely. The cruiser was Sif. I don't know if you have studied the ships at all, but watching this ship fight was amazing. We didn't have a great view, I guess the probes or remotes we watched through could only zoom in so much, but the ship has a weird almost cone shape although the rear slopes back as if two cones were connected. The body of the ship is a dark metallic color and as we watched the fight we'd see modules run around the ship as if they were hamster balls or bumper cars. It took a while before we realized that these were the gun turrets. It was hard because the shots are effectively invisible. I know old sci-fi movies show little bursts of light moving around, but we quickly learned that light speed weapons move too fast for the eye to really see them.

Well, Sif managed to destroy two of the cruisers and chase the third away. Sadly, the hive scout did get past all of the fire and made a landing on the eastern side of one of the two continents. This generated even more alarm among the other sponsors.