Off Armageddon Reef by David Weber Read Free Book Online Page A

problem, and for the first few years, the success of Safehold’s terraforming had hung in the balance.
    That had been when Langhorne and Bédard needed Shan-wei, Kau-yung thought bitterly. She’d headed the terraforming teams, and it was her leadership which had carried the task through to success. She and her people, watched over by Kau-yung’s flagship, TFNS Gulliver , had battled the planet into submission while most of the colony fleet had waited, motionless, holding station in the depths of interstellar space, light-years from the nearest star.
    Those had been heady days, Kau-yung admitted to himself. Days when he’d felt he and Shan-wei and their crews were genuinely forging ahead, although that confidence had been shadowed by the constant fear that a Gbaba scout ship might happen by while they hung in orbit around the planet. They’d known the odds were overwhelmingly in their favor, yet they’d been too agonizingly aware of the stakes for which they played to take any comfort from odds, despite all the precautions Mission Planning had built in. But they’d still had that sense of purpose, of wresting survival from the jaws of destruction, and he remembered their huge sense of triumph on the day they realized they’d finally turned the corner and sent word to Hamilcar that Safehold was ready for its new inhabitants.
    And that was the point at which they’d discovered how Bédard had “modified” the sleeping colonists’ psychological templates. No doubt she’d thought it was a vast improvement when Langhorne initially suggested it, but Kau-yung and Shan-wei had been horrified.
    The sleeping colonists had volunteered to have false memories of a false life implanted. They hadn’t volunteered to be programmed to believe Operation Ark’s command staff were gods.
    It wasn’t the only change Langhorne had made, of course. He and Bédard had done their systematic best to preclude the possibility of any reemergence of advanced technology on Safehold. They’d deliberately abandoned the metric system, which Kau-yung suspected had represented a personal prejudice on Langhorne’s part. But they’d also eliminated any memory of Arabic numerals, or algebra, in a move calculated to emasculate any development of advanced mathematics, just as they had eliminated any reference to the scientific method and reinstituted a Ptolemaic theory of the universe. They’d systematically destroyed the tools of scientific inquiry, then concocted their religion as a means of ensuring that it never reemerged once more, and nothing could have been better calculated to outrage someone with Shan-wei’s passionate belief in freedom of the individual and of thought.
    Unfortunately, it had been too late to do anything about it. Shan-wei and her allies on the Administrative Council had tried, but they’d quickly discovered that Langhorne was prepared for their resistance. He’d organized his own clique, with judicious transfers and replacements among the main fleet’s command personnel, while Shan-Wei and Kau-yung were safely out of the way, and those changes had been enough to defeat Shan-wei’s best efforts.
    Which was why Kau-yung and Shan-wei had had their very public falling out. It had been the only way they could think of to organize some sort of open resistance to Langhorne’s policies while simultaneously retaining a presence in the heart of the colony’s official command structure. Shan-wei’s reputation, her leadership of the minority bloc on the Administrative Council, would have made it impossible for anyone to believe she supported the Administrator. And so their roles had been established for them, and they’d drifted further and further apart, settled into deeper and deeper estrangement.
    And all for nothing, in the end. He’d given up the woman he loved, both of them had given up the children they might yet have