Free The Orphan Alliance (The Black Ships Book 3) by A.G. Claymore

last decade. You could have had unlimited energy by now.
Famine would have been a thing of the past.
    “You can’t eat electricity,” Kale said with an air of
certainty.
    No, but you can use it to de-salinate an endless supply
of seawater for irrigation. You can transport that water to drought stricken
regions at no cost and you can power the transportation of produce from farms
to cities. Many of your nations have lived through fuel shortages but quickly
forgot the fear, the long lines for rationed gasoline.  Imagine what would
happen to your cities as the fuel grew scarce.
    “The lorries would stop rolling, I suppose,” Tommy admitted.
Living among the farms of Guernsey had insulated him from such concerns.
    And mass starvation would follow. You allowed the greed
of a small elite to destroy your future.
    “Aren’t we supposed to be coming up with reasons for the Cold
Determination to not wipe us out?” Kale muttered. “Hell, I’m almost
convinced we should do it ourselves at this point.”
    “There,” Gelna cut in, pointing down at the planet. “That
black speck.”
    They all leaned forward, straining to see the ship. Even
though it was more than forty kilometers in length, it would be a small thing
against a storm forty thousand kilometers wide. Nonetheless, the speck quickly
grew into a ship as she rapidly ascended to meet her sister.
    Dark Defiance, why are you here? The voice appeared
in Tommy’s head. It sounded like a male, but it was hard to be sure.
    I have come because many of the worlds we watch over have
gone through startling changes since our last emergence. I was so dismayed by
what I found on my own charge that I almost sterilized the planet for
re-seeding, but the life forms you see standing on my bridge have helped me to
see that the chaos breeds resilience and creativity.
    Two of these appear to have come from my charge, the
awakened ship said in apparent surprise. If this is true, did they find
their own way to your world?
    They did. Interstellar travel is now becoming quite
common.
    Excellent! Are there many multiple-planet societies?
    We met a few. It’s gratifying to see.
    I can well imagine, it’s nearly impossible for such a
civilization to be destroyed from without, but enough about that. What are your
names?
    “My name is Tommy Kennedy.”
    “Kale Thompsen.”
    And what name do you give our world?
    The ‘our’ was not lost on Tommy. This ship was definitely
invested in the future of its charge. He hoped that was a good thing. “We call
it Earth,” he replied. “What was your name, before you became the ship?”
    Before your people discovered steel, I was a young man
named Camulos.
    Tommy felt a shiver as the name sunk in. “You’ve walked
among our ancestors, haven’t you?” He noticed Kale’s questioning glance out of
the corner of his eye. “There was an ancient Celtic deity of the same name – my
dad’s a huge Irish history buff.” He looked out at the other ship. “Was that
you?”
    It was, young Thommy , and I can
see that you share several genetic markers with some of the people I knew,
though they didn’t think of me as a deity at the time. Rather flattering, now
that I think about it. There was unmistakeable mirth in the tone of his
thoughts.
    “Are you saying you knew some of my own ancestors?”
    The database tells me I associated with humans whose
genes now reside in you, though it was many centuries ago and I can only claim
to remember one of them. His name was Brian Boruma, the first of the Ard Ri na
hÉireann.
    “That’s not English, is it?” Gelna turned to Tommy.
    “No,” Tommy answered quietly. “It’s Irish gaelic . It means the high king of Ireland.”
    “Well, you’re still gonna do your share of cleaning and
cooking,” Kale snorted. The three had originally each claimed their own
apartments from among the long-abandoned high rises of the massive city-ship
but boredom and loneliness had soon driven them to share a large