TOIRIEN HAD TRIED. For a little while, she’d been inspired by Harrington. The woman had really seemed to believe she could do it. But she’d given it her best shot, and it wasn’t good enough.
Sitting at the screen in the mission room, she sank her head into her hands. She just didn’t have the knowledge, nor, she guessed, the intelligence, to understand the engine schematics. She had a basic idea of how the RaptorX engines worked, but while she’d been amazed and impressed at the invention of starjump technology more than twenty years ago, like most people, she’d never really followed the lay explanations the media had published.
It wasn’t like she hadn’t received basic modding at conception. Her parents hadn’t been entirely irresponsible. No, she wasn’t dumb, but neither was she bright eno
