Sassinak (20 page)

Of course, it could be sabotage. That's why she walked the lines herself, struggling to relearn the details of the system so that she knew what she was looking for. But in any complicated system of tubing and pumps, a thousand opportunities exist for subtle acts of sabotage, and she didn't expect to find anything obvious. She was right.

As the ship's days passed in pursuit, with the Ssli certain that it had a lock on the ships ahead, Huron finally came around. Literally, as he appeared at her cabin door with a peace offering: wine and pastries. Sassinak had not realized how much she'd missed his support until she saw the old grin on his face.

"Peace offering," he said. Typically, he wasn't trying to pretend they'd had no quarrel. Sassinak nodded, and waved him in. He set the basket of hot, sugary treats on her desk, and opened the wine. They settled down in comfortable chairs, one on either side of the pastry basket, and munched in harmony for a few minutes.

"I was afraid they'd split up, or we'd lose them," he said with a sideways glance. "And then when we got the final scan on the escort—that it might have been fatal to take it on—I knew you were right, but I just couldn't—"

"Never mind." Sassinak leaned back against the padded chair. Just to have someone to talk with, to relax with—it wasn't over, and it was going to get worse before it got better, but if Huron could accept her decision . . .

"I wish we knew
where
they're going!" He bit into his pastry so hard that flaky bits showered across his lap. He muttered a curse through the mouthful of food, and Sassinak chuckled. Problems and all, life was more fun with Huron in her cabin some nights.

"Huh. Don't we all! And I don't dare send anything back to Sector HQ in case something intercepts it. . ."

"Remember when Ssli and the IFTL system were new, and we were
sure
no one else had them?" He was still swiping crumbs from his lap, and looked up at her with the mischievous lift of eyebrow she'd come to love.

"Sure do." Sassinak ran her hands through her dark hair, and flipped the ends toward him. His eyes widened, then narrowed again.

"One track mind." He shook his head at her.

"You're any different?" Sassinak pointed to the now-empty pastry basket and the bottle of wine. "Think I can't recognize bait when I see it?"

"Brains with your beauty—and a few other things . . ." His eyes finished what she had started, and they were more than halfway undressed when Sassinak remembered to switch the intercom to alert-only. The bridge crew knew what that meant, she thought with satisfaction, before dragging the big brilliantly rainbowed comforter over the pair of them.

"And what I still don't understand," said Huron, far more awake than usual for 0200, "is how they could mount all that on a hull that size. Are they crewing it with midgets, or what?"

Sassinak had taken a short nap, and wakened to find Huron tracing elaborate curlicues on her back while he stared at the readout on the overhead display. She yawned, pushed back a thick tangle of hair, and reached up to switch the display off. "Later . . ."

He switched it back on. "No, seriously—"

"Seriously, I'm sleepy. Turn it off, or go look at it somewhere else."

He glowered at her. "Some Fleet captain
you
are, lazing around like someone's lapcat after a dish of cream."

Sassinak purred loudly, yawned again, and realized she was going to wake all the way up, like it or not. "Big weapons, small hull. Reminds me of something." Huron blushed, extensively, and Sassinak snapped her teeth at him. "Call your captain a cat, and you deserve to get bit, chum. If we're going to go back to work, I'm getting dressed." She felt a lot better, relaxed and alert all at once.

Now that she was awake, she realized that she had not followed through on the analysis of the escort vessel as carefully as she could have. She'd been thinking too much about her main decision and its implications. Together she and Huron ran the figures several times, and then adjourned to the main wardroom. She called in both Arly and Hollister. They arrived blinking and yawning: as mainshift crew, they were normally asleep at this hour. After a cup of stimulant and some food, they came fully awake.

"The question is, are we sure of our data, even that last? Is that thing built on a patrol-class hull, and if so does it really carry those weapons, and if so what's their crew size and how are they staying alive?" Sassinak took the last spiced bun off the platter the night cook had brought in.

Hollister shrugged. "That new detection system isn't really my specialty, but if that's the size we think—dimensional and mass—then it'll depend on weaponry. With up-to-date environmental, guidance, and drive systems, they'd need a crew of fifty to work normal shifts—plus weapons specialists. Say, sixty to seventy altogether. If they work long shifts, maybe fifty altogether, but they'd chance fatigue errors—"

"But they don't expect to need top efficiency for long," Sassinak said. "They come in, rout a colony, escort the transport to their base, wherever that is . . . and most times they never see trouble."

"Fifty, then. That means . . . mmm . . ." He ran some figures into the nearest terminal. " 'Bout what I thought. Look—" A ship schematic came up on the main screen at the end of the table. "Fifty crew, here's the calories and water needs . . . best guess at system efficiency . . . and that means they'll need eight standard filtration units, eight sets of re-op converters, plus the UV trays—" As he talked, the schematic filled with green lines and blocks, the standard representation of environmental system units. "This is assuming their FTL route doesn't take more than twenty-five standard days, and they've got the same kind of oxygen recharge system we do. Most surveyed routes come in under twenty days, as you know. Now if we add the probable drives: we know they have insystem chem boosters as well as insystem mains, and FTL—" The drive components came up in blue. "And minimum crew space: access and living—" That was yellow. "Weapons?"

Arly took over, and the schematic suddenly bled with red weapons symbols. "This is what we got off the scans, captain. Their IFF was a real nutcase: no sense at all. But the passives showed two distinct patterns of radiation leakage: here, and there. And we saw how they knocked out those ground-space missiles . . . they do have optical weapons."

"And it doesn't fit," said Huron, sounding entirely too smug. "Look." Sure enough, the display had a blinking symbol in one corner: excess volume specified.

Arly looked stubborn. "I could not ignore the scan data—"

"Of course not." Sassinak held up her hand for silence when both mouths opened. "Look, Huron, both the scans and this schematic come in part from assumptions we made about those criminals.
If
they crew their ship to a level we think safe,
if
they aren't stressing their environmental system,
if
a few extra particles means that they've got a neutron bomb . . . all if."

"We have to make some assumptions!"

"Yes. I do. I'm assuming they sacrifice everything else to speed and firepower. They want no witnesses: they want to be sure they can blow anything—up to a battle platform, lets say—into nothing, before it can call in help. They want to be able to escape any pursuit. They're not out on patrol as long as we normally are: they sacrifice comfort, and some levels of efficiency. I will bet you that they're undercrewed and carry every scrap of armament our scans found."

"Less crew means they could have a smaller environmental system," said Hollister.

"And with any luck less crew means they're a little less alert to a tail."

"I wish I knew how good their fire-control systems were," said Arly, running a finger along the edge of the console. "If they've got anything like the Gamma system, we could be in trouble with them."

"Are you advising me not to engage?" asked Sass. Arly's face darkened a little. A senior weapons officer could give such advice, but under all the circumstances, it meant taking sides in the earlier argument: something Arly had refused to do.

"Not precisely . . . no. But they've got almost as much as we have, on a smaller hull with different movement capability. Normally I don't have to worry about something that size—with all its mobility, it still can't take us. But this—" She tapped the display. "This
could
breach us, if they got lucky . . . and their speed and mobility increase the danger. Call it even odds, or a shade to their favor. I'd be glad to engage them, captain, but you need to be aware of all the factors."

"I am." Sassinak stretched, then shook the tension out of her hands. "And you'll no doubt have a chance to test our ideas before long. If they're short-crewed and short on environmental supplies, surely they'll have a short FTL route picked out . . . it's been eighteen days, now."

"Speaking of environmental systems," said Hollister gruffly. "That number nine scrubber's leaking again. I could take it down and repack it, but that'd mean tying up a whole shift crew—"

Sassinak glanced at Huron. "Nav got any guesses on their destination?"

"Not a clue. Dhrossh is downright testy about queries, and about half the equation solutions don't fit anything in the books."

"Just keep an eye on the scrubber, then. We don't want Engineering tied up if we're suddenly on insystem drive with combat coming up."

Another standard day passed, and another. None of the crew did anything but what she expected. No saboteur or subversive stood up to expound a doctrine of slavery and planet piracy. At least her relationship with Huron was better, and the other hotheads in the crew seemed to follow his lead. She was squatting on her heels beside the number nine scrubber, with Hollister, looking at a thin line of greasy liquid that had trickled down the outer casing, when the ship lurched slightly as the Ssli-controlled drive computers dropped them out of FTL.

By the time Sassinak reached the bridge, Huron had their location on the big display.

"Unmapped," said Sassinak sourly.

"Officially unmapped," agreed Huron. "Sector margins—you can see that both the nearest surveys don't quite meet."

"By a whole lot
of
useful distance," said Sassinak. Five stars over
that
way, the Fleet survey codes were pink. Eight stars the other, the Fleet survey codes were light green. And nothing showed in the other vectors.

"Diverging cones don't fill space," said Huron. She glowered at him; she'd hit her head on the input connector of the scrubber when the call came in, and besides, she'd wanted to be on the bridge when they came into normal space.

"They could have, if those survey crews had been paying attention. This is one
large
survey anomaly out here." Then it came to her. "I wonder, Huron, if this was
missed
, or left out on purpose." He looked blank, and she went on. "By the same people who found it so handy to have an uncharted system to hide out in."

"Who assigns survey sectors?" asked Arly.

"I don't know, but I intend to find out." Huron had already put the cruiser on full stealth mode; Sassinak now tapped her own board into the Ssli biolink. Two more screens of data came up in front of her, highlighted for easy recognition. "But after we deal with this—and without getting killed. I have the feeling that their detection systems out here will be very, very good."

The ships they pursued had dropped out of FTL in the borders of a small star system: only five planets. The star itself was a nondescript little blip on the classification screen: small, dim, and, as Huron said, "as little there as a star can be." In that first few minutes, their instruments revealed three large clusters of mass on "this" side of the star—presumably planets or planet-systems toward one of which their quarry moved.

They were still days from any of them. Sassinak insisted that their first concern had to be the detection systems the slavers used. "They wouldn't assume anything: they'll have some way to detect ships that happen to blunder in here."

Huron frowned thoughtfully at the main display screen, now a shifting pattern of pale blues and greens as the
Zaid-Dayan
's passive scans searched for any signs of data transmission. "We can't hang around out here forever hunting for it—"

"No, we're going in. But I want to surprise them." Suddenly she grinned. "I think I know—did you ever live on a free-water world, Huron? Skip stones on water?"

"Yes, but—"

"Everyone sees the splash of the skips—and then the rock sinks, and disappears. We'll make sure they see us—and then they don't—and if we're lucky it'll look like someone in transit with a malfunctioning FTL drive, blipping in and out of normal space."

"They'll see
that
—"

"Yes. But with our special capabilities, they're unlikely to spot us when we're drifting. Suppose we get in really close to whatever planet they're using—"

"It'd help if it had a moon, and if we knew which it was." As the hours passed, and their tracking computers reworked the incoming data, it became clear where the others were going. A planet somewhat larger than Old Earth Standard, with several small moons and a ringbelt.

"The gods are with us this time," said Sass. "Bless the luck of a complicated universe—that's as unlikely a combination as I've seen, but perfect for creating unmappable chunks of debris . . ."

"Into which we can crunch," pointed out Huron.

"Getting cautious in your old age, Lieutenant Commander?" Her question had a little bite to it, and he reddened.

"No, captain—but I'd prefer to take them with us."

"I'd prefer to take them, and come home whole. That's what we have Ssli assistance for."

After careful calculation, Sassinak's plan took them "through" the outer reaches of the system in a series of minute FTL skips, a route that taxed both the computers and the Ssli. With a last gut-wrenching hop, the
Zaid-Dayan
came to apparent rest, drifting within a few kilometers of a large chunk of debris in the ring, its velocity not quite matched, as would be true of most chunks. Their scans began to pick up transmissions from the surface, apparently intended for the incoming slaver ships. At first, some kind of alarm message, about the skip-traces noted . . . but as the hours passed, it became clear that the surface base had not detected them, and had decided precisely what Sassinak had hoped: something had come through the system with a bad FTL drive, and was now somewhere else. In the meantime, the alarm message had activated beacons and outer defenses: Sassinak now knew exactly where the enemy's watchers watched.