Ships of My Fathers (28 page)

He glanced briefly at the three of them and turned the page. “Another thirty-eight private vessels offered neither passage, post, nor cargo. They are also quite small, many of them purely sublight craft, and it would be unlikely Mr. Fletcher could successfully stowaway for the duration of a flight. With his history on smaller vessels, I believe he would know this. This leaves us with thirty-six vessels, a mix of yachts, surveyors, and independent freighters. Any of them could have given him free passage and not reported it.”

Her father shook his head. “Thirty-six ships scattering to the winds. I appreciate what you’ve done, but we still don’t know enough to find him.”

Collins smiled briefly and cleared his throat. “The favor of free passage to an unrelated minor is not one to be granted lightly. An aggressive prosecutor could make a kidnapping charge out of it, so this would almost certainly have to be someone Mr. Fletcher knew, either that or someone that Captain Malcolm Fletcher knew.”

Her father took on a scowl and was about to launch into one of his rants. Gabrielle could see it in his eyes, so she cut him off. “Are you saying you know who Captain Fletcher knew?”

Collins nodded. “What I’m about to tell you is not generally known, and were it not for the sterling reputation of Schneider & Williams and its officers and owners,” he said with a nod to her father, “I would not even be discussing this. I must ask for your word as loyal citizens of the Confederacy not to repeat this information.”

His gaze swept across them as they each nodded in turn.

“Thank you,” he said, turning the page. “Since the Caspian rebellion and the rise of the Yoshido pirates afterwards, we in Naval Intelligence have begun tracking people’s movements: the ships they take, the places they visit, the times they visit them, purchases they make, and so forth. I don’t want to say too much about our methods, but suffice it to say, I could pull a report on each of you for the last ten years that would startle even your memories.”

Gabrielle thought about it. They reported crew manifests at each port. Passports were checked at each of the stations, to say nothing of all the financial transactions on station. Hell, the hotels could probably even track who she had slept with based on the patterns of passkey usage. She gazed down at the page, a long list of names, dates, locations, and ship names.

“For normal citizens such as you,” Collins continued, “the tracking is simple and quite accurate. You tend to stay in the more populated areas, stick to the orbital stations and sanctioned ground ports, and don’t play with false identification. As privately as you conduct your affairs, much of it is actually an open book to us.”

Her father stared at Collins. “And do you report this to anyone?”

“Like the taxing authorities?” Collins grinned as her father’s eyes went wide. “No, this is strictly for Naval Intelligence and requires a security clearance to run even the most basic of pattern-matching queries. Believe me, there are a number of government officials and their mistresses who would not appreciate the existence of this database.”

“Then what do you use it for?” Ms. Corazon asked. “This looks like a random assortment of names and places to me.”

“For pattern matching, personnel overlaps, times when one identity disappears and another one reappears… that kind of thing. It’s not meant to keep track of people like you. It’s meant to keep track of those we cannot trust.”

Gabrielle was scanning the page, and the next, and so on. One name kept coming up over and over. “Who is James Anders?”

Collins nodded to her. “The young lady wins a prize. Of all the common intersections between Mr. Fletcher, Captain Fletcher, and the present and past crews of those thirty-six ships, Captain James Anders comes up more than any other, and most suspiciously, his last port of call was Folsom station.”

“We were there last week,” Gabrielle said.

“At the same time Anders was,” Collins replied.

Her father nodded firmly. “So he’s on Anders’ ship, the
Diving Belle
, right?”

“That was my first reaction,” Collins replied, “but now I think not. The
Diving Belle
did not depart for twenty-nine hours after Mr. Fletcher’s last sighting, and when she did depart, her flight plan was for Pinot’s Hammer, which is in the wrong direction. The
Diving Belle
is primarily a salvage vessel, and I do have reports of a recently discovered wreck in the outer orbits of that system.”

“But he still could have gone,” Hans insisted. “Maybe you’re wrong about him heading back.”

Collins shook his head. “The flight plan was filed by Anders’ first officer, which is quite an anomaly in the
Diving Belle
’s records. So, I crosschecked Captain Anders’ history against the other ships in port.” He turned to the final page.

Gabrielle did as well. Only one ship showed up, again and again: the
Blue Jaguar
.

“The
Blue Jaguar
left Latera station two hours after Mr. Fletcher’s last sighting. Her flight plan was for Magella, and I believe both Captain Anders and Mr. Fletcher are on board.”

Her father scanned around the table. “Then that’s where we go, to hell with our cargo.”

Ms. Corazon swallowed hard, but she did not say anything. So with a sigh, Gabrielle was the one to speak up. “We can’t, Father.”

Her father turned to her. “This is your cousin, young lady, not some errant watch stander.”

“I know,” she answered him. “I’m saying the
Heinrich
can’t catch them.”

Collins nodded to her. “Your daughter is quite correct, Captain Schneider. Our best estimate puts the
Blue Jaguar
at three point seven lights to the day. Even with the best navigation, the
Heavy Heinrich
cannot quite reach three. With the
Jaguar
’s head start combined with her median turnaround of thirty-two hours, she’s probably on her way out of Magella even now.”

Hans sagged against the table. “I cannot simply sit here and wait.”

“As it happens,” Collins said, “I have a priority claim for passage on Naval couriers, and I intend to take the next one back to Arvin. Even if that is not Mr. Fletcher’s destination, it is an excellent information nexus to see where the
Jaguar
is heading. I could possibly take one or two of you with me if you decide you want to.”

Hans began to nod slowly, building steam. “That’s an easy decision.”

Gabrielle reached out and took hold of his arm. “Yes, Father, I think it is.”

Chapter 21

“The only reason for putting a rat in a cage is because you plan to do something worse to it later.” — Malcolm Fletcher

F
OR TWO DAYS OUT OF
Magella, Michael sat watch on the bridge without seeing another wake alert. He could almost believe they were a rare software glitch. After all, he had never heard of such a thing in all his years in space, but late in the shift, he began to question it.

The tachyon winds shifted slightly to port with an aggressive clockwise spin, and this time he correctly used the left-handed coordinates for calculating the adjustment, but he was still off from the orientation change Felipe put in. When he asked, Felipe merely said, “You’re overcorrecting. You don’t have to meet it head on, just close enough to keep you at speed without getting pushed out of the lane. It’s not only the wind; it’s where you are.”

He nodded silently, hoping he understood. Still, he wanted to run the numbers again after his shift, so he opened the log to copy the data to his personal storage. That was when he saw them: three wake alerts in the last hour. They had not shown up on his terminal, but they were still in the log. He grabbed them as part of his data selection and sent them along, mumbling something about “checking my math after dinner.”

Three in an hour was not exactly a rare software glitch, and he began to wonder if it was a glitch at all. A cluster like that did not seem to be random noise either. He thought about where they were, roughly halfway between Magella and Deshmon. They were moderately close ports, but they were small enough to not have much traffic between them. At least, not so many that he would expect to roll through that many wakes in such a short period. Maybe it was a glitch after all, but he was determined to look at them much more closely, just not under the watchful eyes of the first officer Nieru.

Dinner was immediately after the shift ended, and he ate it with Anders. Unlike the
Heinrich
, the crew of the
Blue Jaguar
had not made a point of getting to know him. It stung a bit, but he could understand. He was passing through, a transient guest. The fact that he had been allowed to watch the navigation did not truly change him from passenger to crew.

Still, he found himself examining the name and departmental patches of every crewman who walked past. The drive and environmental patches were fairly recognizable, but he found the cargo patches puzzling. At least, he presumed they were cargo with the blocky box shape, but the hammer threw him off.

“What are you looking at?” Anders asked him.

“The patches,” he said, pointing towards one of the men in the food line. He was big and muscular with a crooked scar across his chin. “That one, with the box and hammer, what is it?”

Anders turned and looked. “Cargo.”

Michael nodded. “I figured, but I wondered.”

“Wondered what?”

“There are an awful lot of them. I’ve counted nine since I came on board, and I’m sure I haven’t met everyone.”

“Nine, so?”

He shrugged. “Well, the
Heinrich
had only six, and she was easily three times the size of the
Jaguar
.”

Anders chuckled and frowned. “I could believe it. That’s one of the reasons all the smaller traders are being squeezed off the main shipping lines. Those radial loaders are too damned efficient. Most of us can’t compete.”

Michael thought about the disastrous financial discussion he had had with Gabrielle. Radial loaders like the
Heinrich
really were that much more efficient. Plus, the
Heinrich
only docked at orbital stations, and they had their own dock workers. Ships like the
Blue Jaguar
, and for that matter his own
Sophie’s Grace
, could land on the ground, and ground ports did not always have their own cargo teams. “I see your point,” he said at last. “I guess I didn’t think it through.”

He went to his quarters after dinner. He had little else to do on the
Jaguar
, but instead of queuing up a movie, he pulled up the navigation data he had copied. He started to work on the course adjustment he had overdone, but the wake alerts called to him.

He opened the first and looked at it. It was a crossing course, almost perpendicular to the line of their own trajectory, though the computer was fuzzy on it given the distance, over twenty light days to the galactic south. The second was also a crossing course with a heading similar to the first, but closer. The computer had estimated it to be a much larger sail, moving more slowly. The third, again, was a crossing course, but this time going the opposite direction and only two light days away.

The three wakes clustered together like that seemed too much to be a random coincidence. That kind of traffic was only found in established shipping lanes, and even then, the Magella-Deshmon shipping lane was unlikely to see that kind of traffic over a day, let alone an hour. Thinking back to what Felipe had said, it was also about where you are. He pulled up a star chart and plotted the
Jaguar’s
location in the hour when the wake alerts had fired.

Three dots appeared on the screen. He then plotted the estimated vectors from the wake reports, both forwards and backwards. The plot from the first wake detection did not seem to go anywhere very interesting, but it had been the most distant and weakest. The second and third had had almost exactly the same course but in opposite directions. One went to Tsaigo, and the other went to Tortisia. Tracing the vectors in the opposite direction led back to Tortisia and Tsaigo, respectively. Those ships had been in a shipping lane all right, just not theirs.

The paths between two nearby stars were mind-bogglingly empty, not merely of stars or planetary masses but of other traffic paths as well. Still, on rare occasions those paths could be close. He looked it up in the official chart listings, and the Tsaigo-Tortisia route listed a yellow-two warning about the Magella-Deshmon crossover, urging navigators to divert at least ten light days to the galactic south. Actual collisions would be astronomically rare, so many captains ignored such advisories, following the more direct paths, crossing traffic be damned.

Perhaps there was something to these wake detections after all, but if that were true, why were the alerts now being shifted to the log files instead of the active boards?

Elsa Watkins ate lunch in her quarters. They truly were her quarters, even though the name on the door read Captain Jana Lewis. All her crew knew her by that name, even Bishop and her first officer, though they also knew her as the Winged Lady. The one other person who knew her by that name also knew her by an older name she would prefer to see forever purged from the records.