On the face of it, he couldn’t see any advantage for anyone in the Mesa System in getting another three or four hundred Solarian ships-of-the-wall killed. On the other hand, he was damned if he could see what advantage they’d gotten out of what had happened to Crandall. So either they’d miscalculated in her case, or else they saw an advantage he couldn’t.
It was odd how neither of those possibilities reassured him.
* * *
The bored-looking electronics tech swiped her ID and presented a palm to the scanner before stepping onto SLNS Philip Oppenheimer’s flag bridge. The scanner considered the card’s biometric data, comparing it briefly but thoroughly to the DNA of the proffered hand. Then it blinked a green light, and the officer of the watch glanced in the newcomer’s direction with a raised eyebrow.
“Permission to enter Flag Bridge, Ma’am?” the tech asked with a salute which might have been a bit sharper.
“Do we have a fault I don’t know about, PO…Harder?” the officer of the watch responded, checking the readout from the ID for the tech’s name before acknowledging her salute.
“I don’t think so, Ma’am,” Harder replied. “Just a routine, scheduled maintenance check somebody forgot to make. Or forgot to log, anyway.”
Harder’s tone made it clear she didn’t appreciate having been sent to tidy up someone else’s mistake.
“The Chief Engineer sent me to make sure it’s done and done right,” she continued. “Everything’s probably fine, really, but Captain Hershberger wants to be certain it really is, under the circumstances.”
“Well, I’m not about to argue with that,” the officer of the watch agreed, and nodded for Harder to get on with it.
The noncom pulled up her mincomp work order, then doublechecked the command station number to be certain before she headed across the bridge. She pulled the access panel on the back of Admiral Daniels’ console, laid out her toolkit, flopped down, on the decksole and slid under the complex collection of molecular circuitry with her testing equipment.
* * *
“Well, there’s a thing,” Anton Zilwicki said mildly.
He sat at the communications officer’s station on the Havenite dispatch boat’s cramped bridge. Such bare-bones craft couldn’t begin to match the sensor reach of a real warship, and their much simpler sensor suites had no dedicated plot, either. Instead, they used the main com screen to display such data as they managed to collect, and it was customary for the com officer to be responsible for them. As it happened, the dispatch boat’s official com officer — who seemed to be about twelve, anyway — was in sickbay with, of all ridiculous things, an impacted wisdom tooth.
The situation, Zilwicki thought, said volumes about just how poor medical care, and especially preventative medical care, had been under the People’s Republic of Haven. The restored Republic was working hard to get the backlog of completely preventable complaints — like dental problems — under control, but it hadn’t caught up yet.
Fortunately for Lieutenant Dahmer, the boat’s skipper, Anton Zilwicki had forgotten more about sensor systems and communications equipment than his ailing com officer had yet learned. Which explained why Zilwicki was monitoring the display as the small vessel accelerated towards the planet of Haven. Now he leaned forward, fiddling with the controls and frowning at the icons before him.
“What?” Victor Cachat demanded after a moment, and Zilwicki looked up over his shoulder.
“What ‘what’?”
“You said, and I quote, ‘Well, there’s a thing.”
“Did I?” Zilwicki raised both eyebrows and sighed. “A bad sign, Victor. Talking to myself, I mean.” He shook his head. “I hope you avoid this kind of mental disintegration when you get to be my age.”
The Havenite glowered at him. Victor Cachat was extraordinarily capable, even gifted, in certain very specific, very narrow types of human endeavor. You needed someone killed? Victor Cachat was your man. A lock picked, an extortionist shown the error of his ways, a counterespionage sting run with consummate artistry, a planetary régime destabilized? Pish-tush! Mere bagatelles! Any of those minor challenges, and he was quite literally in a league of his own.
Step outside those…call them his “core competencies,” however, and his expertise disappeared rapidly. When it came to electronics (other than those specifically associated with explosions, arson, and general mayhem, at least) he was not, to put it charitably, at his best. Indeed, Thandi Palane had been known to observe that he was the only man in the universe who could make a standard wrist chrono explode…accidentally. Zilwicki, on the other hand, was one of the galaxy’s top handful of hackers, cyberneticists, and mollycirc wizards. Worse, at the moment, he was a trained naval officer, fully at home on the bridge and (unlike Cachat) able to absorb and interpret its displays as naturally as breathing.
“You know,” Cachat said now, “it would be a tragedy if the working relationship you and I have developed should come to a catastrophic end due to the sudden, unanticipated demise of one half of that relationship.”
“Really?” Zilwicki’s tone remained grave, but there might have been the merest hint of the twinkle in those dark eyes, and his lips twitched ever so slightly. “Are you feeling ill, Victor? You don’t have a bad tooth, do you?”
“Oh, no.” Cachat smiled sweetly. “I’m feeling just fine.”
“Oh, stop it, you two!” Yana said from behind them. Both men looked at her, and she shook her head, her expression disgusted. “I swear, I’ve known three-year-olds with higher maturity quotients than either of you!”
“Hey, he started it!” Cachat said virtuously, jabbing a finger in Zilwicki’s direction.
“Did not.”
“Did too!”
“Didn’t!”
“Did!”
“Stop it!” Yana thwacked Cachat on the back of the head, then shook an index finger under Zilwicki’s nose. “Victor isn’t the only one you’re teasing, Anton, so don’t think I’m going to let you keep this up.”
“Just as a matter of idle curiosity, what do you propose to do about it?” he inquired mildly.
“Me? Nothing.” Yana’s smile was even sweeter than Cachat’s had been. “Not directly, anyway. No, I’ll just mention your behavior to Her Majesty. I’m sure you don’t want Berry taking you to task for picking on Victor this way, do you?”
Zilwicki regarded her thoughtfully, then shrugged. His daughter was unlikely to “take him to task,’ but that didn’t mean she couldn’t find ways to demonstrate her disapproval. And Yana had a point. Berry did have an especially warm spot in her heart for Victor Cachat, galaxy-renowed assassin, ice-cold killer, and general purveyor of doom, chaos, and despair. Besides…
“All right,” he said. “There’s good news, and there’s bad news. The bad news is that there’s no sign of Eighth Fleet. The good news is that the star system’s still intact. So we’re not likely to find Duchess Harrington on-planet, but it doesn’t look like the talks could’ve collapsed too disastrously.”
“Are you sure you’d be able to find Eighth Fleet if it was still here?” Cachat asked. Zilwicki looked at him, and he shrugged. “You’re the one who told me our sensors were crappy, Anton, and everybody knows Manty stealth is better than anyone else’s.”