Day by day, through the sequence of jump points, they worked their way across Familias Space. Miranda proved capable of producing edible meals from the small galley and spent quite a bit of time in her compartment. Cecelia’s nightmares ceased; she no longer tensed up when Miranda came up behind her when she was in the pilot’s seat. She did occasionally wonder what was going on in the world outside—how far the mutiny had progressed, where Heris Serrano was—but that was someone else’s problem. She had enough to do, she told herself, keeping Pounce on course.
The downjump transition occurred six hours ahead of schedule, when Cecelia and Miranda were sitting down to mugs of soup. As the alarm squawked, the ship quivered like a horse shaking off flies and then lurched abruptly. Hot soup landed in Cecelia’s lap; she jumped up and staggered into the cabinet as the ship lurched again. The automatic voice warning came on as Cecelia groped for an ice pack for her scalded leg. “Malfunction . . . malfunction . . . malfunction . . . proximity alarm, excessive flux . . . pilot override . . . pilot override . . .”
Clutching the ice pack to her leg, Cecelia edged carefully along, one hand on a grab bar or other handhold, until she was back in the pilot’s seat. Where had she gone wrong? She’d checked and rechecked the charts; she should have been safely distant from any large mass. All the jump points she’d entered were green-coded, safe and stable . . .
Half her control panel telltales glowed red. Jump drive down, insystem drive down, shields down . . . Cecelia cut the power to emergency level; the lights dimmed. Then she made herself go through the checklist, ignoring the red lights unless they were on it. First was hull integrity: still green. Then atmosphere: still green. She knew that already; she was alive and conscious, so there had to be air. Then environmental systems: yellow. She hesitated, but the protocol said keep going. She keyed it to the short list, and went on. When she’d worked her way through to the reds—drives, shields, longscan, the minimal weapons she carried—she came back to the yellows.
“What’s the score?” Miranda asked quietly.
“We’ve got an intact hull, something to breathe, and some damage to environmental . . . yes . . . correctable. I need to reset the trays and a filter’s come loose. Otherwise, we’re not going anywhere real soon.” Except they were, at their exit velocity, which was faster than she’d have chosen. But she’d deal with that later.
“What happened?”
“Don’t know yet.” Cecelia took the yellow list and headed back to deal with what could be fixed quickly and easily. Item after item returned to green status. They weren’t leaking air; internal power was adequate for all uses at present; all environmental systems were functioning correctly. The reds . . . were beyond her capability. Beyond anyone’s, in such a small ship; even if she’d known how to fix the drives, she couldn’t have accessed them.
She came back to the pilot’s compartment and shook her head at Miranda. “Now I have to figure out where we are, and how fast we’re moving . . . we’re purely ballistic at this point.”
“And what happened?”
“And what happened, if I can. You never got any spacecraft ratings, did you?”
“No—I have atmospheric licenses for flitters and helos, but not spacecraft.”
“Um. Well, while I’m working on position and course, suppose you take a look at this.” Cecelia took a hardcopy manual out of the bin under her seat. “I don’t want to use more power than necessary.”
“I see. Then you’d like me to go shut down the galley, I suppose?”
“Yes, if the shift to emergency didn’t cut it off automatically.” She couldn’t remember, at the moment, whether it would or not. Cecelia opened the cover of the Emergency Position Locator System and read the instructions graved on the inside of the cover. Supposedly this system, with its own internal powerpack, could place them accurately anywhere in Familias Space. She hoped they were still in Familias Space.
The EPLS, designed for emergency use, had only a short list of instructions. Cecelia entered their previous course data, the last jump point they should have passed, and waited for something to come up on the screen.
waiting for calculations, in glowing red letters. She stared at it for a long moment, then became aware of the pain in her leg. The burn. She’d dropped the ice pack somewhere while attending to the loose filter fitting.
“Miranda—”
“Yes?”
“See if you can find the ice pack—I put it down while I was working back near the berths—make sure I didn’t leave it to melt somewhere troublesome.”
“Right.”
The steady red glow didn’t change. Cecelia had no idea how long the calculations would take, if the device worked at all. She pulled the damp fabric of her slacks away from the painful spot on her leg, hissing at the pain. She didn’t want to leave the bridge. Looking around, she remembered that she hadn’t tried retrieving the automatic log.
With one eye on waiting for calculations, Cecelia tried to read the automatic log. At first, it made no sense, then she remembered that she needed to convert it to a text function. The jumble of symbols sorted themselves out into a sketchy journal. There was jump point Rvd45.7, and then (elapsed time 28.52 standard hours), jump point Tvd31.8. Two standard hours later—2.13, actually—they had passed within the e-radius of a mass sufficient to cause jump downshift.
All Cecelia really knew about e-radii and masses was that the bigger the mass, the bigger the e-radius that must be avoided. Usually this was a problem only in insertion and exit, when someone wasn’t using mapped points. In a ship the size of hers, it shouldn’t be a problem unless she actually ran headlong into something. But she had used mapped points, and a standard green-scored route. Nobody else had run into trouble on this route, and once in jump the very indeterminacy of position was supposed to make it safe.
The mass that they had passed too near . . . wasn’t even moonlet-sized, let alone planet-sized. Cecelia tapped for interpretation, one of the options on the screen. The screen blanked. looking up data, it said. She glanced back at the other, which still read, waiting for calculations. The autolog screen changed first, offering a range of possibilities. All were ships.
Ships?
One (1) Very Large Container Freighter, fully loaded with high-mass cargo.
Two (2) Very Large Container Freighters, fully loaded with average cargo.
Three (3) . . . the list went on. Cecelia didn’t think two or three or four container ships would be traveling in close convoy, but farther down the list, item 8 gave her pause: “Flotilla or wave of military vessels with aggregate mass as above, traveling in close convoy . . .”
In other words, she had split or nearly split a group of military ships, whose combined mass was sufficient to pop her out of jump, and disable her FTL drive.
“Oh, great,” she muttered.
“What?” Miranda asked, from behind her.
“If the autolog is right, then the most probable cause of our sudden exist from FTL was that we ran into a cluster of military ships.”
Miranda whistled. “I wonder what we did to them.”
“Possibly nothing. Possibly we blew them away. But if we didn’t . . .”
“They might be after us. I wonder if they’re mutineers or loyalists.”
“Me, too,” Cecelia said. “Did you find that ice pack?”
“Yes—you’d dropped it in the sink. How’s your leg?”
“It hurts. But not too badly.” The EPLS bleeped, and she looked back at it. “Ah . . . here we are . . .” The figures it displayed made no immediate sense, but at least it had figures. Cecelia jotted them down, then called up a graphics display.
They were still in Familias Space, but that was about all the good news. They’d come out in a region of relatively sparse habitable worlds; the nearest mapped systems were two and three jump points away, respectively. Copper Mountain—she knew that, from the hoorah about Brun’s abduction. It was a Fleet base. It was also—the memory jolted her like ice cubes down the spine—it was also where the mutiny had started. Cecelia muttered a string of oaths, and Miranda came forward.