“Bad news?”
“Bad news. Copper Mountain’s the closest inhabited system. Want to bet the ships we almost hit were mutineers?”
Passive scan made it clear that they were a long way from anything useful . . . some 18 AU away, the nearest star glowed orange. Cecelia left the scan on, and after two minutes, it had coded six dots as possible ships based on their relative motion. Another minute, and the color shifted, confirming them as artificial and under power. They were accelerating away; the mass sensor reported an aggregate mass very close to what the autolog had postulated as the cause of dropout.
“That’s what we nearly hit, I gather,” Miranda said, leaning over Cecelia’s shoulder.
“Yeah . . . whatever and whoever it is.” The sinking feeling in her gut said they were mutineers . . . had to be.
“Are you going to try hailing them?”
“Without knowing? No. Let them think we’re a dead issue.” They might well be a dead issue anyway, if she couldn’t get one of the drives up and running.
“Fine with me,” Miranda said. “But we can listen, can’t we?”
“I don’t know if our communication’s working at all,” Cecelia said. The telltale had gone from red to yellow by itself, and she didn’t trust it. “I guess we can try, though.”
She turned the receivers on, and was rewarded by hisses and crackles. She ran through the settings. Then a distorted voice, quickly adjusted by the speech-recognition software.
“—could have been a ship?”
“Not likely. Got anything on scan?”
Cecelia tried to interpret the passive scan data and wished she’d paid more attention when Koutsoudas and Oblo were talking to Brun about scan technique. How far away were those ships, and whose were they?
“There it is.” Cecelia flinched as that distant voice changed tone. “It’s little; that’s why it didn’t blow itself and us to bits. Drives are dead . . . it’s ballistic . . . but there’s a chance the crew are alive.”
“Not our problem,” said the second voice. “They’re unlikely to report us . . . and without a working drive . . .”
So it was the mutineers. Cecelia looked at Miranda, who had gone white. She understood.
“We don’t know the drive’s dead—they might have turned it off. We can’t take the chance. Too much has been going wrong—”
“Doesn’t this system have a navigation beacon?” Miranda asked. “A Fleet ansible? Something?”
Cecelia looked it up. “It’s uninhabited. There’s a mapped jump point, but it’s considered inferior—there’s some big lump of metal barreling in an eccentric orbit which causes some kind of problem . . .” She put her finger on a footnote. “Wait . . . there’s an ansible . . . there’s been a research station here. Trouble is, I don’t know if it’s accessible to civilian signals . . . let’s see . . .”
“Will they notice if we hail it?”
“Probably.” Cecelia selected the listed frequency. “And we don’t have a functioning tightbeam, or any of the other goodies I wish we had. But they already know we’re here, and they’re going to come after us. If we can get a signal to that ansible, we can at least let Fleet know where some mutineers are.” Where they were, that is. They wouldn’t stay in this system. “And maybe, if they realize we’ve signalled, they’ll decide to run for it and leave us behind. We’ll already have done all the damage we can.”
“Somehow,” Miranda said, eyeing the scan on which the marked icons had changed color, with lengthening cones to indicate course change and acceleration, “somehow, I don’t think they’ll do that.”
“Probably not.” Cecelia entered the pulse combination for the ansible and crossed her fingers. Six full minutes for that signal to reach the ansible, six to return . . . and she had to wait for confirmation before sending any message. She knew all too well how much could happen in twelve minutes.
Two of the distant ships disappeared from scan, and two possible ship? icons appeared much closer. Microjump, of course. She retuned the frequency to the one they’d eavesdropped on before.
“—got the transponder,” she heard. Damn. She’d forgotten that going to emergency power did not cut off the ship’s automatic ID signal—in fact, it boosted the power to it, on the grounds that any ship in an emergency would want to be found. They must be lit up like a candelabra on the military ships’ scans.
“Pounce . . . owner Cecelia de Marktos. Isn’t that the broad who’s crazy about horses . . . the one who hired Heris Serrano as a captain?”
“Yesss . . .”
Cecelia did not like the sound of that meditative hiss.
Chapter Ten
Admiral Minor Arash Livadhi stared blindly at the wall of his office. With the star had come considerably more work than he’d anticipated, despite Admiral Serrano’s honest attempt to make the changeover easy on him. Not only were all the experienced flag officers gone, but so were a startling number of the senior NCOs. Anyone who had had a rejuvenation . . . he hadn’t ever noticed how many personnel had had a rejuv; he hadn’t even decided what he’d do when his own number came up in a few years.
And now the mutiny, and all those personnel were coming back—the fit ones at least. The gossip mill, operating at translight speed through illicit private communications on Fleet ansibles, warned that former admirals were moving right back into their places, and the recently promoted were scrambling to find a place. He wondered what he was supposed to do. Go back to ship command? It would be easier, and he knew himself to be a good captain. But his ship—he still thought of his last command as his ship—and his crew were far away, over on the Benignity border, under a new captain.
He considered the forces available. Heris Serrano’s ship was here and she’d been assigned another, halfway across Familias Space. He knew many of her crew, and they knew him. Perhaps he should volunteer to take it? Otherwise the incoming admiral he expected any day would certainly question why he hadn’t assigned someone already, why it wasn’t out on patrol like the others.
It made sense, in more ways than one. Arash did not like considering all the ways; there were things in his life he preferred to forget and ignore. If no one knew, no one would be hurt by the knowledge. That Heris Serrano’s ship, and Heris Serrano’s crew, might be insurance against that discovery, he didn’t quite allow himself to recognize.
He might as well prepare the ship; he might as well make a plan that would convince the incoming admiral of his good intentions. He called in his clerk. “Please inform the officer in charge aboard Vigilance—”
“That’ll be Lt. Commander Mackay,” his clerk said.
“That I need to see him at his earliest convenience.”
“I’m sure you’ve wondered why Vigilance wasn’t sent out on patrol,” he began.
“Yes . . . we thought at first we were waiting for Commander Serrano to return.”
“Of course. But she was assigned to Indefatigable—I frankly thought they’d be revising the assignments as soon as people had time to recover from the first shock, so I didn’t hurry to put someone into Vigilance. Out here on the border is the ideal place for a combat-experienced commander, and I thought she’d be back. But apparently not. Now we know another flag officer’s coming to take over this headquarters, and I’m going to ask for Vigilance myself. I know that any ship Heris Serrano has commanded will be combat-ready, and she and I have been friends for years.”