“She’s not Jordan’s type,” Fergus said, later. “He likes his women curvy.”
Nadia Kentish had no curves at all.
Ean laughed and felt in control for the first time since the start of the session. “Fergus, there’s only one thing a linesman really cares about.” Especially at line training. “It’s not her body he’s interested in. I will bet you she’s a high-level line.”
Sale had been out on the Confluence all day. “How was training?” she asked at dinner.
“Okay.”
“Only okay?” Sale made a face at what was on her plate. “Who is cooking, these days?”
“Ru Li and Hana,” Bhaksir said. “I think they do it badly deliberately, hoping we’ll get someone in.”
“We can suffer bad food for a while,” Sale said. “It’s just until we get rid of the tourists. Only okay, Ean?”
Maybe she’d already heard how bad it had been.
“They’re still antagonistic. A couple of them, especially.”
“Your old cartel mate being one of them?”
Peters wouldn’t like being called a cartel mate. Why single him out, particularly?
“If he gets to be a real problem, let me know. You can get him kicked off the project.”
What he’d really like is for Peters to accept the new way of communicating with the lines and to come on board. Ean would just have to work out some strategies for doing it.
And as for strategies. “If you wanted to find out who on your ship called anyone in Redmond, Sale, how would you do it?”
“Redmond.” Sale pushed her bowl away and stretched her legs out. Radko used to do that, too. Ean missed her suddenly, so much it hurt. “Am I doing it, or you?” Sale asked.
“Both of us.”
“Me, I’d go to Vega. She’ll be looking for anything like that. She’s got access to all the messages that go out and come in, and she’ll be checking their origin and what they say.”
“And me?” It would be interesting to have Sale’s view, given she’d worked so closely with lines over the last six months.
“I’d ask the lines, of course.”
“How do you recognize something from Redmond? I mean, how do you know it’s not from Lancia, say? Or Aratoga?”
“Identifying Redmond. Are they talking or not?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, there’s the language. Redmond uptrill at the end of their sentences.” She tried to put an uptrill at the end of her own, failed miserably. “You get the gist.”
He nodded.
“Otherwise, you can’t pick them. Not like Lancastrians, who are racially distinct.” Then Sale looked Ean over. “Mostly, anyway.”
Ean nodded again, not really hearing her. Suppose he asked the ship to listen for words. Or sounds. Would it work?
Back in his room, he settled down with a primer on the language of Redmond and memorized a hundred basic words. He turned it into a song, to make it easier to remember. When he had it down well enough, he turned to the lines. All ships, on both eleven fleets.
“Tell me when you hear sounds like these.” He concentrated on getting them right, for with the lines, the sound had to be exact. “Greetings, yes, no, today…”
Ean was in the fresher, seriously considering whether he could convince one of the ships to jump to Redmond and back to see if he could identify it as a place, when the Lancastrian Princess said in his mind, “Words,” and suddenly he was looking at a place on ship he’d never been but recognized as part of the VIP area that was set aside for visitors. Of whom Vega had said, fervently, she hoped there were no more.
Jakob’s room, and Jakob was there, speaking into a comms.
Ean stopped the fresher midcycle.
Every sentence had an uptrill at the end of it.
Afterward, he watched Jakob slip the comms into a side pocket of his bag, pick up the bag, and walk down to the shuttle bay. Vega waited there, two guards beside her, along with the woman they had identified as a single-level linesman.
Jakob indicated to the linesman that she enter the shuttle.
“I’m sorry to hear about your mother,” Vega told Jakob. “I hope she improves soon.”
“Thank you, Commodore.” Jakob disappeared into the shuttle as well.
Neither of them mentioned the linesman. Moments later, the shuttle was gone. Vega watched it go.
Ean called Vega. “Where did Jakob go?”
“He’s going home. His mother is ill.”
That was as likely as Sattur Dow’s being a suitable partner for Radko.
“And the linesman?”
“He offered to take her. Said he hadn’t known she had failed line certification.”
“And you believed that?”
“I believe they didn’t expect us to pick up on it so easily. She’s a virtual prisoner here. What else could he do but send her home?”
Where she would tell everyone what she’d seen. Single-level linesmen wouldn’t be a secret much longer. If they were now, for why had the Worlds of the Lesser Gods brought a single-level linesman if they didn’t think there was good reason to?
“Are you listening to Jakob’s cabin?”
“Naturally.”
“You should listen to the last fifteen minutes then.”
“I’ll do that.”
Ean was in the fresher again when Vega called back. He sighed and stopped the fresher. At least this time, it was nearly at the end of the cycle.
“You might tell me what happened in Jakob’s cabin,” Vega said. “For I can’t see a problem.”
She couldn’t? Maybe he was wrong about the language. He didn’t know it really. But he had recognized the sound of some words.
“Not even what he said?”
“He didn’t say anything.”
“But what about—?” Vega must have heard him talking into his comms. “I want to see the security tape.”
He thought for a moment she was going to refuse. Instead, she said, “This had better be a secure line.”
He sang it as secure as he could, then watched, disbelievingly, as Jakob settled onto his bunk with a tired sigh, closed his eyes, then lay there for fifteen minutes before getting up—with another tired sigh—and leaving the room.
“That wasn’t what I saw.”
“So I gathered. Security on this ship is badly compromised.” He could feel the rage coming through on line one. It wasn’t directed at him. Vega liked to be in control.
The ship—and thus Helmo, too—didn’t like it either. And the emotion was building.
“How do I tell the ship what to watch for?”
“First we work out how he did it. Then we can work out how to prevent it. Now, I’d like to hear what Jakob said.”
Maybe Jakob’s people were listening in. But, “No,” from line eight, “Secure.” Ean tried to stop worrying and concentrated on remembering what he could. “He was talking into a comms. Words like… ” He gave what he could remember, which wasn’t much. “Then he put his comms in his bag and went down to the shuttle bay. Can you check if his mother really is sick and that he is going home to see her?”
“No. The Worlds of the Lesser Gods don’t like strangers, and to date, they’ve never been considered a threat.”
“So you don’t think it’s important?”
“I’m saying Lancia doesn’t have anyone on the ground there, and even with this alleged marriage coming up, they’re still blocking us sending anyone in. Subtly, of course, but we know we’re being put off.”
So they couldn’t check. Ean clicked off and spent the rest of the night wondering how he could protect the ships from people like Jakob.