"Well, Bob, we've sent off your appreciation," she said calmly. "In fact, we've done everything we can short of taking it upon ourselves to attack single-handedly."
"I suppose so, sir," Tomanaga agreed sourly, "but the crews are beginning to go stale."
"I know."
Battlegroup 19 had maintained its long, slow patrol of the old Rigelian warp lines, with an occasional foray into dead Arachnid space, for almost five months without a sign of the enemy. They'd encountered a single Tangri battlecruiser, but the horseheads had shown admirable restraint and declined to match themselves against four monitors, two fleet carriers, two light carriers, and four escort destroyers.
Yet that very boredom had been a godsend for Han, and she would have been the first to admit it. Patrol duty wasn't glamorous, but at least it let someone a bit skittish over reassuming a space command ease back into it. Her worries had faded as she grappled with her new responsibilities, and she could look in her mirror now and recognize herself again.
"Well," she said finally, "let's find something to occupy them, then." She swiveled her chair down and frowned-her equivalent of raging consternation-and tapped her terminal. "You've seen this from Shokaku?"
"That freighter, sir?"
The light carrier's recon fighters had found the remains of a freighter drifting erratically around the primary of the Orpheus One System.
"Yes. Does anything about it strike you as odd?"
"You mean aside from what she was doing there to begin with?"
"Exactly. There are no inhabited planets in Orpheus One System. In fact, aside from Shanak and Franos and Telik-both of which belong to the Star Union-there aren't any inhabited worlds within four transits of Orpheus, and haven't been since the Alliance dusted the Arachnids out eighty years ago. I suppose her skipper might've been taking a short cut between Shanak and Rehfrak by way of Zephrain, since it was a Rump registry vessel, not a Tabby. But it's hard to believe anyone would try that, even assuming he could talk the Tabbies into letting him, and I doubt he could. Not when he had a sub-charter from Admiral Trevayne in Zephrain. That made her an official belligerent, and the Tabbies would never have let her pass through their space. But I can't think of anything else he'd be doing unescorted on this side of Zephrain, either, especially this close to Tangri space. Surely everyone knows they've been using that closed warp point in AP Five! They were doing that occasionally even before the Civil War distracted us from the area, and Trevayne's not stupid enough to route a ship through here. Even assuming she'd have anywhere to go out this way."
"But she's here, sir, and she was looted."
"True," Han nodded. "But did you examine the passenger list Shokaku pulled out of her computers?"
"Well, no, sir. Why?"
"They recovered the bodies of all twenty-five crewmen," Han said.
"So? The horseheads don't take prisoners, sir."
"True. But the passenger and crew sections were undamaged. Whoever attacked raked the drive and command sections with primaries and needle beams, then looted the holds and finished off the crew in the process."
"Yes, sir. Typical Tangri work."
Tomanaga was puzzled. Clearly his admiral had noticed something he had missed.
"Except this, Bob. According to the passenger manifest, there were fourteen young women aboard that ship. So where are their bodies?"
"What?" Tomanaga rose and moved to her desk. "May I, sir?" he asked, laying his hand on the swiveled terminal.
"Certainly."
He turned the screen and peered at it thoughtfully, mind racing.
"It doesn't make sense," he muttered. "Only the women are missing."
"Exactly. And the Tangri have never shown any particular interest in kidnapping young, female Terrans."
"Yes, sir. So it had to be someone with a use for them. . . . What about ransom? Were any of them wealthy?"
"On a tramp freighter?" Han shook her head. "Navy nurses and doctors from Zephrain."
"So whoever hit her didn't hail from the Rim, either." Tomanaga frowned. "I don't like it."
"Neither do I. Nor, I suppose, did those passengers and crewmen."
"Sorry, sir. I meant I don't like the implications. Whoever did it isn't based at Orpheus-we swept the place with a fine-toothed comb. That means some bunch of Terrans is involved in inter-system raiding. And that, sir, means there's a joker in the deck. If we spot anyone, we can't know whether it's the Rim or these pirates."
"Perhaps." Han cleared her screen and a warp chart flickered to life. She tapped it with a stylus. "Here's our patrol area. Here's Orpheus One." She touched a light dot to one side of their patrol area. "Now, everything Rimward of Orpheus Two belongs to the Rim, and whoever it is can't operate from there, because both sides watch those warp points like hawks. And he can't operate from here-" her arcing stylus indicated their patrol area "-or we'd've spotted him. But that leaves this warp network over here, see?" She tapped the screen. "It connects with Orpheus from the back, through the closed warp point in Bug Eight . . . and it also extends all the way to here. . . ."
"My God! Right into our rear areas!"
"Precisely. I don't know who they are or where they came from, but someone is raiding civilian traffic from a base somewhere along this warp network. There's nothing much out here but outposts and mining colonies-no heavy traffic, sparse populations, slow communications. Most of the 'colonies'-such as they are, and what there is of them-are less than fifty or sixty years old, emplaced since ISW Four. They could be almost anywhere. Take over a mining colony and the nav beacons and you control all communications with the system. Who's to know you've done it?"
"Then we'd better get a drone off immediately, sir."
"Agreed. But what then? It'll take two months just to reach Cimmaron. Then two more months for Admiral Iskan to reply or relay it-four months, minimum, for whoever it is to go on doing whatever they're doing. No, we have to deal with it ourselves."
"But, sir, this area-" he indicated the suspect warp lines "-is outside our patrol area. It'd take us-what, five weeks?-just to get there, and it'd mean abandoning the picket. I don't think the Admiralty would like that."
"The Admiralty isn't out here, Bob: we are. We won't take the entire battlegroup, anyway. We'll take one other monitor, Shokaku, and two of the cans and leave the rest here under Commodore Cruett. I suppose I could detach Cruett, but it's my responsibility if decisions have to be made."
"Yes, sir. But-"
"Bob, we're going. We're supposed to prevent things like this, war or no war. Understood?"
"Yes, sir."
"Good. Then get together with Stravos and rough out a set of orders for Cruett. And ask Dick to lay out the best search pattern for us. I don't want to be gone any longer than we have to be."
"Aye, aye, sir."
He left and Han cocked her chair back once more, studying the star map and disliking her thoughts.
TRNS Bernardo da Silva plowed slowly through space, accompanied by her sister monitor Franklin P. Eisenhower and the light carrier Shokaku. Two escort destroyers watched the rear while Shokaku's recon fighters swept the detachment's projected track and flanks, and Rear Admiral Li Han sat on her palatial flag bridge, fingers steepled under her clean jaw line, contemplating her empty plot.
A month of cruising the suspect warp lines, and nothing. Was she on the wrong track? Had she made a major error-one that validated her earlier fears over her judgment? Her face was calm as she silently reviewed her discussions with Tomanaga, her endless perusal of dry facts with Irene Jorgensen. The data was there, she decided once more; only her response to it was suspect.