One said ki-ka-ko but didn’t move.
There were a lot of strange chemicals in the air in the chamber, and the suit took a while sorting through them all, but after a few moments it popped up an alert. Duarte’s scent. It was a significant trace. She had a hard time believing that it was just contact with a repair drone. If he’d passed through that room, had he been hurt or killed and the dogs brought him there? Had he figured out the same thing she just did, and used the sewage pools to fix something? Her hands itched a little bit, and she grinned. She felt the impatience of the chase, like she was a dog straining at its leash at the smell of rabbits. The joy of the hunt.
Slowly, methodically, she moved around the perimeter looking for the strongest match. Tracing Duarte’s movement inside the room was probably pointless, but knowing where he’d come from and what direction he’d left would be enough. The best hit was a tunnel leading off the large cavern and gently sloping up.
She followed it, the chemical scent growing stronger as she moved. Half an hour later she emerged into a large room with an open window to the outside.
The chamber was shaped like a half circle, with a flat wall nearly sixty meters across. The middle twenty meters of the wall were missing, creating a large opening to the outside. Sunlight streamed in. Sky glowed oxygen-blue between the draping strands of vine and branch.
He’d been here. More than that, he’d spent time here. Duarte’s scent marker was everywhere.
“High consul?” she said, the suit amplifying her. “This is Colonel Tanaka. If you’re here, I just want to talk with you, sir.”
No one answered.
On either side of the outside opening were spindly cradles growing up from the floor, with fifteen-meter-long egg-shaped objects held in them. The eggs had the same mother-of-pearl gleam she’d seen in the interior of a Gravitar-class battleship. Like something made at the alien construction platform. And the high consul’s most recent scent track moved up to the empty cradle in the center. She walked slowly around the cradle, but no track led away.
“All right, little buddy,” she said to the egg that had been there and was gone, “what the fuck are you?”
“A ship,” Dr. Ochida said.
Tanaka leaned back in her chair. She’d taken over an office in the State Building as her base of operations with a staff of ten and high-priority access to everyone of any importance to the empire. The décor was generic politician, but she’d put a print of Ammon Fitzwallace’s Artemis the Hunter on the wall where she could see it, all vibrant green with shocks of bright and bloody red.
“You’re sure?”
“Well, no,” Ochida said. “We have a team going to the site now, as you requested. We’ll know more once that’s complete, but we have seen similar structures elsewhere. Persephone system. Bara Gaon. Swarga Loka. Seven Kings. It’s not the most common, but it’s certainly not unprecedented. A fair proportion of the artifact tree seems focused on material transport, and especially in the Seven Kings data, we see—”
“Probably a ship.”
“That’s oversimplifying. We believe they were material transport pods,” Ochida said. “But—”
“Did it fly?”
“The location and design seem to indicate yes,” Dr. Ochida agreed with a nod.
“Then how do we track it?”
Ochida leaned forward. His chair creaked under him, and he blinked like an owl. “Track it?”
Tanaka clenched her fist where the scientist couldn’t see it and kept her voice even. “If I wanted to find where the ship went. Is there a drive signature I can search for? Some kind of energy profile?”
Ochida shook his head like she was a little girl who’d asked him for a unicorn. “The native propulsion systems aren’t something we’ve cracked yet. Not for want of trying. But we’ve known since Eros moved that it involves decoupling local inertia from frame inertia. That’s not something that has a drive. It seems more like a controlled gravity where a nonlocal area falls through normal space—”
“Okay,” Tanaka said, not punching the grinning scientist in the face only through great effort of will. “No drive plume. Then what can I use to find it?”
“Eros was also invisible to radar, you’ll recall.”
“You’re telling me a lot of things I can’t do. Start telling me what’s on the ‘can’ list.”
Ochida shrugged. “Eros was at least always visually available. If the ship passed through any light telescopy, you might find it that way. Of course, after the attack the planetary defenses are compromised, so…” He pressed his lips together in a universal gesture of impotence.
“All right,” Tanaka said. “Thank you.”
“You’re quite welcome.”
“No,” she said. “I mean you’re dismissed.”
Ochida blinked in surprise, but then he left. So that was good.
Tanaka ached. She’d barely begun, and her search area had just expanded from Laconia at or near a transport network to literally anyplace in 1,300 systems and no obvious path to narrow it down. The raw frustration of it was a knot between her shoulder blades. She pulled up a notepad and started thinking her options through. Signal intelligence was obvious. Images of the remaining egg-ships had to be put out to anything with visual telescopes. Stations. Ships. Anything near a ring gate.
The Voice of the Whirlwind—the only surviving Magnetar—was acting as ersatz planetary defense. It would be the priority. If it had seen the egg-ship, that would at least give her an idea what direction it was going. It was possible, after all, that Duarte had been going someplace in-system. She didn’t know for sure he’d been headed for a gate.
And then… what? Hunting a ship that couldn’t be tracked on radar, that didn’t leave a drive plume. That ran dark. If she knew what he’d been going after, maybe it would give her a smaller list of possible destinations. She’d need to talk to the valet and Admiral Trejo to see if Duarte had given any hint where he might be heading.
Or… maybe hunting wasn’t the right model. Maybe trapping was. Maybe it wasn’t a place Duarte was heading for. If the high consul was looking for something, that thing could be used as bait.
The records of ongoing operations were highly restricted. Trejo was probably the only one who could access everything, but he’d given her the keys. There were five active groups trying to recover Teresa Duarte. She read over their operating reports, but half of her mind was probing the strategy. Before his resurrection, the only sign Duarte had given that he was still conscious was his slaughter of Paolo Cortázar. That, according to Dr. Okoye, who had been there at the time, had been out of concern for his daughter. Was it such a stretch to think that the girl would be the first person he reached out to now? Wasn’t she the best available bait?
It sure as hell seemed like better odds than tracking the missing ship.
The most promising lead was an intelligence counter-op. A distant cousin of Duarte’s dead wife ran a boarding school on New Egypt, and there had been some chatter between her and known underground contacts. If Tanaka had the girl, it was the sort of place she’d have found to park her. And the school’s new term was starting soon. Hiding a teenage girl in a place with a lot of other teenage girls made sense.
Tanaka pulled up the command structure. The operation was being run through a hunting frigate called the Sparrowhawk. Captain Noel Mugabo was in charge.
Or had been, anyway. Until now.
She opened a connection to her aide and didn’t wait for him to speak. “Contact the Sparrowhawk and let them know I’ll be taking over direct operational command of their New Egypt mission. And find me a fast transport. Something with the breathable-fluid crash couches.