Jester slid through the first jump point, and scan cleared. Brun checked the references, and grinned. The second jump point was right where it was supposed to be . . . an easy transit. She was tempted to make a flat run for it—nothing else should be insystem—but checked for beacons anyway.
Four popped up on the screen. Four? She punched the readout, up came Elias Madero, which should have cleared the system three days before, and three ships with non-Familias registry.
“Jump us out now!” Barrican said. Brun glanced at him; he was staring at the scan monitor.
“They won’t notice us for another few minutes,” Brun said. “Whatever’s going on, we can find out and—”
“We’re scan-delayed too,” he said. “They aren’t where you see them, whoever they are. And it’s trouble—”
“I can see it’s trouble,” Brun said. “But if we’re going to get them help, we need to know what kind—who it is, what’s going on.”
“It won’t help anyone if we’re blown away,” Calvaro said. He had come up behind her. “This thing can’t fight, and we don’t know what those are—they might outrun us.”
“We’re little,” Brun said. “They’ll never even notice. Flea on the elephant.”
“Milady—”
That did it. Her father’s men, protecting her father’s daughter; they probably thought she would faint at the sight of blood. When would her father realize that she was grown, that she was capable . . .
“We’re going to sneak in closer,” she said. “And look. Just look. Then we can jump out and tell Fleet what’s happened.”
“That’s foolish, milady,” Calvaro said. “What if they—”
“If they’re pirates, they’ll think we’re too small to bother with.” She pushed back memories of that lecture on recent incursions from outlying powers. These were not the Benignity—she had seen Benignity ships on scan. Nor the Bloodhorde, which was all the way across Familias space and probably still licking its wounds after the Koskiusko mess. These were common criminals, and common criminals were after the big, easy profit . . . not chasing a small yacht with a few insignificant passengers.
“If you would jump out now, we could be back in range of the Corian ansible in just a few hours—”
“And have nothing much to say. No, we need to record some data, at least the beacon IDs of those other ships—” She grinned at them, and saw the grin have its usual effects. Her father’s employees had been putty in her hands since she had convinced the head cook to give her all the chocolate eclairs she could cram into her mouth. Nor had she been sick, which only proved that the stuffier grownups were entirely too cautious.
Sneaking nearer with the insystem drive just nudging them along was dead easy. Brun napped briefly, slightly worried that one of them might figure out the lockout code she’d put on the nav computer so that they couldn’t go into jump while she was asleep. But they hadn’t. They’d tried—she could see that in their expressions, a mix of guilty and disgruntled—but she’d used a trick she’d learned at Copper Mountain and it held.
Scan delay was down to one minute by then. One of the mystery ships was snugged up to the merchanter, and one was positioned a quarter second away. The third . . . her breath caught. The third had moved . . . on an intercept course.
It couldn’t have seen Jester. The yacht was too small; they could have spotted the bobble near the jump point, but after that—after that she had laid in a straight course and they could have extrapolated.
She should have jinked about. In the back of her mind, a nagging voice told her that she should have done what Barrican said, and jumped out right away. The pirates could not possibly have caught her then. Now—if they had military-grade scans—she flicked off the lockout. She could jump from here; there were no large masses to worry about. She had no idea where they might come out, jumping this far from the mapped points, but it had to be better.
She set up the commands, and pushed the button. A red warning light came on, and a saccharine voice from the console said “There are no mapped jump points within critical; jump insertion refused. There are no mapped jump points . . .”
Brun felt the blood rush to her face as she slapped the jump master control the other way. A rented yacht, with standard nagivation software . . . she had not thought about that, about the failsafes it would have built in, which she would not have time to bypass. Of course Allsystems Leasing would protect their investment by limiting the mistakes lessees could make.
She looked at the insystem drive controls. The yacht’s insystem drive, standard for this model, should be able to outrun anything but Fleet’s fastest—but only if she could redline it. She noticed that the control panel stopped well below what she knew was its redline acceleration. Still, it was all she had.
“Milady—” Barrican said softly as she reached out.
“Yes—”
“They might not have seen us, even so. If you don’t do anything, they might miss us still.”
“And if they don’t, we’re easy meat,” Brun said. “They’ve got the course; a preschooler could extrapolate our position.”
“But if we seem to be unaware of them, they might still consider us unimportant. If you do anything, they’ll have to assume you have noticed trouble.”
What she had noticed was how stupid she’d been. Someday you’ll get into something you can’t handle by being bright and pretty and lucky, Sam had told her. She’d assumed someday was a long way away, and here it was.
“We have essentially no weapons,” she said softly, though there was no need for quietness. “So our only hope of escape is to get within effective radius of that jump point—unless they do ignore us, and somehow I don’t think they will.”
On scan, the other ship’s projected course curved to parallel theirs. Another of the smaller ships now moved—and moved in the blink-stop way of a warship that could microjump within a system.
“We can’t outrun that,” Brun said, under her breath. “Two of them . . .”
“Just go along as if we had no scans out at all,” Barrican advised.
It was good advice. She knew it was good advice. But doing nothing wore on her in a way that action never did. Second by second, Jester slid along much more slowly than it had to; second by second the unknown ships closed in. What kind of scan did they have? Koutsoudas had been able to detect activity aboard other ships—could these? Would they believe that a little ship on a simple slow course from jump point to jump point would notice nothing?
Seconds became minutes, became an hour. She had shut down active scan long since; passive scan showed Elias Madero and the third unknown in the same relative location, with the other two flanking Jester. They were approaching the closest point to the merchanter on their projected course to the second jump point. If they got by, if they weren’t stopped, would that mean they were in the clear?
There was no logical alternative. One could always choose certain death . . . but it was amazingly hard to do. So this was what Barin had faced . . . this was what the instructor had been talking about . . . Brun dragged her mind back to the present. The yacht had a self-destruct capability; she could blow it, and herself and her father’s loyal men. Or she could force the raiders to blow their way in, and not wear a pressure suit—that would do it. But . . . she made herself look at the faces of the men who surrounded her, who were about to die for her, or with her.