“We’re off course—way off course.” He threw the display up on the main screen. “We should be there—” A green circle, fairly near the red dashed line that represented the border of the Benignity. “And instead we’re here.” Another green circle, this one not so close to the red dashed line, on the opposite side. “And we’re entirely too near a gas giant to play games with jumps out. We’ll have to crawl it.”
“Just what system are we in?” Heris asked.
“Nothing we want to be in.” Oblo was scrolling past entries in the reference library, looking for a chart with more detail. “Ah. Not good. Not good at all. The Benignity has bases on the larger moons of this big lump of gravity we’re too close to, and the way we dropped out of jumpspace on their doorstep, they could hardly miss us.”
“It can hardly be an accident,” Ginese said. Neither he nor Meharry turned from their boards. “Coming out right on top of a Benignity base . . . it has to be . . .”
“I know,” Heris said. She swatted down the last of her regrets, and touched the control that would lock Sirkin in her quarters, for all the good that would do now. At least she couldn’t cause any more mischief. Then she opened the ship’s intercom and explained, as briefly as she could, what had gone wrong. “I want Mr. Smith and Lady Cecelia protected, while we have any options at all.” There weren’t any options, if the Compassionate Hand responded. She would ask Lady Cecelia, out of courtesy, but was sure she’d prefer death to being a Compassionate Hand captive. As for Mr. Smith, he could not be allowed to fall alive into their hands.
“Captain—” That was Ginese. “Ships are on us, and their weapons are hot.”
“How many?” she asked.
“Only two,” he said, sounding surprised. So was she. If she’d been that base commander, if she’d known (and he must have known) such a prize was coming, she’d have had a net of every available craft, just in case.
Chapter Twenty
Sirkin, slumped in dull misery on her bunk, heard first the delicate snick of the door lock going home, and then the intercom. She clenched her hands in her quilted coverlet. It was impossible. She had checked and rechecked that course; she had paid attention to every warning in the charts . . . she could not have made such an error. But here they were, and of course—she had to admit the logic of it—the captain had decided she was responsible. She was the traitor.
I am not! She wanted to scream that aloud, but what good would it do? No one would believe her. All the miseries of the past months landed on her again. Amalie’s weakness and Amalie’s betrayal . . . and then Amalie’s death, the way that mutilated face and body looked in the morgue. Hot tears rolled down Sirkin’s face; she didn’t notice. And she had tried, tried so hard to work her way out of it. She had acted cheerful; she had gone on working. She had even enjoyed (and felt guilty for enjoying) those visits with Lord Thornbuckle’s daughter. Her hand strayed to the locket Brun had bought her; inside was the lock of Amalie’s hair Meharry had snipped. Brun—if Brun were here, she wouldn’t believe it was Sirkin’s fault.
Except it had to be. She knew Oblo and the others couldn’t be doing it; they were too loyal to Captain Serrano. Besides, why would they start playing tricks now, when everything had gone so well on the way back from Sirialis? It made no sense. She knew she was no traitor; she knew she had done her work carefully. Yet the work she did came undone somehow, between one watch and the next, and if it wasn’t Oblo or Issi Guar, who could it be? Was she going crazy? Was she losing her memory? Had someone planted some kind of mind-control in her? The thought terrified her. She sank into a daze of misery, staring at the opposite bulkhead.
When her door lock clicked again, she thought someone had come to kill her. She didn’t really care anymore, she told herself, but her gut churned with fear and she felt icy cold. She watched the door slide open with sick dread.
“I . . . know . . . you . . . didn’t . . . do . . . that . . .” Lower than she was looking, in the hoverchair, Lady Cecelia. She had not seen Lady Cecelia since she came aboard, and the shock brought her out of herself. She rolled off the bunk and stood up, instantly dizzy from time she’d spent motionless.
“Sit . . . down . . . don’t . . . faint.”
Sirkin struggled with her dizziness and finally did what she was told, slumping back to the bunk. Lady Cecelia carried a set of keying wands, and looked as smug as her condition allowed.
“You shouldn’t—the captain will be really angry—”
“Let . . . her.”
“But she’s right—something is wrong, and it must have been my fault, because I know Oblo wouldn’t—” She was babbling, and couldn’t stop; she wanted to cry and fought not to.
“She . . . is . . . wrong . . . I . . . told . . . her . . .”
“Did she say you could let me out?” Hope rose—maybe the captain had found out what really happened; maybe it wasn’t her fault after all. Lady Cecelia’s face contorted with what she wanted to say, and couldn’t.
“Not . . . that. . . . Earlier . . .” Lady Cecelia guided the hoverchair into the cubicle, crowding the bunk, and closed the door behind her. “She . . . doesn’t . . . know . . . I . . . came . . . here. . . . She . . . is . . . wrong . . . about . . . you.”
“How do you know?” Rude, she realized a moment later, but she had to know.
“Age . . .” Lady Cecelia said, and grinned a death’s head grin. “You . . . are . . . not . . . that . . . kind . . . of . . . girl.” She held up her hand, a clear signal for Sirkin to listen without interrupting. “Who . . . joined . . .” Pause. “Ship . . . last?”
That had to mean crew, Sirkin thought. “Vivi Skoterin, just before we left Rockhouse. She’s from the ship Captain Serrano had in the R.S.S. She’s an environmental tech.”
“Where . . . now?”
“On the bridge, I expect. Oblo asked her to stand in for me as navigation second during the jumps.”
“No . . . Mistake . . .”
“Well, she’s not trained as a navigator, but all she has to do is check the numbers as Oblo enters them.”
“No . . . that . . . is . . . the . . . mistake.”
She wasn’t getting all that Lady Cecelia meant.
“She . . . is . . . problem . . .”
Sirkin stared at the old lady, shocked.
“Skoterin? But she’s—she’s one of them. She served with them before. They trust her—” Even as she said it, she saw the flaw in that. They trusted her; it didn’t make her trustworthy. “She couldn’t have . . .” she breathed, even as she realized that Skoterin might very well have been able to make Sirkin look incompetent. “She . . . she brought me those charts—the ones I used to set up the course . . . the wrong course.” Inside, a great joyous shout in her head: Not my fault. It’s not my fault. I’m not crazy.
Lady Cecelia nodded. “She . . . made . . . you . . . look . . . bad . . .” Long pause. “Captain . . . did . . . not . . . look . . . further . . . mistake.”
Sirkin’s relief rebounded to fear. “It’s too late, though. We’re going to be attacked—captured—”
“Not . . . captured . . .” Lady Cecelia’s head jerked through a slow shake. “It . . . is . . . too . . . convenient . . . if . . . we . . . disappear. Prince . . . me . . . and . . . all.”
“We do have weapons; we might fight free,” Sirkin said hopefully. “That is, if Vivi hasn’t—”