"A shave, maybe," I said, drifting to her side and steadying myself on her chair back. She wasn't much more than half my age, but then, that was true of nearly everyone aboard except Captain Garrett. Bright kids, all of them. Only a few with Kittredge's same hard-edged ambition, but all of them on the up side of their careers nonetheless. It made me feel old. "Was that thirty seconds to breakout?"
"Yes," she said, voice going distant as the bulk of her attention shifted from me to the bank of displays before her. I followed her example and turned to watch the screens and readouts. And continued my silent grousing.
We weren't supposed to be at Messenia. We weren't, in fact, supposed to be anywhere closer than a day's hyperdrive of the stupid damn mudball on this particular trip. We were on or a bit ahead of schedule for a change, we had all the cargo a medium-sized freighter like the Volga could reasonably carry, and all we had to do was deliver it to make the kind of medium-sized profit that keeps pleasant smiles on the faces of freighter contractors. It should have been a nice, simple trip, the kind where the crew's lives alternate between predictable chores and pleasant boredom.
Enter Waskin. Exit simplicity.
He had, Waskin informed us, an acquaintance who was supposed to be out here with the Messenia survey mission. We'd all heard the rumors that there were supposed to be outcroppings of firebrand opaline scattered across Messenia's surface—opaline whose current market value Waskin just happened to have on hand.
It was pretty obvious that if someone came along who could offer off-world transport for some of the stone—especially if middlemen and certain tax and duty formalities happened to get lost in the shuffle—then that someone stood to add a
tidy sum to his trip's profits. The next part was obvious: Waskin figured that that someone might as well be the crew of the Volga.
It was the sort of argument that had earned Waskin the half-dozen shady nicknames he possessed. Unfortunately, it was also the sort of argument he was extremely adroit at pushing, and in the end Captain Garrett decided it was worth the gamble of a couple of days to stop by and just assess the situation.
I hadn't agreed. In fact, I'd fought hard to change the captain's mind. For starters, the opaline wasn't even a confirmed fact yet; and even if it was there, it was less than certain what the Messenia survey mission would think of us dropping in out of nowhere and trying to walk away with a handful of it.
Survey missions like Messenia's were always military oriented, and if they suspected we were even thinking of bending any customs regulations, we could look forward to some very unpleasant questions.
And I, of course, would wind up with yet another job blown out from under me.
But freighter contractors weren't the only ones to whom the word "profit" brought pleasant smiles... and third officers, I'd long ago learned, existed solely to take the owl bridge shift. Half the ship's thirty-member crew had already made their private calculations as to how much of a bonus a few chunks of opaline would bring, and my arguments were quickly dismissed as just one more example of Travis's famous inability to make winning gambles, a side talent that had made me the most sought-after poker player on the ship.
Waskin always won at poker, too. And got far too much satisfaction out of beating me.
Abruptly, the lights flickered. Quickly, guiltily, I brought my attention back to the displays, but it was all right—the breakout had come off textbook-clean.
"We're here," Fromm reported from the helm. "Ready to set orbit." "Put us at about two hundred for now," Kittredge told him. "Waskin, you want to try and contact this friend of yours and find out about this opaline?"
"Yes, ma'am," he nodded, swiveling around to the comm board.
"Was there anything else?" Kittredge asked, looking up at me.
I shook my head. "I just wanted to make sure we knew one way or another about the rocks before anyone got too comfortable here."
She smiled lopsidedly. "I doubt you have to wor—"
"Holy Mother!"
I snapped my head around to look at Waskin, nearly losing my hold in the process. He was staring at the main display. As I shifted my eyes that direction, I felt a similar expletive welling up like verbal fire in my throat.
We'd come within view of the mission's base camp... or rather, within view of the blackened crater where the base camp was supposed to be.
"Oh, my God," Kittredge gasped as the scanners panned over the whole nauseating mess. "What happened?"
"No idea," I said grimly, "but we'd better find out." My long-ago years in the Services came flooding back, the old pages of emergency procedures flipping up in front of my mind's eye. "Waskin, get back on the scanners. Do a quick full-pattern run-through for anything out of the ordinary, then go back to infrared for a grid survivor search."
"Yes, sir." There was no cockiness now; he was good and thoroughly scared.
With an effort, he got his face jammed into the display hood, his hand visibly trembling as he fumbled with the selector knob. "Yes, sir. Okay. IR... those fires have been out a minimum of... eighteen hours, the computer says. Could be more." His thin face—what I could see of it, anyway—was a rather pasty white, and I hoped hard that he wouldn't pass out. Time could be crucial, and I didn't want to have to man the scanners myself until we could get another expert up here. "Shortwave... nothing in particular. No broadcasts on any frequency.
Neutrino... there's a residual decay spectrum, but it's the wrong one for their type of power plant. Tachyon... uh-oh."
"What?" Kittredge snapped.
Waskin visibly swallowed. "It reads... it reads an awful lot like the pattern you get from full-spectrum explosives."
Fromm caught it before the rest of us did. "Explosives, plural?" he asked.
"How many are we talking about?"
"Lots," Waskin said. "At least thirty separate blasts. Maybe more."
Fromm swore under his breath. "Damn. They must have had a stockpile that blew."
"No," I said, and even to me my voice sounded harsh. "You don't store full-specs that close to each other. Someone came in and bombed the hell out of them.
Deliberately."
There was a long moment of silence. "The opaline," Kittredge said at last.
"Someone wanted the opaline."
For lousy pieces of rock...? I forced my brain to unfreeze from that thought.
Messenia had been militarily oriented.... "Waskin, cancel the grid search for a
second and get back on the comm board," I told him. "Broadcast our ship ID on the emergency beacon frequency and then listen."
Kittredge looked up at me. "Travis, no one could have survived a bombing like that—"
"No one there, no," I cut her off. "But there would have been at least a few men out beyond the horizon from the base—that's standard procedure."
"Yeah, but the radiation would have got 'em," Waskin muttered.
"Just do it," I snapped.
"I'd better get the captain up here," Kittredge said, reaching for the intercom.
"Better get a boat ready to fly, too," I told her. My eyes returned to the main display, where the base was starting to drift behind us. "With the doc and a couple others with strong stomachs aboard. If there are any survivors, they'll need help fast."
She nodded, and that was that. If I hadn't been there, they'd have done a quick, futile grid search and then gone running hotfoot to report the attack to some authority or other without trying the emergency beacon trick. We'd have missed entirely the fact that there was indeed a survivor of the attack.
And we sure as hell would have missed getting mixed up in mankind's first interstellar war. His name was Lieutenant Colonel Halveston, and he was dying.
He knew that, of course. The Services were good at making sure their people had any and all information that might have an influence on their performance or survival. Halveston knew how much radiation he'd taken, knew that at this stage there was nothing anyone could do for him... but countering that was a strong will to hold out long enough to let someone know what had happened. The Services were good at developing that, too.