It had been proposed that a UHF radio from the damaged Hornet be unshipped and pressed into service, but unfortunately it wasn’t a simple radio. Components were scattered around the airframe, and the wiring wasn’t simple; it could and would be used later, but right now there wasn’t time.
The only solution available was a relay. Ms. Briggs was detailed to keep her Hornet alongside the freight carrier, relaying information from the UHF to her earbug. For a while it had looked like another officer would end up doing the Grallt end of the earbug segment, but they didn’t know the language, and putting another person in the loop risked Whisper Game errors, so Peters ended up with the job. Todd was fluent enough to handle it, which would have let them put another ship on duty, but that would have meant cutting their search capability to the extent of another Hornet for comm relay.
“Salvage One, come left to three six seven, nadir zero two,” Ms. Briggs suggested. The Hornet pilot had come up with the call sign on her own; all Peters knew about it was that she thought it was amusing. He passed the correction to the pilot, who furrowed her brow and made micrometric adjustments.
Peters didn’t know the pilot, a zerkre in four-ways called Vredig, but she seemed a nice enough person, if businesslike. He had added a touch of his own: the earbug issued to Llapaaloapalla‘s bridge for airsuit practice had never been returned, and he’d begged it from Dhuvenig and passed it to Vredig. That left him free to move around supervising.
“Good enough, Salvage One,” the Hornet pilot advised cheerfully. “We’ll do more accurate adjustments when we get closer.”
“Thanks, Hornet 210, we’re standing by.” Ms. Briggs acknowledged that with a tongue-cluck in lieu of the microphone click the earbugs couldn’t do, and Peters turned to get the working party organized.
External handling equipment, ha. He’d visualized something like robotic arms or “tractor beams”; the reality was lines with big hooks on the ends, chains, and a half-dozen zerkre with big muscles. The truly surprising thing was that the system seemed to work. They’d been at it for two llor now, and had averaged a little under one recovery per ande, net profit eight zifthkakik to date.
And twenty bodies.
The Grallt all thought Peters was nuts for his insistence on recovering bodies, but he’d kept at it until they went along. He wasn’t doing it out of sentiment. Recovering the bodies gave him a chance to look for paperwork, identifying marks, and anything else that might help them identify their attackers.
Dhuvenig was right: they were Grallt, all but two of them “males”, all wearing kathir suits in checkerboard patterns, red instead of the blue Llapaaloapalla‘s crew wore. So far the gleanings were minimaclass="underline" a few scraps of plastic with scrawls on them, ID plates from the ships, pocket trash. Peters wished for dog tags, but personal ID was another thing nobody seemed to have thought of.
“Salvage One, I make it two targets on approximately the same vector,” Ms. Briggs advised. “Alter heading zero zero five mark zero eight zenith for intercept on the nearest one.” Multiple targets were the rule rather than the exception. Vredig had told him the zifthkakik tended to seek one another when not under control, not quickly but consistently. It meant that wreckage on more or less the same base course tended to group together.
“Wilco, 210.” The pilot made the adjustments when Peters passed them on, then pointed out the “windshield”. Sure enough, a pair of sparks were distinguishable by their motion against the starfield. “Hornet 210, we have a visual.”
“Roger, Salvage One, understood you have eyeballs on the targets. Advise Tomcat 104 has acquired another one, bearing one seven six mark seven three zenith our present heading.”
“Understood, 210. One thing at a time, we need to get to work. Salvage One out.” Vredig was slowing and getting them into position.
“Roger, Salvage One. Hornet 210 out and standing by.” This time Peters returned the tongue-cluck.
The little ship was like the others had been, vaguely airplane-looking, distantly related to the dli but smaller. A wing was broken off, as was the vertical stabilizer and part of the fuselage where it had been attached; laser holes marred the remaining structure, and one of the cabin windows was missing, the frame distorted. They’d seen something like that on all of the ones they’d recovered. After the surprise return the human pilots had kept shooting until pieces broke off, and it looked like the pirates hadn’t given up for real until something took out one or more of the people.
Vredig opened the aft door and looked over her shoulder, twitching the andli until they were stationary with respect to the pirate ship and perhaps ten meters away. One of the Grallt workers, a big black-haired fellow with a heavy “mustache”, jumped over with one of the hooks on the end of a line belayed to a padeye inside the freight hauler, and from there on it was a routine they’d established in two llor of practice. It took about two tle for them to have the craft’s zifthkakik tied down in the compartment, lengthwise as Vredig insisted for some reason, and two bodies in plastic bags ditto.
The Engineering Officer was right about something else, too. Nine zifthkakik in as many ships, all in good condition; twenty-one crew members in the ships, all dead. Their kathir suits felt thin and a little stiff, and the buckles came right off when Peters tugged at the catches. He’d been expecting decompression effects, or at least the burst capillaries he’d gotten when he’d tried removing a glove in vacuum, but the deceased just looked like dead people. He didn’t like handling dead people, but he’d done it before. Hell, he’d done it as a teenager in West Virginia. There were worse things.
He went quickly through the control cabin, finding little or nothing, and shook his head. Probably the fragment of the mother ship that had separated during the battle would yield a lot more information, but the Grallt flatly refused to investigate it. The human pilots had given it a once-over, but there were no identifying marks on the outside, and they had no way of getting inside to look for more. Oh, they did, and it pissed Peters off just thinking about it, but none of the officers had any training at all in kathir suit maneuvering, so he hadn’t even suggested that the Tomcat RIOs get out and get close.
The second pirate ship went like the first one had, a little quicker now that they were into the swing of it. The second zifthkakik went next to the first; the two crewmen were secured next to their fellows, RIP; Ms. Briggs gave them the steer to the next one, Vredig set a course they could refine later, and Peters gritted his teeth and started searching the bodies. Nothing, as usual. Oh, change in the pockets and that kind of thing, but nothing remotely useful.
Tomcat 104 was loitering by the next target, and with its zifthkakik active Vredig had no trouble getting there. Pushing buttons on the control panel picked one of the multiple ships to go to, and after that the white-cross instruments guided the way. She let Peters do part of it, grinning as she took a break, but took over the andli for the close matching. That was fine. It was fun, and he was learning, but he had no illusions about their relative skill levels.