After another few minutes, the wall screen displayed the image of Captain Spier. She did not speak immediately.
“This is the captain. We have engaged a hostile force. All the hostiles who attacked have been destroyed. The engagement was not without casualties. The Alwyn destroyed three enemy frigates and more than ten needle-boats, but was lost in that effort. We have suffered a few casualties, but we are on course for the first of the Gates required to return us to Hamilton system. At this time, it appears that there are no further obstacles to reaching that Gate… You may return to normal operations at this time…”
Return to normal operations?
Suffered a few casualties? Battle cruisers, even former colony ships rebuilt with cruiser drives and armament, were not designed or operated to suffer minimal casualties. Such casualties were either nonexistent or maximal. Why… who… ?
A cold feeling slithered along my spinal cord. Pilots… needleboat pilots, and Jiendra was a pilot.
I unfastened the harness straps, but saved what little I had added to my analysis before putting the console on standby.
Then I hurried toward the ramps, the one leading up to the boat deck. As before, I found the ramps effectively deserted, save for one junior tech who did not even glance at me as he headed inship.
The ready room was empty, the gray chairs equally vacant, under lighting bright and cheerless. I had half expected Commander Morgan, but had rationalized that he well might have remained on the bridge with the captain. I stepped inside the hatch and to one side.
Then a single pilot appeared, not from the boat locks, but from the lockers where they racked their armor. Her hair was damp and plastered to her skull, so short that it was not even heknetlike. Her eyes narrowed as she surveyed me and my obvious lack of official uniformed status. I didn’t recognize her, and that indicated that she was not from the Magellan. I could only surmise the obvious.
“You’re from the Alwyn, I take it.”
Before she could answer, Lieutenant Lindskold appeared, as disheveled as the unidentified pilot. Her eyes flicked to me, but her frown was succeeded by a nod. “Professor Fitzhugh. You shouldn’t really be up here, but…” She glanced toward the hatch through which I’d entered. “I’d suggest you take one of the corner chairs.”
“Do you know… ?” I hesitated to finish the question.
“Ops thinks they have her needle. Lerrys is trying a pickup. She reported that she’d lost all systems after the last Covenanter went to energy.” Lindskold turned to the other pilot. “We might as well wait here until Shaimen and your…”
“Eyler.”
“Until they’re clear of the bay,” Lindskold finished.
“Why’s he here?” murmured the other pilot.
“Interested in Chang. He’s a professor… former commando… took out one of the assassins… probably saved a bunch of us… Ops boss might kick him out… not me.”
Had the situation been otherwise, I might have been tempted to smile at her last utterance. I settled into one of the chairs well out of the way… waiting, ensconced in apprehension.
Before long, two more pilots appeared in the ready room, both women. I recognized Shaimen, although I’d only talked to her in passing in the mess. The other had to be the one mentioned by the other Alwyn pilot—Eyler.
“We’re all supposed to check with sick bay,” Lindskold announced. “Told the major we’d wait until Lerrys and Chang were back.” She turned to the two pilots from the Alwyn. “You can go… if you’d like.”
“We’ll wait,” Eyler stated flatly.
With no warning, Lindskold turned. “Professor? Ops reports that the recovery shuttle has secured Needle Four.” Her visage remained sober. “That’s positive, but without power, there’s no way to tell…”
“The habitability situation,” I noted.
She nodded.
Still, as I recalled Lindskold had said, Jiendra had reported in when she had lost all systems, and that had meant she had been alive then. Space armor, if un-breached, as I had learned all too well in a past I had thought long divorced from my present, provided between two and three hours of survival, even in deep space at close to absolute zero.
I could but trust that her armor was intact—trust and wait.
The moments oozed past me, and all those in the ready room, more slowly than water dripping from the ancient timepieces once employed to measure such passage of elapsed time. My forefingers rubbed the tips of my thumbs.
Shaimen paced back and forth, looking toward Lind-skold, ignoring me, which may well have been for the best, while her eyes alighted but infrequently upon the two pilots from the Alwyn.
“She’s all right!” Lindskold announced. “They had to manually open the needle. Everything was fried, and then some, but she’s on her way to unsuit.”
Shaimen smiled. “Wouldn’t have been right…”
I agreed, even if I had no idea why the younger lieutenant had voiced the words.
Even so, it was another ten minutes before Jiendra walked out into the ready room, her eyes going to Lindskold and Shaimen first, standing, awaiting her. “Glad to see you two… wish… wish I were seeing more…”
Lerrys appeared behind Jiendra, his face slightly flushed, his demeanor almost embarrassed.
I rose, slowly, not wishing to intrude, knowing that the majority of the needle pilots had not been so fortunate as those before me, and yet wishing to convey, by my presence, my concerns for one particular pilot.
At that precise instant, Commander Morgan entered through the main hatch, his iron gray hair more than slightly disheveled, and his eyes reddened and set in darkness, suggesting long stans under high stress. “Welcome back, Lieutenants. All of you did well. All of you.”
Not one of them offered a direct reply.
Lindskold and Jiendra nodded. Shaimen looked down. Lerrys looked at me, and provided the slightest of nods, clearly approval at my presence.
Jiendra looked straight at Morgan. “What were those waves of yellow energy? They burned out all my systems.”
“The Danannian defenses.” Morgan smiled. “They took out all the remaining Covenanters and the CW ships that had been chasing us. If we’d been much closer, they would have taken us as well.”
Jiendra stiffened. “You’d thought there might be something like that. That was what destroyed the Norfolk, wasn’t it. That was why you modified the satellite beacons and left the fusactor sites you left on Danann, wasn’t it?”
The commander did not deign to reply, but I could see that Jiendra had been right, although I had but a general concept of Morgan’s strategy, based on what her question had revealed.
As the silence extended itself, Morgan finally spoke. “It was worth the gamble.” Abruptly, he saw me, apparently for the first time. That, or he wished to use me as way to avoid saying more. “Professor, the ready room is off-limits to civilians.”
“Commander… I believe you have a point there, but do you really wish to press it?” I observed him as if he were a Covenanter crusader, lower than the underside of a sand snake and uglier than a fire roach. While I didn’t care for either Covenanters, sand snakes, or fire roaches, I wasn’t sure I cared much for an officer who had apparently lured two fleets to their destruction by ancient technology and probably denied all of humankind the possibility of more in-depth investigation and inquiry.
He met my eyes, but I wasn’t about to give in, not at the moment, and not until I’d had a chance to assure myself that Jiendra was indeed as strong as she appeared and that she understood the significance she had brought to my existence.