"Keff!" Carialle shouted in his ear. Her voice sounded alarmed. "What are you doing?" The brawn glanced up, as if suddenly aware of his surroundings.
"I'm… looking around," he said, but he knew his voice didn't sound convincing, and Carialle, from nearly sixteen years of experience, wasn't convinced.
"You're looking for something of mine, aren't you?" she asked, her voice soft. "You want to find proof positive that these are my salvagers."
"Well, yes," he admitted, feeling sheepish. He got to his feet and looked down at the sad, lumpy bedding. He kicked it with a toe.
"Sir Knight, you're my best friend and the finest protector a lady could wish for," she said firmly, "but the frogs are waiting, and it would be cruel to leave those aliens playing statue for much longer, even if they are killers. Let's finish up and get out of here."
"But what if there's something here?"
"Someone else will find it, not us," she said firmly. "My gut-level, as much as I feel anything down there, is that we've seen all there is on this ship. Remember that these might not be the same ones."
"I'd hate to think that there were two bunches of pirates roving around out there," Keff said, but he turned and went back to the main cabin.
"Coincidences have occured before," Carialle said, but now Keff wasn't convinced. "In any case, these are the foot soldiers. I want the top bird."
"What is it you want to do?" Keff asked, but he already knew. It was what he wanted as well.
"I want to find their home system," she said. "I have to know what kind of culture fosters a history of mass piracy."
"Right you are, my lady," Keff said, then paused. "You know, Diplomacy and Maxwell-Corey ordered us home. That message they sent with the ship said to relinquish the mission and return."
"Bugger that for a game of soldiers, to quote you," Carialle said at once. "They just want me back under their eye so they can prove me mad. Everything changed when the griffins attacked the DSC-902. Their orders no longer apply. I need to follow this lead up, so I can show them the truth once and for all."
"But if these aren't the ones?" Keff asked.
"Then I'll know. But I'll never find out if we go back. The IG will slap me into protective custody, another highfalutin name for mental confinement. I'll never be satisfied with a remote report. I have to know. I have to. In the meantime, we're in pursuit of piratical perpetrators." The P's popped explosively in his ear. "Are you with me?"
"Always and for ever," Keff said. Resolutely, he strode back to the main cabin. With the Cridi in tow, he went into the fore corridor that led to the bridge.
The computer system was substantially like the one in the dome. All parts were of human manufacture. Some showed hard wear, especially the input peripherals. The navicomp, an ancient model of the kind used by vacuum miners, had been augmented by several different and mutually exclusive hard-memory storage units.
"This group knows how to program," Carialle said. "I wonder why a race with the capability to get into space doesn't build its own equipment?"
"Why buy the cow when you can get the milk?" Keff sat down on the sling with Cridi hovering on both sides. "Ready?" he asked Carialle.
"Ready."
He hooked into the information transfer port, and waited anxiously, with one hand on either side of the small screen, staring into its depths, while Carialle sifted the contents of the hard-storage. He could only sense fleeting impressions of individual star system maps as she read the memory and copied it into protected database.
"We have a match." Her voice sounded triumphant. "Three star systems, put in relatively recently."
"What are they?" Keff said, as the graphics appeared in the 2-D display.
"No can tell, Sir Knight. They're in an alien typography. The keyboard must have been altered to create their symbols. There are sixty-eight. Your first clue to their language. Enjoy."
Keff groaned. "Do you mean this is a dead end?"
"Not at all." There was a long pause, and the stars spun by again, accompanied by colored screens full of square letters. "The flight recorder shows that two of them have been visited more than once. And you'll never guess where one of them is!"
"I give up."
"Right next door. The binary mate, PLE-329-JK6-straight across the lowermost boundary of P-sector. I followed the visual log entries, and I could identify half of the visuals from my personal memory."
"That's incredible!" Keff exclaimed, then paused. "No, that's logical. Why else would they go to so much trouble to prevent a lot of traffic in this part of the galaxy?"
"My thinking exactly," Carialle said. "So that's where we go. We try it first, and if it's wrong, we go on to the next one. One of these has to be home base."
"Right. We try them one by one," Keff said.
Tall Eyebrow and Narrow Leg had been watching Keff curiously, hearing half the conversation. Keff looked at them guiltily. He'd forgotten that he was not alone, and his companions were intelligent. And motivated.
"Where to go next? This map?" the Cridi captain asked, pointing at the screen with a long finger.
"You should all go home now," Keff said. "I thank you for your help and support, but I can't ask you to do any more."
"But we would do much more," Narrow Leg signed, his old eyes wise in the wrinkled, green face. "You have done much for us, opening the way. Together, we defeated. You seek a voyage to unknown, to find truth. We wish also. We go with you."
"But your own people need you for defense," Keff said. "It's one thing to have you accompany us in your own system, and quite another to subject you to unknown danger. Your ship is not prepared for a long space voyage. You… with respect, you lack training."
"Give us training, then," Narrow Leg said. "We need also to find this truth. Many lives were lost-ships, years, lost also. I want explanations. If you say they are not to be found here, then we go to where they are."
"I will train them," Tall Eyebrow said, tapping himself on the chest. "To survive-I know this."
"Ship is ready interstellar travel," Narrow Leg said, with a throwaway gesture. "All supplies were loaded on board at departure. As for defense, half my crew are assembling two more ships from old ones and new parts. Cridi will be defended in atmosphere and out of atmosphere."
Keff shook his head at the old male's expansive signs.
"Captain, it'll take a long time to reach our destination, and we may not even find what we're looking for at this first stop. It could, no, it will be dangerous. I can't let you… er, take such important conclave councillors as Big Voice."
Narrow Leg didn't miss the subtlety. He rolled a beady black eye at Keff. "That fat one will be all right. There is no time to waste. We must not divert back to Cridi. You must be after the villains track to source."
"We come, too," Tall Eyebrow said, sweeping his hands to include his two companions and Big Eyes.
"Yes," Big Eyes agreed, with a brilliant glance at him. "We follow Tall Eyebrow. Experienced twice in space."
"Cari? We have to pursue this to the end, but they don't."
"I'm torn," Carialle said. "We could use the backup. It won't come from CW for ages, even providing they know where we are going, which they do not, and we're not armed. The Cridi want to be our allies. On the other hand, I don't like it that they're entirely without experience. Particularly, I do not like flying interplanetary distances with a possibly explosive emotional problem."
"Big Voice?" Keff asked sublingually, without moving his lips.
"He's the only one who's manifested openly so far. Who knows if any of the others will destabilize during a long trip."
Tall Eyebrow had not missed Keff's eye passing from Cridi to Cridi. "I vouch for each," he said in Standard. "They will not fail."