“It doesn’t work like that,” said El. “Go on. I’m busy.”
“Suit yourself,” he said again, shuffling out.
“Sorry, girl,” said El, running a hand over the console. “Now. Where were we?” she started with the flight plan. The holo blinked, spun into life, star map springing into life. Point of origin, Absalom system. Nate was right about that. Point of destination … wait, that couldn’t be right.
Point of destination was here. One jump, to the midpoint between Absalom and Enia. One jump wasn’t enough. It wasn’t safe. If you didn’t drop out, take a look around to see what had changed in the time it took light to reach a faraway star, you could find yourself in the middle of a meteor, supernova. Sure, the odds were small, but when you were moving at many times the speed of light, small mistakes left big explosions. But if you took that kind of risk, why not jump somewhere with people?
“Come on, Ravana. Don’t be holding out on me.” She’d looked at the logged flight plan, but the flight recorder would tell her for sure what had happened. The holo cleared again, overlaid with the recorder’s details. Many more data points — velocity, thrust, hull stresses, the works. She cleared away the extraneous data, looking for the route. There is was, clear as day.
One jump.
“Crazy,” she said. Was it sabotage or deliberate? One rogue crew member, paid enough to do the wrong thing at the right time, could destroy a ship and her crew as easy as an impact with an asteroid. Her eyes flicked to the bare circuitry, then the other three chairs. Okay, okay. If it was sabotage, it’d need to be complicit sabotage. Maybe there was a log, some kind of crew recording. It was fashionable a few years back, before El had got her wings. Died out, because no one wanted to watch someone interpret the data. You didn’t need some ego’s editorial on their flight plan; you just needed the flight plan. “What about it, Ravana? Any more secrets in there?”
Nope.
Okay, external sensors. Got to be something there. It made sense, anyway, to get current data on the Absalom system; that kind of data was only days old, far better than the hundred-year-old data they’d get from their next series of jumps. El would have got this anyway; ships shared this kind of data where they could, if they rubbed shoulders in the hard black like this. In populated systems, ships would just gobble the data from the Guild, but out here, it was a part of the code.
The Ravana obliged.
Oh. Oh my.
The holo spun in front of El, Absalom’s system plotted in perfect detail. Designation N-973. A single star, yellow and warm. Six planets, the important one the fourth — Absalom Delta. Earth analogue, or close with 1.1Gs. No terraforming required, or not much — just the usual soil bacteria, a little fauna and flora, and job done. None of that was interesting to El. What was interesting was two things orbiting Absalom Delta.
The first was a massive asteroid. The thing was the size of a moon, call it 150 klicks wide. It’d be having some tidal impacts. A thing like that might be why the transmitter was down. It could block line of sight at critical times between the Bridge and the planet. Not likely, but possible, sure. It could also have knocked out a couple of satellites. That was not only possible, but likely; the thing looked to be in some kind of stable — stable! — orbit around the planet’s meridian.
The second thing was far, far more interesting though. It was a warship, a full scale, not-fuck-around destroyer, with a not-fuck-around name. The Gladiator. Her fingers itched with memories, because she’d jockeyed something a lot like it when she’d flown for the Empire. Those things were big guns, nightmares deployed for an opposing threat. Capable of a bunch of different mission types — guns aplenty, drop ships for surface deployment, Marines with attitude on board and good to go. It was a similar size and tonnage to the Torrington if she was any judge. Ten or so decks. Maybe 6,500,000 tonnes, over two klicks nose to tail. Long, and black, and deadly.
“Okay,” said El. “Okay. Did they fire on you?” She didn’t expect a confirmation from the logs, and didn’t get one. Ravana had jumped into this system. Orbited Absalom Delta for a time, doing not much of anything for a couple of days. Probably talking to the surface, waiting for a ride. Then, before any shuttle departed the planet — and a couple of days’ wait on an edge world wasn’t unusual, resources spread a little too thin out here — the Ravana hit hard burn, breaking orbit. As their fusion drives were pouring thrust out the back, the Gladiator had jumped in. They passed each other, spat comms across space — all gone, nothing left of what was said in the recorder — and then the Ravana had jumped. One jump, buffers broken, to here.
The Gladiator hadn’t fired on the Ravana. It was like the Gladiator was some kind of primed response, the end of a fuse of time that ticked over when the Ravana didn’t report in. When the Bridge didn’t fire up on schedule. Because the Ravana hadn’t deployed her transmitter.
Grace was right. This didn’t get them options. But she was wrong, too. It didn’t tell them what they already knew. It gave them a whole bunch of nothing. And that nothing left uncomfortable questions, like why would you jump your crew to your death or what was that destroyer doing in your wake?
One thing was clear: Ravana hadn’t been running from the Gladiator.
So what had she been running from?
CHAPTER TEN
Grace shivered in the Ravana’s cargo bay. The bay was large, like a space warehouse, and was empty except for one thing. She figured the Navy paid the Ravana well to fly with an otherwise empty hold. Grace’s breath misted in the air; the ship was getting colder as Hope prepped the ship, shutting down systems so they could take the reactor.
Stealing it, from a dead crew who had no further use for life support.
The work would take a few days. A rush job, Hope had called it, and impossible, but the impossible was possible if the alternative was death in a fiery explosion. Grace had waiting for one of them to ask the obvious question. Why didn’t they take the Ravana and call it a day?
It was the obvious question, but so was the answer: the Tyche was home. It came off all of them in varying degrees, even the thug. The captain, most of all. It was something she could use. It made them easier marks. And easier to leave, when the time came, because the Tyche wasn’t Grace’s home. Never would be. A temporary ride, to get her somewhere she could lie low for a spell.
She and Nate were standing in front of the one thing in the bay: a large piece of machinery, transparent plastic covering it.
“Assess that,” said Nate.
She looked at him, picking up concern/worry. “It’s a transmitter.”
“You wonder why we’ve got the same thing in our hold?” Nate walked around the transmitter. “You know, you knew a lot more about our mission than I did. You seemed to know more about our mission than those Navy boys did.”
“Yes,” said Grace, picking up suspicion/concern. “I like to know where I’m going and why.”
“So, Grace Gushiken. Where are we going? And why?” Nate completed the circuit of the transmitter. “Why does an edge world need two transmitters?”