Heris blinked. They had mounted phase cannon in a shuttle? “Have you ever fired them?” she asked.
“Not yet. But we think it will work.”
“I think perhaps my engineers should take a look.” Quickly. Before anyone tried it and tore the shuttle apart.
“Of course, Captain Serrano.” The man beamed as if she were conferring a great favor. “Does this mean you’ll take the commission?”
“Let me confer with my . . . er . . . staff,” Heris said. “And if you have any engineering specs on those vessels—?”
“Right away, Captain,” he said.
Koutsoudas received the scan cassette with a curl of his lip that made Heris want to smack him. Oblo, she saw, had a sulky look. Fine. Let Oblo work it off on Koutsoudas.
An hour later, Koutsoudas called her with no sneer at all in his voice. “Good data, Captain. The kid knew what she was doing, whoever she is. Recruit her.”
Heris had already asked. Regret edged her voice: “Can’t, I’m afraid. She died a year back, of some local disease. So what do you have?” She didn’t mention the younger sister she’d been told about, who seemed to have similar talents. Time enough for that later.
“Aethar’s World, but I think the ship ID’s falsified. It’ll be Aethar’s World, just from the flavor of it, but not that number. It’s in the commercial sequence, probably midsize trader . . . too bad that girl didn’t build a wide-band detector as well.”
“I’ll ask,” Heris said. “Maybe she did. But only one ship?”
“So far. I’ll let you know.”
Heris put in a call to Petris, who had gone to take a look at the cannon-loaded shuttle.
“Just got here,” he said. “But you were right. They assumed that only the mass mattered. They’ve got them bolted into the frame—the unreinforced frame—with homemade ports cut in the hull plates.” He sounded less contemptuous than she expected as he went on. “Quite a job, really—they put some thought into it. Pity they didn’t know more about phase cannon. To make this thing operational, we’ll have to dismount them, reinforce, and remount. At best, that’s five weeks of work with the equipment available—”
“Downside or orbital?” Heris asked.
“Downside—they’ve no orbital facilities at all. Anyway, that’d give you a slow shuttle that could fire a couple of bolts every five minutes or so. Not worth it, unless we’re desperate.”
“That will depend on how bad the old escort is.”
All along Heris had wondered who crewed the two escorts. When she swam aboard the remaining Desmoiselle, she found out. Anyone who wanted, it seemed. Oldsters retired from space, youngsters desperate to get above atmosphere, balancing a complete lack of proper training with intimate knowledge of their single ship.
“Grogon’s not a bad ship,” its elderly captain told her. “She takes a bit of easing along, that’s all. . . .” Petris raised his brows but said nothing; he’d explain later. Heris could see for herself most of its problems.
Back with Captain Vassilos, Heris showed him the recommendations of her engineering staff. “Can you tell me why you think the raider’s due?”
“It’s more a guess than anything else,” he said. “It’s come twice before in our springtime, and now it’s late spring. It feels like the right time.”
Heris had heard worse reasons. “Those phase cannon in the shuttle can’t be used as they are—and five weeks of downtime, if your planet-side yards can do the work, still give you only a very minimal weapons platform. If you have the resources to start that work, go ahead, but don’t count on it to do much. I do have another suggestion. . . .”
“It’s a little thing, whatever it is.” Esteban Koutsoudas and Meharry bent over the displays. “Let me just tinker a bit here—ahhh.” He signaled Meharry with one stubby finger. “That cube I had—put it in here—” Another screen came alive with numbers that scrolled so rapidly Heris couldn’t see anything but lines. Then it froze, with one line highlighted.
“Hull constructed at Yaeger, registered with Aethar’s World as a medium trader . . . but Aethar’s traders are everyone else’s raiders.”
That much any of her own crew could have gotten, but Koutsoudas wasn’t through. The screen wavered and steadied on a new display: the other ship’s design details, shown in three-dimensional display. Colored tags marked deviations from the listed criteria. Where Sweet Delight’s other detectors merely showed blots of warning red for weapons on active status, this one showed the placement and support systems for weapons not otherwise detected as live.
“Where’d you get this stuff?” Meharry asked, her voice expressing her lust for that equipment.
“You know how it is,” Koutsoudas said without taking his eyes off the display. “A bit of this, a bit of that. It’s not exactly standard, so I can’t mount it in any Fleet craft—”
“But you can’t get that resolution that far away,” Meharry said. “Thermal distortion alone—”
“You need an almighty big database,” Koutsoudas said. He sounded almost apologetic, as he tweaked the display again and an enlarged view of the distant vessel’s portside weapons appeared, with little numbered comments. “I’ve been sort of . . . collecting this . . . for a long time.” He tapped the cube reader. “Had to design new storage algorithms too. And the transforms for the functions that do the actual work . . .”
“Magic,” Meharry said. Koutsoudas grinned at her.
“That’s it. Got to have my secrets, don’t I? If I teach you everything, who’s going to care about my neck?”
“Nobody cares about your neck now, Esteban. Other parts of you—”
“Are off limits,” he said. “Besides, that ship’s no good.”
“Can you tell what it’s getting?” Heris asked.
“It won’t have us now,” Koutsoudas said confidently. “Not with the last batch of little doodads Oblo and Meharry and I installed. We’re in no danger, and we can sit here and read their mail if we want to.”
“Not and let them run amok in this system,” Heris said. “Not if we can stop them, that is.”
“Oh, we can stop them.” Koutsoudas pointed to his display. “Their weapons look impressive on scan—or will, when they go active and light up the station’s warning system. But this is old tech, slow and stupid stuff. Good for scaring the average civilian, though I’ll bet they never take on any of the big commercial carriers. And when they refitted that hull with new engines, they made a big mistake.” He brought up a highlighted schematic, and Heris saw it herself. They’d wanted more performance, and they’d mounted more powerful drives . . . but without reinforcing the hull or mounts. If they used those engines flat out, they’d collapse either hull or mount. Even worse, they could do structural damage by combining a lower drive setting with missile firing.
“I’d bet they never have fired many shots in anger,” Heris said. “At least, not while under any significant acceleration. That’s a beginner’s mistake.” If only she had a real Fleet warship, she’d simply chase them into their own fireball.
“With any luck, they won’t live long enough to learn better,” Meharry said.
“Not luck,” Koutsoudas said. “Skill. Knowledge.”
Heris wasn’t sure if that was an attempt to flatter her, or to brag about his own ability. “How long before you can strip the rest you want off them?”
“Twelve to fourteen standard hours, Captain,” he said. “With the captain’s permission, I’ll put one of the juniors on scan, and plan to be on the bridge in four hours for a check, and then in ten hours—”
“Of course,” Heris said. “We’ll use the Fleet scheduling for this. Firsts, give me your interim schedules, and make sure you are offshift enough for real rest before then.”
Koutsoudas smiled. “I didn’t know if we’d have the crew for that—”