Koutsoudas found Methlin Meharry in the enlisted mess and sat down beside her. “Meharry—can I talk to you?”
She gave him one of her looks. “You have a voice, ’Steban. What’s up?”
“I don’t know, but I’m going to go nuts if I don’t tell someone about it.”
“Mmm. Is this the best place?”
“Maybe not. Where?”
“You offshift or on?”
“Off.”
“Two hours, break room for weapons three. See you.” Meharry slapped the table and left without another word. She made her rounds, bumped into Oblo as usual, and suggested that he might want to meet her.
“We need Petris?” he asked.
“Doubt it,” Meharry said. “Likely someone’s just leaning on the kid about something and he’d like to blow off a bit. You’re insurance.”
“Got you.” They went their separate ways.
Twenty minutes before the two hours, Meharry ambled into the weapons three break room and leaned over the shoulders of the two corporals who were studying a wire model of the main beam supports. “Something needs polishing,” she said.
“Sir? What, sir?”
“Find it,” Meharry advised. “And polish it very well.”
The brighter of the two blinked again and said, “Sir, any idea how long we need to polish it?”
“An hour and a half should do it,” Meharry said. They left, and she went to work. In five minutes she had disabled the scan pickup that should have reported everything in the room. Oblo appeared eight minutes later, and checked her clearance before settling into one of the chairs. It creaked under him. A pivot with a mug of something started into the room, saw them, and backed out without a word.
The two of them chatted about inconsequential things until Koutsoudas appeared. He had his own gear bag with him, and produced one of his cylinders.
“You don’t trust us?” Oblo said, raising an eyebrow.
“Don’t talk to me about trust,” Koutsoudas said. Meharry couldn’t tell if he was angry or scared or both. Before she could say anything, he rushed on. “This is all slippery stuff, nothing solid. I don’t want there to be anything solid. But you need to know.”
“Can we have a noun?” Meharry asked in a low drawl. “A subject?”
Koutsoudas glanced at the open hatch as if he expected a killer to step through it. Then back at Meharry. “The bridge crew—is about to lose it.”
“Why? We haven’t had any action I didn’t know about, have we?”
“No. It’s—it’s Livadhi. The commodore. Something’s wrong—he’s not like he was.”
Meharry felt a sudden lurch in her midsection, followed by a feeling of satisfaction. So. Everyone had told her how wonderful he was, but despite no evidence at all she had never been able to like him. Her instincts were right.
“What’s he doing?” she asked, forestalling Oblo with a look.
“It’s hard to say. Mostly he’s—twitchy. Jumpy. Everything’s going fine, but he’s wound up tighter than I’ve ever seen him. I hate—I’ve known him for years, I was with him before he sent me to Commander Serrano—and I’ve never seen him like this. I don’t feel right telling you, but I don’t feel right about whatever’s wrong, either.”
“What’s Captain Burleson say?”
“He’s getting tense himself, the way Livadhi’s been jumping on everyone. We’re afraid to say anything but yes, sir and no, sir on the bridge, and we’d become pretty friendly. You know how it is . . .”
Meharry knew. All her instincts were standing up waving their arms at her. She looked at Oblo. His face showed nothing but his eyes—yes, his instincts too.
“Has he done anything—anything at all—outside what he should? Given any questionable orders?”
“No. I can’t believe I’m even thinking he would, but—if he’d been rejuved, I’d be worrying about rejuv failure.”
“What about communications?” Oblo asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Has he made any unusual communications? Outside the convoy, or to unusual destinations?”
“I’m not monitoring his communications,” Koutsoudas said quickly. Then, “I’ll find out. If you think it matters.”
“It might.”
“You’d better go,” Meharry said to Koutsoudas. “We’ll talk again.”
“All right. I just—I need someone.”
“We’re with you, ’Steban. We won’t let anything bad happen.”
After he’d gone, she turned to Oblo. “I was wrong. We do need Petris. If anything’s going on, if that bastard’s going sour on us—”
“He’s not going to lose Heris’s ship for her,” Oblo said.
Some days later, Koutsoudas passed Meharry a data cube with Livadhi’s complete inbound and outbound communications log. When she put it in the cube reader, she found that he’d made notations alongside the entries: this a tightbeam to one or another of the convoy ships, this a tightbeam to a Fleet ansible with destination codes indicating a report to Headquarters. Inbound from a Fleet ansible, origin codes Headquarters. So far so good. Then a civilian origination code . . . his wife, Koutsoudas had noted. Every few days, a message from his wife.
Meharry frowned. Livadhi married? Somehow she’d assumed him to be single. She glanced at the messages; they weren’t encrypted, and were about everyday things. His wife was having a new carpet installed; she was sure he’d like it: it was the same color as the old. The price of snailfish fin had gone through the roof; she supposed it was the effect of the mutiny. His uncle the retired admiral had dropped by and talked for an hour about the political situation; he was convinced that if the old king and Admiral Lepecsu had been in charge none of this would have happened. Her sister’s youngest child had won a music prize. She thanked him for sending a parting gift from Sector VII Headquarters, but didn’t he realize that the shipping charges had tripled the cost? She’d have been just as happy with the usual box of candy from the local confectioners’. The enameled box was pretty, but she didn’t understand the message on the paper inside, or was it just something the people in the shop had left in by mistake?
Meharry stopped and reread that message. Livadhi usually sent candy but this time sent a box? Well . . . maybe he’d thought his wife would like a change. Though any woman who would choose exactly the same shade of carpet to replace the old probably wouldn’t want a change in gifts, either. And surely Livadhi would know it—though Meharry had, in a long career, seen plenty of marriages founder on the shoals of ignorance. People didn’t really know each other better just because they were tied together with a common name. An incomprehensible message inside? Most likely, as his wife mentioned, just a mistake at the shop.
But why send an enameled box that far? Why that box? What was the incomprehensible message?
She glanced down the screen, and found it. Livadhi’s wife had included it, just in case it was his message and he cared to translate. A string of numbers and letters. It looked exactly like a jump point address and ansible access code. Koutsoudas’ annotation, cautious, said that such a jump point and ansible access code were in the files, but that he couldn’t confirm that the writer had meant the string to denote them.
Meharry scrolled on down the log. There—highlighted by Koutsoudas—the convoy had passed through a jump point with the same coordinates as in the message Livadhi’s wife had sent . . . and in that system, Livadhi had stripped a message from the ansible, using that code. The message, in clear, said, “Merchandise undeliverable; addressee unknown at that address. Refund waiting at next port of call.”
Harmless enough, but the numbers had been inside a box which was delivered. What merchandise was undeliverable? Not the box. Something else? Why had Livadhi suddenly bought presents for people at Sector VII HQ and shipped them all over the place? And no civilian should have had a list of the jump points the convoy would pass through, to send a message like this to intercept the convoy. Or have known what the next port of call was, to send a refund ahead.