Petris must have convinced Koutsoudas, she realized.
“Navigation,” she called. “I’m going to read off some jump point coordinates—throw me up a visual, and let’s see if we can figure out where someone’s going.” She read the coordinates aloud—she didn’t want the bridge crew to know the rest of this yet—and while Nav set up the visual, she wrote out her own quick report to Sector HQ. Whatever Livadhi was up to, she was sure he was not acting under orders.
“Captain, an urgent from HQ was down the queue—”
“Send it.” She watched as that message came up clear. all ships, all ships, report any contact with cruiser vigilance or patrol rascal. these ships failed to report on schedule. presumed location 389.24.005. any ship jumping through that point, report debris fields or other evidence of conflict.
Right. Someone had noticed they weren’t where they were supposed to be. She encrypted her report, told the comm officer to tightbeam it to the system ansible, and looked up to see the Nav officer’s visual up on the main screen.
It looked like a random walk example in a math text. But something about it nagged at her mind.
“What kind of jump points?” she asked.
“All multiples. Nothing under a three. But mostly low-density systems.”
Not random at all then, but an attempt to throw off pursuers.
And, except for two jumps early in the sequence, they trended toward the border with the Benignity.
“Damn the man!” Heris said. Heads turned. “Sorry,” she said. “We have a situation, a Fleet cruiser possibly trying to abscond to the Benignity. I have just sent a message to Sector HQ, but by the time someone there figures out what to do, it’ll be far too late.”
“You’re going after him?”
“We’re going after him. Alone, because we can’t strip this system of the other ships. We have evidence that the crew—or some of the crew—may be aware that something’s wrong, but they don’t know what. In the context of a real mutiny, they’re unlikely to start trouble—” Though she could hope Meharry or Oblo would manage to knock Livadhi on the head anyway.
“But—” the navigation officer looked worried. “But, sir, how can we know where to find them? They could be anywhere. And we can’t cross the border—that’d start a war.”
“There’s a tail on them,” Heris said. “A very smart junior officer took the initiative and is reporting at every jump point. When we know what point next to the border they’re at—”
“But they’ll see the tail,” someone said. “They have to, they’ve got scan—”
“Yes, but they’ve got scan technicians who are loyal. They’re covering the tail. What we need to do is get closer to the points they’re likely to pick.”
“Do you know whose ship it is?” asked the Exec.
Heris nodded. “It’s mine—or it was. Admiral Minor Livadhi’s on it now. It’s my crew who figured out how to get word out.”
There was a long moment of silence as they digested this.
“But thanks to the mutiny, and the resulting scrambling of crew, a good part of the crew wasn’t on the ship before, and probably hasn’t a clue.”
“How are you—we—going to stop them if we find them?”
“I’ll figure that out when we find them,” Heris said. The obvious solution was one she didn’t want to contemplate. “First we have to find them.”
“Should I put a message to Rascal onto the general ansible relay, sir? Do you think they can pick up messages, or are they lying too low?”
“Lying low, I would think, and I don’t want to alert Livadhi by sending messages to the shadow we hope he doesn’t know he has.”
“Right. It must be tough on Captain Suiza.”
“Not any tougher than things have been before,” Heris said. But she could easily imagine the younger officer’s tension . . . she was disobeying orders, she was sneaking along behind a ship that could destroy her if it noticed her . . . she was way out on the end of a very fragile string. Still, Suiza had a habit of making good decisions in emergencies. Keep going, she thought at her. Keep on his tail until I get there.
She did not follow the earlier part of Vigilance’s twisting course; she headed straight to the point indicated in the most recent of Suiza’s messages. By cranking Indefatigable to the limit, she was able to ice through the intervening jump points, and hoped that she would be no more than one jump behind, when she came out and got Suiza’s outgoing messsage. Her ship still had that annoying vibrato in its FTL drive, one that would leave its signature scrawled across any system it came to. But that had its uses too—though Koutsoudas wouldn’t know it as her ship, he wouldn’t miss that it was some ship.
Indefatigable wallowed out of FTL with a last gut-wrenching shimmy, and Heris wished very much she had Koutsoudas here to sort out the wavering bars of probability on the scan. If there was anything in this system, it was likely Livadhi and his tail.
Koutsoudas, watching the downjump transition, barely restrained a triumphant whistle. The others had told him, but he had not quite believed that any of this would work, that Heris Serrano could find them before Livadhi took them over the border into certain captivity and probable death. But the ship’s beacon broadcast her identity loud and clear: the R.S.S. Indefatigable. Shields up, he was glad to see. Weapons hot—well, they were all running with weapons hot these days. They’d come out of jump a mere ten light-minutes away; the scan clutter cleared quickly. He pressed the button that signalled the others that Heris had arrived.
“Sir,” he said to Livadhi. “That’s a Fleet ship, a cruiser, Indefatigable. She’s running like we are, shields up.”
“Damn!” Livadhi came up behind him. “How close?”
“Ten light-minutes, sir, on insertion. It was a messy downjump; I’m sure there’s something wrong with the FTL drive.”
“How long before her scan clears?”
“Well, considering that flutter in the drive, there may be flux refraction for longer than usual. I’d say minimum of three minutes, maybe four, not more than five.”
“Can we jump out before she’s clear?”
“Not with the course combination, sir.”
“Mmm. Why do you think that ship’s in this system?”
“Unstable FTL drive,” said one of the engineering officers down the row. ’Steban, if you’ll ’port those scans over, I can check them, but I’d say that much flutter could yank even a cruiser out of FTL space.”
“I’d like to believe that,” Livadhi said slowly. “But—tell me, Koutsoudas, do you know who’s commanding that ship?”
“I can look it up,” Koutsoudas said.
Someone else answered. “Commander Serrano, isn’t it? It was Wiston’s ship, but she was closer when the mutiny started—”
“I cannot believe,” Livadhi said, “that Commander Serrano would permit her ship to have such a badly tuned FTL drive.”
“Could have been damaged in combat,” the same voice offered.
“I don’t think so,” Livadhi said, and something in his voice made the hairs on Koutsoudas’ arms stand up. “I think Commander Serrano came here for the same reason we did. As to how she knew—”
His gaze swept the bridge. No one said anything. “I’ll be in my office,” he said. “I expect a message shortly: pipe it there.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Esmay Suiza had another of those swooping moments of doubt that had afflicted her off and on with Commodore Livadhi. Could he really be under secret orders, or was his claim as false as hers? Ships did sometimes cross the border on secret errands, both ways. The Benignity did have defectors; she’d met one. And Livadhi’s anger seemed so genuine, so straightforward: no tinge of guilt, just the natural annoyance of a commander whose subordinate has screwed up yet again.