Chapter 10
Pure nerves, JR discovered when he reported in on the bridge. Nobody blamed Helm. Their pilot had made a precautionary move when he picked up a carrier’s large presence in the local buoy information, maintaining V.
Then a fast drop to non-combatant stance, all before the rest of them knew anything was going on and before the carrier’s advanced, fire-linked systems could read and confirm their ID off stored files. The deep spacetime punch and quick relocation of their larger than average mass could, unhappily, have given them a warlike, carrierlike, appearance—a paradoxical faster-than-light presence that would propagate through the spacetime sheet in the same way a pin-drop could make itself heard in a still room.
But they weren’t, in that instant, helpless and spotted in the fire-path of the carrier’s hair-triggered defense systems. For one thing, in the hand of cards that Old Man Inertia dealt, an entering ship always had the ace if they had a pilot who knew how to use it. The entering ship could fire downslope if they chose; reposition if they chose. If they hadn’t been willing to meet the carrier, they’d have gone silent and unlocatable somewhere along a track dictated only by physics and the local mass—a track that carrier could calculate, but not soon enough or precisely enough, on a ship that still carried enough V to jump out again on the Viking heading. And fire as they did so.
That rapid stutter of presence they’d made, however, was delay enough to let their systems determine that the presence in the jump-point was Union, not Mazianni, and their subsequent stop let the carrier find out the same about them, since they’d been lawfully using their ID when they came in.
It was still a jittery feeling, a once-enemy dreadnought in possession of the Tripoint system and themselves in its crosshairs. By what JR detected on the displays, the carrier didn’t look at all to be in transit of the jump-point. It was low-energy on a vector that said it had come from Viking, but it wasn’t proceeding. It was just sitting. Looking around. Logging traffic.
Prowling the edges of Alliance territory it wasn’t supposed to visit… except on specific invitation of Pell, which he didn’t think it had.
Mallory’s invitation, however, in the deep uncertainties of this post-War period, might be the answer. The carrier was possibly—possibly—moving out of its territory in order to back up Mallory in Earth space after they’d left Mallory unattended. That would imply Finity’s decision had been made many months earlier than he thought it had—but it wouldn’t be the first time he’d been caught ignorant of Finity’s high-level operations.
Junior officers were expected to guess, and to hone their strategic skills against real situations, trying to outfigure senior officers. But it didn’t help junior officer nerves. He’d taken himself up to B deck at breakneck speed, unshaven, still in flight-slippers, and checked in on the bridge. So had Madison, who was supposed to be the next shift, and who obviated all necessity for him to stay here—but stay he did.
In the duty of second-guessing command without disturbing operations, JR went up to Scan 5’s post and simply observed for a moment, in order not to disturb the critical, multilevel operations of that post.
“Rider status,” he asked Scan 5 after a moment of stable display.
“Uncertain,” Five reported without turning in his chair. “Carrier ID confirmed as Amity. Output normal, range 5 minutes.”
The carrier, five minutes away as light traveled, had resumed ID output, a measure of confidence as it looked them over. Scan and passive-recept alone, however, couldn’t entirely confirm what Amity was doing, whether it was sitting there with its several rider-ships still attached and therefore harmless, or whether it had already deployed them as heavy-fire platforms, lying transmission-silent and ready at various points about the area. Finity’s optics were surely in play, along with other methods of search.
The carrier hadn’t obliged their optics by turning a profile that would make its status clear, either. He saw the fuzzy image and the enhancement and didn’t take that situation for a chance arrangement in their relative positions. Five minutes was close, as ships reckoned entry positions. It was not close in targeting.
They had had an uneasy working arrangement with Union military that had held for nearly two decades. They’d even worked, though not lately, with this particular carrier. Both Alliance and Union protected their secrets, and Union was still very wary, particularly of Mallory’s intentions, even after two decades.
Bucklin and Lyra showed up to take their stations: apprentice-posts, unassigned chairs, like his, that left them able to observe, not necessarily to work at this critical juncture. He made a quiet approach to his own regular post, near the Old Man and Madison, noting that by now in ordinary procedure their bridge shift should have changed. Madison’s team was held, not yet called to duty, and that changeover might be delayed indefinitely.
Then the Old Man engaged Com. Voice meant that senior officials had now made station on the carrier, if they hadn’t been there at the moment of their entry. JR sat beside Bucklin and Lyra and put in his earpiece to catch the drift of that message, relieved to hear the Old Man’s voice addressing the Union captain in a casualness that didn’t betoken hostility.
Reassuring. There was code passing, now, he’d bet, words that didn’t quite fit the conversation, and there was at the same time he noted a relaxation of the Old Man’s features, a little hint of humor.
Madison spared JR a direct glance, a nod, a handsign that meant, ordinarily, Ours, but meant, here, JR believed, Friendly approach.
A time-lagged response from Amity came then, that said:
“Greetings from the admiral and his respects for your efforts at Wyatt’s, Captain Neihart. You may pass that along to your colleague on Norway. I must say your appearance is a surprise. I trust it forecasts success and not bad news at Earth. Where are you bound?”
“Esperance. We’ve resigned from the chase, sir. We’ve gone simply to routine cargo-carrying on this run, and we’ll be back in the trade from now on if things go as we plan. The pirate hunt is growing thin, success in that regard. Now we have to teach these young people of ours the merchant trade, give them a new view of the universe. Greetings to the admiral and our hopes for future cooperation. We’ll be quick to respond if we do spot trouble—sorry about that reposition—but we’re hauling cargo now and we’ll even be taking mail from time to time. Earth’s as stable as I’ve seen it and we hope to have eliminated some of the flow of goods we were concerned about. Salutations from our colleague and expectations of good news from your arena.”
Time-lagged conversations tended to run simultaneously and to change topics multiple times in the same paragraph, following the informational wavefront that had just come to the speaker.
“I wish I’d had the wherewithal to load full at Sol,” the Old Man said, “A load of whiskey, chocolate and wood on our last run, however. I’ll send you over a bottle of Mallory’s favorite Scotch. Her compliments. And mine.”
Audacious. And from Mallory? A Union carrier might not want to swallow a pill Finity dispensed, fearing bombs or biologics. But it was a handsome gift at the prices that prevailed past Pell
A startling implication of connections and conduits of information. The hell, then, they hadn’t known some Union contact might be here. Yet it had startled Helm, appearing as it did? Revise all estimates: they’d expected a smaller ship, but some ship.