The junior officer, kept in the dark and fed whatever data he could find by feel, could at least surmise the fact that they’d expected someone, and spooked for fear of the size of what they’d found. Helm might not have picked it up from buoy input. Helm might have read the interface itself, and been just that fast reacting to the unexpected.
“Delighted to receive fire,” one of the most powerful warships in space answered that offer. “Good voyage to you, Finity.”
A Union carrier was going to search empty space for a beeper-can and a bottle of Scotch whiskey?
Orders were passing. The ops crew down on A deck was finding a cannister, basically a smuggler’s rig, certainly not something you could buy at a station outfitters—and an item which they did chance to have, by some cosmic and unsuspected luck.
As he listened, Lyra, as the available junior-most crew, found herself dispatched on an unusual mission to the captain’s private bar.
“Is Scotch all of it?” he asked Madison as the attenuated conversation wound down to sign-offs.
“Smart lad,” Madison said, and nothing more.
So there was something from Mallory that didn’t involve Scotch, something that they’d been carrying in event of some such meeting somewhere along their course, and that a Union carrier was now going to pick up.
Curious dealings they had. No, they wouldn’t poison-pill a Union carrier. Not on their fragile lives. There was something going on in this voyage that he’d lay odds wasn’t in the line of trade: Mallory’s business, almost certainly so, and Mallory was always a wild card in the affairs of Pell Station, apt to take any side that served her purpose. She was a former merchanter, former Fleet officer and bitterly opposed to Union. And had worked with Union against the Fleet. There was no side she hadn’t been on, at one time or another, including Earth’s.
If Mallory was out there keeping an eye on something, even expecting this carrier, or a carrier to be operating on this border, then there was something afoot. He thought Mallory was back near Sol.
But there were some things for which the senior captains gave no answers because there was no need-to-know, and because crew on liberties were vulnerable and sometimes too damned talkative. Even Family crew.
The more people involved, the more chance of accidents. Clearly if Madison wanted to tell him what was in that packet besides a bottle of extravagantly expensive Scotch, Madison would have said, directly. And it was still the junior’s job to figure things out.
Foolish question he’d asked Madison. Pursuing confirmations, he checked his output from Nav, and then got up to walk past Nav’s more junior stations and confirm their exact arrival point at the dark mass. He should have asked…
“How’d the kid make it through?” Helm 1 asked, Hans Andrew, blindsiding him on the other matter of his reasonable concern as he passed the helmsman’s chair. Fletcher. If there’d been a problem in that department, it had been a junior problem, and no one in senior crew had had time to ask him—until now. Odd and eclectic, the concerns that sometimes came out of Helm, who more than anyone on the ship was focused on the shadow of that carrier and on space at large.
“Fine. Jeremy reported in, they’re fine.” Jeremy had called him as his direct report-to station while Fletcher was in the shower, and reported himself and Fletcher as in good order. In the crisis, JR hadn’t yet checked on the specific details. Fletcher was alive, God hope he was sane.
Things were still questionable on the bridge.
“Sorry to do that to him,” Helm muttered: Hans Andrew, peppershot gray and eyes that, focused on his console, still frantically darted to small side motions with the marginal come-down off a pilot’s hype. JR suspected that Hans was still tracking little if any of the intership communications—nor cared. When a pilot decided to move his ship in reaction to a developing situation, he did so on the situation, not on plan, not on policy, and sometimes not on the captain’s orders: had to, at the speeds Hans’ mind dealt with. The active pilot was in one sense the most aware individual on the ship; the gunner and Scan chief were right behind, with guns autoed live the nanosecond Finity dropped into system.
Meanwhile Helm would ask about the new kid on A deck, but not about the carrier, and Helm’s eyes—one of them with a VR contact—would dart and track minutiae of the ship’s exterior environment on his instruments, alive to that with a focus that concentratedly ignored any micro-dealings of ops. Unless you were the captain, you didn’t talk to Helm unless addressed by Helm. You didn’t bother him when he was hyped.
And he didn’t answer Helm’s comment except to dismiss a concern Helm had evidently carried into hyperspace with him, a stray thought from a month ago. It cleared an item from Helm’s agenda. At the speed Helm’s mind thought, mere human transactions, the negotiations of captains and admirals, must take an eternity.
He walked on to the empty chairs at Nav. Bucklin joined him after about ten minutes in which not much happened but routine and chatter back and forth with the carrier regarding a month-ago solar flare off EpEri, Viking’s sun. “We’ve just dropped the beeper-can,” Bucklin said in a low tone as he sat down in the vacant chair beside him. “What do you make of this crazy goings-on?”
“An interesting voyage,” JR said.
“I thought we’d retired.”
“The Old Man’s full of surprises.”
“You think Mallory’s out there at the moment?”
He thought about it, all the deep dark fringes of the sprawling mass-point where whole Fleets could hide, a hundred ships a mere pinprick on the skin of the universe. Lose something out here? Easy as not knowing what tiny arc to sweep with your scan, in a universe noisy with stars and blinded by local mass.
But he shook his head.
“No. Personally, I don’t. I think she’s somewhere at the other end of Earth’s space. While we lump along like an ore-hauler, on the merchant routes. That ship won’t use them.” Meaning the carrier, meaning the commercial short hops. There were further routes, that ships like that one, with its powerful engines, could use. And he envied that Union ship its capacities, its hair-trigger systems, with all his War-taught soul. State of the art, start to finish. Beautiful. A life remote from a future of slogging about trading stops and loading cargo.
“There is the deep route out of here,” he said to Bucklin. “The other thing that carrier has, besides riders, is an admiral. They might be working with Mallory.”
“She’s telling that carrier where to look for trouble. That’s what I’m thinking. I think we’re a go-between, I don’t think Union wants their ships near her any oftener than they can avoid it.”
It was likely true, in principle. There were a lot of bitter grudges between Union and Alliance, even between specific Union and Alliance ships—resentments from the War years. Mallory very possibly stood off at one end of Alliance space, telling Union where a Fleet operation might pop out of hyper-space in their side, doing nothing that would bring her under Union guns… in these years when the pirate operations were dying down and when, consequently, Union might perceive their need for Mallory as less—as less, that was, if they were fools.
JR drew a long breath in speculation, thinking of the Hinder Stars, where their patrols failed to keep universal security. That strand of stars, the set of stars that had enabled the first starships to reach out from Earth to Pell, was a bridge that no firepower man had yet invented could blow out of existence. Stellar mass was damn stubborn in being where it was at any given moment.