The glowing numbers on the readout overhead told him two standard hours had passed when he felt a curious twinge and realized they'd shifted into FTL drive. Although he'd had basic training in astrogation, he'd never used it, and had only the vaguest idea what FTL travel really meant. Or where, in real terms, they might be. Somewhere behind (as he thought of it) was the cruiser he had left, with its now-familiar crew and its most attractive captain. Its very angry and most attractive captain. He wished she had not been so transparently suspicious of his motives. She was no planet pirate nor agent of slavers. She had nothing to fear from him. And he would gladly have spent more time with her. He let himself imagine the nights they could have shared.
"Sir, we're safely in FTL, if you want to come up to Main."
Dupaynil sighed as the voice over the com broke into that fantasy and thumbed the control. "I'll be there."
He had messages to send, messages he had had no time to send from the transfer station. And with the angry Commander Sassinak sitting on the other end of the block, so to speak, he would not have sent diem from the station anyway. He re-discovered what he had once been taught about escort-class vessels in a few miserable minutes. They were small, overpowered for their mass, and understaffed. No one bunked on Main but the captain who was the pilot. Crew consisted of a round dozen: one other officer, the Jig Executive, eleven enlisted, from Weapons to Environmental. No cook: all the food was either loaded prepackaged, to be reconstituted and heated in automatic units, or synthesized from the Environmental excess.
Dupaynil shuddered; one of the best things about the Zaid-Dayan had been the cooking. With fall crew and cargo, the escort had to ration water: limited bathing. The head was cramped: the slots designed to discourage meditation. There was no gym but the uneven artificial gravity and shiplong access tubing offered opportunity for informal exercise. For those who liked climbing very long ladders against variable G. Worst of all, the ship had no IFTL link.
"'Course we don't have IFTL," said the captain, a Major Ollery whose face seemed to brighten every time Dupaynil found something else to dislike. "We don't have a Ssli interface, do we?"
"But I thought…" He stopped himsetf in mid-argument. He had seen a briefing item, mention of the ship classes that had IFTL, mention of those which would not get it because of 'inherent design constraints.' And escorts were too small to carry a Ssli habitat. "That… that stinker!" he said, as he realized suddenly what Sassinak had done.
"What?" asked Ollery.
"Nothing." Dupaynil hoped his face didn't show how he felt, torn between anger and admiration. That incredible woman had fooled him. Had fooled an experienced Security officer whose entire life had been spent fooling others. He had had a tap on her communications lines, a tap he was sure she'd never find, and somehow she'd found out. Decided to get rid of him. And how in Mulvaney's Ghost had she managed to fake an incoming IFTL message? With that originating code?
He sank down on the one vacant seat in the escort's bridge, and thought about it. Of course she could fake the code, if she could fake the message. That much was easy, if the other was possible. But nothing he'd been taught, in a long and devious life full of such instruction, suggested that an IFTL message could be faked. It would take… he frowned, trying to think it through. It would take the cooperation of a Ssli: of two Ssli, at least. How would the captain of one ship enlist the aid of the Ssli on another? What kind of hold did Sassinak have on her resident Ssli? It had never occurred to him that the Ssli were capable of anything like friendship with humans. Once installed, the sessile Ssli never experienced another environment, never 'met' anyone except through a computer interface. Or so he'd thought.
He felt as if he'd sat down on an anthill. He fairly itched with new knowledge and had no way to convey it to anyone. Ssli could have relationships with humans beyond mere duty. Could they with other races? With Wefts? Were Ssli perhaps telepathic? No one had suspected that. Dupaynil glanced around the escort bridge and saw only human faces, now bent over their own work. He cleared his throat, and the captain looked up.
"Do you… mmm… have any Wefts aboard?"
An odd expression in reply. "Wefts? No, why?" Then before he could answer, OHery's face cleared. "Oh! You've been with Sassinak, I know. She's got a thing about Wefts, doesn't she? They say it started back in the Academy. She had a Weft lover or something. That true?" Ollery's voice had the incipient snigger of those who hope the worst about their seniors.
Dupaynil suppressed a surge of rage. As a Security officer, he listened to gossip professionally; idle gossip, malicious gossip, juicy gossip, boring gossip. He found it generally dull, and sometimes disgusting: a necessary but unpleasant part of his career. But here, applied to Sassinak, it was infuriating.
"So far as I know," he said as smoothly as he could, "that story was started by a cadet expelled for stealing and harrassing women cadets." He knew the truth of that; he'd seen the files. "Commander Sassinak, and" - he emphasized the rank a little, intentionally, and enjoyed seeing Ollery's face pale - "keeps her sex life in her own cabin, where it belongs, and where I intend to leave it."
A muffled snort behind him meant that either someone else thought the captain had been out of line, or that Dupaynil's defense implied personal knowledge. He left that alone, too, and hoped no one would ask.
Silence settled over the bridge; he went on with his thoughts. Telepathic Wefts, and a ship's captain who could sometimes talk that way with them. He'd seen reports on Sassinak's first tour of duty. A Ssli who - he suddenly remembered something from the tour before he joined the Zaid-Dayan. Sassinak had reported it as part of her testimony before the Board of Inquiry. Her Ssli, this same Ssli, had taken control of the ship momentarily and flipped it in and out of FTL space. A move which she had described as "unprecedented, but undoubtedly the reason I am here today."
He was beginning to think that Fleet knew far too little about the capabilities of Ssli. But he had no way to out more at the moment so he moved his concentration to Sassinak herself. When he thought of it, her actions were entirely probable. He could have kicked himself for not realizing that she would react quickly and strongly to any perceived threat. She had never liked having him aboard; she had never really trusted him. So his interception of her classified messages, once she found out, would naturally result in some action. Her history suggested a genius for quick response, for instantly recognizing danger and reacting effectively in novel ways.
And so he was here, out of communication until the escort reached its destination. No way to check the validity of his orders (though he was quite sure now where they had come from) and no way to tell anyone what he'd found out. It occurred to him then, and only then, that Sassinak might have planned even more than getting him off her ship before he could 'do something.' Perhaps she had other plans. Perhaps she was not going to take the Zaid-Dayan tamely into Federation Central space, with all its weaponry disabled and all its shuttles locked down.
For a long moment he fought off panic. She might do anything. Then he settled again. The woman was brilliant, not crazy: aggressive in defending her own, responsive to danger, but not disloyal to Fleet or Federation, not likely to do anything stupid, like bombing FedCentral. He hoped.