“I’m not sure. I don’t suppose there’s any way the Sweet Delight could tell—?”
Heris smacked her forehead with the flat of her hand. Stupid! She’d nearly turned into a dirtsider, all the time she’d spent traveling at the speed of horseflesh. “Of course,” she said. Then—“But can I get a closed channel, a secure channel, from the house?”
“Yes, with my authorization. We’d best do it from my room.”
Cecelia’s room, Heris noted, had even more windows on the morning side of the house—no wonder she woke so early—and was half again as large as her own. The deskcomp looked the same, however, and Cecelia soon had what she considered a secure line to the station. She handed the headset to Heris.
“Captain Serrano; a secure line to the officer on deck, Sweet Delight.”
“At once, Captain.” She thought that was probably the Stationmaster himself, but no visual came up. When the screen lit, it was to show the familiar bridge, warped a bit by the wide-angle lens, and Nav First Sirkin.
“Captain Serrano,” the younger woman said. She looked only slightly surprised.
“I’d like a scan report from . . . oh . . . say . . . fifty-five hours back. Did you log a flitter flight from the Main Lodge, this location, to an island group to the west?”
A broad grin answered her. “Yes, ma’am. That was my shift, and I remember it. Let me bring up the log and scan.” The log display came online, a narrow stripe along the side of the screen, with time and date displayed in both Standard and Planetary Local. The log entry terse and correct, noted the size of craft, the course, and the recognition code of the flitter beacon. The scan proper, a maze of graphics and numbers, matched the log except in one particular.
“They signalled,” Heris said, her finger on the scan. “They called a fixed station—probably the landing field at Bandon. And something responded—”
“Michaels says it’s an automatic loop. There’s no one at the field unless family’s expected.”
“Hmmm. And what’s this?” Heris pointed to a squiggle she knew Cecelia could not interpret, and spoke to her Nav First. “Did you log the other traffic?”
“Yes—although since it didn’t have a satellite locater signal, I assumed they were just maintenance flights or something.”
“Or something,” said Heris. She felt an unreasoning surge of glee and grinned at Cecelia. “Good instincts: something is definitely going on out there.”
“Smugglers, I suppose,” Cecelia said with refined distaste. “I never saw a world without some of it. Probably off-duty crews.”
“No,” the Nav First interrupted. “At least some of them are Space Service. Regular, Captain, like yourself.” Heris winced at the pronoun; centuries after overzealous English teachers had tried to stomp out misuse of me, the reflexive overcorrection lingered as a class distinction. But that was unimportant now.
“How do you know?” she asked. The younger woman flushed.
“Well, I was sort of . . . listening in to see how good that new scan technology was—”
“And you picked up Fleet traffic?” If she had, Heris would report it, small thanks though she’d get for it.
“No, ma’am. It was a private shuttle from a charter yacht docked at Station Three. Someone groundside asked if Admiral Lepescu was aboard, and the shuttle said yes.”
Heris felt as if someone had transplanted icewater into her arteries. She started to ask more, but Cecelia interrupted, with a hand on her arm.
“I want to go after them.”
“Why?” Heris’s mind had clamped onto the admiral’s name; she could not think why Cecelia would want to follow him.
“To bring them back. Before Bunny finds out.”
The youngsters. Ronnie and all. Not Lepescu. Heris struggled to keep her mind on the original problem. They had gone off illicitly, and had not signalled, and their craft’s locator beacon still functioned. And Cecelia wanted to bring them back. That ought to be simple enough. She forced herself to look closely at all the details Sirkin had displayed. One caught her eye at once.
“Sirkin—that flitter locator beacon—it’s not on Bandon.”
“No, Captain; there’s a whole group of islands, and it’s on the one just north of Bandon.”
Heris turned to Cecelia. “But the family lodge is on Bandon proper, surely—with the landing field?”
“I think so.” Cecelia’s face contracted in a thoughtful frown. “I don’t really know; I’ve never been there. Michaels implied it was on the same island.”
“Of course they may have decided to camp on the beach. . . .” Heris looked over the rest of the data. “You said Bubbles had camped on one of the other islands. Odd—the flight path of that flitter doesn’t look right. You’d think they’d have gone by Bandon to pick up supplies, at least. Did they take off with full camping equipment? Or would Michaels know?”
“I could ask,” Cecelia said. “You think they meant to land at Bandon and didn’t? They crashed?”
“Could be.” Heris felt frustration boiling through her mind. Once she would have had the information she needed; once she would have had trusted subordinates to find out anything she lacked. People she could trust . . . she would not let herself remember more than the trust. At least they were safe, she told herself fiercely. At least they still had each other. She had bought them that much.
And she might have the chance to see Lepescu again. Without Fleet interference. Without witnesses.
“Lepescu,” she murmured, hardly aware of saying anything. “You bastard—what are you doing here?”
“I remember,” Cecelia said. “He was the admiral who got you in trouble.” Heris looked up, startled out of her train of memories.
“He was the admiral who nearly got us all killed,” Heris said. “The trouble was negligible, really. . . .” Now she could say that. “The question is, why is he here? To cause me more grief? It would have been easy for him to find out who hired me, and where we were going, but I can’t see why—or what he can do worse than he’s done. Aside from that—”
“Bunny didn’t invite him,” Cecelia said smugly. She had the authorization codes for Bunny’s personal guestlist database, and had run them on the deskcomp. “Never has, according to this. Let’s see . . . no, nor any of Bunny’s relatives. He’s another crasher.”
“Here? No, because Sirkin said that transmission went to a shuttle landing at Bandon.”
“Where nobody’s supposed to be,” Cecelia reminded her. “Where I didn’t know there was a landing zone equipped for shuttles.”
“Whose ship did he come on?” Heris asked. Cecelia couldn’t know, she realized, and asked Sirkin, who had stayed online.
“All I know is it’s a charter yacht out of Dismis, the Prairie Rose. I’d have to have authorization to find out more. . . .”
“We’ll do that,” Heris said. “But post the orders to monitor that flitter beacon, and any and all traffic on that island or the ones next to it. I’ll want flitter IDs, com transcripts, everything.”
“Yes, Captain. Right away.”
“And be prepared to patch my signal from a flitter or other light craft. Lady Cecelia and I will be checking on that beacon ourselves.” As she said it, she raised her brows at Cecelia, who nodded. It was crazy, really. At the least they ought to tell their host and let him assign his own security forces to it. But the thought that she might come face to face with Lepescu, unwitnessed, slid sweet and poisonous into her mind. With Cecelia’s authorization, she could confront him—an uninvited gate-crasher—and demand the answers that had eluded her before. She closed her eyes a moment, imagining his surprise, feeling her hands close around his throat. . . . Her mouth flooded with the imagined taste of victory, and she had to swallow.
“Heris?” Cecelia was looking at her strangely. It was that expression, on the faces of her classmates at the Academy, that had first given her an inkling that she had inherited her parents’ gift of command, the essential ruthlessness of decision.