Atmospheric insertion was a gamble, and a desperate one, but one that had paid off enough times to be slightly preferable to a suicidal scuttling operation.
Skade composed a thought and popped it into her companions’ heads. I admire the shipmaster’s determination. But it won’t help him.
Clavain’s response was immediate. [It’s a she, Skade. We picked up her signal when she tight-beamed the other ship; they were passing through the edge of a debris ring, so there was enough ambient dust to scatter a small fraction of the laser light in our direction.]
And the interloper?
Remontoire answered her. [We always suspected it was a freighter from the moment we had a clean lock on its exhaust signature. That turns out to be the case, and we know a little more now.]
Remontoire offered her a feed, which she accepted.
A fuzzy image of the freighter sharpened in her mind’s eye, accreting detail like a sketch being worked to completion. The freighter was half the size of Nightshade, a typical in-system hauler built one or two centuries ago; definitely pre-plague. The hull was vaguely rounded; the ship might once have been designed to land on Yellowstone or one of the other atmosphere-bound bodies in the system, but it had gained so many bulges and spines since then that it made Skade think of a fish afflicted with some rare recessive mutation. Cryptic machine-readable symbols flickered on its skin, some of which were interrupted by blank acres of repaired hull cladding.
Remontoire anticipated her question. [The ship’s Storm Bird, a freighter registered out of Carousel New Copenhagen in the Rust Belt. The ship’s commander and owner is Antoinette Bax, although she hasn’t been either for more than a month. The previous owner was a James Bax, presumably a relative. We don’t know what happened to him. Records show, however, that the Bax family has been running Storm Bird since long before the war, possibly even before the plague. Their activities seem to be the usual mixture of the legal and the marginally legal; a few infringements here and there, and one or two run-ins with the Ferrisville Convention, but nothing serious enough to warrant arrest, even under the emergency legislation.]
Skade felt her distant body acknowledge this with a nod. The girdle of habitats orbiting Yellowstone had long supported a spectrum of transportation ventures, ranging from prestigious high-burn operations to much slower — and commensurately cheaper, fewer-questions-asked — fusion and ion-drive haulers. Even after the plague, which had turned the once-glorious Glitter Band into the far less than glorious Rust Belt, there had still been commercial niches for those prepared to fill them. There were quarantines to be dodged, and a host of new clients rising from the smouldering rubble of Demarchist rule, not all of who were the kinds of clients one would wish to do business with twice.
Skade knew nothing about the Bax family, but she could imagine them thriving under these conditions, and perhaps thriving even more vigorously during wartime. Now there were blockades to be run and opportunities to aid and abet the deep-penetration agents of either faction in their espionage missions. No matter that the Ferrisville Convention, the caretaker administration that was running circum-Yellowstone affairs, was just about the most intolerant regime in history. Where there were harsh penalties, there would always be those who would pay handsomely for others to take risks on their behalf.
Skade’s mental picture of Antoinette Bax was almost complete. There was just one thing she did not understand: what was Antoinette Bax doing this far inside a war zone? And, now that she thought about it, why was she still alive?
The shipmaster spoke to her? Skade asked.
Clavain answered. [It was a warning, Skade, telling her to back off or face the consequences.]
And did she?
Remontoire fed her the freighter’s vector. It was headed straight into the atmosphere of the Jovian, just like the Demarchist ship ahead of it.
That doesn’t make any sense. The shipmaster should have destroyed her for violating a Contested Volume.
Clavain responded. [The shipmaster threatened to do just that, but Bax ignored her. She promised the shipmaster she wasn’t going to steal hydrogen, but made it pretty clear she wasn’t about to turn around either.]
Either very brave or very stupid.
[Or very lucky,] Clavain countered. [Clearly the shipmaster didn’t have the ammunition to back up her threat. She must have used up her last missile during some earlier engagement.]
Skade considered this, anticipating Clavain’s reasoning. If the shipmaster really had fired her last missile, she would be desperately keen to keep that information from Nightshade. An unarmed ship was ripe for boarding. Even this late in the war, there were still useful intelligence gains to be made from the capture of an enemy ship, quite apart from the prospect of recruiting her crew.
You think the shipmaster was hoping the freighter would do as she said. She detected Clavain’s assent before his answer formed in her head.
[Yes. Once Bax shone her radar on to the Demarchist ship, the shipmaster had no choice but to make some kind of response. Firing a missile would have been the usual course of action — she’d have been fully within her rights — but at the very least she had to warn the freighter to back off. That didn’t work — for whatever reason Bax wasn’t sufficiently intimidated. That immediately put the shipmaster in a compromised position. She’d barked, but she sure as hell couldn’t bite.]
Remontoire completed his line of thinking. [Clavain’s right. She has no missiles. And now we know.]
Skade knew what they had in mind. Even though it had already begun to dive into the atmosphere, the Demarchist ship was still within easy range of Nightshade’s missiles. A kill could not be guaranteed, but the odds were a lot better than even. Yet Remontoire and Clavain did not want to shoot the enemy down. They wanted to wait until it had emerged from the atmosphere, slow and heavy with fuel, but still no better armed than it had been before. They wanted to board it, suck data from its memory banks and turn its crew into recruits for the Mother Nest.
I can’t consent to a boarding operation. The risks to Nightshade outweigh any possible benefits.
She sensed Clavain trying to probe her mind. [Why, Skade? Is there something that makes this ship unusually precious? If so, isn’t it a little odd that no one told me?]
That’s a matter for the Closed Council, Clavain. You had your chance to join us.
[But even if he had, he wouldn’t know everything, would he?]
Her attention flicked angrily to Remontoire. You know that I’m here on Closed Council business, Remontoire. That is all that matters.
[But I’m Closed Council and even I don’t know exactly what you’re doing here. What is it, Skade — a secret operation for the Inner Sanctum?]
Skade seethed, thinking how much simpler things would be if she never had to deal with old Conjoiners. This ship is precious, yes. It’s a prototype, and prototypes are always valuable. But you knew that anyway. Of course we don’t want to lose it in a petty engagement.