“Excuse me, Captain, but the little ship’s departure trace is the same age as the others. Within a few minutes, anyway.”
“So . . . they had arranged a cleanup? Someone to follow behind and make sure the merchanter went through?” Solis shook his head. “But then we still don’t know who the other three ships were. Which way they came in. Any other traces?”
More color shifts on the scan monitor, as the tech cycled through all the enhancement possibilities. Suddenly three pale blue tracks showed up, angling from the second jump point to make a wide circuit and end up positioned along the merchanter’s track.
“There they are, sir. Came in by number two . . . and set up an ambush, looks like.”
“So I see. Good job, Quin. Well, that seems clear enough. Someone knew the merchanter was coming, and wanted it; someone came in and set up either an ambush or a rendezvous.” He grinned at Esmay. “Now, Lieutenant, we’ll go in and see what evidence we can pick up.”
The first evidence was a scatter of what was clearly debris.
“So the ship blew?” Esmay asked. “Or was blown?”
“No—not enough debris.” The scan tech pointed out figures along the side of the screen. “I’ve been keeping track of the estimated total mass of all fragments, and it’s less than would fit into one of the five cargo holds of the freighter we’re hunting. Moreover, if it was from an explosion, it would be much more scattered by now. This was dumped from something with very low relative vee, perhaps given just a little push in addition. My guess is that someone captured it and took it.” She reset one of the fine-grain scans. “Let’s see if we can find any bodies.”
Hour after hour, then day after day, the painstaking work went on. The SAR ship located and identified one piece of debris after another, all the while plotting location and vector on a 3-D display. Hundreds, thousands, of items . . . and then, the bodies they had known must be there, that they had both hoped and feared to find. They gathered the bodies into one of the vacuum bays, tagging them with numbers, the order in which they were retrieved. Men, women . . . the men in shipsuits, with their names stenciled on back and chest, as expected; the women . . .
“Their tongues have been cut out,” the medic said. “And they’re naked.” Esmay could hear the strain in his voice. “I can’t tell, out here, if it was done before or after death.”
“I never heard of the Bloodhorde making it into this sector,” someone said.
“This isn’t Bloodhorde work . . . they mutilate males as well, and this isn’t their typical mutilation anyway.”
Lieutenant Venoya Haral, Major Bannon’s assistant, piled the items on the table. Bannon himself was in the morgue, working on the recovered bodies. “All these things were all marked and recorded in place,” she said to Esmay. “Now we need to know what they tell us about the crew and the raiders.”
“Didn’t Boros give us a crew list?”
“Yes, but crew lists aren’t always dead accurate. Someone gets sick or drunk and lays off for a circuit, or someone’s kid comes along for the ride.”
“Children?”
“Usually. Commercial haulers often have children aboard, especially those on stable runs like this. We haven’t found any juvenile bodies yet—which doesn’t mean anything either way. They’re smaller, and less likely to be picked up. We’re still missing five adult bodies, including the captain. Let’s see.” Haral started sorting items into classes. “ID cases . . . put those down at that end. Grooming items. Recording devices . . . aha.” She started to pick it up and shook her head. “No . . . do things in order. But I can hope that this recorded something useful.”
“Here’s a child’s toy,” Esmay said. It was a stuffed animal, in blue and orange, well chewed by some child. She didn’t want to think about the fate of those children on the merchanter. She had to hope they were dead.
“Good. Stick it over there, and anything else that looks like it belongs with children. Where was it found?”
Esmay referred to her list. “In the back pocket of a man whose shipsuit read ‘Jules Armintage.’ ”
“Probably picked it up off the deck where some youngster dropped it. How was he killed?”
Esmay looked back at the list. “Shot in the head. Record doesn’t say with what.”
“The major will figure that out. Oh, here’s something—” Haral held up a handcomp. “We might get some useful data off that, if they used it for anything but figuring the odds on a horse race. Didn’t you have background in scan?”
When they had catalogued the items, Haral began examining them. “You don’t know how to do this yet,” Haral said. “So I’ll give you the easy stuff. See if any of those cubes have data on them. They’re pretty tough, but the radiation may have fried ’em.”
The first cube seemed to be a record of stores’ usage by the crew over the past eight voyage segments; it listed purchases and inventory levels, all with dates. The second, also dated, was from environmental, a complete record of the environmental log covering thirty days six months before.
“One of a set,” Haral said. “But it gives us some baseline to go on, if you find the one that should’ve been running when the ship was taken. It suggests they blew the ship, but there’s not enough debris.”
“It was found in . . . caught in the crevice of a lifeboat seat, the record says.”
“Um. Someone tried to take the environmental log aboard a lifeboat, and the lifeboat was blown. That makes sense. They may have put all the logs aboard it.”
“What would that be, on a merchanter?”
“Environmental log, automatic. Stores inventory. Captain’s log—how the voyage was going, and so on, and might include the cargo data. Accounting, which would definitely include the cargo data, pay information. Crew list, medical—pretty sparse, on a vessel like this with a stable crew. Communications log, but some merchanters put that in the captain’s log.”
Esmay slotted the next cube into the reader. “This looks like communications. And the date’s recent . . . fits with the ship’s last stop. Elias Madero to Corian Highside Stationmaster . . . to Traffic Control . . . undock and traffic transmissions and receptions.”
“Good. Let me see.” Haral came over and peered at the screen. “This is really good . . . we can match this against the records at Corian, and see if anyone tampered with the log. Wish they’d put it in full-record mode, but that does eat up cube capacity. Let’s just see how far it goes . . .”
“Elias Madero—you get your captain to the com. You surrender your ship, and we’ll let the crew off in your lifeboats.” The voice coming out of the cube reader’s speakers startled them both.
“What is that—” Haral leaned forward. “My God—someone had the sense to turn on full-record mode when the raiders challenged them. No vid yet, but—”
The screen flickered, changing from text to vid. A blurry image formed, of a stern man in tan—Esmay thought it might be a uniform, but she couldn’t tell. Then it sharpened suddenly.
“Got the incoming patched directly to the cube recorder, instead of vidding the screen,” Haral said. They had missed a few words; now another voice spoke.
“This is Captain Lund. Who are you and what do you think you’re doing?” A shift in the picture, to show a stocky balding man who was recognizable from the crew list Boros had supplied. It was definitely Lund. The recording continued, including Lund’s off-transmission commands to his crew.
Haral paused the playback, and sat back. “Well, now we know what happened to this ship . . . and we know they had kids, and hid them. Question is, did the raiders find them? Take them?”