As the days passed, Sassinak considered the Fleet warnings. “Assume subversives on each ship.” Fine, but with no more guidance than that, how was she supposed to find one? Subversives didn’t advertise themselves with loud talk of overturning FSP conventions. Besides, it was all guessing. She might have one subversive on her ship, or a dozen, or none at all. She had to admit that if she were planting agents, she’d certainly put them on cruisers, as the most effective and most widespread of the active vessels. But nothing showed in the personnel records she’d run a preliminary screen on - and supposedly Security had checked them all out before.
She knew that many commanders would think first of the heavyworlders on board, but while some of them were certainly involved in subversive organizations, the majority were not. However difficult heavyworlders might be - and some of them, she’d found, had earned their reputation for prickly sullenness - Sassinak had never forgotten the insights gained from her friends at the Academy. She tried to see behind the heavy-boned stolid faces, the overmuscular bodies, to the human person within - and most of the time felt she had succeeded. A few real friendships had come out of this, and many more amiable working relationships… and she found that her reputation as an officer fair to heavyworlders had spread among the officer corps.
Wefts, as aliens, irritated many human commanders, but again Sassinak had the advantage of early friendships. She knew that Wefts had no desire for the worlds humans preferred - in fact, the Wefts who chose space travel were sterile, having given up their chance at procreation for an opportunity to travel and adventure. Nor were they the perfect mental spies so many feared: their telepathic powers were quite limited; they found the average human mind a chaotic mess of emotion and illogic, impossible to follow unless the individual tried hard to convey a message. Sass, with her early training in Discipline, could converse easily with Wefts in their native form, but she knew she was an exception. Besides, if any of the Wefts on board had identified a subversive, she’d already have been told.
After several weeks, she felt completely comfortable with her crew, and could tell that they were settling well together. Huron had proved as inventive a partner as he was a versifier - after hearing a few of his livelier creations in the wardroom one night, she could hardly believe he hadn’t written the one about the captain’s son and the merchant’s daughter. He still insisted he was innocent of that one. The weapons officer, a woman’ only one year behind her at the Academy, turned out to be a regional sho champion - and was clearly delighted to demonstrate by beating Sassinak five games out of seven. It was good for morale, and besides, Sassinak had never minded learning from an expert. One of the cooks was a natural genius - so good that Sassinak caught herself thinking about putting him on her duty shift, permanently. She didn’t, but her taste buds argued with her, and more than once she found an excuse to “inspect” the kitchens when he was baking. He always had something for the captain. All this was routine - even finding a homesick and miserable junior engineering tech, just out of training, sobbing hopelessly in a storage locker. But so was the patrol routine… nothing, day after day, but the various lumps of matter that had been mapped in their assigned volume of space. Not so much as a pleasure yacht out for adventure.
She was half-dozing in her cabin, early in third watch, when the bridge corn chimed.
“Captain - we’ve got a ship. Merchant, maybe CR- class for mass, no details yet. Trigger the scan?”
“Wait - I’m coming.” She elbowed Huron, who’d already fallen asleep, until he grunted and opened an eye, then whisked into her uniform. When he grunted again and asked what it was, she said, “We’ve got a ship.” At that, both eyes came open, and he sat up. She laughed, and went out; by the time she got to the bridge, he was only a few steps behind her, fully dressed.
“Gotcha!” Huron, leaning over the scanner screen, was as eager as the technician handling the controls. “Look at that…” His fingers flew on his own keyboard, and the ship’s data came up on an adjoining screen. “Hu Veron Shipways, forty percent owned by Allied Geochemical, which is wholly owned by the Paraden family. Well, well… previous owner Jakob Iris, no previous criminal record but went into bankruptcy after… hmm… a wager on a horse race. What’s that?”
“Horse race,” said Sassinak, watching the screen just as intently. “Four-legged mammal, big enough to carry humans. Old Earth origin, imported to four new systems, but they mostly die.”
“Kipling’s corns, captain, how do you know all that?”
“Kipling indeed, Huron. Our schools had a Kipling story about a horse in the required elementary reading list. With a picture. And the Academy kept a team for funerals, and I have seen a tape of a horse race. In fact, I’ve actually ridden a horse.” Her mouth quirked, as she thought of Mira’s homeworld and that ill-fated pack trip.
“You would have,” said Huron almost vaguely. His attention was already back to his screen. “Look at that - Iris was betting against Luisa Paraden Scofeld. Isn’t that the one who was married to a zero-G hockey star, and then to an ambassador to Ryx?”
“Yes, and while he was there she ran off with the landscape architect. But the point is - “
“The point is that the Paradens have laid their hands on that ship twice!”
“That we know of.” Sassinak straightened up and regarded the back of Huron’s head thoughtfully. “I think we’ll trail this one. Commander Huron. There are just a few too many coincidences…” Even as she gave the necessary orders, Sassinak was conscious of fulfilling an old dream - to be in command of her own ship, on the bridge, with a possible pirate in view. She looked around with satisfaction at what might have been any large control room, anything from a reactor station to a manufacturing plant. The physical remnant of millennia of naval history was under her feet, the raised dais that gave her a clear view of everyone and everything in the room. She could sit in the command chair, with her own screens and computer linkages at hand, or stand and observe the horseshoe arrangement of workstations, each with its trio of screens, its banks of toggles and buttons, its quietly competent operator. Angled above were the big screens, and directly below the end of the dais was the remnant of a now outmoded technology that most captains still used to impress visitors: the three-D tank.
Trailing a ship through FTL space was, Sassinak thought, like following a groundcar - through thick forest at night without using headlights. The unsuspecting merchant left a disturbed swath of space which the Ssli could follow, but it could not simultaneously sense structural (if that was the word) variations in the space-time fabric… so that they were constantly in danger of jouncing through celestial chugholes or running into unseen gravitational stumps. They had to go fast, to keep the quarry in range of detection, but fast blind travel through an unfamiliar sector was an excellent way to get swallowed by the odd wormhole.
When the quarry dropped out of FTL into normal space, the cruiser followed - or, more properly, anticipated. The computer brought up the local navigation points.
“That’s interesting,” said Huron, pointing. It was more than interesting. A small star system, with one twenty-year-old colony (in the prime range for a raid) sited over a rich vein of platinum. Despite Fleet’s urging, FSP bureaucrats had declined to approve effective planetary defence weaponry for small colonies… and the catalog of this colony’s defenses was particularly meager.
“Brotherhood of Metals,” said Sass. “That’s the colony sponsor; they hold the paper on it. I’m beginning to wonder who their stockholders are.”