Their scan delay was less than a half-hour, and the raiders had shown no sign of noticing their presence in the system. Now they could track the shuttles rising - all to the transport, Sassinak noted - and then descending and rising again. Once more, and then the raiders boosted away from the planet, on a course that brought them within easy range of theZaid-Dayan. Huron only looked at Sass; she shook her head, and caught her weapons officer’s eye as well. Hold on, she told the self she imagined lying helpless in the transport’s belly. We’re here: we’re going to come after you. But she knew her thoughts did those children no good at all - and nothing could wipe out the harm already done.
Chapter Nine
All too quickly the transport and its escort showed that they were preparing to leave the system. Powerful boosters shoved them up through the planet’s gravity well - a system cheap and certain, if inelegant. Sassinak wondered if the transport that had carried her had had an escort - or if Fleet activities in the past twenty years or so had had that much effect. Considering the cost of each ship, crew, weaponry… if Fleet had made escorts necessary… then either the profit margin of slavers should be much narrower, or the slave trade brought even more money than anyone had guessed. And why?
“Commander Sassinak - “ This mode of address, perfectly correct but slightly more formal than usual to a ship’s captain on board, made it clear to her just how upset her bridge crew were. She glanced at Arly, senior weapons officer, who was pointing at her own display. “We finally got a good readout on their weapons systems… that’s one more hot ship.”
Sassinak welcomed the diversion, and leaned over the display. Since the escort vessel had tampered with its own IFF transmission, they had had to use other detection methods to figure out its class and armament… methods which were supposed to be indetectible, although they’d not yet been tested against any but Fleet vessels. Now she’d find out - in the fabric of her own ship if the designers were wrong - just how accurate and indetectible they were.
“Patrol class: ‘way too big and too hot for anyone but Fleet to have legally,” Arly went on, pointing out the obvious. “Probably modified and refitted from a legal insystem escort or patrol vessel… although it might be a pirated hull from something consigned to scrap.”
“I hope not,” said Sass. “If there’s a hole in our scrap and recycling operation, we could find ourselves facing a pirated battle platform - “
“Best fit of hull and structure is to a Vannoy Combine insystem escort. Then if they retrofitted an FTL drive component - “ The weapons officer’s fingers danced over the controls, and the display split, one vertical half showing a schematic with the changes she proposed. “ - and beefed up the interior a good bit - they’d lose crew space, but gain the reinforcement they need to mountthese.” A final flick of the finger, and the armament that theZaid-Dayan’s detectors and computer had come up with came up as a list.
“Onthat!” Sassinak stared at it. A vessel only one third the mass of her own was carrying nearly identical weaponry, with a nice mix of projectile, beam, and explosives.
“Just as well we didn’t sail in to take an easy kill,” said the weapons officer quietly. Her expression was completely neutral. “Could have been messy.”
“It’s going to be messy,” said Sassinak, just as quietly. “When we catch them.”
“We are following - “ It was not quite a question.
“Oh, yes. And as soon as we have their destination coordinates, we’ll be calling in the whole bloody Fleet.”
But it was not that easy. The two ships moved away from the planet they’d raided, boosting toward a safe range for FTL flight. Sassinak would like to have checked the planet itself for survivors (unlikely though she knew that to be) and evidence, but she could not risk losing the ships when they left normal space. She waited as the ships built speed, until their own scans must be nearly blind as they approached their insertion velocity. The Ssli had queried twice when she finally gave the order to shift position and pursue. Just before they entered FTL flight, she had a burst sent to Sector HQ by low-link, explaining what happened to the colony and her plan of pursuit.
Then it was the same blind chase as they had had following the transport in the first place. Sassinak could only imagine how it must seem to the Ssli on whose ability to sense the trace they all depended. Their lives were hostage to the realities of such travel… the Ssli concentrated so on the traces of their quarry that it could not warn them of potentially fatal anomalies in their path.
With the Ssli controlling the ship’s movement through its computer link, the crew had all too little to do. Sassinak spent some time on the bridge each shift, and much of the rest prowling the ship wondering how she was going to find her subversives - without driving the perfectly loyal and honorable crew up the walls in the process. Dhrossh, their link to their quarry, would not initiate an IFTL link without her direct command, but someone still might loose a message by SOLEC or high-link, not to warn the raiders, but their allies. That would require knowing the coordinates of either a mapped Fleet node or receiving station, but an agent might. She considered sending regular reports to Fleet by the same means, and decided against it. Better to have some conclusion to report, after that disaster at the colony.
Sassinak worked out a duty schedule that involved keeping a Weft on the bridge constantly - at least they could contact her, instantly, if something happened, and they were exceptionally able in reading the minute behaviors of humans. She had to hope that her human crew would not guess her reasons.
She was acutely aware of the crew’s reaction to her decision not to engage the raiders before they attacked the colony, or during the attack. She imagined their comments… “Is the captain losing it? Has someone bought her off?” Volume 8 of the massive Rules of Engagement managed to be lying around the senior officers’ wardroom more than once, although she never caught anyone reading the critical article. Some of the crew sided with her, and she heard some of that. “Pretty sharp, figuring out we were outgunned before we’d come in close-scan range,” one of the biotechs was saying one day as Sassinak passed quietly along on a routine inspection of the environmental system. “I wouldn’t have guessed that the initial readouts were wrong… whoever heard of someone fooling with an IFF?” Sassinak smiled grimly: that wasn’t a new trick, and bridge crew all knew it. But it was nice to have credit somewhere. Too bad that she discovered a minor leak in the detox input filter line, and had to file a report on the very tech who’d been defending her.
The environmental system was, in fact, a nagging worry. Among the modifications made on station, a rerouting of most of the main lines had meant shifting them into cramped, hard-to-inspect compartments rather than out in the open where inspection was easy. Sassinak remembered her first cruise, and the awkwardness of it. Supposedly the equipment now mounted in midline was worth it, in the protection it gave from enemy surveillance, but if the environmental system failed, they would have a miserable trip back - if they survived. Sassinak glared at the big gray cylinders that lay in recesses originally meant for pipelines. They’d better work. In the meantime, either because of the less efficient layout, with its more variable line pressures, or because the line was harder to inspect, minor leaks repeatedly developed in one or another subsystem.