“And with any luck less crew means they’re a little less alert to a tail.”
“I wish I knew how good their fire-control systems were,” said Arly, running a finger along the edge of the console. “If they’ve got anything like the Gamma system, we could be in trouble with them.”
“Are you advising me not to engage?” asked Sass. Arly’s face darkened a little. A senior weapons officer could give such advice, but under all the circumstances, it meant taking sides in the earlier argument: something Arly had refused to do.
“Not precisely… no. But they’ve got almost as much as we have, on a smaller hull with different movement capability. Normally I don’t have to worry about something that size - with all its mobility, it still can’t take us. But this - “ She tapped the display. “This could breach us, if they got lucky… and their speed and mobility increase the danger. Call it even odds, or a shade to their favor. I’d be glad to engage them, captain, but you need to be aware of all the factors.”
“I am.” Sassinak stretched, then shook the tension out of her hands. “And you’ll no doubt have a chance to test our ideas before long. If they’re short-crewed and short on environmental supplies, surely they’ll have a short FTL route picked out… it’s been eighteen days, now.”
“Speaking of environmental systems,” said Hollister gruffly. “That number nine scrubber’s leaking again. I could take it down and repack it, but that’d mean tying up a whole shift crew - “
Sassinak glanced at Huron. “Nav got any guesses on their destination?”
“Not a clue. Dhrossh is downright testy about queries, and about half the equation solutions don’t fit anything in the books.”
“Just keep an eye on the scrubber, then. We don’t want Engineering tied up if we’re suddenly on insystem drive with combat coming up.”
Another standard day passed, and another. None of the crew did anything but what she expected. No saboteur or subversive stood up to expound a doctrine of slavery and planet piracy. At least her relationship with Huron was better, and the other hotheads in the crew seemed to follow his lead. She was squatting on her heels beside the number nine scrubber, with Hollister, looking at a thin line of greasy liquid that had trickled down the outer casing, when the ship lurched slightly as the Ssli-controlled drive computers dropped them out of FTL.
Chapter Ten
By the time Sassinak reached the bridge, Huron had their location on the big display.
“Unmapped,” said Sassinak sourly.
“Officially unmapped,” agreed Huron. “Sector margins - you can see that both the nearest surveys don’t quite meet.”
“By a whole lot of useful distance,” said Sassinak. Five stars over that way, the Fleet survey codes were pink. Eight stars the other, the Fleet survey codes were light green. And nothing showed in the other vectors.
“Diverging cones don’t fill space,” said Huron. She glowered at him; she’d hit her head on the input connector of the scrubber when the call came in, and besides, she’d wanted to be on the bridge when they came into normal space.
“They could have, if those survey crews had been paying attention. This is one large survey anomaly out here.” Then it came to her. “I wonder, Huron, if this was missed, or left out on purpose.” He looked blank, and she went on. “By the same people who found it so handy to have an uncharted system to hide out in.”
“Who assigns survey sectors?” asked Arly.
“I don’t know, but I intend to find out.” Huron had already put the cruiser on fall stealth mode; Sassinak now tapped her own board into the Ssli biolink. Two more screens of data came up in front of her, high-lighted for easy recognition. “But after we deal with this - and without getting killed. I have the feeling that their detection systems out here will be very, very good.”
The ships they pursued had dropped out of FTL in the borders of a small star system: only five planets. The star itself was a nondescript little blip on the classification screen: small, dim, and, as Huron said, “as little there as a star can be.” In that first few minutes, their instruments revealed three large clusters of mass on “this” side of the star - presumably planets or planet-systems toward one of which their quarry moved.
They were still days from any of them. Sassinak insisted that their first concern had to be the detection systems the slavers used. “They wouldn’t assume anything: they’ll have some way to detect ships that happen to blunder in here.”
Huron frowned thoughtfully at the main display screen, now a shifting pattern of pale blues and greens as the Zaid-Dayan’s passive scans searched for any signs of data transmission. “We can’t hang around out here forever hunting for it - “
“No, we’re going in. But I want to surprise them.” Suddenly she grinned. “I think I know - did you ever live on a free-water world, Huron? Skip stones on water?”
“Yes, but - “
“Everyone sees the splash of the skips - and then the rock sinks, and disappears. We’ll make sure they see us - and then they don’t - and if we’re lucky it’ll look like someone in transit with a malfunctioning FTL drive, blipping in and out of normal space.”
“They’ll see that - “
“Yes. But with our special capabilities, they’re unlikely to spot us when we’re drifting. Suppose we get in really close to whatever planet they’re using - “
“It’d help if it had a moon, and if we knew which it was.” As the hours passed, and their tracking computers reworked the incoming data, it became clear where the others were going. A planet somewhat larger than Old Earth Standard, with several small moons and a ringbolt.
“The gods are with us this time,” said Sass. “Bless the luck of a complicated universe - that’s as unlikely a combination as I’ve seen, but perfect for creating unmappable chunks of debris…”
“Into which we can crunch,” pointed out Huron.
“Getting cautious in your old age. Lieutenant Commander?” Her question had a little bite to it, and he reddened.
“No, captain - but I’d prefer to take them with us.”
“I’d prefer to take them, and come home whole. That’s what we have Ssli assistance for.”
After careful calculation, Sassinak’s plan took them “through” the outer reaches of the system in a series of minute FTL skips, a route that taxed both the computers and the Ssli. With a last gut-wrenching hop, theZaid-Dayan came to apparent rest, drifting within a few kilometers of a large chunk of debris in the ring, its velocity not quite matched, as would be true of most chunks. Their scans began to pick up transmissions from the surface, apparently intended for the incoming slaver ships. At first, some kind of alarm message, about the skip - traces noted… but as the hours passed, it became clear that the surface base had not detected them, and had decided precisely what Sassinak had hoped: something had come through the system with a bad FTL drive, and was now somewhere else. In the meantime, the alarm message had activated beacons and outer defenses: Sassinak now knew exactly where the enemy’s watchers watched.
One of the moons had a small base, on the side that faced away from the planet, and a repeated station placed to relay communications to and from the surface. A single communications satellite circling the planet indicated that all settlement was confined to one hemisphere - and by the scans, to one small region.
“A big base,” was Arly’s comment, as scans also picked up weapon emplacements on the surface. “Their surface-to-space missiles we can handle. But those little ships are going to cause us trouble; they’ve got only one or two optical weapons each, but - “