"Sorry, Melly," Prescott said with a smile. "Just thinking, is all."
"About all the nice medals for El Dorado?" she teased.
"No," the admiral said quietly. "Or, yes, in a way. I'm just hoping we get home to collect them."
"Admiral," Kolontai said with the respectful familiarity of almost two years service as his flag captain, "the Terran Cross is as good as on your chest."
"I'd like to think so, but right now I'd settle for the Plazatoro Award," Prescott replied, and his companions laughed. The Plazatoro Award was the fictitious medal awarded to the officer who ran away the fastest.
"Then ask for it, Sir," Kolontai advised. "After this, the Navy will give you anything you want."
"Wait a minute, Andy," Dr. Soo said, her voice as much that of his chief surgeon as of his friend. "Why the gloom? We've got the data. We're headed home, using only warp points we scouted on the way out, so we won't get lost. Come on, confess. What's eating you badly enough to distract you from a pinochle game?"
"It's an admiral's job to worry, Doctor," Kolontai answered for him. "And at the moment, he's worried we may stub our toe on a Bug battle force at the last minute."
"Isn't that sort of unlikely?"
"Unlikely? Of course." Prescott shook his head. "But it was 'unlikely' that Captain Vargas and Small Claw Maariaah would run into a Bug home hive only two transits from Rehfrak. Or that the Bugs would stumble onto two closed warp points in a row and hit Kliean. Just the fact that these warp lines are new to us and there weren't any Bugs-that we know of-around on the way out doesn't mean there won't be any on the way back. And remember what I told you about their cloaked picket ships. It's remotely possible one of them spotted us on our way through in the first place, you know. Or that one could spot us now if we happen to run through a system they know about."
"But if they knew about any of the systems we've explored, then surely they would have explored them themselves," Soo protested. "And if they'd done that, they'd know about the closed warp point from El Dorado. But they don't, because if they did, they would have fortified it just as heavily as they did everything else in that system!"
"You're undoubtedly correct that they don't know about the closed point," Prescott conceded. "I can't conceive of anyone, even a Bug admiral-if there are Bug admirals-leaving an opening like that for any reason at all. But as I also mentioned to you, Admiral LeBlanc's people have concluded, partly on the basis of information not available to me, that the Bugs simply don't explore as extensively as we do. As I understand the logic, LeBlanc thinks it's a conscious security decision on their part. The further they expand in peacetime, the more risk there is of running into another sentient race-like us. And the more they explore in wartime, the greater the risk that they'll contact the enemy somewhere they don't want to, which seems to be what happened initially at Centauri."
Soo snorted, and Prescott cocked an eyebrow at her.
"I suppose it's inevitable that anything that looks like a Bug would prefer to sit like a spider at the heart of its web until the opposition comes to it," she said sourly, and he gave a brief, mirthless chuckle.
"You could put it that way, I guess. But the point is that their explored space could intersect the warp lines we've scouted at any point without their necessarily having fanned out down them the way we would."
"Which is why we're at Condition Two," Kolontai told her. "And why we're expending almost as many RD2s probing warp points on our way home as we did on the way out, and why we go to General Quarters whenever we make transit. Mind you, the odds are with us, but the Admiral-" the Novaya Rodinian nodded at Prescott "-is paid to sweat bullets over things like that so mere captains like me don't have to. All we have to worry about is being killed, which is a much more minor concern."
"I see." And Dr. Soo did see. She'd known, intellectually, that the flotilla was moving homeward with all the caution it had shown on the way out, but somehow euphoria had blinded her to the fact that they might just as easily be intercepted on the way home.
"Don't worry, Melly," Prescott said. "Like Kadya says, the odds are with us. It's just part of my job to worry about the things that won't happen as well as the ones that will."
The flotilla drove onward, moving at the highest economical speed consonant with the maximum efficiency of its cloaking systems and slowing only to probe each warp point with exquisite care before making transit. They weren't surveying now, and after four weeks they were close to halfway home. Of course, "close" was a more than usually relative term in the topsy-turvy geometry of warp transit, and there was no telling which warp point might suddenly disclose a Bug task force, no matter how "close" to L-169 they were. But optimism rose steadily, however subjective its justification, as they raced along without incident.
Yet one man resisted that optimism: the man in the worry seat. Andrew Prescott began losing weight, and Dr. Soo chided him and prescribed a high caloric diet. But behind her teasing, she began to worry secretly about his stability. Yet he passed every response analysis with flying colors, and she concluded that it was only an acute case of fully understandable tension. So her log indicated, but in the silence of her own thoughts, she wondered if it was something more. It was as if he had some private information channel and actually expected to meet the Bugs, and his attitude worried her.
It worried her most because she was afraid he might just be right.
Andrew Prescott sat quietly, watching his display. There was no logical reason for the tension curdling his spine. The RD2s had functioned flawlessly as they scouted the warp point before them, for it was a type three, with relatively mild stresses which had been thoroughly charted on their outward journey months before. The probes had searched the space on the far side of the warp point to the full range of their prodigiously sensitive scanners and found absolutely nothing. And yet he couldn't shake his sense of apprehension, of the universe holding its breath. Perhaps it was because the upcoming transit would mark the exact halfway point of their voyage home, he told himself, but deep inside he knew it was more than that.
Damn it, what was wrong with him? He sensed his staff watching his back, felt their curiosity, not yet strong enough to be called concern, as they wondered why he hesitated over the order to make transit, and there was nothing at all he could have explained to them. He leaned back and once more found himself wishing he could confide in Soo. Melly was levelheaded, if not a trained tactician. Maybe she could shake him out of this. But she was also his chief surgeon, and he'd recognized the concern under her teasing. If she thought he was coming unglued, she'd do her duty and yank him out of the line of command in a minute, and how could he expect her not to decide he was losing it when all he had was a "hunch" he couldn't describe even to himself.
He reached for his pipe and looked at his link to Concorde's command deck.
"All right, Kadya," he told his flag captain calmly. "Start sending them through."
SF 62 forged steadily across the nameless system towards the next warp point on its list, just under five light-hours from its warp point of entry, and Prescott felt himself begin to relax ever so slightly as nothing happened.