’em, I’d march ’er out the dorsal loading hatch as soon as let ’er keep breathing our good air.”
“She’s in this too,” said Boursy. “Bet you she wants us to win, too — look pretty damn stupid if we didn’t, what? Anyway, the woman’s got some kind of diplomatic status; she’s allowed to poke her nose into things if she wants.”
“Huh. Well, the bint had better keep her nose out of my missile loaders, less she wants to learn what the launch tubes look like from inside.”
Grubor stretched his legs out. “Just like Helsingus’s dog, huh.”
“Helsingus has a pet dog?” Boursy was suddenly all ears.
“He had a dog. Past tense. A toy schnauzer this long.” Grubor held his hands improbably close together.
“Little rat-brained weasel of an animal. Bad-tempered as hell, yapped like a bosun with a hangover, and it took to dumping in the corridor to show it owned the place. And nobody said anything — nobody could say anything.”
“What happened?” asked Boursy.
“Oh, one day it picked the wrong door to crap outside. The old man came out in a hurry and stepped in it before the rating I’d sent to follow the damn thing around got there to mop up. I heard about this, but I never saw the animal again; I think it got to walk home. And Helsingus sulked for weeks, I can tell you.”
“Dog curry in the wardroom,” said Kravchuk. “I had to pick hairs out of my teeth for days.” Boursy did a double take, then laughed hesitantly. Slugging back his schnapps to conceal his confusion, he asked: “Why did the Captain put up with it that long?”
“Who knows, indeed? For that matter, who the hell knows why the Admiral puts up with the foreign spy?” Grubor stared into his glass and sighed. “Maybe the Admiral actually wants her along. And then again, maybe he’s just forgotten about her …”
“Beg to report, I’ve got something, sir,” said the sensor op. He pointed excitedly at his plot on the bridge of the light cruiser Integrity.
Lieutenant Kokesova looked up, bleary-eyed. “What is it now, Menger?” he demanded. Six hours on this interminable dog-watch was getting to him. He rubbed his eyes, red-rimmed, and tried to focus them on his subordinate.
“Plot trace, sir. Looks like … hmm, yes. It’s a definite return, from the first illumination run on our survey sector. Six-point-two-three light-hours. Er, yes. Tiny little thing. Processing now … looks like a metal object of some kind, sir. Orbiting about two-point-seven billion kilometers out from the, uh, primary, pretty much at opposition to us right now, hence the delay.”
“Can you fix its size and orbital components?” asked the Lieutenant, leaning forward.
“Not yet, but soon, sir. We’ve been pinging on the hour; that should give me enough to refine a full set of elements pretty soon — say when the next response set comes in. But it’s a long way away, ‘bout four-zero astronomical units. Um, preliminary enhancement says it’s about five-zero meters in diameter, plus or minus an order of magnitude. Might be a lot smaller than that if it’s got reflectors.”
“Hmm.” Kokesova sat down. “Nav. You got anything else in this system that fits the bill?”
“No, sir.”
Kokesova glanced up at the forward screen; the huge red-rimmed eye of the primary glared back at him, and he shuddered, flicked a hand gesture to avert the evil eye. “Then I think we may have our time capsule. Menger, do you have any halo objects? Anything else at all?”
“No, sir.” Menger shook his head. “Inner system’s clean as a slate. It’s unnatural, you ask me. Nothing there except this object.”
Kokesova stood again and walked over to the sensor post. “One of these days you’re going to have to learn how to complete a sentence, Menger,” he said tiredly.
“Yes, sir. Humbly apologize for bad grammar, sir.”
All was silent in the ops room for ten minutes, save for the scribble of Menger’s stylus on his input station, and the clack of dials turning beneath skillful fingertips. Then a low whistle.
“What is it?”
“Got confirmation, sir. Humbly report you might want to see this.”
“Put it on the main screen, then.”
“Aye aye.” Menger pushed buttons, twisted knobs, scribbled some more. The forward screen, previously fixed on the hideous red eye, dissolved into a sea of pink mush. A single yellow dot swam in the middle of it; near one corner, a triangle marked the ship’s position. “This is an unenhanced lidar map of what’s in front of us. Sorry it’s so vague, but the scale is huge — you could drop the whole of home system into one quadrant, and it’s taken us a week to build this data set. Anyway, here’s what happens when I run my orbital-period filter in the plane of the ecliptic.” He pushed a button. A green line rotated through the mush, like the hour hand of a clock, and vanished.
“I thought you said you’d found something.” Kokesova sounded slightly peeved.
“Er, yes, sir. Just a moment. Nothing there, as you see. But then I reran the filter for inclined circular orbits.” A green disc appeared near the edge of the haze, and tilted slowly. Something winked violet, close to the central point, then vanished again. “There it is. Really small, orbit inclined at almost nine-zero degrees to the plane of the ecliptic. Which is why it took us so long to spot it.”
“Ah.” Kokesova stared at the screen for a moment, a warm glow of satisfaction spreading through him.
“Well, well, well.” Kokesova stared at the violet dot for a long time before he picked up the intercom handset. “Corams: get me the Captain. Yes, I know he’s aboard the Lord Vanek. I have something I think the brass will want to hear about …”
Procurator Vassily Muller paused outside the cabin door and took a deep breath. He rapped on the door once, twice: when there was no response he tried to turn the handle. It refused to budge. He breathed out, then let a fine loop of stiff wire drop down his right sleeve and ran it into the badge slot. It was just like the training schooclass="underline" a momentary flash of light and the handle rotated freely. He tensed instinctively, fall-out from the same conditioning (which had focused on search and seizure ops, mist and night abductions in a damp stone city where the only constants were fear and dissent).
The cabin was tidy: not as tidy as a flyer’s, policed by sharp-tongued officers, but tidy enough. The occupant, a creature of habit, was at lunch and would not be back for at least fifteen minutes. Vassily took it all in with wide eyes. There were no obvious signs of fine wires or hairs anchored to the doorframe: he stepped inside and pulled the door to.
Martin Springfield had few possessions on the Lord Vanek: symptomatic of his last-minute conscription.
What he had was almost enough to make Vassily jealous: his own presence here was even less planned, and he’d a lot of time to bitterly regret having misunderstood the Citizen’s Socratic warning (“What have you forgotten?” to a man searching a ship about to depart!); nevertheless, he had a job to do, and enough residual professionalism to do it properly. It didn’t take Vassily long to exhaust the possibilities: the only thing to catch his attention was the battered grey case of the PA, sitting alone in the tiny desk drawer beneath the cabin’s workstation.
He turned the device over carefully, looking for seams and openings. It resembled a hardback book: microcapsules embedded in each page changed color, depending what information was loaded into it at the time. But no book could answer to its master’s voice, or rebalance a ship’s drive kernel. The spine — he pushed, and after a moment of resistance it slid upward to reveal a compartment with some niches in it. One of them was occupied.