“Station scans faded below detection; no other scans detected,” Ginese said. He glanced at her, brows raised.
Heris had considered whether to wait until they made the first jump transition to bring the weapons up, but that had its own risk. If they were unlucky, they could come out of jumpspace into trouble. “Weapons to Code Three,” she said.
“Sir,” said Ginese; now his board had a row of scarlet dots at the top, with green columns below. He grinned. “The tree’s lit, Captain.”
“Thank you, Mr. Ginese,” said Heris formally; she grinned back at him. “Now if we—”
“Oh, shit.” No one had to ask what had happened; all the boards showed it. A ship—a large ship, armed, its weapons ready, had just dropped into the system and painted them with its scans. And there they were, their own illicit weaponry up and active, as detectable as a searchlight on a dark night. “Douse it?”
“Too late,” Heris said. “We’d look even more suspicious if we blanked. We shouldn’t be detecting their scans. What is it?” Their scans should be as good—and the other ship wouldn’t know they had such accurate scans. She hoped.
“Big—military—armed to the teeth, light cruiser. If we’re lucky it’s a Royal ASS ship full of rich playboys. Lemme see—”
“Dumping vee like anything,” Oblo commented. “They came in really hot, and they don’t care who knows it. That turbulence pattern’s a lot like—”
“Corsair class. Not Royals. Regs. Standard assortment up—” Which meant about half the total armament. Heris felt a pang of longing and pushed it away. She had had the bridge of a Corsair Class cruiser . . . she knew exactly what that captain would be seeing. And thinking.
“Time to jump status?” she asked.
Sirkin glanced at her. “Emergency, like at Rockhouse?” She didn’t wait for an answer; her fingers were flying on her board, calling up the data. “Naverrn’s a little more massive, and there’s that satellite; we should use their combined center of mass for the calculation . . .” Heris didn’t interrupt; she had her eye on the other ship’s plot as the data points multiplied.
“She’ll have her data coming back from us,” Ginese said. “She’s still on course for Naverrn.”
“The angle isn’t wide enough yet,” Heris said. “Got a beacon strip?”
“Just—now. Fleet beacon . . . now let me see, what did they say the encryption key was?”
Even in the crisis, that got Heris’s attention. “You got the encryption key as well as the other stuff?”
“Wouldn’t be near as useful without. Ah. Yes. Regular Space Service, we knew that. Corsair Class light cruiser, we knew that. Martine Scolare, we didn’t know that, and commanded by Arash Livadhi. Worse luck.”
“Too true.” Heris stared at the scan, and wished it different. The Livadhi family had as long a history in the Fleet as Serranos; a Markos Livadhi had commanded through most of the campaign that established the Familias Regnant.
“Arash Livadhi,” said Petris. “That means Esteban Koutsoudas as scanner one. We are really in a nest of comets.” Koutsoudas was himself a legend, known for building up entire ships from the faintest data.
“Fourteen minutes, seventeen seconds,” Sirkin said. “At our present acceleration and course.”
To run or not to run. With Livadhi commanding, with Koutsoudas on scan, the Fleet vessel could not miss them and would not ignore them. The Fleet vessel had a considerable excess of vee; it might find maneuver difficult. Or it might not; a cruiser was by no means as clumsy as a freighter of the same mass.
“Eleven minutes, twenty six seconds at maximum acceleration,” Sirkin said, answering the next question Heris would have asked. Good for her, Heris thought. If we get out of this I’ll tell her so.
If they ran, they’d look guilty. But they looked guilty now—she could easily imagine what Arash Livadhi was thinking, arriving insystem to find an absurdly small freighter lighting up his scans with weapons that belonged on his own cruiser. He’d be asking Naverrn Station about them, and Naverrn Station wouldn’t have any answers to satisfy him. His curly red hair would be standing up in peaks already; the incredible Koutsoudas (she remembered coveting Koutsoudas for her own crew) would be checking their signature against his personal memory of tens of thousands of ship signatures. Had he ever scanned Cecelia’s ship? If so, he would know who they really were. Or did they already—had they been sent here to intercept?
If they ran, they might reach a safe distance for jump transition before Livadhi’s equally trained weapons crews could get them. Especially since he’d have to contact them first. But if they ran, he’d follow. If they didn’t run, maybe they could brazen it out.
“They have nothing against us,” murmured Petris, not giving advice but stating his knowledge.
They could answer the hail that was surely coming; they could spin out a plausible story long enough to make the jump point . . . maybe. Livadhi had always been one to check every detail; he would want not only code but voice communication; not only voice but visual—and there it would all fall apart. Heris felt cold all over. No mere change of uniform would work with Livadhi: he knew her. They had served together as junior officers on the Moreno Divide. Moreover, he knew Petris and Ginese by sight; he had been aboard her ship several times, and they’d both been on the bridge. And if he had followed the courts-martial (or any of his bridge crew had) he would know every face on this ship but Sirkin’s. Could Sirkin play the role of captain for the time it would take? No. Heris could not ask that.
“Arash Livadhi knows us,” Heris said. She advanced power, pushing the insystem drive to the limit listed for the Better Luck. She had another ten gravs of acceleration in reserve, but using them would reveal that the beacon data were false. She saw on every face but Sirkin’s the recognition. Then came the hail she expected, as if in response to the change in acceleration, though she knew it had originated before. She sent in reply the standard coded message. Oblo grunted.
“They’ve stripped our beacon. Took ’em long enough.”
“I wish I knew if they’d queried the Station yet.” Livadhi tended to do things in order, but he had his own flashes of brilliance. If the delay in stripping their beacon meant he’d tight beamed the Station and waited for a reply, he could have known about the disappearance of the prince and his double . . . although Heris hoped no one had noticed yet. The shuttle to the planet wasn’t supposed to leave for another eleven standard hours, and she had expected no real search for him until a few hours before boarding. She’d counted on that delay to get out of reach. But he would have the ship’s identity as they’d given it to the station; he would have something to compare that beacon blurt with. Worst case, the station might even have sent visuals of the Better Luck’s captain.
Heris stared at the display, which attempted to simplify the complex spatial relationships of both ships and the Station, and the planetary mass. The cruiser decelerating relative to the planet; the Better Luck accelerating away; the interlocking rotations of planet and satellite and Station. Once the scan computer had plotted the cruiser’s course and decel pattern, it displayed blue; changes would come up highlighted in orange. She hoped to see nothing but blue until they jumped, but she expected at any moment an ominous flare.
“Time?” she asked Sirkin.
“Ten minutes four seconds,” Sirkin said. Blast. Livadhi was reacting as quickly as ever. And why was he here, anyway? No R.S.S. presence had been expected; nothing the king had given her showed any planned activity near Naverrn at all. Unless this was the king’s double cross. It seemed entirely possible.