The others turned to his end of the table. “The Old Planets?” asked Bridget ban.
Hugh gestured to the pocket-base he’d been filling. “The ICC runs through this like the drone of a bagpipe. They took the Dancer from January with little more than a promise. An incautious remark by one of their factors sent the Molnar on his doomed quest. They refurbished the engines on January’s freighter, and now he’s vanished. The Chettinads told you of incautious remarks they overheard. Either your phantom fleet represents a new player entirely, or the ICC recovered their stolen property—and the god Ockham prefers the latter. Who else but the ICC would have known why the Molnar left the Hadramoo, and been in position to intercept his return?”
“Grimpen!” said Bridget ban.
The others looked at her blankly, thinking it another of the odd words in her dialect. But Greystroke said, “What has Large-hound to do with this?”
“After the fight with the Molnar, Grimpen said that he was going to the Old Planets. He’s a methodical sort, not given to sudden flights of fancy. But what nugget of thought did he pluck out of the Molnar’s tale?”
The Fudir spoke up. “Chop and chel, folks. First first,” he said. “Alla bukkin where hole goes—bhōlā. Big dhik, miss front end. Alla blink-blink.”
“A pity,” said Hugh, “that translating implants are so expensive.”
“They’re no great edge when it comes to Terran,” the Hound said. “The patois is a pidgin of a dozen languages. But you’re right, Fudir. If we cannae go in the front end, we’ll ne’er come out the back. So let’s cover that first. Look here.” She activated a lenticel in the conference table and projected the chart she had recovered from Pulawayo’s files into a cubic that hovered above it. “People,” she said, “if you would come around to this side, please? Thank you. This is the point of view from Peacock at this time of their year. These stars I’ve highlighted in red form the constellation they call The Assayer; and this nebula is the one they call His Tail. D’ye see them?” They all nodded, Hugh and the Fudir with agreement; Greystroke because he had navigated through these skies many times.
“Here is where the phantom fleet disappeared. Peacock claims they lost track of the fleet, that it had entered a segment of sky that they did not monitor, or that their equipment failed, or that their STC controllers were distracted by the havoc on the Silk Road.”
Greystroke looked up. “Well, which was it?”
“It was hard to keep track o’ the excuses as they flittered by. Now, here are the tracks of a couple of dozen freighters over the past hektoday. As ye see, and correcting for sidereal drift, they all vanish or appear at the same locus.”
“Not too many points off the entrance ramp for the Silk Road if you take your heading off the Greater Fops,” said Greystroke.
“Aye, and that works tae our advantage. We can heigh as if for the Rift—Xhosa Broadfield lies off the Palisades—but turn aside before the final approaches and pull for the farther point.”
Greystroke pulled his lip. “And if you’re wrong, and we try it, we’re all blinked. Your STC records show us where the entrance was and a certain amount of calculation can approximate where it’s gone; but ‘approximate’ isn’t good enough. Sidereal drift is sensitive to initial conditions and the equations have no analytical solution. ‘The Ricci tensors are all agley,’” he added, imitating her dialect.
“A ramp acts as a gravitational lens,” the Fudir pointed out. “You can pinpoint its location without an ephemeris by checking for parallax shifts and the doubling of background stars behind it.” When they all turned to look at him, he shrugged. “I really do hold a rating as an instrument tech.”
“Then after we’re in the groove,” Bridget ban added, “we maun track the phantom fleet from their fossil images, to learn where they turn off. Who knows how many side channels this road has?”
Greystroke knew which ship had the better imaging equipment. The Fates were subtle indeed, for they had led him to take up the hobby years before in preparation for this day. “Then I take the point, and Fudir stays with me,” he said.
Bridget ban agreed to take Little Hugh O’Carroll with her, and she tried not to smile at the prospect and made sure that Hugh saw that she had tried not to smile.
During the long climb toward Electric Avenue aboard the Hound’s ship, Hugh amused himself by preparing lists; and Bridget ban by preparing him. While he tabulated and crossreferenced everything that the team had learned about the Dancer, she tabulated in a more quiet way everything she learned about him. It was far too easy. She saw that in Hugh’s sometimes self-conscious behavior in the confines of her ship. All that wanted was the right moment for him to seize, and she set about providing it.
Their first day out did not bring them together until dinnertime. Bridget ban stayed in the control room coordinating the magbeam booster schedule with Peacock Roads Traffic and fine-tuning the ship’s onboard power reception. Later, she went belowdecks to the power room and ran the readiness tests on the alfvens. She emerged finally to find that Hugh had prepared a dinner for the two of them.
Nothing exotic: a type of fish called a “colby,” found in the great freshwater sea on Dave Hatchley. He had assembled the filet from the vats, coated and broiled it, and served it with an assortment of familiar vegetables. Like her, he seemed to prefer the plain and simple.
“I don’t know why you bother going down to the power room to run the tests,” he said when they had settled to the table. “Can’t the intelligence run them for you?”
Bridget ban separated the flakes of the colby with her fork. “This will be a tricky approach. There are no marker buoys, no quasar benchmarks to steer by; so the engines must be as finely tuned as possible. The intelligence knows only what the instruments tell it. It can nae ken if the instruments are agley.” She waved the fork. “Always run the standards,” she admonished him.
“I shall,” he said, “should I ever grow daft enough to try for astrogation.”
Bridget ban laughed more than the wit warranted and touched him briefly on the back of his hand. She made careful note of how he responded to the touch and on what his eyes involuntarily fell. By the next day, she had programmed her anycloth to accentuate those areas, arranging everything a little tighter, a little higher, and a little lower.
At his request, she pulled up a map of the South Central Periphery and displayed it on the holowall in the conference room, which consequently took on the aspect of infinite depth. She also gave him access to the ship’s open-source databases. “Just be careful,” she said, rapping her knuckles on endless space, “not to walk into the wall.”
He chuckled. “It does look real. Can I shift the point of view?”
She moved inside his personal space. “Just tell the ship the origin and direction of the view you want. For fine-tuning, use this glove and watch where its icon appears in the wall. Then, push or pull on the image. When you shift your point of view, the stars change to account for light-lag, up to my last gazetteer update. Here, do you see that star?” She touched it with her virtual finger. “Watch what happens when I zoom toward it.” She curled her finger and pulled the view forward and they seemed to race through Newtonian space faster than the speed of space. Hugh staggered a little, his balance confused, and Bridget ban placed her left hand on his waist to steady him. “It takes some getting used to,” she said, meaning the cascading stars, not her hand. Hugh opened his mouth to say something—and the star suddenly blossomed.