Probably because he figures he is in their database now , Duan thought sarcastically. But his sarcastic amusement faded quickly. Finding yourself in the Manty Navy's database under the heading of previously arrested pirate or slaver was a virtual guarantee of the death sentence the second time they apprehended you.
"There's not any reason they should recognize us," he said, looking Egervary in the eye. "If they didn't spot us doing anything we shouldn't have been doing in Split, there's no reason for them to have done anything except check our transponder code. Why waste time taking a close look at one more rusty tramp-especially one that heads out of the system within less than nine hours of your own arrival? Right?"
Egervary looked at him for a moment, then gave a jerky nod.
"All right, then." Duan turned to Sandkaran. "Have we contacted Flight Control yet, Iakovos?"
"No," Sandkaran said, shaking his head.
"And we haven't started squawking our transponder code yet, right?" Another headshake. "Good. Let's crank up a new -transponder-the Golden Butterfly , I think. Get it ready, then contact Flight Control and request a parking orbit as Butterfly . Don't put the transponder on-line until they call you back up and whack you on the wrist for not having it up. Be a little crabby when they do, like a typical lazy merchant spacer. Then put the Butterfly code up. By the time we actually make orbit, the Manty should already have been informed by Flight Control that we're coming under our new name."
"What should I give them for purpose of visit?"
"Good question." Duan thought for a moment, then snorted. "Whatever this guy's doing here, I don't propose to do anything that could make him suspicious of us. The customers waiting on this planet don't know exactly when we're supposed to arrive, anyway. They won't think anything one way or the other if we don't contact them with the right ID code. So I think this time our hatches will just stay sealed nice and tight. If the Combine had a shipping agent on the planet, I'd try telling them we were just dropping off a company message on our way through. Unfortunately, we don't have an agent here. So I think our best bet is to haul out that busted oxygen tank."
Understanding showed in Sandkaran's eyes. Annette actually chuckled, and even Egervary cracked a slight smile. Marianne carried a severely damaged liquid oxygen tank everywhere she went. It was her excuse for stopping at planets where she couldn't produce a legitimate cargo or other reason for being there. The tank was identical to the ones in her life-support plant, and stopping to replace something like that at the earliest possible moment would make sense for any merchantship. Especially for a freighter as dilapidated as Marianne appeared to be, since such a ship would undoubtedly be operating on a thinner safety margin than better maintained vessels.
"Be sure you declare an emergency and explain its nature when you call up Flight Control, Iakovos," Duan directed.
"Do you think Westman's going to call it quits?" Aikawa Kagiyama asked quietly.
He and Helen were sitting at the tactical station. Officially, they had the tac watch, since The Book required Tactical to be manned at all times aboard Manticoran warships. Since absolutely nothing was likely to happen at the moment, it made sense to give both Lieutenant Commander Kaplan and Lieutenant Hearns some downtime. It was also an opportunity for a couple of snotties to get a little more "independent" tac time on their logs. So, officially, Helen was Tac Officer of the Watch with Aikawa as her assistant.
Now she glanced at him quizzically, and he shrugged.
"I'm not asking you to betray any confidences, Helen. On the other hand, do you really think there's anyone in the ship who hasn't figured out roughly why we hurried our buns back here so quickly? Or that the Skipper and Van Dort must've had some reason to go dirt-side and see him again?"
"Well, put that way, I guess not," she admitted.
Now that she thought about it, Aikawa and Ragnhild had put remarkably little energy into bugging her for details. The other two denizens of Snotty Row didn't count. Paulo, of course, never tried to weasel information out of her, and Leo Sottmeister had been left behind on Kornati, along with Hexapuma's third pinnace and Lieutenant Kelso's platoon.
But apparently Aikawa's curiosity had finally gotten the better of his-limited-ability to control it. She looked back at the main plot without really seeing it and considered what she'd seen and heard.
"I don't know what he's going to decide, Aikawa," she said finally, slowly. "I'll tell you this, though. He isn't a bit like Nordbrandt must be. I figure he could be as stubborn and as dangerous as they come over something he really believes in. And I think he really believed in keeping us out of Montana when he started all this. But I'm not so sure he does, anymore. Or, at least, I think he's figured out it's not as black-and-white as he thought it was. I guess the real question's whether or not he's flexible enough to admit we're not the original font of all evil and be sensible about this."
"And do you think he is?"
"I don't know," she repeated honestly. "I hope so, but I wouldn't even venture a guess at this point."
"What I was afraid of," Aikawa sighed. "I guess it would have been too easy for-"
He broke off as a soft chime sounded and an icon on the tactical plot changed. He and Helen both looked at it.
"' Golden Butterfly ,'" Aikawa repeated, reading the name which had appeared as the incoming merchantship brought its transponder on-line and CIC updated the plot. "They think up some pretty screwy names for merchies, don't they?"
"See?" Duan smiled as Montana System Flight Control accepted their ID and the ostensible reason for their visit. The pleasant young woman who'd taken their call hadn't even fussed very hard over the previous absence of any transponder code, and Sandkaran had been suitably apologetic. Now he was turning the microphone over to Azadeh Shirafkin, Marianne's-or, for the moment, Golden Butterfly's-purser.
"I told you," Duan went on to De Chabrol and Egervary as the young woman made sympathetic noises over Shirafkin's explanation of their supposed emergency. "We'll just slide in under their radar horizon by not calling any attention to ourselves, pick up our new oxygen tank, and then-very quietly-get the hell out of here again."
"It works for me," Egervary said fervently.
Aikawa Kagiyama felt bored. Standing a tactical watch was all very well, but it would have been nice if there'd been something a bit more energetic than Montana's anemic traffic to keep an eye on. Even the arrival of a typical tramp for a routine repair call was a welcome diversion... which said something significant about just how boring things had been before the weirdly named Golden Butterfly arrived.
For want of anything else to do, he decided to run a tracking exercise on the freighter, which was now less than fifteen minutes from entering orbit. She was moving at barely 1,703 KPS, and only 736,096 kilometers out, and he had an almost perfect sensor angle, right up the kilt of her wedge.
He studied the information on his display. Aside from the fact that her active sensor emissions seemed just a bit more energetic than he would have expected out of a ship like her, the data was thoroughly uninteresting. He almost pulled the sensors off of her, then shrugged. If he was bored, the ratings manning CIC probably were, as well. He might as well give them something to do, too, so he punched in the command for a routine evaluation of the ship.
He wasn't at all prepared for what came back a moment later.
Helen was no longer sitting at Tactical. Lieutenant Commander Kaplan was, and Helen actually found it a bit difficult to see the plot from where she stood. Perhaps that was because Abigail Hearns, Guthrie Bagwell, Ansten FitzGerald, and Captain Terekhov were all crowded in, peering over Kaplan's shoulder as a noticeably nervous Aikawa took the lot of them back through his impromptu tracking exercise.
"... so, then, Ma'am, I asked CIC to do an evaluation. Just as a drill. I never expected to get this back from them."
He looked up at the circle of astronomically senior faces looming over him, and Captain Terekhov's hand gripped his shoulder.
"Good work, Aikawa," he said quietly. " Very good work."
"Skipper," Aikawa's face flushed with obvious pleasure, "I wish I deserved the credit. But it was just one of those things. I can't even say I had 'a feeling,' because I sure as heck didn't!"