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CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
HMS Fearless spiraled gently outward and settled into her new orbit without fuss or bother, and a cutter departed her boat bay and scudded away towards a mammoth Manticoran-registry freighter with a formal, written invitation for the ships master to join Commander Harrington for supper. The merchant skipper would no doubt be astonished byand possibly a little apprehensive overthat invitation, but none of the people on Fearlesss bridge gave him a thought or paid the cutter much heed. Their attention was bent upon their readouts as passive instrumentation probed cautiously at PMSS Sirius.
She was a big ship, Honor mused, watching her own visual display from her command chair. Fearless herself could have been stowed comfortably in one of the freighters main holds, and that sort of carrying capacity lent weight to Santoss observation. Letting that much ship sit idle any longer than you had to was like pouring money straight out the airlock. No ownernot even a government bureaucracy like Havens Ministry of Tradewould do that without a very good reason.
She leaned back and glanced across at the tactical station. Cardones and McKeon had their heads together over the main sensor console, and Webster was equally intent on his communications panels. If any message traffic was going out from that ship, it was on a tight beam, and tight beams were hellishly hard to detect, but the com officers fingers moved like a surgeons as he gentled his computers through the search. If there was even a whisker beam out there, Webster would find it. Honor was certain of that.
An intercom signal beeped from her panel, and she depressed the stud on her chair arm.
"Bridge. Captain speaking," she said.
"Skipper, we got a good relay from Tacticals visual search down here" Dominica Santoss answering voice sounded excited "and Im replaying the scan of Siriuss after nodes on my screen. I dont see any pitting or scoring, and the date stamp isnt visible, but I can tell you theres something really strange about them."
Nimitz bleeked softly in Honors ear, but she shushed him with a gentle stroke of her fingers.
"Can you relay your imagery to my display, Dominica?"
"Sure thing, Maam. Just a sec." Honors display blanked as Sirius vanished from it, then relit almost at once with a frozen, hugely magnified view of the freighters after hull. One of her drive nodes, smaller than a pinhead against the ships stupendous size in the main visual display, filled the center of the screen, and Honor frowned. Something about that image looked subtly wrong, somehow, but she couldnt quite put her mental finger on the discrepancy.
"What is it, Dominica?" she asked after a moment.
"Its a lot bigger than it ought to be, thats what it is, Maam, and the whole things shaped wrong," Santos replied. "Look." A cursor blipped onto the display, indicating the point at which the node passed through Siriuss outer plating, and Honor cocked her head as she noted the wide, soot-black band of shadow. "See that gap around the base of the node head? That shouldnt be there. And look here." The cursor vanished, and a bright green line arced up the side of the exposed node. It started out flush with the nodes base, but then it curved much more sharply inward. By the time it reached the nodes rounded apex, over a third of the nodes total mass lay beyond the line.
"Thats a normal node profile, Skipper," Santos said, manipulating the green line to make it flash. "This things way too broad for its length, and its not just a design peculiarity. You cant build one with this profilethe physics wont let you. Besides, look here." The cursor reappeared, pointing to a thick, blunt cylinder protruding a slight distance from the end of the node. "Thats the main grav coil, and that thing is almost twice as big in diameter as it ought to be for a node this size. That cross sections better suited to a superdreadnought than any freighter drive Ive ever seen, and if they powered it up with no more governor housing than we see, itd slag the entire after hull."
"I see." Honor stared down at the display, rubbing her nose. "On the other hand, theyve obviously built what were looking at, and they got here under their own power."
"I know," Santos replied, "but I think thats where the gap around the node base comes in. I think the damned things on some kind of ram. When they power up, they run the rest of the nodethe part we cant see because of the platingout to clear the hull. Thats why the openings so large; the node heads greatest width is still inside the outer skin, and they have to get it outboard for safe operation. Skipper, thats a pretty well camouflaged military-grade impeller node, or Ill eat my main engineering console."
"Very good, Dominica," Honor murmured. She gazed at the imagery for a moment longer, then nodded. "Make me the best estimate you can of their actual acceleration capabilityimpeller and Warshawski modeand write it up. Make sure you save all your data, too. Well want to pass it on to BuShips for evaluation."
"Aye, aye, Maam." Santos cut the circuit, and Honor looked up to find McKeon standing beside her chair, his eyebrows raised.
"Commander Santos says we have a definite discrepancy here, Mr. McKeon," she said, and the exec nodded.
"Yes, Maam. I caught the last little bit of your conversation. And Ive got something to add, too. Lieutenant Cardones and I have determined that Siriuss nodes are hot."
It was Honors turn to feel her eyebrows rise. "Could it be a systems test?"
"I dont think so, Maam. Were reading a full standby load on all the alpha and beta nodes on this side of her hull, fore and aft both. A systems test would probably run up just the alphas or the betas, not both. And why should they test both the forward and after nodes simultaneously? Besides, the power levels held steady for over ten minutes now."
Honor leaned back to regard him pensively and saw her own thoughts flicker behind his gray eyes. There was no regulation against a ships holding her impeller drive at standby in parking orbit, but it was almost unheard of. Power was relatively cheap aboard a starship, but even the best fusion plant needed reactor mass, and impeller energy demands were high, even at standby. Maintaining that sort of load when you didnt need to was a good way to run up your overhead. Nor was it good for the equipment. Your engineers couldnt carry out routine maintenance while the drive was hot, and the components themselves had limited design lives. Holding them at standby when you didnt need to would certainly reduce their life spans, and that, again, ran up overhead.
All of which meant no freighter captain would hold his drive at standby without a very compelling reason. But a warships captain might. It took almost forty minutes to bring your impeller wedge up from a cold start; by starting with hot nodes, you could reduce that to little more than fifteen minutes.
"Thats very interesting, Mr. McKeon," Honor murmured.
"Curiouser and curiouser, Maam," McKeon agreed. "Oversized impeller nodes and a full standby load. Sounds to me like youve got your discrepancy if you want to go aboard, Captain."
"Maybe, and maybe not." Honor nibbled her lower lip and felt Nimitz nip her earlobe as he detected her worry. She grinned and hoisted him down into her lap to protect her ears, then sobered once more as she looked back up at McKeon.
"The problem is that nothing requires them to give us the real specs on their drive," she pointed out, "and no law says they have to build a freighter whose drive makes economic sense. The fact that their nodes are live and dont show the sort of wear we ought to see if theyve got tuner failure would certainly seem to argue that they lied to Warlock about the nature of their engineering problems, but thats all weve got. A good lawyer could probably argue that away, and wed have to admit that they havent even sent a shuttle down to the planetor anywhere else, for that matterin over two and a half months. Without their making physical contact with anyone else, we can hardly accuse them of smuggling. Theyve just sat here in orbit, minding their own business like good little law-abiding merchant spacers. That means our probable cause is still awfully weak, and I still have reservations about tipping our hand, as well."
She rubbed Nimitzs ears, wrestling with an unaccustomed indecisiveness. On the one hand, she could probably justify, however thinly, sending an examining party on the basis of her observational data. But if she did, and if the Havenites truly were up to something, theyd know she suspected that they were. And theyd be certain to lodge all sorts of diplomatic protests. What bothered her most was her inability to decide whether it was fear of revealing her suspicions or fear of the protests which most daunted her. She thought it was the former, but a nagging little voice wondered if it werent the latter.
She closed her eyes, making herself stand back and consider the options with all the detachment she could muster. The real problem was that, under interstellar law, the freighters master could still refuse her inspectors entry, whatever she cited as probable cause, unless she had evidence that theyd violated Manticoran law or posed a direct threat to Manticoran security, and nothing she had constituted an actual criminal violation. If Captain Coglin refused her the right to board his ship, her only options would be to accept the slap in the face or expel Sirius from Manticoran space. She had the authority to do that to any ship which refused to allow her examination, with or without probable cause, should she so choose, but it was an action she would have to justify to the Admiralty, and she could just see the headlines it would provoke. "RMN EXPELS MERCHANT SHIP WITH DEFECTIVE DRIVE." "FREIGHTER SENT TO DIE IN HYPER BY HEARTLESS MANTICORAN OFFICER." "HAVEN PROTESTS HARRINGTONs INHUMAN EXPULSION OF DAMAGED FREIGHTER."
She shuddered at the thought, but she rather thought she could face the fallout if it came to that. Lord knew some of the news services back home had already had some fairly terrible things to say about herespecially the ones Hauptman and his cronies controlled! Yet the real cruncher was that while she might put a crimp into Havens plans if she did expel Sirius, she would neither learn what those plans might have been nor insure that they couldnt be reactivated some other way. And it seemed likely that anything as involved as this appeared to bewhatever it was!would have built-in backups, and that meant
"Captain?"
She opened her eyes to find Webster standing beside McKeon.
"Yes, Mr. Webster?"
"Excuse me, Maam, but I thought youd want to know this. Theres a three-cornered secure com net between Sirius, the Haven consulate, and the consulates courier boat, Maam." Honor cocked her head, and Webster gave a small shrug. "I cant tell you much more than that, Skipper. Theyre using mighty tight-focused lasers, not regular com beams, and theres not much traffic. Ive deployed a couple of passive remotes, but theyre just catching the edge of the carriers. I cant tap into them without getting a receptor into one of the lasers itself, and theyd be sure to notice that."
"Can you tell if its scrambled?"
"No, Maam. But given how tight their beams are, Id be surprised if it wasnt. They dont need whiskers this tight for any technical reasons at this piddling little range. It has to be a security measure."
"I see." Honor nodded, and her indecision vanished into tranquillity. "Mr. McKeon, as soon as Mr. Tremaine returns aboard, I want us returned to our original orbit, but put us back into it astern of the Havenite courier boat."
"Aye, aye, Maam." McKeon responded automatically, but Honor saw the puzzlement in his eyes.
"Keep a close eye on Sirius, but see if you can determine whether or not the couriers nodes are hot, too," she went on. "I think weve pretty definitely established that something strange is going on out here, and that Haven is at the bottom of it, but we still dont know what. I want to know that, Exec. I want to catch them with their hands dirty and nail them in front of God and everybody."
"Yes, Maam." McKeons puzzlement had turned to understanding, and Honor nodded.
"In the meantime, I want Fearless held on standby for impeller, as well. If either of those two start going anywhere, I want to be able to go in pursuit. Clear?"
"Clear, Maam."
"Good." She turned back to her com officer. "Mr. Webster, I need a secure link to Dame Estelle."
"Aye, aye, Maam. Ill get right on it."
Honor watched her two subordinates return to their stations and leaned back, rubbing Nimitz and looking back down at the frozen imagery of Siriuss impeller node with distant eyes.
"Youre right, Honor. Theyre definitely up to something." Dame Estelle looked tired on the com screen, and Honor wondered if shed gotten back to sleep at all after their midnight conversation.
"I dont think theres any doubt," Honor agreed. "Especially not now that weve confirmed the courier boats drive is hot, too. I hate to say it, Dame Estelle, but I really dont like that."
"Dont blame you." Matsuko rubbed her eyes, then lowered her hands to her desk with a sigh. "They wouldnt be on standby if they didnt figure there was a pretty good reason to be going somewhere, and that damned courier boat has diplomatic immunity. We cant touch it if it starts to leave."
"Im less worried about whether or not I can touch it legally than I am about the fact that there are two of them, Maam," Honor said bleakly. Dame Estelle looked at her sharply, and she shrugged. "Im not looking forward to any diplomatic incidents, but my big problem is that I only have one ship. If Ive got two targets headed in different directions, I can only chase one of them."
"But whats the point?" the commissioner almost groaned. "Ive got drug-crazed natives armed with black-powder rifles and primed to slaughter off-worlders in job lots, and youve got two starships with drives on standby! Wheres the connection?"
"I dont knowyet. But I am certain there is one, and all this com traffic seems significant to me, too."
"I have to agree with that." Dame Estelle sounded glum. "Ill see what I can find out for you."
"Find out?" Honor raised her eyebrows in surprise, and Dame Estelle produced a tired smile.
"Im afraid Im not quite as trusting as my exalted superiors in the Ministry for Medusan Affairs would like. My people and I have, ah, acquired a few communications devices not on the official equipment list for my compound down here. We keep a pretty close watch on the message traffic from the off-world enclaves."
"You do?" Honor blinked in astonishment, and Dame Estelle chuckled.
"You dont have to mention that to anyone, Honor. Thered be all kinds of repercussions if you did."
"I imagine there would," Honor agreed with a slow smile of her own.
"You imagine correctly. But as far as the Havenites are concerned, we can keep an eye on their traffic volume, but we cant do much with specific transmissions. They not only scramble their signals but routinely encrypt them, as well. Weve managed to break their latest scramble codesunless theyve shifted them again in the last day or so, and I just havent heard yetbut we cant do much with their encryption."
"Do you think they know youre doing it?"
"Hard to say. They may, though, particularly if theres direct traffic between their courier boat and this freighter of theirs," Dame Estelle said thoughtfully. "We cant touch their ship-to-ship traffic from down here, so that would give them at least one secure com channel."
"But that would assume their mastermind is up here," Honor pointed out. "Otherwise, theyd still have to pass all their command signals through the consulate."
"True." Matsukos fingers tapped a nervous syncopation on the edge of her desk, and she made a face. "I hate all this guesswork," she sighed.
"Me, too," Honor agreed. She rubbed the tip of her nose. "Well, whatever theyre up to, theyve obviously been working on it for a long time, and your clan chieftain said his relative warned him the Delta would be a bad place to spend the winter. Thatswhat? Another two months from now?"
"About that. So you think weve got that long to get on top of this?"
"I dont know. But I do know that were just beginning to put the pieces together, and thats bound to give us a sense of urgency whether theyre really on the edge of activating their operation or not. On the other hand, weve already turned up enough for me to go official with it."
"Go official? How?"
"Im putting together a dispatch, complete with all of my facts, suspicions, and conclusions, for the personal attention of the First Space Lord," Honor said grimly. "He may think Im crazybut he may also just get some help out here."
"How long would that take?"
"At absolute best, given the tenuousness of our information, it would probably take something like fifty hours, and thats assuming he doesnt just decide Im crazy and he has someone he can divert straight out here. Frankly, Id be surprised if we saw any useful reaction in less than three or four days, but at least itd be a step in the right direction."
"And until then, were on our own," Dame Estelle observed.
"Yes, Maam." Honor rubbed her nose again. "Whats the status on Barneys patrol?"
"They should be pulling out in about" Dame Estelle glanced at her chrono "twenty minutes, now. Barneys down at the hangar for their final brief; then hell come back here. Theyre under express order not to land anywhere without checking back in, but hes going to have them keep a close eye on everything they overfly en route to the target area. At least we should be able to determine where this shaman and his parishioners arent, anyway."
"Good. Id like to add his findings, good or bad, to my dispatch to Admiral Webster. And Ill feel a lot more comfortable personally once we have some sort of accurate idea of just how bad the situation ground-side really is."
"So will I." Dame Estelle shook herself. "All right, Honor. Thanks. Ill get on my end of things. Keep me posted if anything breaks up there."
"I will, Maam."
Honor killed the com link and crossed her legs. She steepled her fingers under her jaw in her favorite thinking posture, and the occasional soft murmur of command and response flowed over her as her bridge crew went about its duties. She never knew exactly how long she sat there, but finally she snorted softly and lowered her hands.
"Mr. McKeon."
"Yes, Maam?" The exec looked up. She beckoned to him, and he crossed to her chair as she stood.
"I think were moving into the end-game phase," she said quietly, pitching her voice for his ears alone. "Im trying to keep an open mind about that, but too many things seem to be coming together here." She paused, and McKeon nodded in agreement.
"Ive been over Papadapolouss deployment plan, and it looks good," she went on, "but I want two changes made in it."
"Yes, Maam?"
"First, I want the Marines moved aboard the pinnaces now. Theres room for them to bunk aboardtheyll have to hot-bunk, but they can squeeze inand I want them ready to drop on zero notice. They can armor up on the way down or even after they hit dirt."
"Yes, Maam." McKeon pulled out his memo pad and keyed notes into it. "And the second change?"
"I want Lieutenant Montoya and our other medical people back up here. Get them aboard by mid-watch, if you can."
"Excuse me, Maam?" McKeon blinked, and Honor hid a sour smile.
"Officially, Ive decided that it would be unfair to ask Dame Estelle and the NPA to make do with the services of our junior physician in the event of an incident on Medusa. In light of Commander Suchons many more years of service, I feel it would be much more reasonable for us to put her experience to good use down there."
"I see, Maam." There was a faint gleam in McKeons eyes. "And the, um, unofficial reason?"
"Unofficially, Mr. McKeon," Honors voice was much grimmer, "Dame Estelle and Barney Isvarian have quite good medical staffs of their own, and there are a good many other civilian doctors in the enclaves down there. Between them, they should be able to carry Suchons dead weight." McKeon winced at the acid bite in his captains voice, but he nodded.
"Besides," Honor went on after a moment, "Lieutenant Montoya may be ten years younger than Suchon, but hes a better physician than shell ever be. If we need a doctor up here, were going to need him in a hurry, and I want the best one I can get."
"Do you really think were going to need one?" McKeon couldnt quite hide his surprise, and Honor shrugged uncomfortably.
"I dont know. Call it a feeling. Or maybe its just nerves. But Ill feel much more comfortable with Suchon dirt-side and Montoya in Fearless."
"Understood, Skipper." McKeon put away his memo pad and nodded. "Ill take care of it."
"Good. In the meantime, Ill be in my quarters. Ive got a dispatch to write." She produced a smilea strange smile, compounded of fatigue, worry, awareness of her own ignorance, and an odd undercurrent that might almost be excitementand McKeon felt a tingle sweep over him as he saw it.
"Who knows?" she finished softly, still with that same, strange smile. "I may even have something interesting to put in it in a few more hours."
She walked into the lift with her treecat, and McKeon stood for several seconds, looking at the door which had closed behind her and wondering why her smile had frightened him so.
Chapter | P | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 |
17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | A |