“I’ll detail a prize crew.” The XO made some notes on her dataslate.
“Decisive, this is Herrera. We’ve reached the bridge.” Jaime Herrera’s face reappeared in another one of the display windows. “The computer cores have been removed and the sensor records erased. I don’t think we’re going to get much out of—oh, the lights just came back on.”
“Decisive, Shah. Power restored,” Amar Shah reported. “We’re restarting life support and bringing gravity online at ten percent standard.” That would spare Decisive’s boarding team from making a sudden and unexpected acquaintance with Carmela Día’s deck plates; at 0.1 g, they’d have plenty of time to orient themselves to the ship and get clear of anything about to fall to the deck.
“Thank you, Mr. Shah,” Sikander answered. He returned his attention to Herrera, on the derelict’s bridge. “Mr. Herrera, what’s the status of the helm and navigation systems? Are they operable?”
“They’re booting up now, Captain.” Herrera turned away and spoke to the crewhands accompanying him. “Petty Officer Tolbin says the helm looks okay, although it’s displaying some damage to the drive systems. The sensors need a hard reset, but I think she’s flyable.”
“No sign of the bridge crew?” Fraser asked him over the comm channel.
“No, XO. I think everyone was either shot on the mess deck, or spaced afterwards.”
Sikander exchanged a look with Fraser. He hadn’t expected anything else, but they had to be sure. “All right, Mr. Herrera,” he said. “Coordinate with Mr. Shah and get the navigation systems back online. We might as well bring her in.”
* * *
In the end, Decisive recovered sixteen of Carmela Día’s dead—thirteen inside the ship, and five drifting in space nearby. While none of the ship’s logs or records remained aboard, Zoe Worth and Jaime Herrera came up with the idea of making a careful examination of the ship’s berthing compartments and counting bunks that had been slept in. Their best guess was a complement of twenty-one on the freighter’s last voyage; as Michael Girard had predicted, the ship had been a little shorthanded. Sikander found himself wondering what lucky spacer had resigned his position or gotten herself fired at the exact right time. That left four crew unaccounted for—taken off by the pirates or left to drift somewhere Decisive’s boats couldn’t find them, no one could say.
Sikander ordered the ship’s master-at-arms to preserve all the evidence they could find. Unfortunately, Decisive had only three petty officers with master-at-arms ratings, and a freighter made for a big crime scene. Amelia Fraser had to detail a number of the ship’s chief petty officers and junior officers to lend a hand. While the master-at-arms’s improvised teams carefully documented everything they could, Amar Shah and his engineers got the freighter’s engines working again, and Decisive’s sensor techs restored basic navigational systems on the bridge. Nineteen hours after the Aquilan destroyer had arrived on the scene, Decisive and Carmela Día set course for Bursa’s inner system and got under way.
Given the damaged freighter’s limited acceleration, a journey that would normally take Decisive a day stretched out to three. Sikander resigned himself to the plodding pace, and kept the destroyer close by Carmela Día. Fraser’s suggestion about setting a trap was fresh in his mind, and perhaps if they got lucky another pirate might mistake two sensor contacts in close company for one big one. Sikander also instructed Girard to refrain from notifying the local authorities about their discovery, at least not until they were a lot closer to Bursa. If anyone was monitoring the local system patrol’s communications, he saw no need to announce Decisive’s presence.
On the second day of their passage, Sikander joined his reduced wardroom for dinner at the customary time: Amelia Fraser, four of his six department heads, and ten of his fourteen division officers. Reed Hollister noticed his arrival first, and came to his feet. “Attention on deck!” he called out as Sikander entered the room.
“Please, be seated,” Sikander told his subordinates, and took his place at the head of the table. One of the small perks of being the captain was that meals weren’t served until he arrived, and usually appeared on the table within minutes once he sat down. He glanced over at Grant Edwards, seated near the head of the table. “What’s on the menu tonight, Grant?”
“Chicken ravioli, I believe,” Edwards answered. Meal planning and preparation fell under the Supply Department’s purview. Like most supply officers, Grant Edwards had a large department to run and many different demands on his time—he rarely presumed to tell his mess specialists how to do their job. Sikander suspected that Edwards only checked on the menu just before dinner so that he’d be able to answer the question if Sikander happened to ask about it, which was the way things worked on just about every ship in the fleet.
“Excellent,” Sikander told him, maintaining the time-honored routine. He had to be careful about showing disappointment over a meal; he’d served on ships where the mere suspicion that the captain didn’t care for dinner could send the mess specialists into paroxysms of panic. In this case, Sikander wasn’t trying to spare anyone’s feelings—he rarely ate pasta, but he liked it well enough when the galley served it. He waited patiently while the stewards brought out generous plates of ravioli, green salads, and the various sides and accompaniments, then made a point of sampling his dinner. Wardroom etiquette dictated that junior officers waited until the captain started to eat before diving into their own dinners.
He quietly watched the other officers as he ate, gauging their mood. He liked to think that Decisive was generally a happy ship—he tried hard to be fair and even-tempered, and his department heads naturally took their cues from his command style. Conversation around the table seemed unusually subdued this evening, though. It’s the Carmela Día situation, he realized. Everybody spent hours yesterday looking for bodies and documenting the evidence of brutal murders. I should’ve anticipated the effect of that work. Most of his younger officers—indeed, most of his officers, period—didn’t have much experience with the sort of scene they’d encountered aboard the drifting freighter. His own experiences in situations like Hector’s desperate battle at Gadira and the chaos and confusion of the warumzi agu revolution in the Tzoru Dominion were the exception in Aquilan service, not the rule.
Time to change the topic, he decided. He looked down the table and spotted Grace Carter picking at her food. “Ms. Carter, it just occurred to me that I never asked about your brother’s wedding,” he said. The young ensign had taken leave for the family event shortly before Sikander had headed home himself. “I take it you saw him securely married off?”
Carter almost dropped her fork in surprise. “Umm, yes, sir,” she replied. “Everything went off without a hiccup, and I have to say, I really like Isabel—er, that’s Kyle’s wife. She’s great. I have no idea what she sees in him.”
A soft ripple of laughter went around the table. “All three of my brothers managed to marry better women than they deserved,” Sikander told her. “You can imagine my surprise.” That earned another round of chuckles, and from there the conversation turned to a collection of wedding stories. Some he’d heard before—after all, he’d shared dinner stories with most of the wardroom for a year now, and some tales inevitably got recycled—but several of his younger officers surprised him with new ones, including a disastrously bad bachelor party that had very nearly gotten Reed Hollister and his cousins arrested. Sikander was just about to launch into the story of his cousin Amarleen and a wedding cake when the compartment’s intercom—located near the head of the table, where the captain usually sat—chirped for attention.
“This is the captain, go ahead,” Sikander answered, holding up one hand to excuse himself from the dinner conversation. The rest of the company quieted down.
“Captain, Bridge. Mr. Herrera speaking, officer of the deck. Sir, we’re receiving a distress call. A mining post called United Extraction Sixteen reports that they’re under attack by an unidentified vessel.”
&nb
sp; Sikander tuned out the dinner table around him, focusing on Herrera’s report. “Where are they, Mr. Herrera?”
“The system’s middle asteroid belt, sir, bearing zero-two-seven up ten, distance twelve light-minutes.”
Amelia Fraser worked out the math in her head. “Twelve light-minutes? That’s six and a half hours, or more like twenty for a zero-range zero-speed rendezvous.”
Sikander nodded. His XO had figured the intercept faster than he had, but he’d already realized that whatever was going on at the United Extraction post would likely be over by the time Decisive arrived on the scene. “We don’t have to make that choice for several hours yet. Mr. Herrera, set a course for minimum-time interception, full military acceleration. Signal the mining post that we’re on our way, but don’t tell them exactly when we’ll get there.”
“Aye, sir,” Herrera replied. “Bridge, out.”
The stars in the wardroom’s exterior-view vidscreens reeled suddenly as Decisive spun to point her nose on an intercept course, and the surge in acceleration gently tugged at Sikander until the ship’s inertial compensators caught up. “Captain, should we send an acknowledgment?” Amar Shah asked. “Whoever is attacking the mining station will hear it too. They might flee before we get close enough to overtake them.”
“I hate to say it, but I hope that they do. As the XO just pointed out, we’re hours and hours from the scene—there’s nothing we can do to help the station. On the other hand, the attackers might break off once they realize we’re on the way. As much as I’d like to catch pirates in the act, I can’t think of anything else we can do to protect the people under attack.” Sikander’s expression tightened. “I’d rather not get to that post and find more bodies floating in space.”
“What do you want to do with Carmela Día?” Fraser asked.
“Have her continue on her course,” he decided. He glanced at the wardroom’s vidscreens, where the bulk freighter was now rapidly falling astern. He had fifteen people on board the other ship, but the freighter had no hope of keeping up with Decisive and he couldn’t spare the time to recover them. There’s no point in regretting that decision now, he told himself. We’ve seen nothing during months of patrolling. How could we expect two incidents in three days? If he’d known that he might suddenly have to leave the freighter on its own he might have put a more senior officer in charge, but Zoe Worth could handle the job of seeing the ship into port.
He hurried through the rest of his dinner, and headed forward to the bridge to study the tactical situation. If he decided to bring Decisive to a rendezvous with the mining post, he’d need to “turn ship” near the halfway point of the run and begin decelerating. Or he could have his crew keep on accelerating past the halfway point in order to reach the vicinity of the station as quickly as possible, but in that scenario Decisive would flash by her destination in the blink of an eye. They might be able to fire on a hostile ship lingering near the post … but no pirate skipper would be likely to oblige him by neglecting to flee the scene when he saw an Aquilan destroyer coming after him hell-for-leather.
“What do you want to do, Captain?” Jaime Herrera asked, watching Sikander study the tactical display. He understood perfectly well the decision Sikander faced.
“Any indication that the station’s attacker is turning away?”
“Not yet, sir. But it’s a twenty-four-minute observation lag at this distance.”
Sikander nodded. The speed of light dictated that anyone near the station wouldn’t hear Decisive’s reply to the distress signal until twelve minutes after Decisive transmitted—and Decisive wouldn’t see what the distant target did in response to Decisive’s reply for another twelve minutes after that.“We’ll push on a little past the turnover point, and aim for a flyby at a thousand kps. That should save a few hours over the zero-zero intercept, and I don’t mind an hour or two of maneuvering to return to the scene after we overshoot. Designate the unknown attacker Target Alpha.”
“Aye, sir. We’ll plot it out.” Herrera moved off to begin working on the navigation computers.
“You know, an ugly and suspicious thought occurs to me,” Amelia Fraser murmured to Sikander. She’d followed him to the bridge, joining him in evaluating the situation.
Sikander raised an eyebrow. “What’s that, Amelia?”
“We’re not supposed to be here. According to our original patrol schedule, we should be departing Tejat Minor today, and arriving in Bursa four days from now. Someone aware of our schedule might have figured that they had plenty of time to carry out an attack or tidy up a mess around a missing freighter before we unbubbled in-system. But the problem with the generator—something no one else knew about or might have foreseen—forced us to accelerate our timetable.”
Sikander stared at his XO, considering the implications. “You believe that Zerzura’s pirates know our patrol schedule? Good God!”
“It seems awfully coincidental that the first time in months that we’ve shown up ahead of schedule we find interesting things going on.”
“You have a devious turn of mind, XO.”
Fraser shrugged. “I have two small children at home, and that teaches you to cultivate a certain sense for mischief taking place out of your sight.”
Sikander might not share his exec’s maternal instincts, but he had some grounding in intelligence work. Earlier in his career he’d spent a tour of duty as the staff intelligence officer with Helix Squadron, on the Tzoru frontier. Intel officers generally didn’t believe in coincidences; if this patrol seemed to be turning out differently than previous patrols it seemed logical to assume that it was because something had changed, and Fraser’s observation seemed all too likely as he thought more about it. So who knew our patrol schedule? he wondered. We did, of course, and Pleiades Squadron Operations. Our people wouldn’t let it slip, not on purpose … but if Amelia is right, this has been going on for months. One leaked schedule could be an accident, but a year’s worth? That’s espionage or collusion.
“Captain?” said Herrera, interrupting Sikander’s ruminations. “Target Alpha is withdrawing. Looks like they got our message.”
“Course and speed?” Sikander asked.
“System true, they’re on course two-nine-zero, acceleration sixty-five g. It looks like they’re running for open space, sir.”
“They have to know we’ve got the acceleration to run them down,” Fraser observed. “Are they on a transit course, Jaime?”
The big gunnery officer turned his attention to the tactical display and studied the navigation display for a moment. “You nailed it, XO,” he said after a moment. “They’re lining up for a transit to Tunis. Assuming they’re showing us all the acceleration they have and they bubble up at ten percent c, they’ll clear out an hour before we can bring them into firing range.”
“I guess we’re not going to catch any pirates today,” Fraser said.
“Not today, XO, but we know where they’re going, and once they spin up their warp ring we’ll know when they’re going to arrive,” said Sikander. Ships traveling in warp didn’t accelerate; they coasted, making their transit with whatever course and speed they had when they activated their warp generators. The faster a ship was going when it created its warp bubble, the more extreme their warp gradient … which meant that once Decisive observed the velocity at which the unknown ship activated her ring, Sikander’s crew would be able to plot out a higher-velocity transit and get to the destination system on their quarry’s heels, or maybe even a little ahead of her. “In the meantime, we might as well have Lieutenant Worth pick up our generator parts as long as she’s bringing in Carmela Día. And let’s see if the United Extraction outpost captured any good imagery of Target Alpha before she turned tail. I’d like to have a better mug shot in my pocket if we chase them all the way to Tunis.”
* * *
Decisive arrived in the Tunis system roughly twenty-five minutes after Target Alpha’s calculated arrival time. Sikander’s bridge crew couldn’t be exact
ly sure, because they didn’t know where in Tunis their quarry intended to cut their warp generators—an extra few minutes in transit duration could easily make the difference between unbubbling near the system’s Kuiper Belt or carrying clear through to the Kuiper Belt on the other side. In the absence of any better information, Sikander opted for bringing Decisive to a more or less middle-of-the-system warp termination, figuring that he at least wouldn’t be entirely across the system from whatever destination Target Alpha was aiming for.
“Clear arrival, Captain,” Ensign Carter announced from her post by the bridge’s sensor techs. “Nothing within ten million kilometers.”
“Very good,” Sikander said. “You know what we’re looking for, Ms. Carter. Remember, they’ll be decelerating from a Bursa transit vector.” As he’d hoped, the United Extraction post in Bursa had gladly transmitted imagery of their attacker to Decisive as the Aquilan destroyer raced past the station in pursuit of the pirate—a light multipurpose cargo ship of a sixty-year-old type, battered by years of hard use. Scores of similar ships could be found in any system of the Zerzuran frontier, although few were stripped for speed and fitted out with the sort of armament Target Alpha carried in its current career.
“Aye, sir. The sensors are coming online now.”
“Mr. Girard, send our arrival notice to the local traffic authority. And ask them about any other arrivals in the last couple of hours.”
“I doubt that pirates are in the habit of obeying local traffic reporting regulations,” Jaime Herrera observed. He and the other Gunnery Department officers manned the weapons consoles at the aft end of the compartment—every man and woman aboard Decisive was ready for action.
“You’re probably right, but it occurs to me that pirates might find it useful to pretend to be law-abiding citizens when they unbubble in a new system. It would seem to be simpler than hiding all the time.” Sikander studied the nav display showing Tunis’s planetary arrangement, then returned to his battle couch and composed himself to wait. In fourteen years of active duty and the four years of midshipman training before that, he’d never been on a ship attempting an interstellar pursuit. It just didn’t come up very often, although some rarely used sections of the Commonwealth Navy’s tactical manuals offered a few suggestions.
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