“All right…” Corson looked down, then up. “I don’t know all of it. But I do know the Marie wasn’t the only ship Paison had insystem. Why the mercs didn’t find the other, I don’t know—it must’ve been stealthed somehow. But anyway—Paison was regional boss for the Barrenta gang. Posed as an ordinary trader, had a respectable history as cover. He had some kind of deal with the government here; the only people he was afraid of were ISC. He knew about the ansible attack: who did it, and why. And the Empress Rose was in on it, too. Kristoffson was one of ’em—nobody ever suspected anything of a passenger liner from a line like that. And he was going to rendezvous with his other ship, change the beacon on this one, put an FTL drive in it, and…”
“Kill us all,” Hemphurst finished. “He was a damned pirate, in other words.”
“Kind of,” Corson said.
“Which means you’re a pirate—”
“No! No, I’m not. I just—I found out something when I was on Empress, and they grabbed me and threatened me and then stuck me on Marie. There wasn’t anything I could do. They watched me all the time—I was just like a prisoner—”
“So what do you know about beacons?” Ky said, interrupting what promised to become a verbal game between Corson and Hemphurst. “Do you know how to fix them?”
“I—don’t know,” Corson said. “I know some things to try.”
“Then you had better come try them,” Ky said. “Hemphurst is not the only one willing to kill you if you don’t cooperate.” She met Hemphurst’s gaze; he nodded at her. “And as for the rest of you—anyone else have any expertise in this area?”
“Com Tech Sawvert, Aspergia,” said a woman on the far side. “I don’t know what’s been done to the beacon, but I have done beacon maintenance. I might be able to help.”
“Good. You, too, then.”
Corson and Sawvert made an odd pair, Ky thought, as she escorted them back through the maintenance passages with Mehar and Beeah close behind them. Corson so clearly nervous about retaliation from Paison’s people, and Sawvert, despite the effects of hunger, eager to get to work. At the access hatch, Ky stopped them. “Here—before you go to work, have some lunch.” It was only a sandwich apiece and a thin slice of fruitcake.
“Thanks, Captain,” Sawvert said. Corson nodded; half his sandwich was already in his mouth.
“If we can make contact and get an ETA for help, I’ll know whether I can treat everyone,” Ky said. “Engineer Chok and Environmental Tech Mehaar will keep an eye on you.”
Chapter Sixteen
Gerard Vatta’s implant bleeped insistently. “Excuse me a moment,” he said to the midweek meeting he was chairing.
“Gerry, it’s Lewis Parmina at ISC.”
His stomach went into free fall. “Yes?”
“Gerry, our people went insystem at Sabine about seven hours ago. And your daughter’s ship is not there anymore.”
“Not there?” He turned away from the table, from the faces that were searching his own for meaning.
“No,” Parmina said. He went on, speaking rapidly. “The story we got from the mercs who came out, and from other civ ships, is that they interned captains and officers on your ship; your daughter was… was fine then. They made a contract with her; we’ve forwarded a copy they showed us to your offices.”
Gerard noted but didn’t comment on that slight hesitation. Alive would have done; fine could be defined variably. Contract—he motioned to one of the assistants hovering around the main table, scribbled New contract, Mackensee & Vatta, just in, bring it. The assistant stepped back with the glazed expression that meant he was querying by implant.
“Apparently they disabled the FTL drive or it wasn’t working or something,” Parmina went on. “So the ship was expected to be insystem on a particular ballistic course. Its beacon was working; they’d loaded additional rations and supplies and so on to cope with the additional passengers. We found the cargo—”
“Cargo?”
“The cargo your ship had been carrying, ag equipment. It was put outside the ship, netted, separately beaconed, with a copy of the relevant contract, because the cargo holds were converted to hold the passengers.”
What the dickens was Ky doing carrying ag equipment, anyway? She’d set off with a cargo of mixed trade goods. One corner of his mind quickly put together a first stop at Belinta, a relatively young colony, and Sabine, known for its ag equipment in this region. He turned back to the table, waved, mouthed Later and left the room, heading for his office.
The rest of his mind stayed with Parmina, absorbing every word, every nuance of tone and expression.
“The contract states she had picked it up on consignment for the Belinta Economic Development Bureau. It was found on the course the mercs told us to check, right where the ship should have been. And the ship wasn’t there. There were old traces of drive usage—apparently she turned on the insystem drive sometime after the mercs departed the system, but without a beacon trace, none of the scans in the system picked it up. We have no idea where she went, or why the beacon didn’t show on anyone’s scan.”
“That can’t be good,” Gerard murmured.
“No… Gerry, I’m sorry. I really hate having to tell you this. If it were my daughter…”
“Don’t apologize,” Gerard said. “I can’t thank you enough for telling me this much. A drive signature—at least that’s not an explosion. I don’t know what it means, but… there’s a chance.”
“We’ll keep looking,” Parmina said. “The primary mission has to be restoring ansible communication and ensuring the security of our people and equipment, but then—”
“Do you have an estimate on that?” Gerard asked.
“We’ll have a skeleton system up, for nonpublic and emergency communications, within another couple of days. Very limited bandwidth. Rebuilding the platforms for full commercial usage will take much longer. How long we won’t know until we examine the wreckage and find out if any of the power units are usable. And we need to find out how it was done—how they destroyed them.”
“But you’re in communication with your people there now?”
“Spike ansible—yes, but we can’t give anyone else access to that. I have put Ky’s name in a priority-one bin, though, Gerry. We’ve also made it clear to Mackensee that your daughter’s welfare is very important to us. If anyone there hears from her—or via any of our ansibles—our security personnel have been directed to pass it straight up to me. You’ll have the news as soon as I do.”
“Thanks, Lew,” Gerard said. “I know you have a lot more on your mind than one little trading ship—”
“The whole Sabine situation is nonstandard enough that I’d be glad of some good neutral input,” Parmina said. “The mercs are upset, the Sabine government is upset, no one’s claiming responsibility for the ansible attack, and now that ship disappearing… It’s not just a simple bit of sabotage anymore. I have my own reasons for wanting to find that ship, as well as our friendship.”
Something in Parmina’s voice left a cold spot, even colder than the rest in Gerard’s gut. “You aren’t thinking… that Ky was involved…?”
“No, no, of course not. I don’t think she blew the ansibles. For one thing, there’s good scan data from before the attack to show that she was docked at Prime’s orbital station. She did undock without permission after the ansibles were hit, but other ships did that, too—the orbital station was the next logical target. But ships don’t just disappear like that, Gerry. You and I both know that ship beacons are sealed systems intended to work unless completely vaporized, and vaporized ships don’t have a drive path signature. Something weird was going on, with her ship as well as the whole system.”
Gerard could think of nothing to say. She had been there, alive after the time when he had feared she was dead. She had been alive until a few days ago, for sure. Now… maybe she was alive, even though the disappearance of her ship—or the malfunction of her ship’s beacon—suggested something very
serious had gone wrong.
“Thank you,” he said again, just for something to say.
“I’ll let you know as soon as we hear anything else. As for general business, I’d say it would be safe to schedule deliveries and pickups within seven to ten days. We won’t have public systems back up by then, but surveillance will be full-on. Got to go, Gerry; we’re up to our armpits in alligators.” The line went blank.
“So is she all right?” Stavros was in the doorway.
“I don’t know,” Gerard said. His voice sounded disgustingly normal, he thought. Inside he felt shaky as jelly, but his voice didn’t waver. “That was Lew Parmina at ISC. They’re in the system; they have eyewitness and other records that show she was there, and she was alive and well up to the point where the mercs left the system. She was just coasting along, ballistic, full of passengers, with her cargo netted outside, and then—the beacon went off, there’s insystem drive residue, and she’s nowhere to be found.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Stavros said, frowning. “If she was being pursued she might wish the beacon were off, but—I don’t have a clue how to turn one off and I doubt she did. And why didn’t she jump out of that mess? She’s got a perfectly good FTL drive—”
“Apparently not,” Gerard said. “I’m not clear on when it was disabled, or by whom, but apparently all she’s got is insystem drive. What she does have is contracts. One with Belinta, to deliver ag equipment—”
“Which explains why she was on Sabine, instead of almost to Lastway,” Stavros put in.
“Yes. The other is with the mercs, for carrying the passengers they assigned her, the officers of the other ships they interned temporarily. We have a copy of that, via the Mackensee Military Assistance Corporation and the ISC; I haven’t looked at it yet.” He checked the latest deliveries, and found it. “Here we are. Standard passenger rates for ten days’ passage on an assigned course which is the same as that which the mercs gave the ISC, and on which the cargo was found.”
“Binding on the firm, then?” Stavros asked.
Gerard winced. If Vatta Transport took over those contracts, it would be an admission that Ky was dead. And yet, their reputation rested on prompt, complete service.
“We can’t do anything about the passengers,” he said. “Not until the ship shows up. But we can reassure Belinta that they will get their cargo, though it may be somewhat delayed.”
“Send someone to pick it up in space or reorder?”
“Let’s look at the routings… wait a second—” He had come to the last part of Mackensee’s message to ISC about the ship and its captain. “They say she no longer has a Vatta implant—what can that mean?”
Stavros shook his head. “How would they know, unless—” He looked at Gerry. “They removed it themselves. She must have been their prisoner.”
He would not faint. He would not panic. It would do no good, and she was—she had been—alive, and might still need him. “Routings,” he said, in a voice that sounded nothing like his own.
Together, they called up the present positions and routings of all the Vatta ships within two jumps of Sabine system. Nothing that would work easily, nothing that wouldn’t break other commitments. Katrine Lamont was closest.
“We’ll do it,” Stavros said. “I’ll get in touch with Furman—he knows her, I think. Wasn’t he captain when she was on that apprentice trip?”
“I think so,” Gerard said. He looked at the schedules. “If I ship today on a fast courier, I can send her a replacement implant, and that stack of mail waiting for her; Furman can pick that up at—where’s he going to be? Delian II? Tight, but he can wait for it. We’d still want to confirm that Sabine’s stable before we send him in.”
“There’s a piece missing,” Sawvert said. The beacon’s capsule lay open, its components spread on the deck.
“He must have taken it,” Corson said. “Paison must have taken it out so he could put it in later.”
“Or destroyed it,” Ky said. “We know he destroyed part of the insystem drive control linkage.”
“It’s small,” Sawvert said. “He could just stick it in his pocket—it’s about like this”—she pointed at another piece, a slender cylinder about a finger long—”a number five inducer.”
“You’re sure it’s missing…”
“Yes, Captain, I’m sure.”
“And I am, too,” Corson said. “Everything else looks fine—there’s no sign of anything wrong but the missing part.”
Something about the shape tickled Ky’s memory. She had seen that shape before, but not in the beacon… she’d never looked inside the beacon case. Where had it been…?
“Did you… er… search the bodies after you… shot them?” Sawvert asked.
“No.” She had had other priorities, like getting the ship back under control and the rest of the hostages safely locked into the cargo holds again.
“It might be still… in his clothes…” Corson looked sick at this suggestion. Ky felt the same way.
“There’s a problem,” she said. “We don’t have the bodies.”
“You—spaced them?”
“I had cargo holds full of you folks, some of you hostile, and a ship to get under control, and no spare space anywhere,” Ky said, trying not to sound defensive. “I couldn’t just stick them in the cooler with the rations.”
“Maybe he dropped it somewhere,” Sawvert said. “Or maybe he gave it to someone who doesn’t realize what it is.”
“Maybe,” Ky said. She felt certain that it was in one of Paison’s pockets, and the dead pirate was mocking her still.
But that wasn’t where she’d seen something like that part. Where was it?
“What kind of marks would it have on it?” she asked.
“Marks?”
“Any way to identify it? Stripes or something?” She waved at the disassembled beacon. Some of those parts had color-coding stripes, or numbers.
“Sure,” Sawvert and Corson said together. They glanced at each other, and Sawvert went on. “It depends on the manufacturer, but basically it’ll have a number and a stripe, probably purple. You don’t have a parts store that might have it, do you?”
“No… but I know I’ve seen that shape aboard,” Ky said. She frowned; something was tugging her toward her cabin, a memory too vague to be recognizable. It couldn’t hurt to follow the hunch… “I’ll be back,” she said.
In her cabin, she stood still, trying not to think, not to interfere with whatever memory was trying to find its way to the surface. Nothing showed on the surface but the stains from the cleanup after the… the death. No handy part lay in the middle of the floor, or her bunk, or her desk. The shelves to either side of her desk held only the cube reader and one rack of cubes. The desk drawer had her captain’s log and its stylus. She pulled open the locker under her bunk, where the brightly wrapped fruitcakes had been stowed. One remained; she hoped they wouldn’t have to cut into that one. So far no one had dared complain about the flavor, but Ky still preferred to donate her share to others. No way Paison could have accidentally dropped the part here, but what if he’d hidden it, or had someone hide it, for him? Wouldn’t he have chosen the captain’s cabin?
It still didn’t make sense, the timing of it. He had not had time to disable the beacon and hide a part in her cabin; she knew that. She had been in her cabin when they discovered the beacon wasn’t working; she had confronted him too soon after that.
But something was here… she knew it. She started with the lockers over her bunk, where she found that things were not quite as she remembered. Of course. The mercs would have searched the cabin and simply shoved things back in, and she’d been too busy since to come in and reorganize. Entertainment and study cubes, clothes folded not quite as neatly as she’d left them. Behind them was a box, somewhat bent. The model… the spaceship model. She remembered now having shoved it to the back herself.
Ky pulled the box out—it rattled. When she opened it, a folded note was on top
of broken parts. Sorry, the note said. Needle got it. This is most of the pieces. The needle-round had not reduced the model to its component parts, quite. Some of the assembly was still there. Ky laid the pieces on her bunk, wondering where the round had hit—obvious when she laid them in order—and there it was.
No purple stripe, but molded into the gray cylindrical shape which the assembly directions had told her was a missile was “I–5–239684.” The other “missiles” were beige.
Cold chills ran up and down her back. The meaning of MacRobert’s cryptic little note suddenly seemed clear. He had, for whatever reason, given her parts to a beacon of some kind and she had been too stupid to recognize them…
She grabbed the whole box and raced back down the passage to where Corson and Sawvert were slumped against the bulkhead, contemplating the guts of the beacon.
“Is this one?” she asked, holding out the little cylinder.
Sawvert looked up. “Looks like it—let me see—” She took it, turned it, peered at the inscription. “Yup, that’s it. Where’d you find it?”
“In a model kit,” Ky said. She put the box down. “Either of you know what the rest of this stuff is?”
“Model kit!” Sawvert leaned over the box. “That’s nothing—nor that—but this—and this—and that bit there—all that’s the makings of a small pin-beacon. A shouter.” She pushed the parts around with her finger. “I don’t know if you’ve got all of it—are there any more pieces?”
“There were, but it was in the way when the mercs shot up my cabin.”
“I didn’t know about that,” Sawvert said.
“You weren’t aboard then,” Ky said. “Someone we’d picked up off the docks at Prime—someone from home—went crazy and tried to fight with the mercs. They shot him.” The less said about that, the better. “So—anything more we can use to fix this beacon?”
“Let’s just see what this piece does—if it works, the beacon should work. If it doesn’t, we have some more bits to try, at least.”
Reassembling the beacon took another two hours, but even before they closed the case, Lee reported from the bridge that their passive scan showed the beacon on.
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