The Phoenix in Flight

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The Phoenix in Flight Page 55

by Sherwood Smith


  Ng watched him take a deep breath as he pitched his voice for firmness. “General quarters. Engineering, rig engines for tactical maneuvers. Fire Control, ready all ruptors. Charge skipmissile.”

  As the general-quarters klaxon rang out—a sound Ng knew dated back to the oceanic navies of Lost Earth—excitement and purpose showed in straightened spines and a quick exchange of grins. She could read them so easily—general quarters, no question whether it was real or a drill, and they were on alpha! On Grozniy, alpha crew stayed on through general quarters, which was why that status was both feared and sought after.

  “Navigation, SigInt, coordinate a light-cone convergence on the beacon’s destruction and position us for observation. Start one light-hour out, normal to the ecliptic. Communications, full-scan record, give me a visual.”

  The Grozniy leapt briefly into fivespace and as quickly out. The transitions were rougher this time: the lower frequency skip required for fine tactical movements was hard on the engines. A faint whisper of datacode commenced.

  “Beacon acquired,” said Wychyrski. They had skipped to a point outside the expanding wavefront marking the beacon’s destruction.

  Another set of transitions, the fiveskip burping so briefly that an eyeblink would have missed it. The whisper ceased.

  “No beacon.” Inside the wavefront.

  Ng noted sweat on Mzinga’s brow, and his massive arms bulged against his trim uniform as he jumped the battlecruiser back and forth, struggling to get it to the desired position as quickly as possible. The countdown ticked off fifteen seconds more as the big ship continued its series of skips, which seemed on the edge of divergence.

  “Navigation,” said Rom-Sanchez. “Try—“ He stopped abruptly, and Ng knew that this time he had seen loss of flow when the crew shifted attention from their tasks to him. “Belay that. Carry on.” He leaned back in his pod, gaze taking in the bridge, then he relaxed as he comprehended everyone settling back into smooth action. Good! Least action, best action. You’re learning.

  The fiveskip burped twice more.

  “On screen.” Ensign Ammant at Communications tapped at his console. A small targeting cross blinked at the center of the screen, and the faint whisper of datacode once again squealed onto the bridge from the doomed beacon.

  Nothing happened for nearly a minute. Then a tiny flare of reddish light bloomed near the cross.

  “Emergence,” Wychyrski said. “Signature indicates Alpha-class destroyer.”

  Ng stroked the keypads at her station. “Signature ID’d. Eichelly’s Talon of God.”

  The short chain-of-pearls wake of a skipmissile briefly connected the destroyer with the beacon, which vanished in an ardent burst of light. Then the destroyer vanished, leaving behind a reddish pulse.

  The Tenno rippled furiously as the destroyer’s orientation on skip and other betraying aspects of its signature propagated through the bridge systems. “SigInt, find his emergence,” Rom-Sanchez ordered. “Navigation, drop us in five light-minutes out from his emergence, long-range, and then take us in to ten light-seconds on my mark. Fire Control, prepare ruptors for barrage at skip-smash level. We want him intact.”

  The seconds stretched into minutes. Finally Wychyrski spoke, disbelief betrayed in her voice. “No emergence, sir. He’s gone.”

  Ng leaned forward in her pod, glaring at the screen as if she could compel the Rifter to emerge. But there was no arguing with what the sensors showed. At normal skip speeds, the Talon of God would already be light-days away—and they were watching from a vantage point over an hour in the past. She shook her head, looking from Krajno to Rom-Sanchez, whose expressions mirrored her own feelings of confusion and anger—with perhaps a tiny bit of relief in the lieutenant’s.

  She spoke to Rom-Sanchez. “Very well done, Lieutenant. I have the con.”

  He swiped at his console, his face flushed with pleasure at her compliment, but the tremble in his fingers betrayed his relief. “AyKay, sir. You have the con.”

  She raised her voice. “Stand down to threat-level one.”

  “He bashed the beacon and skipped out of the system?” Krajno’s bass rumble was hesitant. “What the hell for?”

  Ng bit her lip. “There’s been some suspicion about the disappearance of Writ-holders like Eichelly. That maybe it was to distract us from something else by pulling patrols out-octant. This stinks of concerted action across systems, so perhaps that ‘something else’ is coming down—and we need to get to the bottom of it.”

  She pitched her voice to bridge cadence again. “Navigation, SigInt, get me a precise vector on his skip.”

  She stood up, motioning to Krajno and Rom-Sanchez. “Genz, will you join me in the plot room?”

  “Captain?” Ensign Wychyrski’s voice was uncharacteristically hesitant. “There was something odd about that explosion. Spectrum’s wrong for a skipmissile impact.”

  “Very well, Ensign. Log it for analysis and give me a report. Lieutenant Mzinga,” she continued, “you have the con. Give us the vector soonest and stand by. Communications, squirt a message to the Wolakota Node informing them it’s safe to replace the beacon. Set the Fleet tacponder to monitor status and ready a report for it, full record of this action. We’ll add our report in a few minutes.”

  o0o

  Rom-Sanchez watched the captain lean back and tap her fingers on the edge of the compad in front of her.

  “So, Lieutenant, he obviously expects us to follow him. Where did he go?” she asked, her light hazel eyes quirked with humor.

  Rom-Sanchez knew his surprise must have shown, for Commander Krajno chuckled. “She took the con, but you’re not off the hook.”

  “His vector gives us only two other core members of the local stellar association: either Treymontaigne or Schadenheim,” Rom-Sanchez began, giving himself time to think. “Thirty and forty-two hours respectively, at full speed.”

  Ng shifted slightly in her chair, letting him know his delaying tactic wouldn’t work. But then he had the answer. “It doesn’t matter which way we think he went,” he continued, “because the local transponder shows no change from what we popped at Pulwaiya: Prabhu Shiva in-system at Treymontaigne on detached duty at the Archon’s request.”

  He tried to keep his voice even, detached, but that quirk of humor vanished from the captain’s face.

  Commander Krajno did not hide his disgust. His lip lifted, the sneer in his heavy face making him look like a pirate in a vid chip, as the rest of the officers shifted, or looked away. Few Navy officers had much respect for an Archon who ran close to the edge under the Covenant of Anarchy, and then called for a battlecruiser to back him up when his subjects started to resent his excesses.

  “Too much of that sort of thing going on lately,” Krajno said.

  Ng opened a hand, which effectively shut down the topic of politics.

  Rom-Sanchez continued. “So we can assume that Captain Harimoto will give Eichelly a warm welcome if he chose Treymontaigne, and we’re for Schadenheim in case he didn’t.”

  Ng nodded. “Good.” She turned to the plot-pane, which responded with a red line, spearing through the Schadenheim system.

  Krajno grimaced. “Awful name, that.”

  “Ancient Doitch,” said Ng. “Means something like Home of Destruction.”

  Krajno nodded. “Matches the people there—pretty bloody-minded bunch.”

  Ng grinned at the XO. “Coming from you, Commander, that puts a visit to Schadenheim on a par with a vacation on Dol’jhar.”

  Krajno laughed. Rom-Sanchez had come to learn that Krajno thoroughly enjoyed his reputation for a harsh, rough-and-ready approach to discipline, but no one had ever called him unfair.

  Rom-Sanchez allowed himself to tune out the banter. He watched Ng instead, the way her short hair, the color of maple leaves in autumn, swirled against her face as she turned from Krajno to the plot pane and back. Her hair looked like silk. So did her skin, which was the goldy-brown hue that some called sallow. He found it b
eautiful. As she gestured toward the plot plane, he stole a peek at the way her faultless blues modeled her slight, muscular figure.

  Then he shifted his attention to his compad, and slapped himself down mentally. He was fairly sure that those hazel eyes did not miss much. What he didn’t know was what she thought in personal terms: she never discussed private affairs, ever, with anyone—so far as he was aware.

  Did she have a private life? Some officers didn’t. Some of those highborn Douloi from the Tetrad Centrum families acted as antiseptic as if they’d been decanted as adults from a steel tube straight into the Academy.

  But Ng was not Douloi. Rom-Sanchez remembered Mdeino’s comment in the wardroom about everyone getting a shot at alpha. “Lot of ships you can’t say that about.” Rom-Sanchez had been lucky in his assignment to Grozniy, lucky to avoid a ship where his Highdweller origins might hold him back. Best not to screw it up with stupid fantasies about a captain almost twice his age, not to mention one who’d been awarded the Panarchy’s highest honor for her heroism at the Battle of Acheront that ended the Dol’jharian War.

  He forced his attention back to the conversation.

  “. . . maybe the Local Justice Option, Captain?” Krajno was saying, rubbing his hands with exaggerated pleasure.

  That’s the real decision: what do we do with Eichelly when we do catch him? I think she’s already decided.

  “Look who’s being bloody-minded!” Ng laughed. “A tribunal won’t need to make that decision. Can you imagine Schadenheimers in particular not posting on Eichelly? Best we can hope for is a crack at interrogating the survivors.”

  She slapped the pane and it went dark. “That’s assuming our ruptors even leave enough for the Schadenheimers. “

  She tabbed the compad. “Bridge.”

  “Yes, sir?” Mzinga’s voice responded.

  “Plot a full-speed course to Schadenheim and stand by.”

  “AyKay, sir, full-speed course to Schadenheim and stand by.”

  She tapped the compad off and turned to Rom-Sanchez. “We have a few minutes before the tacponder report is ready, which gives us time for a different kind of tribunal.”

  Despite the hint of smile betrayed at the corners of her eyes, and the wink Krajno sent him, Rom-Sanchez’s stomach lurched.

  “So, Lieutenant,” she continued. “Tell me what you did wrong...”

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