Sassinak

by Anne McCaffrey

  So far as the junior officers were concerned, the cruiser patrolled in the old way; because of warnings from Fleet about security leaks, Sassinak told only four of her senior crew, who had to know to operate the scan. Other modifications to the Zaid-Dayan, intended to give it limited stealth capability, were explained as being useful in normal operations.

  As the days passed, Sassinak considered the Fleet warnings. "Assume subversives on each ship." Fine, but with no more guidance than that, how was she supposed to find one? Subversives didn't advertise themselves with loud talk of overturning FSP conventions. Besides, it was all guessing. She might have one subversive on her ship, or a dozen, or none at all. She had to admit that if she were planting agents, she'd certainly put them on cruisers, as the most effective and most widespread of the active vessels. But nothing showed in the personnel records she'd run a preliminary screen on—and supposedly Security had checked them all out before.

  She knew that many commanders would think first of the heavyworlders on board, but while some of them were certainly involved in subversive organizations, the majority were not. However difficult heavyworlders might be—and some of them, she'd found, had earned their reputation for prickly sullenness—Sassinak had never forgotten the insights gained from her friends at the Academy. She tried to see behind the heavy-boned stolid faces, the overmuscular bodies, to the human person within—and most of the time felt she had succeeded. A few real friendships had come out of this, and many more amiable working relationships . . . and she found that her reputation as an officer fair to heavyworlders had spread among the officer corps.

  Wefts, as aliens, irritated many human commanders, but again Sassinak had the advantage of early friendships. She knew that Wefts had no desire for the worlds humans preferred—in fact, the Wefts who chose space travel were sterile, having given up their chance at procreation for an opportunity to travel and adventure. Nor were they the perfect mental spies so many feared: their telepathic powers were quite limited; they found the average human mind a chaotic mess of emotion and illogic, impossible to follow unless the individual tried hard to convey a message. Sass, with her early training in Discipline, could converse easily with Wefts in their native form, but she knew she was an exception. Besides, if any of the Wefts on board had identified a subversive, she'd already have been told.

  After several weeks, she felt completely comfortable with her crew, and could tell that they were settling well together. Huron had proved as inventive a partner as he was a versifier—after hearing a few of his livelier creations in the wardroom one night, she could hardly believe he hadn't written the one about the captain's son and the merchant's daughter. He still insisted he was innocent of that one. The weapons officer, a woman only one year behind her at the Academy, turned out to be a regional sho champion—and was clearly delighted to demonstrate by beating Sassinak five games out of seven. It was good for morale, and besides, Sassinak had never minded learning from an expert. One of the cooks was a natural genius—so good that Sassinak caught herself thinking about putting him on her duty shift, permanently. She didn't, but her taste buds argued with her, and more than once she found an excuse to "inspect" the kitchens when he was baking. He always had something for the captain. All this was routine—even finding a homesick and miserable junior engineering tech, just out of training, sobbing hopelessly in a storage locker. But so was the patrol routine . . . nothing, day after day, but the various lumps of matter that had been mapped in their assigned volume of space. Not so much as a pleasure yacht out for adventure.

  She was half-dozing in her cabin, early in third watch, when the bridge com chimed.

  "Captain—we've got a ship. Merchant, maybe CR-class for mass, no details yet. Trigger the scan?"

  "Wait—I'm coming." She elbowed Huron, who'd already fallen asleep, until he grunted and opened an eye, then whisked into her uniform. When he grunted again and asked what it was, she said, "We've got a ship." At that, both eyes came open, and he sat up. She laughed, and went out; by the time she got to the bridge, he was only a few steps behind her, fully dressed.

  "Gotcha!" Huron, leaning over the scanner screen, was as eager as the technician handling the controls. "Look at that . . ." His fingers flew on his own keyboard, and the ship's data came up on an adjoining screen. "Hu Veron Shipways, forty percent owned by Allied Geochemical, which is wholly owned by the Paraden family. Well, well . . . previous owner Jakob Iris, no previous criminal record but went into bankruptcy after . . . hmm . . . a wager on a horse race. What's that?"

  "Horse race," said Sassinak, watching the screen just as intently. "Four-legged mammal, big enough to carry humans. Old Earth origin, imported to four new systems, but they mostly die."

  "Kipling's corns, captain, how do you know all that?"

  "Kipling indeed, Huron. Our schools had a Kipling story about a horse in the required elementary reading list. With a picture. And the Academy kept a team for funerals, and I have seen a tape of a horse race. In fact, I've actually ridden a horse." Her mouth quirked, as she thought of Mira's homeworld and that ill-fated pack trip.

  "You would have," said Huron almost vaguely. His attention was already back to his screen. "Look at that—Iris was betting against Luisa Paraden Scofeld. Isn't that the one who was married to a zero-G hockey star, and then to an ambassador to Ryx?"

  "Yes, and while he was there she ran off with the landscape architect. But the point is—"

  "The point is that the Paradens have laid their hands on that ship twice!"

  "That we know of." Sassinak straightened up and regarded the back of Huron's head thoughtfully. "I think we'll trail this one, Commander Huron. There are just a few too many coincidences . . ."

  Even as she gave the necessary orders, Sassinak was conscious of fulfilling an old dream—to be in command of her own ship, on the bridge, with a possible pirate in view. She looked around with satisfaction at what might have been any large control room, anything from a reactor station to a manufacturing plant, The physical remnant of millennia of naval history was under her feet, the raised dais that gave her a clear view of everyone and everything in the room. She could sit in the command chair, with her own screens and computer linkages at hand, or stand and observe the horseshoe arrangement of workstations, each with its trio of screens, its banks of toggles and buttons, its quietly competent operator. Angled above were the big screens, and directly below the end of the dais was the remnant of a now outmoded technology that most captains still used to impress visitors: the three-D tank.

  Trailing a ship through FTL space was, Sassinak thought, like following a groundcar through thick forest at night without using headlights. The unsuspecting merchant left a disturbed swath of space which the Ssli could follow, but it could not simultaneously sense structural (if that was the word) variations in the space-time fabric . . . so that they were constantly in danger of jouncing through celestial chugholes or running into unseen gravitational stumps. They had to go fast, to keep the quarry in range of detection, but fast blind travel through an unfamiliar sector was an excellent way to get swallowed by the odd wormhole.

  When the quarry dropped out of FTL into normal space, the cruiser followed—or, more properly, anticipated. The computer brought up the local navigation points.

  "That's interesting," said Huron, pointing. It was more than interesting. A small star system, with one twenty-year-old colony (in the prime range for a raid) sited over a rich vein of platinum. Despite Fleet's urging, FSP bureaucrats had declined to approve effective planetary defense weaponry for small colonies . . . and the catalog of this colony's defenses was particularly meager.

  "Brotherhood of Metals," said Sass. "That's the colony sponsor; they hold the paper on it. I'm beginning to wonder who their stockholders are."

  "New contact!" The technician's voice rose. "Excuse me, captain, but I've got a Churi-class vessel out there: could be extremely dangerous—"

  "Specs." Sassinak glanced around the bridge, pleased with th
e alert but unfrantic attitudes she saw. They were already on full stealth routine; upgrading to battle status would cost her stealth. Her weapons officer raised a querying finger; Sassinak shook her head, and he relaxed.

  "Old-style IFF—no beacon. Built forty years ago in the Zendi yards, commissioned by the—" He stopped, lowered his voice. "The governor of Diplo, captain."

  Oh great, thought Sass. Just what we needed, a little heavyworlder suspicion to complete our confusion.

  "Bring up the scan and input," she said, without commenting on the heavyworlder connection. One display filled with a computer analysis of the IFF output. Sassinak frowned at it. "That's not right. Look at that carrier wave—"

  "Got it." The technician had keyed in a comparison command, and the display broke into colored bands, blue for the correspondence between the standard signal and the one received, and bright pink for the unmatched portions.

  "They've diddled with their IFF," said Sass. "We don't know what that is, or what it carries—"

  "Our passive array says it's about the size of a patrol craft—" offered Huron.

  "Which means it could carry all sorts of nice things," said Sass, thinking of them. An illicitly armed patrol craft was not a match for the Zaid-Dayan, but it could do them damage. If it noticed them.

  Huron was frowning at the displays. "Now . . . is this a rendezvous, or an ambush?"

  "Rendezvous," said Sassinak quickly. His brows rose.

  "You're sure?"

  "It's the worse possibility for us: it gives us two ships to follow or engage if they notice us. Besides, little colonies like this don't get visits from unscheduled merchants."

  Judging by the passive scans, which produced data hours old, the two ships matched trajectories and traveled toward the colony world together—certainly close enough to use a tight-beam communication band. The Zaid-Dayan hung in the system's outer debris, watching with every scanning mode it had. Hour by hour, it became clearer that the destination must be the colony. They're raiders, Sassinak thought, and Huron said it aloud, adding, "We ought to blow them out of the system!" For an instant, Sassinak let the old fury rise almost out of control, but she forced the memory of her own childhood back. If they blew these two away, they would know nothing about the powers who hired them, protected them, supplied them. She would not let herself wonder if another Fleet commander had made the same decision about her homeworld's raid.

  She shook her head. "We're on surveillance patrol; you know that."

  "But, captain—our data's a couple of hours old. If they are raiders, they could be hitting that colony any time . . . we have to warn them. We can't let them—" Huron had paled, and she saw a terrible doubt in his eyes.

  "Orders." She turned away, not trusting herself to meet his gaze. She had exorcised many demons from her past, in the years since her commissioning: she could dine with admirals and high government officials, make polite conversation with aliens, keep her temper and her wits in nearly all circumstances . . . but deep in her mind she carried the vision of her parents dying, her sister's body sliding into the water, her best friend changed to a shivering, depressed wreck of the lively girl she'd been. She shook her head, forcing herself to concentrate on the scan. Her voice came out clipped and cold; she could see by their reactions that the bridge crew recognized the strain on her. "We must find the source of this—we must. If we destroy these vermin, and never find their master, it will go on and on, and more will suffer. We have to watch, and follow—"

  "But they never meant us to let a colony be raided! We're—we're supposed to protect them—it's in the Charter!" Huron circled until he faced her again. "You've got discretion, in any situation where FSP citizens are directly threatened—"

  "Discretion!" Sassinak clamped her jaw on the rest of that, and glared at him. It must have been a strong glare, for he backed a step. In a lower voice, she went on. "Discretion, Huron, is not questioning your commanding officer's orders on the bridge when you don't know what in flaming gas clouds is going on. Discretion is learning to think before you blow your stack—"

  "Did you ever think," said Huron, white-lipped and angrier than Sassinak had ever seen him, "that someone might have made this decision when you were down there?" He jerked his chin toward the navigation display. She waited a long moment, until the others had decided it would be wise to pay active attention to their own work, and the rigidity went out of Huron's expression.

  "Yes," she said very quietly. "Yes, I have. I imagine it haunts that person, if someone actually was there, as this is going to haunt me." At that his face relaxed slightly, the color rising to his cheeks. Before he could speak, Sassinak went on. "You think I don't care? You think I haven't imagined myself—some child the age I was, some innocent girl or boy who's thinking of tomorrow's test in school? You think I don't remember, Huron?" She glanced around, seeing that everyone was at least pretending to give them privacy. "You've seen my nightmares, Huron; you know I haven't forgotten."

  His face was as red as it had been pale. "I know. I know that, but how can you—"

  "I want them all." It came out flat, emotionless, but with the power of an impending avalanche . . . as yet no sound, no excitement . . . but inexorable movement accelerating to some dread ending. "I want them all, Huron: the ones who do it because it's fun, the ones who do it because it's profitable, the ones who do it because it's easier than hiring honest labor . . . and above all the ones who do it without thinking about why . . . who just do it because that's how it's done. I want them all." She turned to him with a smile that just missed pleasantry to become the toothy grin of the striking predator. "And there's only one way to get them all, and to that I commit this ship, and my command, and any other resource . . . including, with all regret, those colonists who will die before we can rescue them—"

  "But we're going to try—?"

  "Try, hell. I'm going to do it." The silence on the bridge was eloquent; this time when she turned away from Huron he did not follow.

  The scans told the pitiable story of the next hours. The colonists, more alert than Myriad's, managed to set off their obsolete missiles, which the illicit patrol craft promptly detonated at a safe distance.

  "Now we know they've got an LDsl4, or equivalent," said Huron without emphasis. Sassinak glanced at him but made no comment. They had not met, as usual, after dinner, to talk over the day's work. Huron had explained stiffly that he wanted to review for his next promotion exam, and Sassinak let him go. The ugly thought ran through her mind that a subversive would be just as happy to have the evidence blown to bits. But surely not Huron—from a small colony himself, surely he'd have more sympathy with them . . . and besides, she was sure she knew him better than any psych profile. Just as he knew her.

  Meanwhile, having exhausted the planetary defenses, the two raiders dropped shuttles to the surface. Sassinak shivered, remembering the tough, disciplined (if irregular) troops the raiders had landed on her world. The colonists wouldn't stand a chance. She found she was breathing faster, and looked up to find Huron watching her. So were the others, though less obviously; she caught more than one quick sideways glance.

  Yet she had to wait. Through the agonizing hours, she stayed on the bridge, pushing aside the food and drink that someone handed her. She had to wait, but she could not relax, eat, drink, even talk, while those innocent people were being killed . . . and captured . . . and tied into links (did all slavers use links of eight, she wondered suddenly). The two ships orbited the planet, and when this orbit took them out of LOS, the Zaid-Dayan eased closer, its advanced technology allowing minute hops of FTL flight with minimal disturbance to the fields.

  Their scan delay was less than a half-hour, and the raiders had shown no sign of noticing their presence in the system. Now they could track the shuttles rising—all to the transport, Sassinak noted—and then descending and rising again. Once more, and then the raiders boosted away from the planet, on a course that brought them within easy range of the Zaid-Dayan. Huron o
nly looked at Sass; she shook her head, and caught her weapons officer's eye as well. Hold on, she told the self she imagined lying helpless in the transport's belly. We're here: we're going to come after you. But she knew her thoughts did those children no good at all—and nothing could wipe out the harm already done.

  Chapter Nine

  All too quickly the transport and its escort showed that they were preparing to leave the system. Powerful boosters shoved them up through the planet's gravity well—a system cheap and certain, if inelegant. Sassinak wondered if the transport that had carried her had had an escort—or if Fleet activities in the past twenty years or so had had that much effect. Considering the cost of each ship, crew, weaponry . . . if Fleet had made escorts necessary . . . then either the profit margin of slavers should be much narrower, or the slave trade brought even more money than anyone had guessed. And why?