Loralynn Kennakris 1: The Alecto Initiative (7 page)

“Sorry, Kris.” Mariwen reached out and curved her hand
around Kris’s shoulder in a neutral fashion and Kris didn’t flinch it off. “I
really am. Please forgive me?”

Kris nodded, throat tight. Mariwen slipped her hand off
Kris’s shoulder, flashed one of her old safe teasing smiles. “I’m going to take
a shower. I’ll be interested to see if the old cold-shower trick works.”

Being teased allowed Kris to regain some equilibrium. She
returned the volley with a smirk. “You don’t know yet?”

“Never had to find out before,” Mariwen shot back.

“Mariwen!”

“Don’t look at me like that,” Mariwen said archly. “
Your
fault.”

Kris conceded defeat. “Alright, alright. Let’s go. I’ll even
let you shower first.”

“
So
gracious.” Mariwen flounced out ahead of her,
swaying her hips and blowing a kiss.

On the way back, they passed Huron in the corridor again.
His face had a rigid set to it and there were lines around the mouth and eyes
as if he had been missing sleep. He nodded to them politely, touching the brim
of his peaked cap, but did not stop. Kris read tension and frustration in even
that brief gesture. Something was going on.

“Excuse me, Lieutenant,” she called after him. “Something’s
up, isn’t it?” Huron paused a moment, indecision momentarily stiffening his
back. Then he turned.

“Well yes,” he began hesitantly, “something is up.” He
rubbed the fingers of his right hand across his palm. “I guess you two have
earned the right to know this, if anyone has. Yesterday we picked up the phase
wake of a small flotilla. Probably someone coming to meet your friends”—he bit
down hard on the sarcastic syllables—“but since we crashed the party, they’re
trying to clear out of the area. At the moment, I’m afraid they are
succeeding.”

“They are?” Kris’s voice took on an edge.

Huron looked pained around the eyes. “I’m afraid so, yes.
The wakes are very weak—we can’t track them reliably. None of the transit
estimates converge. If we had an idea of their destination, we could probably
still nail them—but we don’t.”

A strange, hard look settled on Kris’s features. “Where are
we?”

“Grid reference LZ-117.” He looked dubious. “Does that mean
anything to you?”

“Maybe,” Kris answered chewing her lip. “Is that a Never’s
Projection reference?”

Huron’s eyes widened slightly. “Malthus-Never’s. Pretty
close.”

“Then we’re near Hipparcos Prime? In the Belt? A little
G-north of Sagittarius?”

Huron’s eyes widened more. “That’s the closest major, yes.”

Kris eyes glittered as she grinned thinly. “Then they’re
heading for d’Harra.”

Huron blinked. “We checked that. It didn’t fit.”

“You used book numbers. They’ll be running real hot—probably
no better than point seven optimum.”

“That’s a hell of a risk!”

“Compared to you guys
shooting
at them?” Kris shook
her head. “Nah. They run hot to ball up your numbers if you hear them. If you
assume anything reasonable, you’ll way overshoot.” She locked eyes with him.
“You said your estimates wouldn’t converge.”

Huron rubbed his jaw, not yet convinced. “But there’s
nothing at d’Harra.”

“That’s why they go there,” Kris snapped. “They can try to
wait you out on it and skate away real shallow once you’re faked out.”

Huron continued rubbing his jaw, digesting this. “Excuse me
a moment.”

He walked away slowly a few paces, pulled out the device
like a stylus and hailed the bridge. They heard him talking, fast and low, but
couldn’t make out the words.

“What’s going on?” Mariwen whispered anxiously in Kris’s
ear. Kris jumped a little. She’d quite forgotten Mariwen. She turned and saw Mariwen’s
eyes—large and worried. “I didn’t understand half of what you said. Is there
going to be a fight?”

“I don’t think so,” Kris muttered back, having no idea if it
was actually true.

“. . . yeah, I know that,” Huron snapped suddenly. “I didn’t
say it made sense. Just run it!”

More unintelligible talking. “Point seven’s just an
estimate, dammit!” Silence. Huron fidgeting and tapping a finger on his trouser
seam. Kris watching him stonily. Mariwen looking out-of-place and confused.
Then the stylus-thing crackled again. Expressions kaleidoscoped across Huron’s
face and ended in a smile.

“d’Harra at point six-eight optimum. Got a ninety-eight
convergence.” He looked curiously at Kris. “How did you know that? We’ve been
pulling refugees off slaver boats for years—none have ever been able to tell
us a thing about their routes. How did you find out?”

“You got a system?” Kris asked by way of an answer.

“In my cabin.” He looked across Kris’s shoulder at Mariwen.
“Please excuse us, Ms. Rathor?”

“Of course.” Mariwen had recovered a little of her customary
aplomb. She brushed a strand sweat-stiff hair out of Kris’s face and played at
straightening the damp jersey. “You look great, honey. Now don’t be late.”

*     *     *

Huron’s cabin was smaller than she expected. There was
a narrow extrudable bunk in the sleeping niche, three cabinets with fake teak
paneling, the last of which was an autovalet; a desktop piled with yellow
plaspaper flimsies, two chairs, a console, a mess port in case he wanted to eat
in his quarters, and an omni-lit ceiling. Two fresh uniforms hung on a hook by
a long mirror and there was a stack of chips on a nearby shelf.

Huron invited her in. “The system’s in the desktop,” he
said, brushing it clean with a casual sweep of his hand. Then he took out the
stylus-like device again, flipped it into the mempad-like mode and waved it
over the desktop. “There. You can use it now.”

“What is that thing?” Kris asked. It obviously also had some
security functionality, since she was sure he’d just unlocked his system with
it and probably configured it into a guest mode too. “Some sort of cel? Or is
it more like a mempad?”

“This?” He held up the device as it transformed itself back
into a cylinder. She nodded. “It’s a xel. It’s a comm, a personal system and
it’s own cloud node. You can form autonomous hives with them too. Some have a
basic sensor suite, but not these. And you can’t think-link them.”

The cels Kris knew of were just local hive or cloud clients
that would run fairly simple apps. Even the tablets and the better mempads
she’d seen didn’t have as much capability as the thing he called a xel. And
she’d never heard of think-linking. “Do lots of people have them?”

“Most people,” he said, sliding it into his pocket. “We
restrict them onboard ship because frankly, they can be a damn nuisance. These
aren’t nearly as capable as the commercial ones since they have to be fully
secure—their capacity is limited and they don’t have as many configuration
options and, of course, you can’t customize them as much. The good ones are
about as powerful as most desktop systems—a lot of people don’t use desktop
systems anymore.”

“Oh.” She’d figured they had technology far beyond anything
she was used to, but she had no idea it was this far ahead. What was his system
like? Could she even use it?

Huron pulled over a chair and gestured for Kris to sit. She
did, then nervously thumbed the system on and adjusted the display the way she
liked it. The screen lost its silvery-purple sheen and glowed a soft blue.

“Can you talk to it?” she asked. Trench’s system had had a
speech interface.

“Used to be able to,” Huron answered. “I yanked it. Hate
machines that talk back to you.”

“Oh.” Kris frowned slightly as she glided the cursor over
the icons. Well, so far things looked pretty much the same . . .

“Problem?”

“No,” Kris shook her head. She selected a couple of
functions, frowned again as the display changed unexpectedly. “What OS is
this?”

“x7.01. What are you used to?”

“x5.0.”

“Not much different,” Huron said. “They merged a few of the
libraries, and application builder is over there.” He pointed. “They updated
the analyst—moved the config menus under that round thing in the upper left—no,
the silly glowing one.”

“Oh. Okay.” Kris brightened considerably. She selected a
library and quickly ran its contents through the analyst.

“What do you need?”

“Tesseract and a copy of the TSAO catalog, if you’ve got
it.” She squinted at the screen. “I can use Amber Mountain, if not.”

“Tesseract is in the root. I called it
T
.”

“You didn’t link?”

Huron shrugged. “Why? I can type.” He was rummaging through
the chips on the shelf. “I’ve got TSAO here somewhere. Don’t keep it on the
machine.”

“Isn’t it in the ship’s library?”

“Probably. Ah, here we go.” He pulled the chip out of its
case. “What do you need this for anyway?”

“I need to build a grid.”

Huron looked blankly at her with the chip in his hand.

“Oh, it won’t take that long,” she added. “Probably about a
half hour. Is that okay?”

“There’s mapper, if you want,” Huron finally said in a funny
tone of voice. “Type
Map
.”

She did. The display switched to holo mode and grid popped
up in with a point highlighted.

“Oh, cool!” Kris breathed. “We’re here?” She pointed at the
highlighted grid reference.

“Yeah. Those are manifolds and allowed phases. Those are
nodes.”

“And where are we going?”

“Cassandra Station. It’s NQ-147.”

She entered the reference. The display put an amber globe
around it. Now she just had to know where they jumped the slaver ship.

“LQ-85,” Huron told her. She clicked on it. “This is great.
How do I plot a transit?”

“Hot-linking the transform from Tesseract is probably
easiest. I’ve got a procedure written that’ll do an gross iterative solution,
if you like.”

“Oh that’s okay,” Kris said sunnily. With the grid up and
the destination marked, this was going to be easy. “Can I just pull the
transforms out of the function library and enter them here?”

Huron lifted his cap and ran his fingers through his hair.
“Well, yeah. If . . .”

She ignored the rest of what he said and got into the
function menu. Biting her lip gently, she pulled up a basic transform and
started to convolve it. A red line began to wobble tentatively through the
display.

“Shit,” she muttered. “Wrong sign.” She typed a couple of
key strokes and started the convolution again. The red transit line arced
across to impale Cassandra.

“There,” Kris said triumphantly. “That’s it.” Then she
grinned a little sheepishly. “Of course, that’s not what we’re running exactly,
but it oughta be close. Optimum’s all I can do in my head.”

“Uh huh.” Huron stared at the display incredulously, then
sat down in the other chair. “What exactly does this tell me about slaver
routes?”

“I needed a reference,” Kris answered in a cheery voice,
enjoying herself immensely. “Now I can fill the rest in pretty easily.”

“But how did you figure it out to begin with?”

Kris’s brows rose. “Isn’t it obvious?”

Huron brought up a hand to smooth the hair over his temple
again; a distracted little gesture. “No. I’m afraid it isn’t. I don’t imagine
they just told you.”

“No,” Kris said, “They’re usually real close-mouthed. It was
times.”

“Times?”

Kris nodded. “Yeah. For an optimum transit, the transit
times are unique. Time enough transits and you can build a wire diagram, then
you just rotate it until the ends all touch a destination.”

“Oh.” Huron digested this for a moment. “But you need to
anchor it somewhere. If you don’t know where you were when you started timing
transits, you’ve got a problem. And how do you handle routes with similar
timings? They don’t always run optimum—so you said.”

Kris shrugged. “That’s easy. When you take on the same
supplies, when guys start talking about the same bars or whorehouses, when you
hear the same people on the comms—stuff like that. Finding the anchor was
harder, but the routes are pretty repetitive and after awhile it narrows down.
I got to talk to the transportees a few times and that confirmed it.”

“Yeah. Okay.” Huron quit fidgeting. “And you figured this
out all by yourself?”

Kris’s brows quirked in a hurt look. “I had eight years.”

“Good point.” He stood up. “Look, will you excuse me for a
few minutes? I think the captain should know about this.”

Kris shrugged. “Sure. This’ll take me a little while.”

“That’s fine. I’ll be back in about fifteen.” He pointed at
the entry pad by the door. “If that goes off, answer it.” He flashed a narrow,
one-sided smile. “I’ve got my reputation to think about.”

Before Kris could comment, he was out the door.

*     *     *

Lieutenant Huron walked quickly down the hall, his
head spinning. He caught the lift-ladder to O-Deck, breezed out, punched
the bridge hatch open without losing stride. Lieutenant Fitz Lee Walsh was
manning the nav-station. Huron went and leaned over the display.

“Fitz, show me our transit.”

Walsh brought it up. Huron stared hard at it, muttering and
tracing the line with his finger. Close, but not exact. Well, she’d said that.
“What are we running?”

“About nine-three,” Walsh answered. “Old Man’s in a hurry.”

“Plot an optimum, would you?”

“What for?”

“Don’t give me grief, Walsh.”

“Alright. Gimme a second.” Walsh reached out, blanked the
display, brought up the nav module, started fiddling. A minute or so later he
had a transform. He ran it through a pole checker to make sure there were no
unallowed singularities in the solution, then did a residue calculation.
Finally, he brought up the convolver, and stuffed the transform in it with the
residual inputs. The thin red line arced across the display to their
destination. The whole process took about three minutes—Walsh was a pretty
good navigator. “How’s that?”