Sassinak (18 page)

Huron, she realized quickly, was an asset in more ways than one. Colony-bred himself, he had more than the usual interest in their safety. Too many Fleet officers considered the newer colonies more trouble than they were worth. As the days passed, she found that Huron's assessment of the junior officers was both fair and leavened by humor. She began to wonder why his previous commander had had so little confidence in him.

That story came out over a game of sho, one evening some days into their patrol. Sassinak had begun delicately probing, to see if he had a grievance of any sort. After the second or third ambiguous question, Huron looked up from the playing board with a smile that sent a sudden jolt through her heart.

"You're wondering if I know why Commander Kerif gave me such a lukewarm report last period?"

Sass, caught off guard as she rarely was, smiled back. "You're quite right—and you don't need to answer. But you've been too knowledgeable and competent since I came to have given habitually poor performance."

Huron's smile widened. "Commander Sassinak, your predecessor was a fine officer and I admire him. However, he had very strong ideas about the dignity of some . . . ah . . . prominent, old-line, merchant families. He never felt that I had sufficient respect for them, and he attributed a bit of doggerel he heard to me."

"Doggerel?"

Huron actually reddened. "A . . . uh . . . song. Sort of a song. About his son and that girl he's marrying. I didn't write it, Commander, although I did think it was funny when I heard it. But, you see, I'd quoted some verse in his presence before, and he was sure . . ."

Sassinak thought about it. "And do you have proper respect for wealthy merchants?"

Huron pursed his lips. "Proper? I think so. But I am a colony brat."

Sassinak shook her head, smiling. "So am I, as you must already know. Poor Kerif . . . I suppose it was a very
bad
song." She caught the look in Huron's eye, and chuckled. "If that's the worst you ever did, we'll have no problems at all."

"I don't want any," said Huron, in a tone that conveyed more than one meaning.

Years before, as a cadet, Sassinak had wondered how anyone could combine relationships both private and professional without being unfair to one or the other. Over the years, she had established her own ground rules, and had become a good judge of those likely to share her values and attitudes. Except for that one almost-disastrous (and, in retrospect, funny) engagement to a brilliant and handsome older diplomat, she had never risked anything she could not afford to lose. Now, secure in her own identity, she expected to go on enjoying life with those of her officers who were willing and stable enough not to be threatened—and honest enough not to take advantages she had no intention of releasing.

Huron, she thought to herself, was a distinct possibility. From the glint in his eyes, he thought the same way about her: the first prerequisite.

But her duty came first, and the present circumstances often drove any thought of pleasure from her mind. In the twenty years since her first voyage, Fleet had not been able to assure the safety of the younger and more remote colonies; as well, planets cleared for colonization by one group were too often found to have someone else—legally now the owners—in place when the colonists arrived. Although human slavery was technically illegal, colonies were being raided for slaves—and that meant a market somewhere. "Normal" humans blamed heavyworlders; heavyworlders blamed the "lightweights" as they called them, and the wealthy mercantile families of the inner worlds complained bitterly about the cost of supporting an ever-growing Fleet which didn't seem to save either lives or property.

Their orders, which Sassinak discussed only in part with her officers, required them to make use of a new, supposedly secret, technology for identifying and trailing newer deep-space civilian vessels. It augmented, rather than replaced, the standard IFF devices which had been in use since before Sassinak joined the Fleet. A sealed beacon, installed in the ship's architecture as it was built, could be triggered by Fleet surveillance scans. While passive to detectors in its normal mode, it nonetheless stored information on the ship's movements. The original idea had been to strip these beacons whenever a ship came to port, and thus keep records on its actual travel—as opposed to the log records presented to the portmaster. But still newer technology allowed specially equipped Fleet cruisers to enable such beacons while still in deepspace, even FTL flight—and then to follow with much less chance of detection. Now the plan was for cruisers such as the
Zaid-Dayan
to patrol slowly, in areas away from the normal corridors, and select suspicious "merchants" to follow.

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 the 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.