The Serrano Succession (74 page)

Clutching the ice pack to her leg, Cecelia edged carefully along, one hand on a grab bar or other handhold, until she was back in the pilot's seat. Where had she gone wrong? She'd checked and rechecked the charts; she should have been safely distant from any large mass. All the jump points she'd entered were green-coded, safe and stable . . .

Half her control panel telltales glowed red. Jump drive down, insystem drive down, shields down . . . Cecelia cut the power to emergency level; the lights dimmed. Then she made herself go through the checklist, ignoring the red lights unless they were on it. First was hull integrity: still green. Then atmosphere: still green. She knew that already; she was alive and conscious, so there had to be air. Then environmental systems: yellow. She hesitated, but the protocol said keep going. She keyed it to the short list, and went on. When she'd worked her way through to the reds—drives, shields, longscan, the minimal weapons she carried—she came back to the yellows.

"What's the score?" Miranda asked quietly.

"We've got an intact hull, something to breathe, and some damage to environmental . . . yes . . . correctable. I need to reset the trays and a filter's come loose. Otherwise, we're not going anywhere real soon." Except they were, at their exit velocity, which was faster than she'd have chosen. But she'd deal with that later.

"What happened?"

"Don't know yet." Cecelia took the yellow list and headed back to deal with what could be fixed quickly and easily. Item after item returned to green status. They weren't leaking air; internal power was adequate for all uses at present; all environmental systems were functioning correctly. The reds . . . were beyond her capability. Beyond anyone's, in such a small ship; even if she'd known how to fix the drives, she couldn't have accessed them.

She came back to the pilot's compartment and shook her head at Miranda. "Now I have to figure out where we are, and how fast we're moving . . . we're purely ballistic at this point."

"And what happened?"

"And what happened, if I can. You never got any spacecraft ratings, did you?"

"No—I have atmospheric licenses for flitters and helos, but not spacecraft."

"Um. Well, while I'm working on position and course, suppose you take a look at this." Cecelia took a hardcopy manual out of the bin under her seat. "I don't want to use more power than necessary."

"I see. Then you'd like me to go shut down the galley, I suppose?"

"Yes, if the shift to emergency didn't cut it off automatically." She couldn't remember, at the moment, whether it would or not. Cecelia opened the cover of the Emergency Position Locator System and read the instructions graved on the inside of the cover. Supposedly this system, with its own internal powerpack, could place them accurately anywhere in Familias Space. She hoped they were still in Familias Space.

The EPLS, designed for emergency use, had only a short list of instructions. Cecelia entered their previous course data, the last jump point they should have passed, and waited for something to come up on the screen.

waiting for calculations, in glowing red letters. She stared at it for a long moment, then became aware of the pain in her leg. The burn. She'd dropped the ice pack somewhere while attending to the loose filter fitting.

"Miranda—"

"Yes?"

"See if you can find the ice pack—I put it down while I was working back near the berths—make sure I didn't leave it to melt somewhere troublesome."

"Right."

The steady red glow didn't change. Cecelia had no idea how long the calculations would take, if the device worked at all. She pulled the damp fabric of her slacks away from the painful spot on her leg, hissing at the pain. She didn't want to leave the bridge. Looking around, she remembered that she hadn't tried retrieving the automatic log.

With one eye on waiting for calculations, Cecelia tried to read the automatic log. At first, it made no sense, then she remembered that she needed to convert it to a text function. The jumble of symbols sorted themselves out into a sketchy journal. There was jump point Rvd45.7, and then (elapsed time 28.52 standard hours), jump point Tvd31.8. Two standard hours later—2.13, actually—they had passed within the e-radius of a mass sufficient to cause jump downshift.

All Cecelia really knew about e-radii and masses was that the bigger the mass, the bigger the e-radius that must be avoided. Usually this was a problem only in insertion and exit, when someone wasn't using mapped points. In a ship the size of hers, it shouldn't be a problem unless she actually ran headlong into something. But she had used mapped points, and a standard green-scored route. Nobody else had run into trouble on this route, and once in jump the very indeterminacy of position was supposed to make it safe.

The mass that they had passed too near . . . wasn't even moonlet-sized, let alone planet-sized. Cecelia tapped for interpretation, one of the options on the screen. The screen blanked. looking up data, it said. She glanced back at the other, which still read, waiting for calculations. The autolog screen changed first, offering a range of possibilities. All were ships.

Ships?

One (1) Very Large Container Freighter, fully loaded with high-mass cargo.

Two (2) Very Large Container Freighters, fully loaded with average cargo.

Three (3) . . . the list went on. Cecelia didn't think two or three or four container ships would be traveling in close convoy, but farther down the list, item 8 gave her pause: "Flotilla or wave of military vessels with aggregate mass as above, traveling in close convoy . . ."

In other words, she had split or nearly split a group of military ships, whose combined mass was sufficient to pop her out of jump, and disable her FTL drive.

"Oh, great," she muttered.

"What?" Miranda asked, from behind her.

"If the autolog is right, then the most probable cause of our sudden exist from FTL was that we ran into a cluster of military ships."

Miranda whistled. "I wonder what we did to them."

"Possibly nothing. Possibly we blew them away. But if we didn't . . ."

"They might be after us. I wonder if they're mutineers or loyalists."

"Me, too," Cecelia said. "Did you find that ice pack?"

"Yes—you'd dropped it in the sink. How's your leg?"

"It hurts. But not too badly." The EPLS bleeped, and she looked back at it. "Ah . . . here we are . . ." The figures it displayed made no immediate sense, but at least it had figures. Cecelia jotted them down, then called up a graphics display.

They were still in Familias Space, but that was about all the good news. They'd come out in a region of relatively sparse habitable worlds; the nearest mapped systems were two and three jump points away, respectively. Copper Mountain—she knew that, from the hoorah about Brun's abduction. It was a Fleet base. It was also—the memory jolted her like ice cubes down the spine—it was also where the mutiny had started. Cecelia muttered a string of oaths, and Miranda came forward.

"Bad news?"

"Bad news. Copper Mountain's the closest inhabited system. Want to bet the ships we almost hit were mutineers?"

Passive scan made it clear that they were a long way from anything useful . . . some 18 AU away, the nearest star glowed orange. Cecelia left the scan on, and after two minutes, it had coded six dots as possible ships based on their relative motion. Another minute, and the color shifted, confirming them as artificial and under power. They were accelerating away; the mass sensor reported an aggregate mass very close to what the autolog had postulated as the cause of dropout.

"That's what we nearly hit, I gather," Miranda said, leaning over Cecelia's shoulder.

"Yeah . . . whatever and whoever it is." The sinking feeling in her gut said they were mutineers . . . had to be.

"Are you going to try hailing them?"

"Without knowing? No. Let them think we're a dead issue." They might well be a dead issue anyway, if she couldn't get one of the drives up and running.

"Fine with me," Miranda said. "But we can listen, can't we?"

"I don't know if our communication's working at all," Cecelia said. The telltale had gone from red to yellow by itself, and she didn't trust it. "I guess we can try, though."

She turned the receivers on, and was rewarded by hisses and crackles. She ran through the settings. Then a distorted voice, quickly adjusted by the speech-recognition software.

"—could have been a ship?"

"Not likely. Got anything on scan?"

Cecelia tried to interpret the passive scan data and wished she'd paid more attention when Koutsoudas and Oblo were talking to Brun about scan technique. How far away were those ships, and whose were they?

"There it is." Cecelia flinched as that distant voice changed tone. "It's little; that's why it didn't blow itself and us to bits. Drives are dead . . . it's ballistic . . . but there's a chance the crew are alive."

"Not our problem," said the second voice. "They're unlikely to report us . . . and without a working drive . . ."

So it was the mutineers. Cecelia looked at Miranda, who had gone white. She understood.

"We don't know the drive's dead—they might have turned it off. We can't take the chance. Too much has been going wrong—"

"Doesn't this system have a navigation beacon?" Miranda asked. "A Fleet ansible? Something?"

Cecelia looked it up. "It's uninhabited. There's a mapped jump point, but it's considered inferior—there's some big lump of metal barreling in an eccentric orbit which causes some kind of problem . . ." She put her finger on a footnote. "Wait . . . there's an ansible . . . there's been a research station here. Trouble is, I don't know if it's accessible to civilian signals . . . let's see . . ."

"Will they notice if we hail it?"

"Probably." Cecelia selected the listed frequency. "And we don't have a functioning tightbeam, or any of the other goodies I wish we had. But they already know we're here, and they're going to come after us. If we can get a signal to that ansible, we can at least let Fleet know where some mutineers are." Where they were, that is. They wouldn't stay in this system. "And maybe, if they realize we've signalled, they'll decide to run for it and leave us behind. We'll already have done all the damage we can."

"Somehow," Miranda said, eyeing the scan on which the marked icons had changed color, with lengthening cones to indicate course change and acceleration, "somehow, I don't think they'll do that."

"Probably not." Cecelia entered the pulse combination for the ansible and crossed her fingers. Six full minutes for that signal to reach the ansible, six to return . . . and she had to wait for confirmation before sending any message. She knew all too well how much could happen in twelve minutes.

Two of the distant ships disappeared from scan, and two
possible ship?
icons appeared much closer. Microjump, of course. She retuned the frequency to the one they'd eavesdropped on before.

"—got the transponder," she heard. Damn. She'd forgotten that going to emergency power did not cut off the ship's automatic ID signal—in fact, it boosted the power to it, on the grounds that any ship in an emergency would want to be found. They must be lit up like a candelabra on the military ships' scans.

"Pounce
 . . . owner Cecelia de Marktos. Isn't that the broad who's crazy about horses . . . the one who hired Heris Serrano as a captain?"

"Yesss . . ."

Cecelia did not like the sound of that meditative hiss.

Admiral Minor Arash Livadhi stared blindly at the wall of his office. With the star had come considerably more work than he'd anticipated, despite Admiral Serrano's honest attempt to make the changeover easy on him. Not only were all the experienced flag officers gone, but so were a startling number of the senior NCOs. Anyone who had had a rejuvenation . . . he hadn't ever noticed how many personnel had had a rejuv; he hadn't even decided what he'd do when his own number came up in a few years.

And now the mutiny, and all those personnel were coming back—the fit ones at least. The gossip mill, operating at translight speed through illicit private communications on Fleet ansibles, warned that former admirals were moving right back into their places, and the recently promoted were scrambling to find a place. He wondered what he was supposed to do. Go back to ship command? It would be easier, and he knew himself to be a good captain. But his ship—he still thought of his last command as his ship—and his crew were far away, over on the Benignity border, under a new captain.

He considered the forces available. Heris Serrano's ship was here and she'd been assigned another, halfway across Familias Space. He knew many of her crew, and they knew him. Perhaps he should volunteer to take it? Otherwise the incoming admiral he expected any day would certainly question why he hadn't assigned someone already, why it wasn't out on patrol like the others.