Family Law 3: Secrets in the Stars (40 page)

The USNA
Frank B. Kellogg
and
Henry A. Kissinger
were listed as destroyed the same date on Luna, but again, not how. There were no extra files on them. Another Home vessel, the
Eddie's Rascal
, was listed as destroyed in China by bombardment along with eleven Chinese vessels. That shocked Lee. What the heck was a Home vessel doing on the ground in China? The list and web portion gave no clue why, or who bombarded them.

There was a pause and then the Chinese vessels
The Straight Path
,
Guan
, and
Anchun
were all listed as destroyed in lunar orbit. The
Ruyi
was listed for the same date as 'captured', but no indication who captured it. It was frustrating, but there sure were a lot more ships lost than Lee imagined for the era. There weren't as many flying then and this many had to be a substantial fraction.

Lee went back to the first entry as it at least identified who destroyed the
Pretty as Jade
and the
James Kelly
. When she enter the name
Happy Lewis
she got a surprise. The picture was of a really small vessel, smaller than one of their landing shuttles, hanging from the ceiling of the Space Museum in the Lunar Republic, with tourists looking up at it. She'd been in the Lunar Republic and nobody had even told her there
was
a Space Museum. There was a rover to be seen in the background and things beyond. It appeared to be a pretty big facility.

There was a story board for the tourists and Lee drew a rectangle around it and expanded it hoping the resolution was sufficient to read it. It was. It listed April Lewis as the pilot (Apprentice) at the vessel's first flight, and noted she flew under the direction of Master Pilot Washington Carter Dixon (Easy), commanding. The ship hanging there was noted to be the third major revision to the vessel. It had two command seats and up to four passenger seats could be inserted or removed. It was capable of lunar landings, which it had done frequently, and had been loaned to the collection by Singh Industries. It mentioned the drive and power plants had been removed for display. It was listed as fourteen point six meters long and seventeen metric tons dry.

What made Lee choke on her coffee and made everybody turn and look concerned at her was the next line. It said the maximum acceleration of the vessel in its final configuration was unpublished but it had been observed on public traffic scan to pull a sustained 14G. Lee was amazed they put that right out on a sign in front of God and everybody. 14G? Did nobody twig to the fact that was a lethal level of acceleration? Unless you were a Caterpillar... with either much more tolerance, or gravity manipulation one supposed.

"Are you OK?" Gordon asked Lee, mildly worried.

"Yeah, but I'm finding out some stuff has been what you'd call hidden in plain sight that puts a new light on things," Lee told him. "If I told you Home had an armed vessel back about 2090 that could pull 14G and the damn thing is now retired, and hanging in a museum, what would you think?"

Gordon did one of those slow blinks that she'd come to know meant all his neural circuits were busy and he was overwhelmed processing a new reality. It was pretty hard to overload him like that.

"If... that is accurate. What do they have now?" Gordon immediately jumped to the correct question.

"I don't know, but I think we better find out when we get to Earth," Lee said. "I'm sending all this to your screen. If we only had the tiny old web fraction from our exploring days I couldn't have found
any
of this. As it is, even with the big download you bought on Fargone I'm just getting tantalizing glimpses of what went on.

"But there sure were a lot of ships lost in a narrow time frame. I try to find more data on the ship's names and it's a blank. You really have to dig for it. Once we are able to buy deeper access I'll have a whole long list of people and ships I want to research. I don't care if we have to buy access to the whole damn web real time, we
need
it, not just archived and in English."

"Alright, when we are at Luna we'll let you dig into this deeper," Gordon agreed. "I know our fraction is limited, but why don't you have Luke dig into what we have deeper? He seems to be pretty good at data mining and he may find something else before we get there."

"You tell him," Lee said. "He accepts direction from you better than me. He'll just ask you to confirm it after I've told him anyway. So you still invest about as much time telling him from the start and it avoid irritating me when he asks. But yeah, I can think of a few searches he can do for us."

"Seems to me you are pre-irritated," Gordon said, looking amused.

Lee cut the command channel access to speak privately to Gordon. She should have done that before her previous remarks but hadn't. "Yes, next voyage if the man signs up with us fine, he's useful, but I don't want him on the same ship with us. I have no confidence if we had a whistling hole venting the compartment, and I ordered him to patch it, he wouldn't ask you if that was OK before he got his butt in gear to grab the patch kit."

"Done," Gordon promised her. Deciding now was also not a good time to argue over when or if there'd be another voyage. They were near shift end and everybody was tired.

* * *

After Lee was in bed, her mind was still racing. She'd made a start on research instructions for Luke to pursue about ships and politics in the 2080s and 2090s. But something else occurred to her. Lee pulled her com tablet from the inside corner of her bunk where she always left it and activated it in the dark.

She looked up Singh Industries. The list included shipbuilding and leasing, lunar tunneling and cubic management, food industries and industrial materials, leasing of heavy equipment and even banking. There was the System Bank, the System Bank of Central, and the System Bank of Central at Camelot. There was even a casino. There were both com and physical addresses on Home and Luna, but no stock symbols or numbers for their capitalization and activity. It must be a privately held company.

When Lee put in Washington Carter Dixon she got no bio, no obit, just a contact, which was oddly enough Singh Industries again. April Lewis got a short bio. She was listed as a partner for Singh Industries along with Jeff Singh and Heather Anderson. Lee noted those for Luke to research. The head and shoulders portrait of April wasn't dated, but was startling. It showed a very young girl in short hair, not at all the current fashion, with modest earrings, a neck chain, and no tats. She had on old-fashioned spex and what looked like an beaded armored vest with a stiff standup collar. There was a wrapped handle sticking up behind her shoulder. Lee had no idea to what sort of tool it could be attached.

April was also listed as associated with a pretty long list of businesses on Home and the Central Kingdom. Apparently those apparently were public documents, but the web fraction didn't detail them. It also listed as a reference the minutes of The Assembly of Home and several news articles starting with a BBC video in 2083, none of which were in the web fraction at this size. It was frustrating, but Lee could see including the uncited references must encourage sales of a greater fraction. There was no obituary. Strangely, at the end it said, Contact: Home com AL04, Central com Lady Lewis 023. That was weird. A granddaughter maybe? More likely a great-granddaughter Lee added up in her head. Lee saved the references and was finally able to sleep.

* * *

When they reached the last system before a jump to Sol was possible, it was a fairly complex active system, with industry and mining. Although it had no water world or living world. The low number for Survey System 17 said how close it was to Earth. It even had an old pre-Survey name of Epsilon Indi. It was a complex system to jump to with a lot of massive objects, the main star, two brown dwarfs tied together, a dark stellar remnant and a gas giant.

Lee was reading the Survey details of the system before jump. She stopped and watched the stars change. It was beyond imagining she'd ever get so jaded she wouldn't pause and watch that miracle. But it was interesting enough she went back to it after the jump. She had some questions but they could wait while the bridge listened to the system scan and announced themselves.

Gordon identified their three ships, making the point clear the
Dart
was an alien vessel associated with them, and that the Caterpillar ship also was a different species, but not under his control. He identified himself as commander and announced their intention to pass through to Earth.

Once the messages were away Lee asked, "Why is it that this system that has two brown dwarfs and that dark thing don't have big moon systems like the ones we found?"

"I don't know," Gordon admitted. "If you want to ask Mr. Goddard if there is some theory advanced about that he should know. If he didn't before he must certainly have had his interest renewed after our discoveries and researched it. What I'm wondering now is if the other systems with brown dwarfs closer to Earth are like this or more like the ones we found. If they have resources there will be a renewed effort to be able to visit them, even though they are difficult jump targets."

"We should have asked our people going to New Japan to inquire how hard it would be to make a fuel scooping drone that can dip into a brown dwarf," Lee decided. "We talked about that, but I just realized when we file claims for our finds it's going to make everybody want to find a way to tap into the closer brown dwarfs too. We should have gotten the jump on them."

"Fear not," Gordon counseled, "we thought of that, and engineering composed some inquiries into the matter to both New Japan and Fargone. We didn't feel the need to bother you with every detail."

"Oh good," Lee said. But she felt bad she hadn't remembered to arrange it herself.

This close to Earth there were picket ships posted to all the close stars. that duty rotated among the nations who pledged ships to the Claims Commission. It was something nations with smaller space forces usually performed to fulfill their membership obligation. At System 17, the system scan identified the Indian frigate
Sahyadri
as standing
the current picket watch.

The speed of light lag both ways finally let the
Sahyadri
reply to Gordon.

"
High Hopes
, this is Captain Dhar of the
Sahyadri,
we are proceeding under acceleration for jump to Earth. Our instructions obligate us to make a return without delay if a vessel of an unknown alien race appears. There was no exception made for an escorted vessel so we are following our orders literally with no interpretation. We anticipate jumping out before you can respond.

"Our return and report will undoubtedly result in a heightened alert status among many of the Commission members. I suggest Commander Gordon that you delay here and send a jump drone through detailing your intentions and await a response for everyone's safety. I'm not at all certain a non-Earth armed vessel such as the
Retribution
will be given clearance to Earth orbit. Armed ships of Fargone and New Japan do not routinely enter the Solar System. The Commission and space powers may want to send somebody to inspect the ship of these new species, and may carry word of a refusal to grant traffic clearance."

"
Well
, we certainly never had this response before coming to file our claims," Gordon said.

"That was carefully weasel worded," Lee said. She looked upset. "And he avoided asking a lot of questions he could or should have asked, or at least requested you put in a drone message. Brownie, is he really going to jump out before our transmission could reach him?"

"System scan lists the ship as in-system, but censors the location of the picket ship. The delay suggests he was sticking with the main mining group, but he hasn't fired up his own radar at all, which would certainly locate him. He might even jump out behind the primary from us and not accept relayed messages. But he'd have to be boosting at over three G, and nobody wants to do that needlessly. You start to have a significant probability someone will have a medical emergency at that acceleration. It's not like we are in pursuit or shooting at him," Brownie pointed out.

"Yes, he seems anxious
not
to talk to us," Gordon agreed.

"I could illuminate that whole quadrant of the system with a full power ping," Thor offered from the
Retribution
. "If we catch an echo off him before he jumps we know he lied."

"No," Gordon decided. "Let's play the game. We don't want to tell him we know he's lying, nor turn things adversarial by using military power radar in a peaceful system. Let us see what else they say to us, thinking we are buying the story, before we contradict anyone."

"Notice, he says the Commission and the
space powers
may deny us permission to enter, without naming those powers,” Lee said. "He doesn't say we'll be met with armed force, but just implies it by saying there will be an alert. He sounds like a lawyer instead of a ship's captain."

"And what does all that tell you, if you were sitting this seat?" Gordon asked.

This struck Lee as one of those critical questions and a test, that would determine when or
if
she was ever going to be considered for command.

"I would consider myself informed that likely
everything
Captain Roosevelt told is fact, and much more to be learned he didn't tell us," Lee decided.

That seemed agreeable to Gordon. If she'd failed the question he'd have immediately turned it into a lesson. Instead he asked, "So would you send a drone as he urged us or just show up uninvited and see what sort of reception we get?"

"They may be a little sensitive to Gordon of Red Tree coming to Sol," Lee said as tactfully as possible. "The last time an armed Derf vessel went through North America got clobbered. They lost an orbital fort and an entire shipyard with work in progress. You scare the snot out of the Fargoers and you didn't even shoot at
them
. It may not seem credible to you, but they might panic. That's a bad thing."