Korval's Game (14 page)

I dare
: Korval’s motto.

Octavia Vinikov knew the motto; knew a thread or two of Korval history.

Octavia Vinikov had seen her old drinking friend and chess partner leave dock commanding a warship, and acted as a portmaster must, to ensure the safety of the port; though she must have known, canny tactician that she was, that her armada could never withstand an attack from the
Passage
.

Shan sighed. “Gods defend the innocent,” he murmured, and pushed his palm against the comm-room door.

“Innocent? Who’s innocent?” demanded the familiar voice of Senior Radio Technician Rusty Morgenstern.

Shan managed a wan smile. “We’re all innocent, my friend,” he said and nodded at the console Rusty sat before. “How fares the new set-up?”

“Almost done. Would’ve been done, if we hadn’t got a lot of last minute stuff in code because of the farewell parade.” Rusty grinned, soft, round face glowing with martial importance before he bethought himself of something else and rummaged briefly on the console’s ledge.

“Got a couple here for you—”

He held out a sealed envelope with a holostripe across the seal.

Shan lifted his eyebrows.

“It came out in code after I decoded it,” Rusty explained, suddenly diffident; “so I thought I ought to . . .”

“Of course.” Shan took the package and weighed it idly in his hand. “From now on anything like that should be routed directly to me on the—”

Rusty nodded seriously.

“I tried that, but Priscilla said you were almost at the door.”

“I see. And did Priscilla tell you anything else?”

“Just that I should double check all outgoing channels and be sure we’ve got Tree-and-Dragon on primary and back-up, and to do the same for the lifeboat comms when I get the chance.”

Shan shook his head ruefully. “I see I could have saved the steps.”

“Naw, one of us had to see the other. Need your signature on this.”

Shan looked dumbly at the official-looking orange card: Korval’s sigil was printed at the top; at the bottom were the words “Code Confirmation.”

He looked at Rusty and caught the thrill of the other man’s fear.

“It’s in the book, Captain,” he said carefully. “I’m sorry . . .”

“Yes, it is, isn’t it, Radio Tech?” Shan bent and scrawled his name. He handed the card back with a straight look into worried brown eyes. “I’m sorry, too.”

Rusty nodded, countersigned the card, carefully peeled back from front, and held out the second copy.

Shan tucked the card away, hoping he’d remember to file it at some point, then stuffed the envelope in the same pocket.

“Thank you, old friend. Carry on.”

He left then, weaving a brief tapestry of good will to chase away Rusty’s fear.

***

The first disk
held the information he’d been expecting from their agent in-system: an up-to-the minute listing of the locations and schedules of those Korval and Korval-allied ships still on regular trade runs, plus the first and second choice fall-back points of each.

To obtain more than that would require Nova’s First Speaker’s key.

Just as well
, Shan thought with uncharacteristic grimness.
Better that I don’t know it all
. He extended a long arm and activated his link with the first mate’s station on the bridge.

“Priscilla, I’m sending up some information to go under Captain’s Seal. Do take a moment to glance at it and memorize three or four coords from the bottom half of the list.”

“Yes, Captain. I’ll take it at number four.”

He copied the information to her terminal and memorized two new coords himself. He already knew the others.

That done, he moved to the second disk.

He laughed aloud when the code formed on the screen: “Poor Rusty!”

Of course the key wasn’t filed in the ship’s codebook—how could it be? It was built on the constantly changing situations of four different correspondence chess games.

Shan tapped in the algebraic codes of the last move in each game.

Na5xBb2. 0-0-0+. d5xe4. g6.

He paused with his finger on
go
, considering the last notation. That pawn chain was an awfully tempting target and would take—

“Fool!” he snarled under his breath and smacked
go
with such force that the terminal beeped in protest. Flutter-witted Shan—trust him to worry about the outcome of a chess game with Plan B in effect!

He ran the codebook command and glared at the reformed screen. The decoded message was blunt. Adrenaline surged and he hit the direct line to the cargo master’s office.

“Man the reserve bridge,” he snapped as soon as the line came open. “I’ll be with you momentarily.”

There was one heartbeat of startled silence. “Yes, Captain,” said Ken Rik, and the line went dead.

The next call was to the first mate’s station.

“This is the Captain. Do me the kindness of calling battle stations—yellow alert. When you have 80 percent compliance, go to red.”

“Shan, we’re in Jump.”

“Indeed we are. Call battle stations. And put Gordy in charge of . . .” He glanced at the ship’s master plan posted above his desk. “Put Gordy in charge of courier boat thirteen. Now.”

The sounding of battle stations nearly drowned out his next words, which were, “Always remember that I love you, Priscilla.”

The headset
of the light duty pressure suit Shan wore brought him the harsh sound of breathing. Deeper inside weapon pod six, Cargo Master Ken Rik yo’Lanna wore a heavy duty suit against the possibility of booby traps or contamination.

“Fingernails,” Ken Rik muttered, fury and terror making an interesting counterpoint to the bloodlust in his voice. “One an hour, and then the toenails—with my own set of grab calipers, I swear it. Just promise me the opportunity—gods! Three more, Shan! I’ll peel his face with a diamond-dust plane . . .”

“Do you have that, Priscilla?” Shan murmured into his link with the bridge. “Three more. These in sub-bay six. What’s our count now?”

“Fourteen.” Her voice was cool in his ear, soothing Healer nerves rubbed raw with Ken Rik’s emotions. “The computer builds a pattern suggestion. It—”

“Another!” Ken Rik snapped. “This one’s bad. Active. Rigged into the Jump scans.”

“Location?”

“Access panel between sub-bay six and the emergency power module. There’s a thin wire running off it through the panel edge. I can—”

“
Don’t touch
!” Priscilla cried, Command Mode freezing even Shan for a moment.

“As you say, Lady. As you say.” The old cargo master’s voice held a note of near hysteria.

“Ken Rik, that is not to be touched,” Priscilla said, very carefully—very gently. “I have a feeling . . .”

Shan shivered, though this was not the first time Priscilla’s wizardly powers had saved a life.

“A feeling?” he ventured.

He heard the buzz of an open line, but it was nearly a minute before she spoke.

“Intent,” she said finally. “That one has malicious intent behind it. I—”

“They all have malicious intent!” Ken Rik broke in, but Shan had already gotten his lifemate’s meaning. The other devices had been set as—devices, hardware necessary to accomplish a goal. What Priscilla sensed around this latest trap was the lingering taste of anticipation and desire.

Whoever had set that booby trap had
wanted
them to die.

“Yes, friend,” Priscilla was telling Ken Rik; “but you cannot see the pattern I have here on the screen. There’s a density and—”

“Spare me the obvious, girl,” Ken Rik snapped. “It’s a spiral, any fool can see that! And as it spirals in toward the power storage and capacitor banks it gets more and more dangerous. We dare not make one mistake in disarming them. We dare not believe we might even find them all! I haven’t begun to look in the firing heads . . .”

Out of view of everyone, Shan nodded. Someone had carefully planned the death of the
Passage
. Planned it to be mysterious and untraceable—an explosion in Jump, confined to the Jump locus—matrix—not much chance of survivors from that!

“Ken Rik, mark your place, leave the access panels open and come to me here.” He hadn’t intended his tone to be so sharp, or the order so abrupt.

“At once, Captain.” Relief washed some of Ken Rik’s terror away, but Shan scarcely noticed.

“Priscilla, cut pod six to minimum power. Shift as many of the crew as possible to the opposite side of the ship. Discounting Ken Rik and myself, you have eight full pilots. Keep three with you, send one to the inner bridge, and station two outside my quarters, to be given access to the captain’s controls, should necessity arise. You will have Gordy go to Storage Unit 117-A and remove what he finds there to the courier boat. Once back at the boat he is to go to internal power and be at battle stations with the other pilot.

“And, Priscilla—please be good enough to pull and cross link every file we have on the theoretical and practical aspects of the mathematics of Jump.”

***

“The situation,”
Shan said carefully, “is quite awkward.”

He glanced up into the split-screen where nine serious faces watched him, even as he watched them: Gordy, his foster-son—and Priscilla’s—tight-lipped and gray-faced beside the large eyes and dark face of Thrina Makami; Vilobar, mustache shiny with sweat; Seth, laconic as always; Priscilla. . .

It was hard not to watch Priscilla. He would have rather been on the bridge, where he could take comfort from her presence, but the melant’i of the situation was plain. Resources needed to be spread out as much as possible. Both ship and crew had a better chance if at least one pilot survived—

“Weapons pod six has been—mined. Booby-trapped. Sabotaged while in storage.”

There was a brief outburst of anger and fear; Shan raised his hand and quieted the noise.

“Who? It doesn’t matter for the moment. How? Apparently under the guise of maintenance the proper fittings were from time to time replaced with fittings containing built-in bombs. How did we know? I received a coded pinbeam from—an impeccable source. Claiming the pod seems to have set a number of rumors into motion, not the least of which is that the galaxy should soon hear of the destruction of a major Liaden trade vessel under mysterious circumstances.

“As far as we are able to determine, there are more than fifteen explosive devices on board, all designed to do some damage, several designed to do maximum damage. The difficulty is that the devices have a variety of timers and triggers associated with them—at least one appears to be Jump-activated—and we very probably have not seen all the devices. Master Ken Rik believes the chance of finding and disabling all these traps before Jump-end is vanishingly low.”

He looked at each of the nine serious faces in turn. No one seemed unduly distressed. He glanced down at his hands, big, brown, clever hands, folded quietly, the Master Trader’s amethyst shining like a small purple sun in the light of the instrument panel. He looked back at the screen.

“In normal space I would merely reset shields and take the calculated risk that we would be far enough away from the thing when it exploded—or use it for target practice if it didn’t.

“Here, we have a different situation. We are, as you all know, in Jump, and cannot maneuver. On the other hand, the physical laws regulating Jump suggest that an explosion in the connected pod will release the energy therein which will then duly fill up the Jump locus-matrix with itself, the total energy/mass equivalency of the system not being altered. Does anyone disagree?”

Nine dismayed faces reflected agreement.

Shan sighed.

“The captain sees no immediate clear answer either. I suggest each command location consider alternatives for the next twelve minutes, on my mark. We shall then reconvene. Pilots, I give you my mark . . . three—two—one—now!”

***

“Pogo stick!”
Vilobar protested, smoothing his mustache nervously. “I can’t see how—”

“No arguments,” Shan directed. “We’re taking ideas now.”

“No, but the springs—if rocket thrust won’t work maybe springs will!” Gordy pelted on, overriding both the older pilot and the captain. “Put them in the connecting passage, compressed, attached to the support arm. Cut the connections—the springs will uncompress and push the pod away. Then we retract the support arm . . .”

“. . . use the pod’s own screens, if we can trust them. Once we achieve separation it depends on philosophy. Will energy flow through the whole system, or does loss of physical congruency stop energy flow?”

Seth looked up from his scrawled notes, and gave a wry grin. “If it works we’ll give the philosophers and physicists plenty to argue about.”

“. . . cut the entire pod mount away, if we must,” Ren Zel said rapidly. “The power expenditure is within tolerances, as is the weakening of overall ship structure. We’d likely lose the cutting team . . .” He glanced up, eyes bleak in a politely expressionless Liaden face. “Necessity, Captain.”

This, too, Shan limited to twelve minutes; there really was not enough time to decide how much time there was.

***

Shan stared at a screen
filled with a growing forest of landing struts, braces, jacked platforms, and the occasional shadow that was one of the volunteers, making fine adjustments, doing the best they could to get even pressure.

Ken Rik had charge of the volunteer team. There had to be a pilot in it, and an old first classer, Ken Rik had said with a sobering lack of his usual vitriol, would be less missed by ship and crew—if something went awry—than a master pilot. Even a master pilot who was a thorough young idiot.

Shan watched and waited. On his second screen he saw Priscilla, likewise waiting, and was surprised by a surge of longing so intense his eyes teared. He was going to have to do something soon about adjusting priorities; this keeping the ship’s first and second officer apart for security considerations didn’t have the feel of a long-term working solution.

“That’s the last,” Ken Rik announced from within the pod, still in that disturbingly calm tone. “We’re coming out now, Captain.”

“Fine,” Shan said. “Each of you count off as you come into the hall. We don’t want to leave anyone in there with that thing.”