Ruler of Naught (11 page)

Commercial traffic at the leading trojan was ships passing
through the system, who couldn’t skip locally any great distance without
further compromising their safety on the next leg of their fivespace journey.
That’d give their hypothetical Rifters—no doubt hiding behind a chunk of rock
or ice, as usual—sufficient time intercept their prey.

It also meant that the
Grozniy
now had something less
than fifteen minutes to find the intruders—if the beacon’s destruction had
indeed been deliberate.

Rom-Sanchez tapped his console and a countdown windowed up
in a corner of the main screen, starting at ten minutes.
Good!
He was
settling into his role as acting captain, and pushing the crew. His next order
was crisp.

“Navigation, take us in to within five light-seconds of the
attractor point. Siglnt, run a scan for debris and radiation. Extrapolate time
of destruction if you find traces.”

The plot shifted as the fiveskip burped. One glyph indicated
the presence of a Fleet tactical transponder nearby. Rom-Sanchez tapped at his
console, highlighting the tacponder.

“SigInt, pop that tacponder and update Tactical immediately
for threat assessment. Check its monitor status.”

Ng saw the impact, minor as it was, of the unnecessary last
order: a slight hitch in the otherwise smooth flow of activity on the bridge.
There was a brief silence on the bridge as Ensign Wychyrski began the scan. A
window from Communications popped up on Ng’s console.

“No data from transponder,” she said. “Last update plus four
months, no new threats reported, monitor mode off. Latest Wolakota data plus
seven months, Pulwaiya tacponder.” That had been on their way out-octant.

“Tactical, assessment?”

“Worst case, Eichelly’s back,
sine lege
. Four Alphas
in his fleet, three of them third-tranche.” It took a minimum of three
destroyers to take on a battlecruiser, so the possibility they were facing a
renegade Writ-holder with four of them made Eichelly a credible threat, even
though one of his destroyers was more than 400 years old.

Rom-Sanchez’s eyes flicked towards Ng, and this time he
hesitated a bit longer— too long—but then his shoulders straightened. “Very
well. Take us to threat-level two.”

By the book, so far.
“AyKay. Ship status to
threat-level two.” Rom-Sanchez betrayed mingled relief and desperation as Ng
fell into bridge alert cadence and echoed his order, followed by the other
stations’ secondary confirmations: relief that she hadn’t countermanded him,
desperation that she wasn’t taking the con back.

I’m not taking you off the hook yet.
They still
didn’t have confirmation of hostile activity, and tactically, it was impossible
that more than one destroyer would be able to take a shot at them at the
beginning of an engagement, given a battlecruiser’s sensor platform.
Not that
any jacker would be insane enough to do so.
In any case, there was no
danger to
Grozniy
, now that its shields were powered up sufficiently.
They were still tracking the standard scenario: nothing Rom-Sanchez couldn’t
handle, if he didn’t over-think things.

The brassy tones of the alert pealed out, followed by the
hiss of the tianqi increasing the airflow into the bridge. Ng breathed in,
aware of the faint bergamot scent fading, replaced by a complex of pine,
jasmine, and less familiar scents, calculated to promote alertness, balanced
with rose and jumari, for relief of stress. She knew, but could not sense, that
the conditioners were also raising the ionization level slightly, and cycling
faint subsonics at irregular intervals in a pattern that reached deep into the
human thalamus with the age-old message: thunderstorm coming, be alert!

The aft hatch whispered open. Commander Krajno slipped into
the pod on her left side, giving her a glance of muted surprise as he brought
up his console.

“Dead again, eh?” Krajno’s gravelly voice perfectly matched
his craggy, amiable face, like that of a boxer whose guard had been less than
perfect during his career. It was a deceptive facade—Ng considered him one of
the sharpest officers in the Fleet.

Wychyrski sang out, “Debris detected. Crystalline stress
patterns of debris consonant with skipmissile impact. Dispersion indicates
destruction about one hour ago, plus or minus ten minutes.”

Skipmissile, and only an hour past—that’s like a
front-row seat.

Ng grinned at Krajno. His answering grin was feral,
anticipating action after months of tedious patrol and training; Perthes was
too scrupulous an executive officer not to get out of the rack when his captain
ran drills at all hours, even if he didn’t have to.

Rom-Sanchez glanced their way. Ng kept her manner neutral,
and knew Perthes was doing the same.
Show time.
Her fingers tingled,
longing for the feel of the command console, but taking control now would teach
entirely the wrong lesson, possibly even destroy a budding career. She had to
demonstrate her confidence in him.

Ng watched him take a deep breath as he pitched his voice
for firmness. “General quarters. Engineering, rig engines for tactical
maneuvers. Fire Control, ready all ruptors. Charge skipmissile.”

As the general-quarters klaxon rang out—a sound Ng knew
dated back to the oceanic navies of Lost Earth—excitement and purpose showed in
straightened spines and a quick exchange of grins. She could read them so
easily—general quarters, no question whether it was real or a drill, and they
were on alpha! On
Grozniy
, alpha crew stayed on through general
quarters, which was why that status was both feared and sought after.

“Navigation, SigInt, coordinate a light-cone convergence on
the beacon’s destruction and position us for observation. Start one light-hour
out, normal to the ecliptic. Communications, full-scan record, give me a
visual.”

The
Grozniy
leapt briefly into fivespace and as
quickly out. The transitions were rougher this time: the lower frequency skip
required for fine tactical movements was hard on the engines. A faint whisper
of datacode commenced.

“Beacon acquired,” said Wychyrski. They had skipped to a
point outside the expanding wavefront marking the beacon’s destruction.

Another set of transitions, the fiveskip burping so briefly
that an eyeblink would have missed it. The whisper ceased.

“No beacon.” Inside the wavefront.

Ng noted sweat on Mzinga’s brow, and his massive arms bulged
against his trim uniform as he jumped the battlecruiser back and forth,
struggling to get it to the desired position as quickly as possible. The
countdown ticked off fifteen seconds more as the big ship continued its series
of skips, which seemed on the edge of divergence.

“Navigation,” said Rom-Sanchez. “Try—” He stopped abruptly,
and Ng knew that this time he had seen loss of flow when the crew shifted
attention from their tasks to him. “Belay that. Carry on.” He leaned back in
his pod, gaze taking in the bridge, then he relaxed as he comprehended everyone
settling back into smooth action.
Good! Least action, best action. You’re
learning.

The fiveskip burped twice more.

“On screen.” Ensign Ammant at Communications tapped at his
console. A small targeting cross blinked at the center of the screen, and the
faint whisper of datacode once again squealed onto the bridge from the doomed
beacon.

Nothing happened for nearly a minute. Then a tiny flare of
reddish light bloomed near the cross.

“Emergence,” Wychyrski said. “Signature indicates
Alpha-class destroyer.”

Ng stroked the keypads at her station. “Signature ID’d.
Eichelly’s
Talon of God
.”

The short chain-of-pearls wake of a skipmissile briefly
connected the destroyer with the beacon, which vanished in an ardent burst of
light. Then the destroyer vanished, leaving behind a reddish pulse.

The Tenno rippled furiously as the destroyer’s orientation
on skip and other betraying aspects of its signature propagated through the
bridge systems. “SigInt, find his emergence,” Rom-Sanchez ordered. “Navigation,
drop us in five light-minutes out from his emergence, long-range, and then take
us in to ten light-seconds on my mark. Fire Control, prepare ruptors for
barrage at skip-smash level. We want him intact.”

The seconds stretched into minutes. Finally Wychyrski spoke,
disbelief betrayed in her voice. “No emergence, sir. He’s gone.”

Ng leaned forward in her pod, glaring at the screen as if
she could compel the Rifter to emerge. But there was no arguing with what the
sensors showed. At normal skip speeds, the
Talon of God
would already be
light-days away—and they were watching from a vantage point over an hour in the
past. She shook her head, looking from Krajno to Rom-Sanchez, whose expressions
mirrored her own feelings of confusion and anger—with perhaps a tiny bit of
relief in the lieutenant’s.

She spoke to Rom-Sanchez. “Very well done, Lieutenant. I
have the con.”

He swiped at his console, his face flushed with pleasure at
her compliment, but the tremble in his fingers betrayed his relief. “AyKay,
sir. You have the con.”

She raised her voice. “Stand down to threat-level one.”

“He bashed the beacon and skipped out of the system?”
Krajno’s bass rumble was hesitant. “What the hell for?”

Ng bit her lip. “There’s been some suspicion about the
disappearance of Writ-holders like Eichelly. That maybe it was to distract us
from something else by pulling patrols out-octant. This stinks of concerted
action across systems, so perhaps that ‘something else’ is coming down—and we
need to get to the bottom of it.”

She pitched her voice to bridge cadence again. “Navigation,
SigInt, get me a precise vector on his skip.”

She stood up, motioning to Krajno and Rom-Sanchez. “Genz,
will you join me in the plot room?”

“Captain?” Ensign Wychyrski’s voice was uncharacteristically
hesitant. “There was something odd about that explosion. Spectrum’s wrong for a
skipmissile impact.”

“Very well, Ensign. Log it for analysis and give me a
report. Lieutenant Mzinga,” she continued, “you have the con. Give us the
vector soonest and stand by. Communications, squirt a message to the Wolakota Node
informing them it’s safe to replace the beacon. Set the Fleet tacponder to
monitor status and ready a report for it, full record of this action. We’ll add
our report in a few minutes.”

o0o

Rom-Sanchez watched the captain lean back and tap her
fingers on the edge of the compad in front of her.

“So, Lieutenant, he obviously expects us to follow him.
Where did he go?” she asked, her light hazel eyes quirked with humor.

Rom-Sanchez knew his surprise must have shown, for Commander
Krajno chuckled. “She took the con, but you’re not off the hook.”

“His vector gives us only two other core members of the
local stellar association: either Treymontaigne or Schadenheim,” Rom-Sanchez
began, giving himself time to think. “Thirty and forty-two hours respectively,
at full speed.”

Ng shifted slightly in her chair, letting him know his
delaying tactic wouldn’t work. But then he had the answer. “It doesn’t matter
which way we think he went,” he continued, “because the local transponder shows
no change from what we popped at Pulwaiya:
Prabhu Shiva
in-system at
Treymontaigne on detached duty at the Archon’s request.”

He tried to keep his voice even, detached, but that quirk of
humor vanished from the captain’s face.

Commander Krajno did not hide his disgust. His lip lifted, the
sneer in his heavy face making him look like a pirate in a vid chip, as the
rest of the officers shifted, or looked away. Few Navy officers had much
respect for an Archon who ran close to the edge under the Covenant of Anarchy,
and then called for a battlecruiser to back him up when his subjects started to
resent his excesses.

“Too much of that sort of thing going on lately,” Krajno
said.

Ng opened a hand, which effectively shut down the topic of
politics.

Rom-Sanchez continued. “So we can assume that Captain
Harimoto will give Eichelly a warm welcome if he chose Treymontaigne, and we’re
for Schadenheim in case he didn’t.”

Ng nodded. “Good.” She turned to the plot-pane, which
responded with a red line, spearing through the Schadenheim system.

Krajno grimaced. “Awful name, that.”

“Ancient Doitch,” said Ng. “Means something like Home of
Destruction.”

Krajno nodded. “Matches the people there—pretty
bloody-minded bunch.”

Ng grinned at the XO. “Coming from you, Commander, that puts
a visit to Schadenheim on a par with a vacation on Dol’jhar.”

Krajno laughed. Rom-Sanchez had come to learn that Krajno
thoroughly enjoyed his reputation for a harsh, rough-and-ready approach to
discipline, but no one had ever called him unfair.

Rom-Sanchez allowed himself to tune out the banter. He
watched Ng instead, the way her short hair, the color of maple leaves in
autumn, swirled against her face as she turned from Krajno to the plot pane and
back. Her hair looked like silk. So did her skin, which was the goldy-brown hue
that some called sallow. He found it beautiful. As she gestured toward the plot
plane, he stole a peek at the way her faultless blues modeled her slight,
muscular figure.

Then he shifted his attention to his compad, and slapped
himself down mentally. He was fairly sure that those hazel eyes did not miss
much. What he didn’t know was what she thought in personal terms: she never
discussed private affairs, ever, with anyone—so far as he was aware.

Did she
have
a private life? Some officers didn’t.
Some of those highborn Douloi from the Tetrad Centrum families acted as
antiseptic as if they’d been decanted as adults from a steel tube straight into
the Academy.