Ships of My Fathers Page 20

  Gabrielle thought about it. They reported crew manifests at each port. Passports were checked at each of the stations, to say nothing of all the financial transactions on station. Hell, the hotels could probably even track who she had slept with based on the patterns of passkey usage. She gazed down at the page, a long list of names, dates, locations, and ship names.

  “For normal citizens such as you,” Collins continued, “the tracking is simple and quite accurate. You tend to stay in the more populated areas, stick to the orbital stations and sanctioned ground ports, and don’t play with false identification. As privately as you conduct your affairs, much of it is actually an open book to us.”

  Her father stared at Collins. “And do you report this to anyone?”

  “Like the taxing authorities?” Collins grinned as her father’s eyes went wide. “No, this is strictly for Naval Intelligence and requires a security clearance to run even the most basic of pattern-matching queries. Believe me, there are a number of government officials and their mistresses who would not appreciate the existence of this database.”

  “Then what do you use it for?” Ms. Corazon asked. “This looks like a random assortment of names and places to me.”

  “For pattern matching, personnel overlaps, times when one identity disappears and another one reappears… that kind of thing. It’s not meant to keep track of people like you. It’s meant to keep track of those we cannot trust.”

  Gabrielle was scanning the page, and the next, and so on. One name kept coming up over and over. “Who is James Anders?”

  Collins nodded to her. “The young lady wins a prize. Of all the common intersections between Mr. Fletcher, Captain Fletcher, and the present and past crews of those thirty-six ships, Captain James Anders comes up more than any other, and most suspiciously, his last port of call was Folsom station.”

  “We were there last week,” Gabrielle said.

  “At the same time Anders was,” Collins replied.

  Her father nodded firmly. “So he’s on Anders’ ship, the Diving Belle, right?”

  “That was my first reaction,” Collins replied, “but now I think not. The Diving Belle did not depart for twenty-nine hours after Mr. Fletcher’s last sighting, and when she did depart, her flight plan was for Pinot’s Hammer, which is in the wrong direction. The Diving Belle is primarily a salvage vessel, and I do have reports of a recently discovered wreck in the outer orbits of that system.”

  “But he still could have gone,” Hans insisted. “Maybe you’re wrong about him heading back.”

  Collins shook his head. “The flight plan was filed by Anders’ first officer, which is quite an anomaly in the Diving Belle’s records. So, I crosschecked Captain Anders’ history against the other ships in port.” He turned to the final page.

  Gabrielle did as well. Only one ship showed up, again and again: the Blue Jaguar.

  “The Blue Jaguar left Latera station two hours after Mr. Fletcher’s last sighting. Her flight plan was for Magella, and I believe both Captain Anders and Mr. Fletcher are on board.”

  Her father scanned around the table. “Then that’s where we go, to hell with our cargo.”

  Ms. Corazon swallowed hard, but she did not say anything. So with a sigh, Gabrielle was the one to speak up. “We can’t, Father.”

  Her father turned to her. “This is your cousin, young lady, not some errant watch stander.”

  “I know,” she answered him. “I’m saying the Heinrich can’t catch them.”

  Collins nodded to her. “Your daughter is quite correct, Captain Schneider. Our best estimate puts the Blue Jaguar at three point seven lights to the day. Even with the best navigation, the Heavy Heinrich cannot quite reach three. With the Jaguar’s head start combined with her median turnaround of thirty-two hours, she’s probably on her way out of Magella even now.”

  Hans sagged against the table. “I cannot simply sit here and wait.”

  “As it happens,” Collins said, “I have a priority claim for passage on Naval couriers, and I intend to take the next one back to Arvin. Even if that is not Mr. Fletcher’s destination, it is an excellent information nexus to see where the Jaguar is heading. I could possibly take one or two of you with me if you decide you want to.”

  Hans began to nod slowly, building steam. “That’s an easy decision.”

  Gabrielle reached out and took hold of his arm. “Yes, Father, I think it is.”

  Chapter 21

  “The only reason for putting a rat in a cage is because you plan to do something worse to it later.” — Malcolm Fletcher

  FOR TWO DAYS OUT OF Magella, Michael sat watch on the bridge without seeing another wake alert. He could almost believe they were a rare software glitch. After all, he had never heard of such a thing in all his years in space, but late in the shift, he began to question it.

  The tachyon winds shifted slightly to port with an aggressive clockwise spin, and this time he correctly used the left-handed coordinates for calculating the adjustment, but he was still off from the orientation change Felipe put in. When he asked, Felipe merely said, “You’re overcorrecting. You don’t have to meet it head on, just close enough to keep you at speed without getting pushed out of the lane. It’s not only the wind; it’s where you are.”

  He nodded silently, hoping he understood. Still, he wanted to run the numbers again after his shift, so he opened the log to copy the data to his personal storage. That was when he saw them: three wake alerts in the last hour. They had not shown up on his terminal, but they were still in the log. He grabbed them as part of his data selection and sent them along, mumbling something about “checking my math after dinner.”

  Three in an hour was not exactly a rare software glitch, and he began to wonder if it was a glitch at all. A cluster like that did not seem to be random noise either. He thought about where they were, roughly halfway between Magella and Deshmon. They were moderately close ports, but they were small enough to not have much traffic between them. At least, not so many that he would expect to roll through that many wakes in such a short period. Maybe it was a glitch after all, but he was determined to look at them much more closely, just not under the watchful eyes of the first officer Nieru.

  Dinner was immediately after the shift ended, and he ate it with Anders. Unlike the Heinrich, the crew of the Blue Jaguar had not made a point of getting to know him. It stung a bit, but he could understand. He was passing through, a transient guest. The fact that he had been allowed to watch the navigation did not truly change him from passenger to crew.

  Still, he found himself examining the name and departmental patches of every crewman who walked past. The drive and environmental patches were fairly recognizable, but he found the cargo patches puzzling. At least, he presumed they were cargo with the blocky box shape, but the hammer threw him off.

  “What are you looking at?” Anders asked him.

  “The patches,” he said, pointing towards one of the men in the food line. He was big and muscular with a crooked scar across his chin. “That one, with the box and hammer, what is it?”

  Anders turned and looked. “Cargo.”

  Michael nodded. “I figured, but I wondered.”

  “Wondered what?”

  “There are an awful lot of them. I’ve counted nine since I came on board, and I’m sure I haven’t met everyone.”

  “Nine, so?”

  He shrugged. “Well, the Heinrich had only six, and she was easily three times the size of the Jaguar.”

  Anders chuckled and frowned. “I could believe it. That’s one of the reasons all the smaller traders are being squeezed off the main shipping lines. Those radial loaders are too damned efficient. Most of us can’t compete.”

  Michael thought about the disastrous financial discussion he had had with Gabrielle. Radial loaders like the Heinrich really were that much more efficient. Plus, the Heinrich only docked at orbital stations, and they had their own dock workers. Ships like the Blue Jaguar, and for that matter his own So
phie’s Grace, could land on the ground, and ground ports did not always have their own cargo teams. “I see your point,” he said at last. “I guess I didn’t think it through.”

  He went to his quarters after dinner. He had little else to do on the Jaguar, but instead of queuing up a movie, he pulled up the navigation data he had copied. He started to work on the course adjustment he had overdone, but the wake alerts called to him.

  He opened the first and looked at it. It was a crossing course, almost perpendicular to the line of their own trajectory, though the computer was fuzzy on it given the distance, over twenty light days to the galactic south. The second was also a crossing course with a heading similar to the first, but closer. The computer had estimated it to be a much larger sail, moving more slowly. The third, again, was a crossing course, but this time going the opposite direction and only two light days away.

  The three wakes clustered together like that seemed too much to be a random coincidence. That kind of traffic was only found in established shipping lanes, and even then, the Magella-Deshmon shipping lane was unlikely to see that kind of traffic over a day, let alone an hour. Thinking back to what Felipe had said, it was also about where you are. He pulled up a star chart and plotted the Jaguar’s location in the hour when the wake alerts had fired.

  Three dots appeared on the screen. He then plotted the estimated vectors from the wake reports, both forwards and backwards. The plot from the first wake detection did not seem to go anywhere very interesting, but it had been the most distant and weakest. The second and third had had almost exactly the same course but in opposite directions. One went to Tsaigo, and the other went to Tortisia. Tracing the vectors in the opposite direction led back to Tortisia and Tsaigo, respectively. Those ships had been in a shipping lane all right, just not theirs.

  The paths between two nearby stars were mind-bogglingly empty, not merely of stars or planetary masses but of other traffic paths as well. Still, on rare occasions those paths could be close. He looked it up in the official chart listings, and the Tsaigo-Tortisia route listed a yellow-two warning about the Magella-Deshmon crossover, urging navigators to divert at least ten light days to the galactic south. Actual collisions would be astronomically rare, so many captains ignored such advisories, following the more direct paths, crossing traffic be damned.

  Perhaps there was something to these wake detections after all, but if that were true, why were the alerts now being shifted to the log files instead of the active boards?

  Elsa Watkins ate lunch in her quarters. They truly were her quarters, even though the name on the door read Captain Jana Lewis. All her crew knew her by that name, even Bishop and her first officer, though they also knew her as the Winged Lady. The one other person who knew her by that name also knew her by an older name she would prefer to see forever purged from the records.

  And he sat across from her, eating pork tenderloin: Jimmy Anders.

  “This is good — much better than you’ve got down in the galley.”

  She shrugged. “Captain’s privilege.”

  “I appreciate it, but I don’t think you invited me because you had extra.”

  She shook her head. “Your boy has been asking a lot of questions.”

  He took a sip of the juice and made a face at its tartness. “Well, he’s curious.”

  “He’s getting too curious for my taste, too curious by far.”

  Anders shrugged. “Well, he’s never been on this kind of ship before. Things are different here. More cargo workers for starters.”

  She smiled at him. “Cargo workers?”

  He chuckled. “Well, I could hardly call them boarders, could I?”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “So, what kind of questions is he bothering you with?”

  She shook her head. “Not me, my bridge crew. I was willing to tolerate his interest in navigation. It seemed a reasonable distraction for him, but now he’s digging through the logs looking at wake reports.”

  He made another face, this time not from the tart juice. “Watch reports?”

  “Wake reports,” she repeated. “Tachyon winds, sails, trailing wakes. That kind of thing.”

  He frowned. “I guess I’ve heard about them. Those don’t actually work, do they?”

  She shot him a feral grin. “Let’s not get too deep into how I run my business. It’s enough that he’s been looking where he shouldn’t, and I want it to stop.”

  “Why don’t you cut off his access?”

  “I already have, but now I’m worried about how much he’s seeing on the bridge in general. We’re keeping clean on this run, for more reasons than your boy, but I can’t turn this into a peace-loving vessel at the flip of a switch. He’s got an eye like Malcolm had, and I won’t have that eye wandering around untended.”

  “So what then, toss him in the brig? I remind you that we’re trying to keep his trust, or at least keep it long enough to access the Sophie’s computer core.”

  “I think we can avoid the brig for now, but I’m growing pessimistic about him handing over those codes in good faith. My security chief agrees.”

  Anders shrugged. “Your Mr. Bishop seems unnaturally dour if you ask me.”

  “I don’t pay him for his optimism.”

  “Obviously. So what do you want to do about Deshmon? We get there tomorrow, right?”

  “The boy stays on board. He jumped ship once. I don’t intend on giving him that opportunity myself.”

  “What do I tell him?”

  “Restricted liberty. He went last time.”

  He nodded. “Just as well. You know, he was actually thinking about sending a message back to his ship. Hey, I’m all right and all that.”

  She sighed. “I don’t know how I let you talk me into this, Jimmy. I really don’t.”

  “Restricted liberty, my ass!”

  Michael sat up on his bed and bounced a ball against the wall partitioning off the closet. The only other time he had been denied liberty was when he had disobeyed Malcolm, but apparently on the Blue Jaguar this was a matter of course. And this turnaround was even faster than the last, nineteen hours.

  He threw the ball again, hitting the exact same spot over and over. It made a nice hollow thump against the partition and fell back towards him as a dead weight. His head and shoulders were leaning against structural bulkheads. He had tried bouncing the ball against that, but it had retained too much energy and bounced wildly around the room. He had a private bath across from his bed, but that was a maze of uncatchable ricochets.

  So he threw the ball again. By this point, he could see he was leaving a mark on that one spot.

  Yes, he knew different ships were run different ways, but the Jaguar was almost alien to any ship he had even heard about. He did not have a lot of ship-born peers, but he did run into them at port every now and then. They sometimes complained about things Michael liked, or they raved about things he hated, but by and large, they were all living similar experiences — not so much on the Jaguar. How Captain Lewis kept her crew happy was beyond him.

  “Better not be restricted next time,” he grumbled. “Or I might have to find another berth.”

  Gabrielle pushed the remnants of her lunch around the tray. She hardly expected the food on board the CFS CP-2133 to be up to the Heinrich’s standards, but even for instant food, this was pretty weak. The so-called galley was little more than a refrigerated locker, a speed heater, and a table with four chairs. Then again, with an active-duty crew of five, they probably never needed more than that.

  The three passengers had been ordered onto a shifted schedule, two hours off from the crew. “It minimizes the shocks to the support systems that way,” their skipper Morris had said, a lieutenant who seemed far too young to be that fat. Father was using the one shower on board at the moment, while she had breakfast. Her turn would come in an hour, after the water systems had recharged.

  She heard footsteps and looked up to see Commander Collins ducking through the hatch
. “Good morning,” she said.

  He nodded and went to the coffee dispenser. He sniffed at it and added a squirt of cream. “How are you holding up?”

  She put on the best smile she could manage. “It’s not home, but it’s okay.”

  He sat down opposite her. “At least it’s fast.”

  “How fast?”

  He shrugged. “Emergency speed is classified, but we’re moving at a good clip. We should reach Tortisia tomorrow and Arvin four days after that. You do the math.”

  She already had. It was almost four times faster than the Heinrich’s usual plodding pace. Even then, they weren’t sure they would reach Arvin before Michael did. Collins had hinted that the Blue Jaguar might be faster than they expected, and they had lost another day and a half at Latera waiting for the next courier run.

  “What do we do when we get there?”

  “Well, I wish I could have sent word ahead to flag the Blue Jaguar, but of course, that message would have gone on this ship. If we get there first, we can be waiting when she docks. If not, hopefully we can hold her before she leaves.”

  “You hope? They’ve got Michael. Isn’t that enough to hold them?”

  He sipped at his coffee and chuckled. “We think Michael is on board, but that’s a far cry from ‘they’ve got him.’ Captains don’t take kindly to having their ships boarded and searched.”

  “Even by the navy?”

  “How do you think your father would react?”

  She frowned. “Yeah, he wouldn’t like that much.” In fact, she was pretty sure she knew exactly which sections of the commercial shipping code he would quote while standing steadfast in the airlock.