Rules of Engagement

Good? That she was carrying the child of one of these disgusting monsters? He seemed to read her feelings in her face.

  “You won’t be able to do anything unnatural. If you try, we’ll confine you alone. Understand?”

  She glared at him, and he slapped her. “You’re just pregnant, not injured. You will answer appropriately when I ask you a question. Understand?” Against her will, she nodded. “Get dressed now.”

  Under his gaze, she fumbled back into the ugly tubelike dress the girl had made for her and tied the tapes that held it closed. She threw the square of cloth that covered her arms around her shoulders. They hadn’t figured out yet how to put sleeves in the dress.

  “Come along,” he said to her, and led her back to the compartment where the girl and the little ones waited. The girl looked at her, then looked away. Brun wasn’t sure how old the girl was; she looked very young, perhaps eleven or twelve, but if she’d had an implant to retard puberty, she might be as old as eighteen. If only they could talk-even write notes back and forth . . . But there were no writing materials in the cabin, and the girl refused to talk, looking away when Brun tried to mouth words at her.

  Day followed day, unbearable in their sameness. Brun watched the young girl try to quiet and entertain the two little ones, feed them, keep the compartment clean. She was always gentle with the younger girls, always busy in her care for them. The girl accepted Brun’s help, but seemed afraid of her. When the girl held out food she had been ordered to give Brun, she looked down or away.

  Brun had no way of telling time, except by her body’s growth. When she felt the first vague move­ment that could not be ignored, she burst into tears. After a while, she felt someone patting her head gently, and looked through tear-stuck lashes to see one of the babies-the one the girl called Stassi. The child put her head near Brun’s.

  “Don’ cry,” she said very softly. “Don’ cry.”

  “Stassi, no!” That was the older girl, pulling the child away. Brun felt as if she’d been stabbed in a new way. Did the girl think she would hurt the child? Was she to have no one to comfort her? She struggled to hold back the sobs, but couldn’t.

  To get her mind off herself, she tried to pay more attention to the others, especially the older girl. The girl could not be one of them-not originally. She sewed clumsily, with no real know­ledge of how to fit cloth to human shapes. When the men dropped off garments to be mended, Brun could see that they had been made originally with great skill . . . with hand sewing, like the most expensive “folk” imports, the stitches subtly imperfect. Surely a girl of their people would know, by that age, how to do it right. She glanced at the girl, whose brown hair hung down like a curtain to either side of her face. She didn’t even know the girl’s name . . . the men always called her Girlie, and the little ones Baby.

  If the girl weren’t one of theirs, where had she come from? No clues now . . . the pullover that formed the top of her dress might have come from anywhere, one of the millions sold in a midprice shop at any spaceport. Spaceport? Had she been snatched off a space station? Or a ship? By the color of her skin and hair-by her features-she could have come from any of a hundred planets, off any of a thousand ships. And yet-she was herself, an individual, just as Brun was. She had a past; she had hoped for a future. Ordinary . . . but very real. Brun found herself imagining a family for the girl, a home . . . wondering if the little ones were her sisters or just other captured children. How did the girl stand it?

  Tears choked her again; she clenched her hands to her swelling belly. The girl flashed her a quick look, wary. Then, for the first time, she reached out a hand, and patted Brun’s. That did it. Brun cried harder, rocking back and forth.

  Chapter Eight

  Some days after boosting the trader on its way, Shrike nosed into the spindown military docking collar at Overhold, the larger of the two orbital stations serving Bezaire, as gently as a spider landing on a tree. Esmay carried out the docking sequence under Solis’s watchful eye; it was her first docking. Everything went smoothly; Solis nodded as the status lights flicked to green, and then spoke to the Stationmaster. “R.S.S. Shrike docked; permission to unseal?”

  “Permission to unseal. All personnel leaving ship must be ID’d at the security desk opposite the docking bay.”

  “Understood, Stationmaster. We anticipate a brief visit, and no station liberty. My quartermaster will be coming out to arrange for some supplies.”

  “Right, Shrike. You do have a hardcopy packet in the tank.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Solis grimaced as he flicked off the screen. “Idiot civilians . . . says that right out on the station com, where anyone with a halfway decent datasuck could get it.” He turned to Esmay. “Lieutenant, you’ll take the bridge while I’m on station picking up our mail. I anticipate being gone less than an hour. If I’m delayed, I’ll call you.”

  “Sir.” Esmay toggled the internal com. “Security escort to the access for the captain, on the double.”

  “And . . . I think we’ll do a practice scan, as well. Nobody’s checked Overhold since Hearne was by, and there’s no reason to trust her data. You can set that up while I’m gone.”

  Nothing showed up on the scan by the time Solis returned, and he sent Esmay off to other routine duties. Half a shift later, Chief Arbuthnot came back from the station in a state of annoyance and reported to the cook while Esmay was in the galley inspec­ting the sink traps.

  “They don’t have any Arpetan marmalade in, and we need it for the captain’s birthday dinner. I always get it here; it’s better quality than out of stores at HQ. They say they don’t expect any until the Boros circuit ship comes in. You know how fond he is of Arpetan marmalade, especially the green gingered.”

  “Odd. Wasn’t that ship supposed to be in already?” The cook glanced up at a schedule on the bulk­head. “We usually get here a week or so after her.”

  “Yes, but she’s not. They don’t sound very wor­ried, though.”

  Esmay reported that conversation, minus the specifics of a treat for the captain’s birthday, to Captain Solis.

  “They don’t seem concerned . . . interesting. I think perhaps we’ll have a word with the Boros shipping agent here.”

  The Boros agent, a flat-faced woman of middle age, shrugged off Captain Solis’s concern.

  “You know yourself, Captain, that ships are not always on time. Captain Lund is getting on a bit-this was to be his last circuit-but we are confident in his honesty.”

  “It’s not his honesty I’m questioning, but his luck. What was his percentage of late arrivals?”

  “Lund? He’s better than ninety-three percent on time, and in the last five years one hundred percent on time.”

  “Which you define as . . .”

  “Within twenty-four hours, dock to dock.”

  “On all segments?”

  “Well . . . let me check.” The woman called up a file and peered at it. “Yes, sir. In fact, on the segment ending here, he’s often twelve to twenty-four hours early.”

  “When would you have reported an overdue ship, if we hadn’t asked?”

  “Company policy is to wait three days . . . seventy-two hours . . . for any run, and add another day for each scheduled ten days. For Elias Madero, on this segment, that would come to ten days ­altogether. And from day before yesterday, when she was due, that’s . . . seven days from now.”

  Captain Solis said nothing on the way back to the ship, but called Esmay into his office as soon as they arrived.

  “You see the problem . . . scheduled transit time is seventy-two days, from Corian to Bezaire, dock to dock . . . most of that time spent on insystem drive. If you consider beacon-to-beacon time, she should have been off-scan only sixteen days.”

  “What’s the scan data from Corian?”

  “Normal exit from system. The approved course was like this-” Solis pointed it out on the charts. “That makes the scheduled transit fairly tight . . . if the company really schedules things that tight, then it
makes sense to allow some overage. But I’d ­expect someone on this route to be over the alloted time at least thirty percent of the time. And the Elias Madero wasn’t. Does that tell you anything?”

  “They’ve been using a shortcut,” Esmay said promptly. “They’d have to.”

  “Right. Now we have to figure out where.”

  “Someone at Boros should know,” Esmay said.

  “Yes-but if it’s an illegal transit, unmapped or something, they may not want to tell us. Tell me, Lieutenant, who would you recommend for a little quiet questioning?”

  The crew list ran through Esmay’s mind, unmarked by any helpful notes on deviousness; she hadn’t been with them long enough to find out. She fell back on tradition. “I would ask Chief Arbuthnot, sir.”

  “Good answer. Tell him we need someone who would be confused with a shady character, someone who can get answers out of a rock by persuasion.”

  Chief Arbuthnot knew exactly what Esmay wanted and promised to send “young Darin” out at once. The answer that finally came back several days later was expected, but not overly helpful.

  “A double-jump system,” Solis said, when he had taken the data and dismissed the pasty-faced Darin. “Hmm. Let’s see if we can get confirmation out of someone at Boros. They probably ran into a shifting jump point.”

  “Why would someone retiring risk that?” Esmay wondered aloud.

  “He probably thought it was stable. Some of those systems are stable for decades, but that doesn’t mean they’re safe.”

  Something tickled Esmay’s mind. “If . . . they were carrying contraband . . . then the time gained in a shortcut would give them time to offload it. Or if someone knew they had contraband, it’d make a fine spot for an ambush.”

  “Well . . .” Solis raked a hand through his hair. “We’d better go take a look and see . . . I have to hope it’s not a shifting jump point . . .”

  By this time, the local Boros agent was quite willing to list the Elias Madero as missing. Even so, it took Solis another two days to locate someone higher in the Boros administration who could confirm not only the existence, but the location of the shortcut.

  “There’s an off odor about this whole thing,” he said to Esmay. “Normally I’d expect reluctance to admit to using a dangerous route, but there’s some­thing more. Or less . . . I’m not sure. Now-how would you plot a course to this place?”

  It was not, Esmay discovered, a simple matter. The shortest route would have been to reverse what the trader’s course would have been, but Fleet charts did not list any insertion data for the out­bound jump point.

  “Besides,” Solis said, “if we go in that way, we’ll cross any trail they made. We need to come in the way they did.”

  “But that’ll take much longer.”

  Solis shrugged, a gesture which did nothing to mitigate the tension of his expression. “Whatever happened has already happened. My guess is that it happened days before we got to Bezaire. So what matters now is to find out what happened, in as much detail as possible. That means approaching the system with all due caution.”

  All due caution meant spending twenty-three days jumping from Bezaire to Podj to Corian, and from there to the shortcut jump points. Esmay set up each course segment, and each time Solis approved.

  Shrike eased its way into the system with what Esmay hoped would be low relative velocity. So it proved . . . and as scan steadied, she could see that the system held no present ­traffic.

  “But over here, Lieutenant, there’s some kind of mess-I can’t tell if it’s distortion from interaction of the two jump points or leftover stuff from ships. If it’s ships, it’s more than one.” The senior scan tech pointed to the display.

  “Huh.” Esmay looked at the scan herself; ripples and blurs obscured what should have been a steady starfield. “What’s the range?”

  “Impossible to say right now, Lieutenant. We don’t know how large it is, so we can’t get a range . . . but to me, the texture looks closer to this than the other jump point.” The scan tech glanced at the captain.

  “We’ll continue on course for two hours, then see what parallax gives us,” Solis said.

  In two hours, the area of distorted scan was hardly larger.

  “Well, Lieutenant,” Solis said, “we can risk a micro-jump, run in a few light-seconds, and see what happens . . . or we can sneak up on it. What’s your analysis of the relative risk?”

  Esmay pointed to the scan display. “Sir . . . this knot in the grav readings ought to be the second jump point, and if it is, it hasn’t shifted. Nor has this one. Which suggests that we’re definitely looking at transit residue . . . and therefore, unless it’s an entire Benignity battle fleet, it’s not that big. So . . . it’s close, but not within a light minute-we could jump in 15 second increments, and have a safe margin.”

  “If it’s only transit residue, you’re right. If it’s also debris-it’s been expanding from its source-and we don’t know the location of its source-at some ­velocity we also don’t know, for at least-I’d say thirty days. Worst-case: Elias Madero was carrying the missing weapons, and for some reason they all detonated . . . how much debris, in how big a volume, are we talking about?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” Esmay said, feeding numbers into the calc subunit as fast as she could.

  “Nor do I, and that’s why we’ll jump in one second bursts, with the main shields on full.”

  Solis brought Shrike toward the anomaly in repeated small jumps. At twenty-one light-seconds in, the scan was markedly different. Now they could see clearly that more than one ship had been involved.

  “Let’s just sit here and look at this,” Solis said. On insystem drive, Shrike was hardly sitting still, but it would still take her hours to reach the distortion. “Do we have any indication at all of an original track?”

  “Very attenuated, sir, but this might be the mer­chanter’s original trace-” Scan switched filters and enhancement to pick out, in pale green, a faint, widened trail. “If we take the centerline of that, we get appearance at the incoming jump point, and progress consistent with an insystem drive of its class up to this point-” He pointed to the confusion of stronger traces. “But there’s a more recent trace, much smaller.”

  “So . . . assume for the moment that we have found the merchanter’s incoming trace, and it’s a perfectly straightforward course toward the second jump point, just as they’d done before. There’s no bobble indi­cating slowdown until the mess?”

  “None, Captain, but the traces are so old I can’t be sure.”

  “Right. But I’m assuming that for now. She comes in, she heads for her outbound jump, and . . . runs into a bunch of other ships. Trouble, no doubt. Do we have any older traces?”

  “No, and from this angle it’d be hard to see ’em.”

  “Fine, we’ll go up and take a look there.” Solis put his finger on the chart. “A thirty-two-second jump to these coordinates. I want to be well outside the zone of distortion.”

  Scan blurred and steadied again. “Now,” Solis said, “I want to find out where those other ships came from, and in what order.”

  Esmay found this tedious, but knew better than to say so. Surely the fastest way to find out what had happened to the Elias Madero would be to go in and look. The system was empty-what could be wrong with that?

  The scan tech raised his hand. “Captain, the merchanter-or the ship that made the incoming trace-left by the second jump point.”

  “What!”

  “Yes, sir. Look here. There’s five outbound traces: three maybe patrol-size craft, one very small-my guess is it’s whatever little ship overlay the mer­chanter’s trace on the way in-and the big one, the merchanter itself.”

  “Then why hasn’t it shown up?” Solis muttered.

  “They . . . raiders don’t steal entire ships, do they?” Esmay asked.

  “Not . . . often. But . . . if she was carrying weapons . . . they might. Let’s think this through. We have one large s
hip-we’re assuming for now it was the Boros ship-coming in, running into something, and then leaving by the second jump point. One little ship, sometime later, following it in and out-”

  “Excuse me, Captain, but the little ship’s departure trace is the same age as the others. Within a few minutes, anyway.”

  “So . . . they had arranged a cleanup? Someone to follow behind and make sure the merchanter went through?” Solis shook his head. “But then we still don’t know who the other three ships were. Which way they came in. Any other traces?”

  More color shifts on the scan monitor, as the tech cycled through all the enhancement possibilities. Suddenly three pale blue tracks showed up, angling from the second jump point to make a wide circuit and end up positioned along the merchanter’s track.

  “There they are, sir. Came in by number two . . . and set up an ambush, looks like.”

  “So I see. Good job, Quin. Well, that seems clear enough. Someone knew the merchanter was coming, and wanted it; someone came in and set up either an ambush or a rendezvous.” He grinned at Esmay. “Now, Lieutenant, we’ll go in and see what evi­dence we can pick up.”

  The first evidence was a scatter of what was clearly debris.

  “So the ship blew?” Esmay asked. “Or was blown?”

  “No-not enough debris.” The scan tech pointed out figures along the side of the screen. “I’ve been keeping track of the estimated total mass of all fragments, and it’s less than would fit into one of the five cargo holds of the freighter we’re hunting. Moreover, if it was from an explosion, it would be much more scattered by now. This was dumped from something with very low relative vee, perhaps given just a little push in addition. My guess is that someone captured it and took it.” She reset one of the fine-grain scans. “Let’s see if we can find any bodies.”

  Hour after hour, then day after day, the pain­staking work went on. The SAR ship located and identified one piece of debris after another, all the while plotting location and vector on a 3-D display. Hundreds, thousands, of items . . . and then, the bodies they had known must be there, that they had both hoped and feared to find. They gathered the bodies into one of the vacuum bays, tagging them with numbers, the order in which they were ­retrieved. Men, women . . . the men in shipsuits, with their names stenciled on back and chest, as ­expected; the women . . .