The Dragon Never Sleeps

— 83 —

It took four days to clean up the station. Haget put together a long-winded report and entrusted it to the Horigawa Hauler. Then he ordered the Traveler on to M. Shrilica.

"He didn't even mention how well you handled the station, Jo," AnyKaat said.

"He's busy."

"Stop making excuses. You know what he's busy doing? Using that station as a median point to develop a descriptive probability from which to predict which other stations might have been infiltrated."

"It has to be done."

"At Starbase. We got a job. Catch the runaways."

Jo did not want to argue. Especially since AnyKaat was saying what she was thinking.

Haget was having trouble handling an ongoing relationship. He was evading by burying himself in work.

They visited M. Shrilica station. They made the locals nervous for two days. But the more sure Jo, Degas, and Vadja became that there was something worth finding there, the more perfunctory became Haget's attitude. Fifty-three hours in he decided to go after the phantom phantom.

Five strands anchored on M. Shrilica. One led toward Starbase, one back to the station already policed. Haget presented a search program moving outward from the next anchors of the remaining strands.

"He's screwed up royal," Degas said. "Why doesn't the Deified jump him?"

Jo could not defend Haget.

Vadja said, "Not to worry, Jo. We scavenged every bit of information except what's locked up inside human minds. He'll come back. When he does, we'll know what questions to ask."

Vadja launched a record pod that would lie dormant till a Guardship broke off the Web.

Jo worried for Haget. Everybody thought his decision stupid. The Deified probably did, too. But he exercised no opinion. He never spoke. He just watched. It was easy to forget he was there.

Eight months. The Horigawa Traveler visited a hundred systems, finding no sign of a Lost Child or phantom, catching only an occasional whiff of a methane breather long gone.

The venture was not a waste. It established with certainty a sinister rot spreading throughout that end of Canon space. Which scared Jo.

They had stumbled onto something big.

Haget assembled Jo, Vadja, and the Chief. "This search was a mistake. You've rubbed it in, never saying a word, making me wallow in it, good little soldiers carrying out every order. Waiting for me to run out of ways to save face. All right. I'm out. I fucked up. I made a dumb decision and compounded it by not backing down." He gutted himself.

"Let's get back in stride. Any suggestions?"

Vadja said, "Back to M. Shrilica, sir. Between the phantom's visit and ours, only two ships stopped there. One was VII Gemina. Data from the abandoned in-system station suggests the phantom did approach station close enough to have docked briefly."

"So?"

"Six days later Canon's only agent there, tolerated because he was an honorary, was killed in a freak accident. Following his death there was a twenty percent rise in shuttle traffic between Tregesser Xylag and station. That increase was noted by the old station but not by the new. No personnel transfers are noted officially, but new names begin appearing in official reports and old ones are not seen again."

Haget maintained his composure. He dared not ask how long Vadja had possessed that information. Vadja would tell him. It would go on record.

"Lieutenant. Is that the place to start?"

"Yes, sir."

"Smokey. Head for M. Shrilica."

The Traveler broke off the Web.

Seeker's thought was a bellow. The methane breathers are here!

The Traveler lurched. Its screen activated without a murmur of command. The ship rotated violently, facing back the way it had come. Its weapons belched CT projectiles. A long black needle of a ship, a type like none Jo had ever seen, became a garden of flame.

Though that ship had been in ambush, it never got off a shot.

Bruised, abraded, bleeding from mouth and nose, Jo picked herself up and blessed WarAvocat for having stuck them with that miserable damned spying Deified.

AnyKaat said, "There are five more ships near station."

Haget snarled, "Let's go get them."