Thunderhead

17

On the message deck, Lieutenant Pryor frowned into the screen from which the saturnine features of Captain Aaron gazed back sourly.

“The commodore’s going to be unhappy about this,” Pryor said. “If you’re sure your extrapolation is accurate—”

“It’s as good as the data I got from Plotting,” Aaron snapped. “The bogie’s over the make-or-break line; we’ll never catch him now. You know your trans-Einsteinian physics as well as I do.”

“I never heard of the Djann having anything capable of that kind of acceleration,” Pryor protested.

“You have now.” Aaron switched off and keyed command deck, passed his report to the exec, then sat back with a resigned expression to await the reaction.

Less than a minute later, Commodore Broadly’s irate face snapped onto the screen.

“You’re the originator of this report?” he growled.

“I did the extrapolation,” Aaron stared back at his commanding officer.

“You’re relieved for incompetence,” Broadly said in a tone as harsh as a handsaw.

“Yessir,” Aaron said. His face was pale, but he returned the commodore’s stare. “But my input data and comps are a matter of record. I’ll stand by them.”

Broadly’s face darkened. “Are you telling me these spiders can spit in our faces and skip off, scot-free?”

“All I’m saying, sir, is that the present acceleration ratios will keep the target ahead of us, no matter what we do.”

Broadly’s face twitched. “This vessel is at full emergency gain,” he growled. “No Djann has ever outrun a Fleet unit in a straightaway run.”

“This one is… sir.”

The commodore’s eyes bore into Aaron’s. “Remain on duty until further notice,” he said, and switched off. Aaron smiled crookedly and buzzed the message deck.

“He backed down,” he said to Pryor. “We’ve got a worried commodore on board.”

“I don’t understand it myself,” Pryor said. “How the hell is that can outgaining us?”

“He’s not,” Aaron said complacently. “From a standing start, we’d overhaul him in short order. But he got the jump on us by a couple of minutes, after he lobbed the fish into us. If we’d been able to close the gap in the first half hour or so, we’d have had him; but at trans-L velocities, you can get some strange effects. One of them is that our vectors become asymptotic. We’re closing on him—but we’ll never overtake him.”

Pryor whistled. “Broadly could be busted for this fiasco.”

“Uh-huh,” Aaron grinned. “Could be—unless the bandit stops off somewhere for a quick one…”

After Aaron rang off, Pryor turned to study the position repeater screen. On it Malthusa was represented by a bright point at the center, the fleeing Djann craft by a red dot above.

“Charlie,” Pryor called the NCOIC. “That garbled TX we picked up last watch; where did you R and D it?”

“Right about here, Lieutenant.” The NCO flicked a switch and turned knobs; a green dot appeared near the upper edge of the screen.

“Hey,” he said. “It looks like maybe our bandit’s headed out his way.”

“You picked him up on the Y band; have you tried to raise him again?”

“Yeah, but nothing doing, Lieutenant. It was just a fluke—”

“Get a Y beam on him, Charlie. Focus it down to a cat’s whisker and work a pattern over a one-degree radius centered around his MPP until you get an echo.”

“If you say so, sir—but—”

“I do say so, Charlie! Find that transmitter, and the drinks are on me!”