Wasteland of Flint

The Cornuelle

Finally.

Hadeishi nodded sharply to Hummingbird's image and closed the channel. He swung his command chair to the threat-well at the center of the bridge, a speculative expression on his face. "Sho-sa Kosho, ship to alert status one. All hands to stations."

Immediately, even as the captain's words faded from the air, the exec's slim finger stabbed a double-size glyph on her control panel. A sharp hooting sound rang out through every pressurized space on the light cruiser and every comm flashed an attention signal. Kosho was unable to keep a fierce smile from her face, though the cultured, exact voice issuing from the comm was perfectly devoid of emotion. "All hands to battle stations. All hands to battle stations. Ship will lock down in one hundred eighty seconds. Gravity will be zero in one hundred seconds. All hands…"

Hadeishi felt suddenly awake, his vision clear, hearing acute, his hands filled with an immediate quick energy. His combat display had already split — keyed by the alert — into four sections, one showing the status of his ship, another the immediate space around the Cornuelle, another with a summary of all known threats — empty for the moment — and the fourth filled with palm-sized v-feeds from the various divisions. Everything was entirely familiar, save for Engineering, where a suddenly sweaty and perturbed-looking Sho-i Ko-hosei Yoyontzin had started in horror at the sound of the alarm horns.

"Mister Hayes," Hadeishi snapped, feeling a cold, invincible calm settle over him. "Status?"

"No threats," the weapons officer replied, his broad face showing no emotion at all. "Palenque orbit is stable, engines cold. One shuttle docked, the other groundside at base one. Recon drones and survey satellites show no motion, no hostiles. Passive scan is quiet. Shall I go active?"

"No, Hayes-tzin, not at this time. Sho-sa Kosho?"

The exec tucked a curling trail of raven-dark hair behind one ear. She was leaning on her panel, one hand knuckled against the glassite, an antique gold stopwatch in her free hand. She was counting silently. After the briefest moment, she raised her eyes to the captain and said "fifty-eight" while clicking the stopwatch. Hadeishi waited while the lieutenant tapped open the all-hands ship channel. "Ship in lockdown," she announced, and the captain felt a distant rumble through his chair as the hab rings spun to a stop and locked in place, then a hissing clang as the main bridge pressure hatches sealed. At the same moment, his shipsuit stiffened and a warning tone sounded beside his ear.

"Gravity zero," Kosho announced, securing the watch and taking hold of the edge of her display. "Engines hot."

"All systems tracking," Hayes announced at almost the same moment. "Beam nacelles are live, missile racks one through nine are cleared to load. Shall I load out?"

"Rack with flash loads by evens," Hadeishi replied in a crisp voice. "Timing, Mister Hayes, I want timing." He turned slightly to look at his exec again. "Time, Sho-sa?"

Kosho came to attention, though no one save a shipmate could have told the difference from one moment to the next. "All hands to station in ninety-six seconds, Chu-sa. Engines hot, systems secured in one hundred fifty seconds."

Hadeishi's chair vibrated again and he knew the missile racks were loading, magazine carrels rotating into place, the slender shapes of Hayai Roku sliding into their launch tubes.

"Admirable," the captain replied, looking to the communications station. "Emissions status, Mister Smith?"

"T-relay offline," the midshipman replied, cheeks flushed, the beat of his heart thudding in the artery at his neck. "Main array in passive. Comm array on the Palenque forced down, ship to ground forced down, emissions are at minimum. Shipskin neutral."

"Hayes-tzin? Backscatter from civilian sources? Visual confirmation?"

The weapons officer suppressed a start — he'd expected to report the even-numbered missile racks loaded and their launch status green — hands moving in a blur across his panel. Hadeishi watched keenly — the request to double-check the light cruiser's emissions status from local civilian sources was unexpected, though they were rarely in position to take direct control of civilian sensor apparatus — and counted the seconds until the Thai-i responded. Out of the corner of his eye, the captain watched Kosho counting as well, ancient watch magically back in her hand.

"Civilian sensors are blank," Hayes said, his voice a fraction rushed. "Visual confirm is…is positive. I have outline from Palenque navigational cam." A finger speared sideways and a new v-pane unfolded on Hadeishi's display. With interest, the captain examined the image. "Backscatter from satellites is null, backscatter from Palenque main array is…null."

"Interesting." Hadeishi folded his hands in his lap. The civilian ship mounted an entire array of exterior cameras to assist in docking at a station or other orbital facility. Apparently they also included moderately sophisticated pattern-matching soft, which had picked the outline of the Cornuelle — even at one hundred kilometers — out of the background starfield. The Palenque comp could not make a match for ship type or registry, but it knew something was within its programmed avoidance limits. "Maintain feed from the civilian ship, Hayes-tzin. Sho-sa Kosho, please adjust ship orientation by degrees."

Cocooned in his command chair, Hadeishi could not feel the massive bulk of the Cornuelle begin to move, though the video feed on the Palenque picked up the spark of her maneuvering engines as they began a topwise spin. The threat-well and most of the displays remained constant — only the one pickup showing the arc of Ephesus shifted, the planet turning slowly upside down.

"Five second burn." Kosho's face remained porcelain, her eyes calmly tracking the movement of the ship. "Burn halted."

Hadeishi watched the comp on the Palenque adjust, seeing the image — and the identifier — flicker in and out, adapting, adapting…then the lock vanished and the civilian software declared the "foreign ship" to have vanished. "There you are… Reverse roll, Kosho-san."

The Cornuelle reappeared for a moment on the civilian display as momentum carried the cruiser back into a recognizable configuration. A second series of burns halted roll, then nudged her back, second by second, into an unidentifiable "hole" against the wall of night.

Hadeishi nodded. Kosho was already making a note in the log, while Hayes and Smith spoke softly into their throat mikes, adding their own commentary. The captain waited until they were done, then lifted his chin. "Admirably swift," he said. "Lieutenant Kosho, please make a note to schedule an exercise — at a later date — to determine the detection envelope of the civilian cameras. Then double-check with Fleet to see they have the same information. Mister Hayes, you may stand down your missile crews." He glanced over his display again. Everything remained quiet.

"Now there is the matter of this mysterious shuttle. I want a full report by end of watch, which we will discuss over dinner."

Kosho and the others nodded sharply and Hadeishi cancelled alert status himself. No need to disturb the cooks, he thought, though perhaps I should — an alert during dinner would certainly put everyone to the test… "We will remain underemissions control, Lieutenant. Move the ship to a different orbit. No sense in being too predictable."

Even though no one seems to be here to see us.…But Hadeishi knew exactly how easy it would be to hide in the interplanetary dark, unmoving, unnoticed, nearly invisible.

"Hrrmmm…" Magdalena was curled up again, both long arms lapped over her knees, snout resting on plush, close-napped black fur. One of her displays showed the faint traces of the Cornuelle shifting orbit — the flare of the big maneuvering drives were impossible to disguise, particularly at this short range — and the other presented an image of the "mysterious" shuttle the little bird had found.

The Hesht was not pleased with the man's efficiency or the power of his comps. She had watched with entirely open avarice as the Mйxica had unpacked three copper-colored blocks — each one no more than a forepaw wide — from his baggage and set them up in a cluster with the cabin display. She could smell something secret and powerful about them, and her tail lashed slowly from side to side, fur itching with the desire to take hold of them for just a moment.

At the same time, she was entirely convinced tweaking the tail of this human would be bad luck, for her, for her adoptive pack and for her hunt-sister Gretchen. So she watched impatiently, busying herself with a thorough search of the young skywatcher male's planetary scan archive. Magdalena had convinced herself there was a great deal of information hidden in the c-storage racks down at the observatory base. Many secrets, she mused. Waiting to be revealed to the light of day, like a heep burrow peeled back by a gentle claw.

She checked the progress of her image scan. The number was far, far too low to satisfy her desire, so a claw dragged an override and the Palenque main comp began to devote nearly thirty percent capacity to her search.

Hadeishi sat back, letting his steward remove the small dinner bowls from the table. The momentary burst of activity this afternoon had broken an almost imperceptible weight of boredom, though now — with nothing new to engage his attention — he felt the deadening effect of routine stealing up on him again. This pricked his mind to something like angry motion, and he'd spent the period between end of watch and dinner devising a series of sudden training alerts, each one timed to come at the most inappropriate or difficult time.

Standing on station like this — waiting, with nothing in the offing — was particularly trying. Hadeishi prided himself on being a calm man — particularly in the face of tumult or crisis — but amid this stultifying sameness he found himself reaching for something, anything, to enliven the day. Today, particularly after sensing Sho-sa Kosho's quiet pride in the crew's reaction time to the alert, he was tempted to press her until her imperturbable calm broke.

That is entirely unworthy, he reminded himself. Your boredom is not an excuse to torment a fellow officer. Still, the prospect intrigued — Hadeishi was beginning to wonder if the lieutenant had ever truly lost her temper.

The steward set down small pale green plates, each one containing a single orange wedge. Hadeishi speared his with a single hashi and popped the sweet fruit into his mouth. Around the low table, his officers did the same — each in their own way — and then the stewards finished clearing the last of the dishes. Mugs of tea appeared, each steaming, filling the air with the turned-earth aroma of a high-grade sencha.

"Very well, then," he said, after a decent interval. "What have you found?"

Kosho bowed politely. Like the others, she was officially off-duty, so she tied back the sleeves of her kimono with a deft motion and turned her head toward the captain with a very proper air. Beside her, Hayes moved aside, leaving a section of otherwise blank wall unobstructed.

"As Hummingbird-san reported, a Valkyrie-class mining shuttle was observed in the northern hemisphere of Ephesus Three. The aircraft was banking over an extensive lava field at north sixty, west ninety-eight degrees." Kosho indicated the blank wall with a control stylus and a rectangular image appeared — an enhanced version of the shuttle in flight. "Due to space limitations on the peapods, Smalls-tzin had set them to record one image every half hour at moderate visual density. As a result, this snapshot of the shuttle is only a very small section of a very large image area. We do not have enough data to extract a ship name or identification number from the visible surfaces of the shuttle."

The lieutenant commander motioned with the wand again. "We have scanned the snapshots for two-hour periods on either side of the sighting, and there is no evidence of the shuttle in flight. Given the altitude and location of the mining shuttle, we believe it was descending from orbit and then landed before the next set of pictures could be taken."

"And was hidden," Hadeishi commented. "Within thirty minutes."

"We believe so," Kosho said, inclining her head. "The Valkyrie-class is usually attached to a Tyr-class mobile refinery." Another image appeared, this of a huge, ungainly and entirely ugly collection of massive spheres, exposed girders and bulbous fuel tanks all arranged around an extended hexagonal core. "A Tyr can carry as many as fifteen shuttles, each with a nominal operating range of about eight hundred million k, with an operational duration of twenty days. They are designed for light exploration, survey and ore sample recovery."

"I see. Any pirate or wildcatter would be entirely pleased to have one under his control. Was the shuttle's descent within line-of-sight of the Palenque?"

"No, Hadeishi-san. At the time of descent, the civilian ship was on the opposite side of the planet."

"Then our friends knew of the expedition ship and its detection envelope."

Kosho nodded, though the stylus raised to indicate a point. "The miners may not have been aware of the weather satellites. Peapods are small and innocuous, with a relatively tiny aspect. If the refinery ship was somewhere else in the system — in the asteroid belt, for example — the shuttle might have made a scouting trip in, unaware of being observed."

Hadeishi frowned. "How did they hide the shuttle, then? Their first trip should have included a great deal of loitering in atmosphere, looking for someplace suitable to set down. They would have shown up on subsequent satellite images."

"This is true, sir. But what if they already knew where to land?" Kosho's eyes narrowed the tiniest fraction. "What if someone had already found a place for them to set down, had left a beacon, one leading them to something of interest?"

Hadeishi's boredom — ephemeral as it was — dropped away like silk crumpling to a courtesan's tatami. "Doctor Russovsky."

"She is the most likely candidate," the lieutenant commander said, slowly. The Fleet had avoided a great deal of trouble by promulgating a policy assuming all citizens, regardless of national affiliation or descent, were innocent as lambs. Treachery and rebellion, of course, were instantly and brutally repressed. Making racial distinctions about reliability…Hadeishi was only too aware of his own failing in this regard. Even Anderssen's name set his teeth on edge. A Russian…who could really trust a Russian?

"On the other hand," Kosho continued in a careful tone, "the other scientists have also made expeditions into the hinterlands. Russovsky's use of an ultralight, however, has allowed her to range far and wide across the northern hemisphere."

"Did the Valkyrie make this flight before or after Russovsky returned to base camp with the cylinders?"

"Before," Kosho said, cueing up a timeline. "But only by a few days."

"So — she could have found the cylinders, informed her compatriots and then headed back to base with some samples, while leaving the rest for these 'miners' to secure."

The lieutenant commander nodded, dark eyes glittering in the light of the overheads. "Yes, Chu-sa, but the real question is: Did Russovsky realize what the cylinder would do, if it were disturbed?"

Hadeishi grunted and a sardonic smile creased his face. "You mean, Sho-sa, did she murder the crew of the Palenque to ensure no one noticed a shuttle lifting off with a hold full of First Sun artifacts? That is an excellent question."