Rules of Engagement

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 ship—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 . . .

“Their tongues have been cut out,” the medic said. “And they’re naked.” Esmay could hear the strain in his voice. “I can’t tell, out here, if it was done before or after death.”

“I never heard of the Bloodhorde making it into this sector,” someone said.

“This isn’t Bloodhorde work . . . they mutilate males as well, and this isn’t their typical mutilation anyway.”

Lieutenant Venoya Haral, Major Bannon’s assistant, piled the items on the table. Bannon himself was in the morgue, working on the recovered bodies. “All these things were all marked and recorded in place,” she said to Esmay. “Now we need to know what they tell us about the crew and the raiders.”

“Didn’t Boros give us a crew list?”

“Yes, but crew lists aren’t always dead accurate. Someone gets sick or drunk and lays off for a circuit, or someone’s kid comes along for the ride.”

“Children?”

“Usually. Commercial haulers often have children aboard, especially those on stable runs like this. We haven’t found any juvenile bodies yet—which doesn’t mean anything either way. They’re smaller, and less likely to be picked up. We’re still missing five adult bodies, including the captain. Let’s see.” Haral started sorting items into classes. “ID cases . . . put those down at that end. Grooming items. Recording devices . . . aha.” She started to pick it up and shook her head. “No . . . do things in order. But I can hope that this recorded something useful.”

“Here’s a child’s toy,” Esmay said. It was a stuffed animal, in blue and orange, well chewed by some child. She didn’t want to think about the fate of those children on the merchanter. She had to hope they were dead.

“Good. Stick it over there, and anything else that looks like it belongs with children. Where was it found?”

Esmay referred to her list. “In the back pocket of a man whose shipsuit read ‘Jules Armintage.’ ”

“Probably picked it up off the deck where some youngster dropped it. How was he killed?”

Esmay looked back at the list. “Shot in the head. Record doesn’t say with what.”

“The major will figure that out. Oh, here’s something—” Haral held up a handcomp. “We might get some useful data off that, if they used it for anything but figuring the odds on a horse race. Didn’t you have background in scan?”

When they had catalogued the items, Haral began examining them. “You don’t know how to do this yet,” Haral said. “So I’ll give you the easy stuff. See if any of those cubes have data on them. They’re pretty tough, but the radiation may have fried ’em.”

The first cube seemed to be a record of stores’ usage by the crew over the past eight voyage segments; it listed purchases and inventory levels, all with dates. The second, also dated, was from environmental, a complete record of the environmental log covering thirty days six months before.

“One of a set,” Haral said. “But it gives us some baseline to go on, if you find the one that should’ve been running when the ship was taken. It suggests they blew the ship, but there’s not enough debris.”

“It was found in . . . caught in the crevice of a lifeboat seat, the record says.”

“Um. Someone tried to take the environmental log aboard a lifeboat, and the lifeboat was blown. That makes sense. They may have put all the logs aboard it.”

“What would that be, on a merchanter?”

“Environmental log, automatic. Stores inventory. Captain’s log—how the voyage was going, and so on, and might include the cargo data. Accounting, which would definitely include the cargo data, pay information. Crew list, medical—pretty sparse, on a vessel like this with a stable crew. Communications log, but some merchanters put that in the captain’s log.”

Esmay slotted the next cube into the reader. “This looks like communications. And the date’s recent . . . fits with the ship’s last stop. Elias Madero to Corian Highside Stationmaster . . . to Traffic Control . . . undock and traffic transmissions and receptions.”

“Good. Let me see.” Haral came over and peered at the screen. “This is really good . . . we can match this against the records at Corian, and see if anyone tampered with the log. Wish they’d put it in full-record mode, but that does eat up cube capacity. Let’s just see how far it goes . . .”

“Elias Madero—you get your captain to the com. You surrender your ship, and we’ll let the crew off in your lifeboats.” The voice coming out of the cube reader’s speakers startled them both.

“What is that—” Haral leaned forward. “My God—someone had the sense to turn on full-record mode when the raiders challenged them. No vid yet, but—”

The screen flickered, changing from text to vid. A blurry image formed, of a stern man in tan—Esmay thought it might be a uniform, but she couldn’t tell. Then it sharpened suddenly.

“Got the incoming patched directly to the cube recorder, instead of vidding the screen,” Haral said. They had missed a few words; now another voice spoke.

“This is Captain Lund. Who are you and what do you think you’re doing?” A shift in the picture, to show a stocky balding man who was recognizable from the crew list Boros had supplied. It was definitely Lund. The recording continued, including Lund’s off-transmission commands to his crew.

Haral paused the playback, and sat back. “Well, now we know what happened to this ship . . . and we know they had kids, and hid them. Question is, did the raiders find them? Take them?”

“Must have,” Esmay said, feeling sick at the thought. Four preschoolers, the age she had been when—she pushed that away but was aware of a deep rage stirring to action. The person who had had the sense to put this cube in the lifeboat—who had thought to switch to full-mode recording—had also quickly shot vid from the children’s records. So they knew the children’s names, and had faces to go with them. Two girls, sisters. Two boys, cousins.

“The vid quality is good enough that we should be able to read the insignia on those uniforms, see if intel has anything on them. Faces—we may have them in the file somewhere. And that’s the most audio we’ve ever had from raiders. Interesting accent.”

But all Esmay could think about was the children, the helpless children. She turned the orange and blue toy over and over in her hands.

One by one, the rescue crews located and retrieved the bodies.

“We’ve got too many bodies,” the team chief said. “How many were on the merchanter’s crew?”

“So some raiders died,” Solis said. “I’m not grieving.”

“These men have been stripped—not like the others. Would the raiders have stripped and dumped their own dead?”

“Unlikely. Stripped, you say? Why these men?”

“Dunno, but there’s no ID on them at all. We can take tissue samples, but you know what that’s like—”

“No fingerprints, retinals?”

“Nope. All burned. After death, the medic says; they died of combat wounds.”

Solis turned to Esmay. “Ideas, Lieutenant?”

“Unless we’ve stumbled into some local fighting ground . . . no, sir.”

“The merchanters look like ordinary spacers,” the medic said. “Light-boned, small body mass . . . merchanters nearly always run with low grav because it feels good. Varying ages—the cook was two years older than the captain, all the way down to the kid.” The scrawny teenager who’d been in a fight before he was shot. “But these others . . . they could be Fleet, except that they don’t have Fleet IDs. Look at the muscular development—and their bone mass indicates regular hard exercise in a substantial field, at least standard G. Even though the raiders burned off the fingerprints, we can see enough callus structure on the hands that’s consistent with weapons use . . .”

“Assuming it was the raiders, why wouldn’t the raiders want them identified? If their primary target was the merchanter—which seems obvious—and they left the crew identifiable, what was it about these?”

“Don’t know. Military, not Fleet . . . a Benignity spyship, maybe? A probe from the Guernesi? But—why would the raiders care if we knew that? Unless they’re from the same source—but that would imply that these are their people, and we’ve already said they probably aren’t. About all we can be sure of is that they weren’t merchanter crew.”

“We can’t do a genetic scan?”

“Well, we could—if we had one of the big sequencers. The forensic pathology lab at Sector would have one, but that still doesn’t tell you much. Maybe a rough guess at which dozen planets the person came from, but the amount of travel going on these days, it’s less and less accurate. I’m running the simpler tissue scales here . . . but I don’t expect anything to come up. If someone reports missing persons, and has their genome on file, that would do it.”

“We’re finding less each sweep,” Solis said. “Time to move on. This jump point has how many mapped outlets?”

“Five, sir.”

“All right. We’ll hop to Bezaire, where the merchanter was headed, and report to Boros on what we found. I don’t expect to find any trace there—we’d have noticed it when we were there before—so we’ll have to let HQ decide if they want us to check each of the other known outlets or send someone else. Prepare a draft report for Sector HQ, and we’ll pop that onto the Bezaire ansible when we get there. Include a recommendation to interdict this route, and a request for surveillance of all the outlets . . . not that it will do any good.”

Shrike popped out in Bezaire’s system, and Esmay oversaw the signal drop to Fleet Sector HQ. Scan reported no traces matching that of the Elias Madero . . . no other ship of that mass had been through in over a hundred days, according to the Stationmaster.

“I told you that before.”

“Yes, but we have to check.”

“The Boros Consortium local agent wants to talk to you.”

“No doubt.” Solis looked grim. “I want to talk to Boros, as well. We’ll need a real-time link.”

“Not . . . all of them?” The Boros agent paled.

“I’m sorry,” Solis said. “Apparently the ship was captured—there is evidence under imminent threat of heavy weapons—and although the crew had been promised safe exit in a lifeboat, they were instead killed.”

“The . . . children?”

“We don’t know. We found no children’s bodies, and we know the crew had concealed them in one or more core compartments.”

“But—but who—?”

“We don’t know yet. We’ve sent the data we have back to headquarters; someone will figure it out, I’m sure. Now, about the deceased—”

The agent drew herself up. “You will of course release the remains to Boros Consortium, for transmittal to the families—”

“I’m afraid we can’t at this time. We have positively identified all adult crew personnel and one apprentice, but it’s possible the bodies bear additional evidence of the perpetrators. We must continue to examine them.”

“But—but that’s outrageous.”

“Ma’am, what was done to these people was outrageous. We must find out who did it, so that we don’t have more of this—”

“What was done . . . what was done?”

“There was . . . mutilation, ma’am. And that’s all I care to say until forensics is through with the remains. I can assure you that all due care will be taken to return remains to family members as soon as possible.”

When the crew remains and the other debris had been transferred to the courier that would take it to sector HQ, Shrike went back out on patrol.

“We don’t try to pursue?”

“No. Not our job. We can’t tangle with three armed ships, and we have no idea where, besides Bezaire, that jump point leads. Someone’s going to have to explore it blind. The trail’s cold, and growing colder. We did what we could—we have hull signatures on the raiders, or close to, we know what happened to the crew—”

“But not if there were weapons aboard—”

“No. But I’d say it was a fair bet that there were. We’ll just have to keep eyes and ears open.” He looked at her with what might almost be approval. “You’re asking good questions, though, Lieutenant Suiza.”