“That ain’t right,” Elzbet muttered under her breath as she stared at the screen in front of her and the various readouts.
Heads swiveled to look. Somebody apparently buzzed Kanda, because the commander’s face appeared on the side of Elzbet’s console.
“What’s up?” the command centurion asked.
“So a freighter climbed out of the atmosphere several hours ago,” Elzbet replied. “Real time signal has a four and a half hour lag. It reached orbit, sat still for a while, and then jumped.”
“M’kay?” Kanda sort of agreed, unwilling to interrupt her science officer’s train of thought.
“Instead of going out and then up, like they always do, it went straight down,” Elzbet continued her thought. “Landed about twenty AU out and sat there for a while. Much shorter signal lag, and they immediately began broadcasting a strange message. Random-sounding alpha-numeric sequence.”
“With you so far,” Kanda said.
“System says that the value being transmitted is Amala Bhattacharya’s serial number, with a plus sign and nine,” Elzbet said. “Bhattacharya took eight with her.”
Elzbet left it at that. This was when it turned into Kanda’s problem.
“What’s the lag now?” the command centurion said.
“About an hour,” Elzbet replied. “Assuming this is a civilian ship, a safe bet judging by the way they fly, they might be programming each jump manually. So they might be there for a bit, or might have jumped already.”
“Bring the ship to alert,” Kanda ordered. “I’ll be there in sixty seconds.”
Elzbet’s hand was already reaching for the button. The alarm wound itself up and people started pulling out emergency suits, just in case. She waited, running through all her systems and every sensor, regardless of the direction it might be pointed.
Nothing new. No warships that might be hiding out here for a trap. No messages that had gone out before or after, unless it was a tight beam sent somewhere else. If that was the case, there was nothing to be done about it, yet Kanda probably had some sneakiness in her.
The command centurion came through the hatch quickly.
“Have they moved yet?” she asked, taking her position.
“Not as of an hour ago,” Elzbet answered.
“Good,” Kanda said. “Now we watch and see what they have planned.”
It wasn’t that long a wait.
On one screen, Elzbet watched the ship pivot slowly in place on all three dimensions, and then disappear from sight. Reverse triangulation of their pivot-sequence provided the direction to the nearest of Buran’s inhabited systems, the first place the squadron had visited, before blowing up that orbital station.
“You sure?” Kanda asked.
“Close enough for government work,” Elzbet replied. “Bhattacharya has no idea who might be out here, and wouldn’t want to blow our cover anyway. If they follow standard practice, the next jump should be about five light years, give or take. Figure they’re three and a half days to that system.”
“Could you find them midway when they drop out?” Kanda asked.
“Needle in a big haystack,” Elzbet replied drolly.
It was an old joke. One with a lot of prefacing zeroes, as it went, when invoking the haystack.
“We’ll try anyway,” Kanda decided. “Drop a log buoy here in case Jessica or Jennifer come by before we get back. They’ll trigger it and decide.”
Elzbet nodded and began programming the little barrel with everything it needed to hide up here.
Then they would go stalk a goat in the high grass.
Sometimes, you got lucky. Elzbet wasn’t willing to call it anything else. Certainly not skill alone, although that probably helped.
Two days into the chase, Ballard had dropped out of JumpSpace and sat quiet for a hard scan of the neighborhood. A signal had popped up on the boards, a little more than a light-hour away.
That same goofy freighter, waddling slowly along.
Kanda managed to drop out of JumpSpace right on top of them before they could leap again, which probably scared the crap out of the pilot. A Galactic Survey Cruiser was a big beast, built on a heavy cruiser hull, but without most of the guns.
Still, had to be impressive when it was suddenly ordering you to heave to and prepare for boarding. In the middle of deep space at least three light years from the nearest star.
Elzbet watched the ship surrender. The image in her head was a puppy rolling over on its back with its paws up in the air. Something close enough to the truth.
And, since it was her kill, she was on the comm.
“TO:557231455891, this is RAN Ballard,” Elzbet growled into her microphone. “Stand by for our boarding party. Any hint of resistance will get you destroyed. Do you understand?”
“Affirmative, Ballard,” a familiar-sounding voice replied. “This is SC Bhattacharya and party. Captain Ko would greatly appreciate our departure. We’ll be ready for you to dock. Please prepare a diplomatic reception on your end.”
A what?
Elzbet turned, astounded, to her commander. Kanda didn’t help matters by shrugging back at her.
“Understood,” Elzbet said anyway, unsure of what the situation called for.
But she didn’t have to worry all that much. The team she was sending over were experts at weird circumstances. And was commanded by Centurion Mererid Dimitriou, the only security marine in the fleet with a PhD in Geology.
How better to explore the galaxy than to go survey it on someone else’s Levs?
Elzbet switched channels to talk to the shuttle preparing to depart.
“Alpha, this is Fortress,” Elzbet said. “This appears to be our party. Prepare for weird.”
Brief pause. Probably trying to parse what she meant by weird. As if she knew.
“Acknowledged, Fortress,” Mererid replied in that quiet voice of hers.
Did geologists ever need to yell?
All her sensors beeped as the shuttle separated and began the crawl across the short space to the ugly, squat box with engines bolted to it.
That thing was probably the most utilitarian use of volume Elzbet had ever seen in space. Starships that never landed on the surface could be any shape you wanted, usually dictated by basic physics but otherwise just driven by cultural aesthetics. This one was merely a shipping container with engines at one end and scars and burn marks from a couple of lifetimes of hard service.
And about as dangerous as a goldfish, even as lightly-armed as Ballard was.
But it was apparently transporting Keller’s ambassador to the psychos, so something must be up.
Now, to see what the next weird was going to be.