The Serrano Connection (77 page)

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 . . . a
ha
." 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."