Instead of a lively discussion of the latest political scandal from Escalon or Contaigne, with encouragement to join in, the ensigns sat quietly as Captain Fargeon delivered brief, unemotional critiques of the ship's performance. Sassinak grew to dread his quiet "There's a little matter in Engineering..." or whatever section he was about to shred.

The shift to Communications Section gave her some sense of contact with the outside world. Fleet vessels, unlike civilian ships, often stayed in deepspace for a standard year or more. None of the cadets had ever experienced that odd combination of isolation and confinement. Sassinak, remembering the slave barracks and the pirate vessel, found the huge, clean cruiser full of potential friends and allies an easy thing to take, but some did not.

Corfin, the ensign who slipped gradually into depression and then paranoia, had not been a particular friend of hers in the Academy, but when she recognized his withdrawal, she did her best to cheer him up. Nothing worked; finally his supervisor reported to the Medical Officer, and when treatment slowed, but didn't stop, the progression, he was sedated, put in coldsleep, and stored for the duration, to be discharged as medically unfit for shipboard duty when they reached a Fleet facility.

"But why can't they predict that?" asked Sassinak, in the group therapy session the Medical Officer insisted on. "Why can't they pick them out, clear back in the first year, or before - " Because Corfin had been in the Academy prep school, and had a Fleet medical record going back ten years or more.

"He was told of the possibility," she was told, "it's in his chart. But his father was career Fleet, died in a pod repair accident: the boy wanted to try. and the Board agreed to give him a chance. And it's not wasted time, his or ours either. We have his record, to judge another by, and he'll qualify for a downside Fleet job if he wants it."

Sassinak couldn't imagine anyone wanting it. To be stuck on one planet, or shipped from one to another by coldsleep cabinet? Horrible. Glad she had no such problems herself, she went back to her work eagerly.

It was, in fact, a prized assignment. The communications "shack" was a good-sized room that opened directly onto the bridge. Sassinak could look out and see the bridge crew: the officer of the deck in the command module - or, more often, standing behind it, overlooking the others from the narrow eminence that protruded into the bridge like a low stage. Of course she could not see it all; her own workstation cut off the view of the main screens and the weapons section. But she felt very much at the nerve-center of the cruiser's life. Communications in the newly refitted heavy cruiser were a far sight from anything she'd been taught in the Academy.

Instead of the simple old dual system of sublight radio and FTL link, both useful only when the ship itself was in sublight space, they had five separate systems, each for use in a particular combination of events. Close-comm, used within thirty LM of the receiver, was essentially the same old sublight microwave relay that virtually all technical races developed early on.

Low-link, a low-power FTL link for use when they themselves were not on FTL drive, brought near- instantaneous communications within a single solar system, and short-lag comm to nearby star systems. Two new systems gave the capability for transmissions while in FTL flight: a sublight emergency channel, SOLEC, which allowed a computer-generated message to contact certain mapped nodes, and the high-power FTL link which transmitted to mapped stations. Even newer, still experimental and very secret, was the computer-enhanced FTL link to other Fleet vessels in FTL flight.

For each system, a separate set of protocols and codes determined which messages might be sent where, and by whom... and who could or should receive messages.

"One thing is, we don't want the others to know what we've got," said the Communications Chief. "So far, all the commercials in human space are using the old stuff: electromagnetic, lightspeed-radio and stuff like that - and FTL link - really a low-link. Arbetronics is about to come out with a commercial version of the FTL sublight transmitter, but Fleet's got a total lock on the high-link. Our people developed it; all that research was funded in house, and unless someone squeaks, it's our baby. And the Fleet IFTL link even more so. You can see why."

Sassinak certainly could. Until now. Fleet vessels had had to drop into sublight to pick up incoming messages - usually at mapped nodes, which made them entirely too predictable. Her instructors at the Academy had suspected that Fleet messages were being routinely stripped from the holding computers by both Company and unattached pirates. The IFTL link would make them independent of the nodes altogether. "Information," the Comm Chief said. "That's the power out here - who knows what? Now, ordinarily, in any disputed or unsecured sector, all crew messages are held for batch transmission, ordinary sublight radio, to the nearest mail facility. Anything serious - death, discharge, that kind of thing - can be put on the low-link with clearance from the Communications Officer, who may require the captain to sign off on it. The initiating officer's code goes on each transmission. That means whoever authorized it, not who actually punched the button - right now you're not booked to initiate any signals. The actual operator's code also goes on it; whoever logs onto that system transmitter automatically gets hooked to the transmission. Incoming's always accepted, and automatically dumped in a protected file unless its own security status requires even more. Accepting officer's code - and that's you, if you're on duty right then - goes on it in the file. If it's the usual mail-call batch, check with 'Tenant Cardon; if he says it's clear, then let the computer route it to individuals' E-mail files."

"What about other incoming?"

"Well, if it's not a batch file message, if it's a singleton for one person, you have to get authorization to move it to that individual's file. If it's a low-link message, those are always Fleet official business, and that means route to the captain first, but into his desk file, not his private E-mail file. We don't get any incoming on high-link or SOLEC, so you don't have to worry about them. Now if it's something on the IFTL, that's routed directly to the captain's desk file. Pipe the captain, wherever he is, and no copies at all. Nothing in main computer. Clear?"

"Yes, sir. But do I still patch on my ID code, on an IFTL message?"

"Yes, of course. That's always done."

Some days later, Sassinak came into Communications just as the beeper rang off on the end of an incoming message burst. Cavery, who had already discovered the new ensign could do his job almost as well as he could, pointed at the big display. Sassinak scanned the grid and nodded.

"I'll put it down," she said.

"I've already keyed my code on it. Just the mail run from Stenus, nothing fancy."

Sass flicked a few keys and watched the display. The computer broke each message batch into its component messages, and routed them automatically. The screen flickered far faster than she could read it. She liked the surreal geometries of the display anyway. It hovered on the edge of making sense, like math a little beyond her capability.

Suddenly something tugged at her mind, hard, and she jammed a finger on the controls. The display froze, halfway between signals, showing only the originating codes.

"Whatsit?" asked Cavery, looking over to see why the flickering had stopped.

"I don't know. Something funny."

"Funny! You've been here over six standard months and you're surprised to find something funny?"

"No... not really." Her voice softened as she peered at the screen. Then she saw it. Out of eighteen message fragments on the screen, two had the same originator codes, reduplicated four times each. That had made odd blocks of light on the screen, repeating blocks where she'd expected randomness. She looked over at Cavery. "What's a quad duplication of originating blocks for?"

"A quad? Never saw one. Let's take a look - " He called up the reference system on his own screen. "What's the code?"

Sassinak read it off, waited while he punched it in. He whistled. "Code itself is Fleet IG's office... who the dickens is getting mail from the IG, I wonder. And quad duplication. That's..."

She heard his fingers on the keys, a soft clicking, and then another whistle. "I dunno. Ensign. Some kind of internal code, I'd guess, but it's not in the book. Who're they to?"

Sassinak read off the codes, and he looked them up.

"Huh. 'Tenant Achael and Weapons Systems Officer... and that's Tenant Achael. Tell you what. Ensign, someone sure wants to have Achael get that signal, whatever it is." He gave her a strange, challenging look. "Want me to put a tag on it?"

"Mmm? No," she said. Then more firmly, as he continued to look at her. "No, just the receiving code tag. It's none of our business, anyway."

Still, she couldn't quite put it out of her mind. It wasn't unknown for the IG to pull a surprise inspection - and not unheard of for a junior officer to be tipped off by a friend ahead of time. Or someone - presumably 'Tenant Achael - might have made a complaint directly to the IG. That also happened. But she couldn't leave it at that. She was responsible, whenever she was on duty, for spotting anything irregular in the Communications Section. Two messages from the IG's office - two messages sent to the same person by different routes, and with an initiating code that wasn't in the book. That was definitely irregular.

"Come in. Ensign," said Commander Fargeon, seated as usual behind his desk. She wished it had been some other officer. "What is it?" he asked.

"An irregularity in incoming signals, sir." Sassinak laid the hardcopy prints on his desk. "This came in with a regular mail batchfile. Two identical strips for Lieutenant Achael, one direct to his E-mail slot, and one to Weapons Officer. The same originating code, in the IG's office, but repeated four times. And it's in code..." She let her voice trail off, seeing that Fargeon's attention was caught. He picked up the prints and looked closely at them.

"Hmm. Did you decode it?"

"No, sir." Sass managed not to sound aggrieved: he knew she knew that was strictly against regulations. She hadn't done anything yet to make him think she was likely to break regs.

"Well." Fargeon sat back, still staring at the prints. "It's probably nothing. Ensign - a friend in the IG's office, wanting to make sure he'd get the message - but you were quite right to bring it to my attention. Quite right." By his tone, he didn't think so - he sounded bored and irritable. Sassinak waited a moment. "And if anything of a similar nature should happen again, you should certainly tell me about it. Dismissed."

Sassinak left his office unsatisfied. Something pricked her mind; she couldn't quite figure it out, but it worried her constantly. Surely Fargeon, the most rigid of captains, couldn't be involved in anything underhanded. And was it underhanded to be receiving messages from the IG? Not really.

She mentioned her inability to feel comfortable with Fargeon's attitude to the Weft ensign, Jrain.

"No, we don't think he's bent," was Jrain's response. "He doesn't like Wefts, but then he doesn't like much of anyone he didn't know in childhood. They're pretty inbred, there on Bretagne. A bit like the Seti, in a way: they have very rigid ideas of right and wrong."

"I thought the Seti were pretty loose," said Sass. "Vandals and hellraisers, always willing to start a fight or gamble it all on one throw."

"They are, but that doesn't mean they don't have their own rules. Did you know Seti won't do any gene engineering?"

"I thought they were primitive in that field."

"They are, but it's because they want to be. They think it's wrong to load the dice - genetic or otherwise. But that's beside the point: what matters is that Fargeon is straight, so far as Wefts can tell. Even though he doesn't like us. Wefts choose to serve on his ship, because he is fair."

Only a few shipdays later, they had their first break in routine since leaving Base. The cruiser had orders to inspect a planet in the system which had generated conflicting reports: an EEC classification of "habitable; possibly suitable for limited colonization" and a more recent free scout's comment of "dead - no hope."

From orbit, the remote survey crews backed up the free scout's report. No life, and no possibility of it without major terraforming. But Fleet apparently wanted a closer investigation, some idea of who had done it - the Others, or what? Commander Fargeon himself chose the landing team: Sassinak went as communications officer, along with ten specialists and ten armed guards.

It was her first time since the training cruise at the Academy in fall protective gear. This time, a sergeant checked her seals and tanks, instead of an instructor. The air tasted "tanky" as they put it, and she had to remind herself where all the switches were. Carefully, very aware that this was no training exercise, she checked out the main and backup radios she'd be using on the surface, made sure that the recording taps were all open, the computer channels cleared for input.

She didn't see the planet until the shuttle cleared the cruiser's hull. It looked exactly like the teaching tapes of dead planets. Sassinak ignored it after a glance and ran another set of checks on her equipment. Although the planet had once had a breathable oxygen atmosphere, sustained by its biosphere, it had already skewed towards the reducing atmosphere common to unlivable worlds.

Besides, whatever had been used to kill its living component might still be active. They would be on tanks the entire time. She had hardly cleared the shuttle ramp on the surface, and felt the alien grit rasping along her bootsoles, when the landing team commander called a warning.

At first Sassinak could not judge the size or distance of the pyramidal objects that seemed to grow, like the targets in a computer simulation game, from nothing in the upper air. Certainly they didn't follow the trajectories required by normal insystem drives, nor did they slow for the careful landing the shuttle pilot had made. Instead they hovered briefly overhead, then sank apparently straight down to rest firmly on the bare rock.

Sassinak reported this, hardly aware of doing it, so fascinated was she by the display. Half a dozen of the pyramids now sat, or lay, m an irregular array near the shuttle. Theks, the landing party commander had said; apart from teaching tapes, she had never seen a Thek and now she saw many in person, if such designation was accurate for those entities.

Another member of the landing party beeped the LPC and asked, "What do we do about them, sir?"

The LPC snorted, a splatter of sound in the suit corn units. "It's more what are they going to do about us. For future reference, this looks to me like the beginnings of a Thek conference. Meanwhile, look your fill. Not many of us ephemerals get a chance to see one forming."

His suit helmet tilted; Sassinak looked up, too. More of the pyramids appeared, sank, and landed nearby.

"If that's what they're doing," LPC said after a brief silence, "we might as well go back in the shuttle and have something to eat. This is going to take longer than we'd planned. Inform the captain. Ensign."

More and more pyramids arrived.. -. and then, without sound or warning, the ones already landed rose and joined the others to form a large, interlocking structure of complex geometry.

"That," said the LPC, sounding impressed, "is a Thek cathedral. It's big enough inside for this whole shuttle, and it lasts until they're through. The Xenos think they're linking minds. Humans who have been in one don't talk about what happened."

"Humans get drawn into one of those things?" someone asked, clearly unsettled by the notion.

"If a Thek calls, you come," replied the LPC.

"How would you know a Thek wanted you?"

"Oh, there's evidence that the Thek recognize individual humans from time to time..."

"Their time?" a wise guy quipped.

"It does look a lot like the Academy Chapel right now," said Sassinak softly. She didn't think this was a time to be clever but people reacted differently to something they couldn't quite understand.

"Most people think that. You're lucky to see one, you know. Just try to keep out of one, if you've got the option. No one says 'no' to one Thek, let alone a whole flotilla."

"Does anyone know more about them than the Academy tapes?"

"Did you take Advanced Alien Cultures? No? Well, it's not that much help anyway. An allied alien race, co-founders of the Federation, we think. Wefts are one of their client races, although I don't know why. They're mineral, and they communicate very... very... slowly... with humans, if at all." Although they were back in the shuttle now, the LPC kept his voice low. "Have a taste for transuranics, and they're supposed to remember everything that ever happened to them, or a distant ancestor. Live a long time, but before they dissolve or harden, or whatever it is they do that corresponds with death, they transmit all their memories somehow. Maybe they're telepathic with each other. For humans they use a computer interface or modulate sound waves. Without, as you can see, any mouth. Don't ask me how; it's not my field, and this is only the second time I've seen a Thek."

Hours later, the Theks abruptly disassembled themselves and flew - or whatever it was - back into the darkening sky. The landing party, now thoroughly bored and stiff, grumbled back into action.

Sass followed them to the outcrop that had been chosen for primary sampling. They set to work as she relayed their results and comments back to the ship. Worklights glared, forming haloes at the edge of her vision as the dust rose, almost like smoke-haze in a bar, she thought, watching suited figures shift back and forth. Suddenly she stiffened, wholly alert, her heart racing. One of them - one of the helmeted blurs - she had seen before. Somewhere. Somewhere in a fight.

It came to her: the night of Abe's murder, the night of the brawl in the bar. That same bold geometric pattern on the helmet had then been on the jacket of one of the street gang. That same flicking movement of the arm had - she closed her eyes a moment, now recognizing something she had never quite put together - had aimed something at Abe.

Rage blurred her vision and thought. She opened her mouth to scream into the corn unit, but managed to clamp her teeth on the scream. Abe's murderer here? In a Fleet uniform? She didn't know all the landing party, but she could certainly find out whose helmet that was. And somehow, some way, she'd get her revenge.

Through the rest of the time on planet, she worked grimly, determined to hide her reactions until she found out just who that was, and why Abe had been killed. She wondered again about the mysterious duplicated message to 'Tenant Achael. Could that be part of the same problem?

Back on the ship, Sass made no sudden moves. She had had time to think about her options. Going to Fargeon with a complaint that someone on the ship had murdered her guardian would get her a quick trip to the Medical Section for sedation. Querying the personnel files was against regulations, and even if she could get past the computer's security systems, she risked leaving a trace of her search. Whoever it was would know that she was aware of something wrong. Even asking about the helmet's assigned user might be risky, but she felt it was the least risky... and she had an idea.

Partly because of the Thek arrival and conference, the LPC had permitted more chatter on the circuits than usual, and Sass had already found it hard to tag each transmission with the correct originating code, as required. She had reason, therefore, to ask the rating in charge of the helmets for a list of occupants, "just to check on some of this stuff, and be sure I get the right words with the right person."

The helmet she cared most about belonged to Tenant Achael. Gotcha, thought Sass, but kept a bright friendly smile on her face when she called him on the ship's intercom. "Sorry to bother you, sir," she began, "but I needed to check some of these transmissions..."

"Couldn't you have done that at the time?" he asked. He sounded gruff, and slightly wary. Sass tried to project innocent enthusiasm, and pushed all thought of Abe aside.

"Sorry, sir, but I was having trouble with the coded data link while the Theks were there." This was in fact true, and she'd mentioned it to the LPC at the time, which meant she was covered if Achael checked. "The commander said that was more important..."

"Very well, then. What is it?"

"At 1630, ship's time, a conversation on the geochemical sulfur cycle and its relation to the fourth stage of reseeding... was it you, sir, or Specialist Nervin, who said 'But that's only if you consider the contribution of the bacterial substrate to be nominal.' That's just where the originating codes began to get tangled." Just as she spoke, Sass pushed the capture button on her console, diverting Achael's response into a sealed file she'd prepared. Highly illegal, but she would have need of it. And if the shielded tap she'd put together didn't work, he'd hear the warning buzz on her speech first. He should react to it.

"Oh - " He sounded less tense. 'That was Nervin - he was telling me about the latest research from Zamroni. Apparently there's some new evidence that shows a much greater contribution from the bacterial substrate in fourth stage. Have you read it?"

"No, sir."

"Really. You were involved in installing the new environmental system, though, weren't you? I'd gotten the idea that biosystems was your field."

"No, sir," said Sassinak firmly, guessing where he wanted to go with this. "I took command course: just general knowledge in the specialty fields. Frankly, sir, I found most of that environmental system over my head, and if it hadn't been for Chief Erling - "

"I see. Well, does that give you enough to go on, or do you need something else?"

Sassinak asked two more questions, each quite reasonable since it involved a period with multiple transmissions at a time when her attention might have been on data relay. He answered freely, seemingly completely relaxed now, and Sassinak kept her own voice easy. He was still willing to chat. Then she cut him off, making herself sound reluctant. Did she want to meet for a drink in the mess next shift indeed!

I'll drink at your funeral, she thought to herself, and dance on your grave, you murdering blackheart.

CHAPTER Six

Sassinak wondered how she could get into the personnel files without being detected. And could she find out anything useful if she did? Certainly Achael wouldn't have "murderer" filling in some blank (secondary specialty?), and since she had no idea who or what had marked Abe for death, she wasn't sure she could recognize anything she found anyway. Still, she had to do something.

"Sassinak, can I ask you something?" Surbar, fellow ensign, was a shy, quiet young man, who nonetheless used his wide dark eyes to good advantage. Sassinak had heard, through Mira, that he was enjoying his recreational hours with a Jig in Weapons Control. Nonetheless, he'd given her some intense looks, and she'd considered responding.

"Sure." Sassinak leaned back, in the relaxed atmosphere of the second watch mess, and ran her hands through her hair. In one comer of her mind, she considered that it was getting a bit too long, and she really ought to go get it trimmed again. Tousled was one thing, but a tangled mass - which is what her hair did every chance it got - was another. The difference between sexy and blowsy.

"D'you know anything about Tenant Achael?"

Sassinak barely controlled her reaction. "Achael? Not really - he was on the landing party, but I was too busy with all my stuff to talk to him. Why?"

"Well." Surbar frowned and scratched his nose. "He's been asking about you. Lia wanted to know why, and he said you were too good-looking to be running around loose. Thought you might be related to somebody he'd known."

Sassinak made herself chuckle casually. Apparently it worked because Surbar didn't seem to notice anything. "He's one of those, is he? After every new female on the ship?"

Surbar shrugged. "Lia said he made eyes at her, but backed off when she said no. Then he started asking about you - so I guess maybe he is that kind."

"Mmm. Well, then, I'll be sure to stay out of airlocks and closets and other closed spaces if Mr. Lieutenant Achael is around."

"Meaning you're not interested?" Surbar gave her his most melting look.

"Not in him," said Sassinak, glancing at the overhead and then letting her glance slide sideways to meet Surbar's. "On the other hand..."

"Lia's coming to play gunna tonight," said Surbar quickly. "Maybe another time?"

Sassinak shrugged. "Give me a call. Thanks, anyway, for the warning about Achael." On her way back to her compartment, she thought about it. Achael had enough seniority to cause her trouble, and as Weapons Officer he had high enough clearance to access most communications files. If he wanted to. If he thought he needed to. She wanted him dead, if he was Abe's killer, or in league with Abe's killer, but she didn't want to ruin herself in the process.

The next shift, Sassinak had her first IFTL message to process. Muttering her way through the protocol, she logged it, stripped the outer codes, and got it into the captain's eyes-only file without help. Cavery nodded. "Good job - you're doing well at that."

"Wonder what it's about."

"Ours not to know - they say your eyes turn to purple jelly and your brain rots if you peek at those things."

Sassinak chuckled; Cavery had turned out to have quite a sense of humor. "I thought ensigns didn't have brains, just vast pools of prediluvian slime - isn't that what I heard you tell Pickett, yesterday?"

"Comes from trying to decode IFTL messages, that's what I just said. Keep your mind, such as it is, on your work. You can't afford to lose more." His grin took all the sting out of it, and Sassinak went on logging in routine communications for the rest of the shift.

That night Fargeon announced in the wardroom that they were to intercept an EEC craft and pick up reports for forwarding. He spent a long time droning on about the delicate handling necessary to rendezvous in deep space, and Sassinak let her attention wander. Not so far as some, though, for Fargeon's rebuke fell on a Jig from Engineering, who had been doodling idly on her napkin. For some reason, Fargeon chose to interpret this as carelessness with classified information, and by the time he'd finished reaming her out, everyone in the room felt edgy. Of course deep-space rendezvous were tricky, everyone knew that, and of course the EEC pilot couldn't be depended on to arrive at a precise location, as the cruiser would do, but this was no different from any other time, surely. If the EEC ship fouled up badly enough, and they all made a fireworks display that wouldn't be seen anywhere for fifty years or so, too bad.

Since everyone came out of dinner disgruntled, Sassinak didn't pay much attention to her own mood. But the next morning she found that Lieutenant Achael had the bridge: Fargeon, Dass, and Lieutenant Commander Slachek were, he said, in conference. Sassinak glanced around the bridge, and ducked into the communications cubby. It was empty. A scrawled note on the console said that Perry had gone to sickbay: Achael had cleared it. Sassinak frowned, wondering if that's why Cavery was late - perhaps he'd gone with Perry to sickbay. But communications hadn't been uncovered long; the incoming telltales showed nothing in the queue in any system. Odd - they'd been getting regular bursts last shift, relayed position checks on the EEC ship. Sassinak pulled up the last entries in the incoming file, to check the log-in times - if they hadn't had anything coming in for awhile, it might mean trouble with the systems.

She was so intent on the idea of a systems failure that she almost didn't recognize her own initiation code when it flashed on the screen. What? Her nose wrinkled in concentration. She'd just gotten there, and yet her code was time-linked to a file query five minutes before. It couldn't be - unless someone had entered her code by mistake... or for some other reason.

"Hey - sorry I'm late." Cavery slid into his seat, took a look at the display, and recoiled. "I thought I told you not to go poking around in the incoming message files."

"You did. I didn't. Somebody used my code."

"What!" After that first explosive word, his voice lowered. "Don't say that, Sassinak. Probably every comm posting in the universe has snooped one time or another, but lying doesn't make it better."

"I'm not lying." Sassinak laid her hand over his on the console. "Listen to me. I wasn't here at the time that was logged; I came in right on time, not early as usual. Someone logged my code five minutes before I was here."

"What'd Perry say?"

"He's in sickbay. Nobody was here when I got here, just a note - " She handed it over. Cavery frowned.

"Hardcopy, not on the computer. That's odd. Who's got duty - ?" He craned to see around the angle, and snorted. "Oh, great. Achael. Where's Fargeon?'

"In conference, Achael said. But Cavery, the thing is - "

"The thing is, your code's on there, telling the whole world you were snooping in the IFTL files, and if you say you're not either you're a liar, which is one problem, or someone else is, which is another. Damn! All we needed, with the captain the way he is right now, is a Security glitch."

"But I didn't - "

Cavery looked at her, hard, then his mouth relaxed. "No, I don't think you would. But with your code on the file, and - what the dickens is that?" He pointed to the realtime display, which was filling with the outgoing batch message for SOLEC transmission. "I don't suppose you put your code on that one either?"

Sassinak looked and saw the other anomaly that Cavery had missed. "Or that quad code for the Inspector General's office, either - it's the same thing we had before, only outgoing, and using my code as originator."

"That one, I will strip." Cavery froze the display, keyed in the ranking codes, and displayed the message itself, along with its initiating and destination sequences, Sassinak noticed that he was copying all this into another file, sealed with his own code. He sat back, clearly baffled by the message.

"Subject unaware; no suspicious activity. Assignment coincidental. Will continue observation."

Cavery looked over at her, brows raised. "Well, Ensign, are you keeping someone under surveillance, or is someone keeping you under surveillance?"

"I - don't know." Achael, she thought. It has to be Achael, but why? And who's behind it?

"Well, I know one thing, and that's where all this is going: straight to the captain."

"But - " Sassinak stopped herself; if she protested, he'd have reason to think she knew more. Yet she wasn't near ready to accuse Achael of involvement with Abe's death... how could she? No matter how it came out, she'd lose: ensigns don't get anywhere accusing lieutenants of murder months back and somewhere else.

Cavery waited, his expression clearly daring her to object.

"I know," she said finally, "that Captain Fargeon has to be informed. But he's not on the bridge, and I don't... really... want to involve any more officers than necessary."

"I remember whose number was on those quad-coded messages. Ensign Sassinak - " Cavery nodded toward the main bridge area. "You needn't try to be obscure."

"Sorry, sir. I wasn't trying to be obscure, I was just - " She paused, as near waving her hands in confusion as she'd ever been. Then inspiration hit. She saw by Cavery's expression that her own had changed with her idea. "Sir, if all this ties together, right now is a bad time to go charging out of here to the captain, isn't it? And if it doesn't, it would still... confuse things, wouldn't it?"

Cavery leaned back fractionally, considering. "You have a point." He sighed, and cleared the display. "I can't see that it would hurt to wait until midwatch break, anyway, and maybe later. Depends on the captain's schedule."

Sassinak said nothing more, but settled to her work. Thank whatever gods there were she hadn't meddled with the Personnel files or the message banks: Achael didn't know she suspected anything. Assignment coincidence? What else could it be, when she had no powerful family to pull strings for her... or had that been Abe's secret, perhaps? More than ever, she needed to see Achael's file, but how was she going to do that?

The shattering clamor of the emergency alarm brought her upright. Fast as she was, Cavery's hand almost covered hers as they shut the console down for normal use and flicked on the emergency systems. After the first blast of noise, the siren warbled up, down, up twice: evacuation drill.

"Stupidest damn drill in the book," grumbled Cavery as he fished under the console for the emergency masks. "Here - put this on. Nobody ever evacuates a cruiser; as long as it takes to get everyone in the shuttles and evac pods, whatever it is will have blown the whole place up. Now remember. Ensign, you close the board when you leave, and that's not until the duty officer clears the bridge." His voice was muffled, now, through the foil and plex hood and mask. Sassinak found that hers cut off all vision to the side and rear. As she fastened the tabs to the shoulders of her uniform, Cavery grunted. "Ah, good: Fargeon's taken the bridge. Soon as this damn drill's over, we can get this other taken care of - " His voice sharpened. "Yes, sir; communications secured, sir."

Although Cavery's acid comments implied that pirates could have boarded the ship and flown it to the far side of the galaxy before their turn came, Sassinak thought it wasn't long at all before she was jogging forward along the main portside corridor from the bridge to the transport bays where the shuttles and evac pods were docked. A stream of hooded figures jogged her way, and another jogged back; once you were logged into your assigned evacuation slot, you had to return to your duty post. It did seem illogical. She looked again at the strip of plastic giving her assigned pod: E-40-A. Here, along a side corridor, through a narrow passage she'd never explored. Bay E: someone in full EVA gear glanced at her assignment strip and waved her to the right; section 40 was the last one at the end. Someone else, also suited up, pointed out Pod A, one of a row of hatches still dogged shut. Sassinak struggled with the hatch lock, checked to see that the telltales were all green, and pulled the heavy lid open. Inside the little brightly lit compartment, she could see the shape of an acceleration couch, shiny fittings, a bank of switches and lights.

She ducked her head to clear the hatch opening. Suddenly a sharp pain jabbed her arm, and when she tried to turn it felt like the weight of the whole cruiser landed on her head. She could do nothing but fall forward into darkness.

Commander Fargeon in a rage was no pleasant sight. His officers, ranged around his desk at attention, had no doubt of his mood. "What I want to know," he said icily, "is who dumped that pod. Who sent it out there, and what's that ensign doing in it, and why isn't the beacon functioning, and what's all this nonsense about communications security leaks."

Eyes slid sideways; no one volunteered. Fargeon barked, "Cavery!"

"Sir, Ensign Sassinak had reported an incident of duplicate transmissions with unusual initiation codes - "

"I know about that. That's got nothing to do with this, has it?"

Cavery wasn't sure how far to go, yet. "I don't know, sir: I was just starting at the beginning." He took a breath, waited for Fargeon's nod, and went on. "Today she reported that someone had used her initiation code to attempt access to a restricted file - "

"Ensign Sassinak? When?"

"Apparently it happened about five minutes before she came on duty. She reported it to me when I arrived - " Cavery went on to explain what had happened up until the drill alarm went. Fargeon listened without further comment, his face expressionless. Then he turned to another officer.

"Well, Captain Palise: what did you see in E-bay."

"Sir, we logged Ensign Sassinak into E-bay at 1826.40; she logged off the bridge on evac at 1824.10, and that's just time to go directly to E-bay. As you know, sir, in an evac drill we have personnel constantly shifting about; once someone's logged into the bay, there's no way to keep watch on them until they're into their assigned shuttle or pod. When the hatches are dogged, then they're logged as onboard evac craft, and they're supposed to return to duty as quickly as possible. Within two minutes of Ensign Sassinak's bay log-in, we show fifty-three individuals logging into the same bay - about what you'd expect. Eight of them were in the wrong bay - and that's about average, too. We had two recording officers in E-bay, but they didn't notice anything until Pod 40-A fired."

"Very well. Captain Palise. Now, Engineering - "

"The pod was live, sir, as they always are for drill. We can't be shutting down the whole system just because somebody might make a mistake - "

"I know that." It had been Fargeon's own policy, in fact, and the Engineering Section had warned more than once that having evac drills with live pods and shuttles while in FTL travel was just asking for trouble. Fargeon glared at his senior engineer, and Erling glared back. Everyone knew that Erling had taken to Sassinak in her first assignment. Whatever had happened, Erling was going to pick Sassinak's side, if he knew which it was.

"Well, sir, activation would be the same as always. If the hatch is properly dogged, inside and out, and the sequence keyed in - "

"From inside?"

"Either. The shuttles have to be operated from inside, but the whole reason behind the pods was safe evacuation of wounded or disabled individuals. Someone in the bay can close it up and send it off just as easy as the occupant."

"I don't think we need to worry about that," said Fargeon repressively. "My interest now is in determining if Ensign Sassinak hit the wrong button out of stupidity, or did she intend to desert the ship?"

Into the silence that followed this remark. Lieutenant Achael's words fell with the precision of an artisan's hammer.

"Perhaps I can shed some light on that, sir. But I would prefer to do so in private."

"On the contrary. You will tell me now."

"Sir, it is a matter of some delicacy..."

"It is a matter of some urgency. Lieutenant, and I expect a complete report at once."

Achael bowed slightly, a thin smile tightening his lips. "Sir, as you know I have a cousin in the Inspector General's office. As weapons officer, I have particular interest in classified document control, and when that directive came out two months ago, I decided to set up such a test on this ship. You remember that you gave your permission - ?" He waited for Commander Fargeon's nod before going on. "Well, I had three hard copies of apparently classified documentation on the new Witherspoon ship-to-ship beam, and - as the directive suggested - I made an opportunity to let all the newly assigned officers know that they existed and where they were."

"Get to the point. Lieutenant."

"The point, sir, is that one of them disappeared, then reappeared one shift later. I determined that three of the ensigns, and two Jigs, had the opportunity to take the copy. I handled the copy with tongs, and put it in the protective sleeve the directive had included, for examination later at a forensic lab. And I reported this, in code, to my cousin, in case anything - ah - happened to me."

"And you have reason to believe that Ensign Sassinak was the person who took the document?"

"She had the opportunity, along with several others. Forensic examination should show whether she handled it. Or rather, it would have."

"Would have?"

"Yes, sir. The document in question, in its protective sleeve, is missing from my personal safe. We have not only a missing pod, and a missing ensign, but a missing document which might have identified someone who had broken security regulations. And a non-functioning beacon on the pod. I scarcely think this can be coincidence."

"Not Sassinak!" That was Cavery, furious suddenly. He had had his doubts, but not after the pod ejected. If Sassinak had wanted to escape, she wouldn't have called herself to his attention that very morning.

"As for the outgoing message with her initiation code, I believe she may have been reporting to whomever she - er - worked with."

"The destination code was in the IG's office," said Cavery. "The same code as your incoming message."

"You're sure? Of course, she might have done that to incriminate me - "

"NO!" Erling and Cavery shouted it together.

"Gentlemen." Fargeon's voice was icy, his expression forbidding. "This is a matter too serious for personalities. Ensign Sassinak may have been ejected accidentally. Or, despite her high ratings in the Academy, she may have been less than loyal. There is her background to consider. Of course. Lieutenant Achael, it's one you share."

Achael stiffened. "Sir, I was a prisoner. She was a slave. The difference - "

"Is immaterial. She didn't volunteer for slavery, I'm sure. However, her captors would have had ample time to implant deep conditioning - not really her responsibility. At any rate. Lieutenant, your information only adds to the urgency and confusion of this situation." He took a long breath, but before he could begin the long speech they all knew was coming, Makin, the Weft Jig, spoke up.

"Begging the captain's pardon, but what about retrieval?"

Fargeon became even stiffer, if possible. "Retrieval? Mr. Makin, the pod was ejected during FTL flight, and we are en route to a scheduled rendezvous with an EEC vessel. Either of those conditions alone would make retrieval impossible - "

"Sir, not impossible. Difficult, but - "

"Impossible. The pod was ejected into a probability flux - recall your elementary physics class, Mr. Makin - and would have dropped into sublight velocity at a location describable in cubic light-minutes. With a vector of motion impossible to calculate. Now if the beacon had functioned - which Engineering assures me it did not - we would be getting some sort of distorted signal from it. We might spend the next few weeks tracking it down, if we didn't have this rendezvous to make. But we have no beacon to trace, and we have a rendezvous to make. My question now is what report to make to Fleet Headquarters, and what we should recommend be done about that ensign."

When Fargeon dismissed them, he announced no decision; outside his office, the buzzing conversations began.

"I don't care what that sneak says." Cavery was beyond caution. "I will not believe Sassinak took anything - so much as a leftover muffin - and if she did she'd be standing here saying so."

"I don't know, Cavery." Bullis, of Admin, might not have cared: he argued for the sheer joy of it. "She was intelligent and hardworking, I'll grant you that, but too sharp for her own good. If you follow me."

"Not into that, I won't. I - " He paused, and looked around at Makin, the Weft Jig, who had tapped his arm.

"If I could speak to you a moment, sir?"

Cavery looked at Bullis and shrugged, then followed Makin down the corridor. "Well?"

"Sir, is there any way to convince the captain that we can locate that pod, even without a beacon on it?"

"You can? Who? And how?"

"We can because Ensign Sassinak is on it - Wefts, I mean, sir. With Ssli help."

Cavery cocked his head. "Ssli help? Wait a minute - you mean the Ssli could locate that little pod, even in normal space, while we're - "

"Together, we could, sir." Cavery had the feeling that the Weft meant something more than he'd said, but excitement overrode his curiosity for the moment.

"But I don't know what I can do about the captain," he murmured, lowering his voice as Achael strolled nearer. "I'm not going to get anywhere arguing."

"Cavery," Achael broke into their conversation. "I know you liked the girl, and she is attractive. I'd have spent a night or so with her gladly." Cavery reddened at that insinuation. "But the circumstances are suggestive, even suspicious."

"I suppose you'd suspect any orphan ex-slave?" Cavery meant it to bite, and Achael stiffened.

"I'm not the one who brought up her ancestry," he pointed out.

"No, but you have to admit, if it's a matter of access, you were in the same place at the same time. Maybe someone twisted your mind. Curious you never saw her, hmm?"

Achael glared at him. "You've never been anyone's prisoner, have you? I spent my entire time on that miserable rock locked in a stinking cell with five other members of the Caleb's crew. One of them died, of untreated wounds, and my best friend went permanently insane from the interrogation drugs. I hardly had the leisure to go wandering about the slaveholds looking for little girls, as she must have been then."

"I - I'm sorry," said Cavery, embarrassed. "I didn't know."

"I don't talk about it." Achael had turned away, hiding his face. Now he spun about, pinning Cavery suddenly with a stiffened forefinger. "And I don't expect you, Cavery, to tell everyone in the mess about it, either."

"Of course not." Cavery watched the other man stalk away, and wished he'd never opened his mouth.

"You notice he never answered your question," Makin said. At Cavery's blank look, he went on. "You're right, sir, that during that captivity an enemy had a chance to deep-program Lieutenant Achael... and nothing he said makes that less likely. A friend who went insane from interrogation drugs... perhaps Achael did not."

"I don't - like to accuse anyone who went through - through something like that - "

"Of course not. But that's what they may have counted on, to cover any lapses. Now, about the pod and Ensign Sassinak - "

Sassinak's supporters barely crammed into Cavery's quarters. Wefts, other ensigns, Erling from Engineering. After the first chaos, when everyone assured everyone else that she couldn't have done any of it, they concentrated on ways and means.

"We have to do it soon, because those damn pods don't carry much air. If she's conscious, she'll put herself in coldsleep - and amateurs trying to put themselves in are all too likely to make a fatal mistake."

"Worse than that," said Makin, "we can't track her if she's in coldsleep - it'll be like death. We've got to get her before she does that, or before she dies."

"Which is how long, Erling?" Everyone craned to see the engineer's face. It offered no great amount of hope. He spread his hands.

"Depends on her. If she takes the risk of holding out on the existing air supply as long as she can, or if she opts to go into coldsleep while she's alert. And we don't even know if the person who ejected the pod sabotaged the airtanks or the coldsleep module, as well as the beacon. At an outside, maximum, - if she pushes it, hundred-ten to hundred-twenty hours from ejection." Before anyone could ask, he glanced at a clock readout on the wall and went on. "And it's been eight point two. And the captain's determined to make the rendezvous with the EEC ship tomorrow, which eats up another twenty-four to thirty." His glare was a challenge. The Weft ensign Jrain took it up.

"Suppose we can't convince the captain to break the rendezvous - what about going back afterwards? He might be in a more reasonable frame of mind then."

Erling snorted. "He might - and then again he might be hot to go straight to sector command. To go back - hell, how would I know? You tell me you can find her, you and the Ssli, but I sure couldn't calculate a course or transit time. Even if we hit the same drop-point as the ejection - if that's not a ridiculous statement in talking of paralight space - we'd have no guarantee we'd come out with the same vector. They found that out when they tried dropping combat modules out of FTL in the Gerimi System. Scattered to hell all over the place, and it took months to clean up the mess. But again, assume we can use you as guides, we still have to maneuver the ship. Maybe we can, maybe we can't."

"We have to try." Mira rumpled her blonde hair as if she wanted to unroot it. "Sassinak isn't guilty, and I'm not going to have her take the blame. She helped others at the Academy - "

"Not your bunch," Jrain pointed out.

"So I grew up," Mira retorted. "My mother pushed me into that friendship; I didn't know better until later. Sassinak is my friend, and she's not going to be left drifting around in a dinky little pod for god knows how long..."

"Well, but what are we going to do about it?"

"I think Jrain had a good idea. Let Fargeon get this rendezvous out of his head, and then try him again. And if he doesn't agree..." Cavery scowled. No one wanted to say mutiny out loud.

CHAPTER Seven

When Sassinak woke up, to the dim gray light of the evacuation pod, she had a lump on her forehead, another on the back of her head, and the vague feeling that too much time had passed. She couldn't see much, and finally realized that something covered her head. When she reached for it, her arm twinged, and she rubbed a sore place. It felt like an injection site, but... Slowly, clumsily, she pawed the foil hood from her head and looked around. She lay crumpled against the acceleration couch of a standard evac pod; without the hood's interference, she could see everything in the pod. Beneath the cushions of the couch was the tank for coldsleep, if things went wrong. She had the feeling that perhaps things had gone wrong, but she couldn't quite remember.

Slowly, trying to keep her churning stomach from outwitting her, she pushed herself up. It would do no good to panic. Either she was in a functioning pod inside a ship, or she was in a functioning pod in flight: either way, the pod had taken care of her so far, or she wouldn't have wakened. The air smelled normal... but if she'd been there long enough, her nose would have adapted. She tried to look around, to the control console, and her stomach rebelled. She grabbed at the nearest protruding knob, and a steel basin slid from its recess at one end of the couch. Just in time.

She retched until nothing came but clear green bile, then wiped her mouth on her sleeve. What a stink! Her mouth quirked. What a thing to think about at a time like this. She felt cold and shaky, but a little more solid. Aches and twinges began to assert themselves. She pushed the basin back into its recess, looked for and found the button that should empty and sterilise it (she didn't really want to think about the pod's recycling system, but her mind produced the specs anyway), and turned over, leaning against the couch.

Over the hatch, a digital readout informed her that the pod had been launched eight hours and forty-two minutes before. Launched! She forced herself to look at the rest of the information. Air supply on full; estimated time of exhaustion ninety-two hours fourteen minutes. Water and food supplies: maximum load; estimated exhaustion undetermined. Of course, she hadn't used any yet, and the onboard comp had no data on her consumption. She tried to get onto the couch and almost passed out again. How could she be that weak if she'd only been here eight hours? And besides that, what had happened? Evac pods were intended primarily for the evacuation of injured or otherwise incapable crew. Had there been an emergency; had she been unconscious on a ship or something?

The second try got her onto the bench, with a bank of control switches ready to her hand. She fumbled for the sip-wand, and took two long swallows of water. (The recycling couldn't be working yet, she told her stomach.) A touch of the finger, and she cut the airflow down 15%. She might not tolerate that, but if she did it would give her more time. Another swallow of water. The taste in her mouth had been worse than terrible. She felt in her uniform pocket for the mints she liked to carry, and at that moment the memory came back.

The drill... E-bay... ducking to enter her assigned pod... and something, had jabbed her arm, and landed on her head. She rolled up her sleeve, frowning. Sure enough, a little red weal, slightly itchy and sore. She'd been drugged, and slugged, and dumped in a pod and sent off - As suddenly as that first memory, the situation on the cruiser came to her. Mysterious messages, someone using her comm code, and her belief that Achael had had something to do with Abe's murder. If she'd had any doubts, they vanished.

With the wave of anger, her mind seemed to clear. Perhaps Achael or his accomplice had thought she'd die of the drug - or maybe they meant to force her into taking coldsleep, and intended the pod to be picked up by confederates.

You have such cheerful thoughts, she told herself, and looked around for distraction.

There, on the control console an arm's length away, a large gray envelope with bright orange stripes across it. Fleet Security, Classified. Do Not Open Without Proper Authorization. The pressure seal hadn't quite taken; the opening gaped. Sassinak started to reach for it, then stopped her hand in midair. Whoever had dumped her in here must have left that little gift... which meant she wanted no part of it.

It might even become evidence. She grinned to herself. A proper Carin Coldae setup this was, and no mistake. Now what would Carin do? Figure out a way to catch the villain, without ruffling one hair of her head. Sassinak rumpled her own hair and remembered that she'd been planning to cut it.

Moment by moment she felt better. She'd suspected that something was going on, and she'd been right. She'd felt in danger, and she'd been right. And now she was helplessly locked into an evac pod, which was headed who knows where, and even with the beacon on no one was likely to find her until she'd run out of air... and she was happy. Ridiculous, but she was. A little voice of caution murmured that it might be the drug, and she shouldn't be overconfident. She told the little voice to shut up. But just in case... she found the med kit, and figured out how to lay her arm in the cradle for a venous tap. Take a blood sample, that should do it. If she had been drugged, and the drug proved traceable... the sting of the needle interrupted that thought for a moment. Beacon. She needed to check the beacon.

But as she had already begun to suspect, the beacon wasn't functioning. She looked thoughtfully at the control console. The quickest way to disable the beacon, and the simplest, required a screwdriver and three or four minutes with that console. Lift the top, giving access to the switches and their attached wiring. Then, depending on how obvious you wanted to be, clip or crosswire or remove this and that. She was not surprised to see a screwdriver loose on the "deck" of the pod.

And her first impulse would normally have been to check out the beacon, using that screwdriver to free the console top. After she'd picked up the envelope with Classified all over it. Her fingerprints, her body oils, would have been on the tool, the envelope, the console, even the switches underneath, obscuring the work of the person who'd put her here.

Sassinak took another long swallow of water, and rummaged in the med kit for a stimulant tab. This was no time to miss anything.

In the end, the med kit provided most of what she needed. Forceps, with which to lift the screwdriver and put it into a packet that had held headache pills. It occurred to her that while she was unconscious, her assailant might have pressed her fingers against the envelope, or the screwdriver, but she couldn't do anything about that. She found the little pocket scanner that was supposed to be in every evac module, and shot a clip of the envelope as it lay on the console. When she had all the evidence secured, she suddenly wondered how that would help if she were in coldsleep when she was found. Suppose her assailant had confederates, who were supposed to pick her up? They could destroy her careful work, incriminate her even more. That gave her the jitters for awhile, and then she remembered Abe's patient voice saying "What you can't change, don't cry over: put your energy where it works, Sass."

Right now it had to go into prolonging her time before coldsleep.

Which meant, she remembered unhappily, no eating. Digestion used energy, which used oxygen. No exercise, for the same reason. Lie still, breathe slow, think peaceful thoughts. You might as well spend the time in coldsleep, she grumbled to herself, as try to act as if you were in coldsleep. But she took the time to clean herself up as well as she could, using the tiny mirror in the med kit. The slightly overlong hair could be tied back neatly, the stains wiped from her uniform. Then she lay down on the couch, pulled up the coverlet, and tried to relax.

She had not been hungry like this since her slave days. Her empty stomach growled, gurgled, and finally settled for sharp nagging pains. She chivvied her mind away from the food fantasies it wanted to indulge in, steering it into mathematics instead. Squares and square roots, cubes and cube roots, visualizing curves from equations, and imagining how, with a shift in values, the curve would shift... as a loop of hose shifts with changing water pressure. Finally she slipped into a doze.

She woke in a foul mood, but more clear-headed than before. Elapsed time since ejection was now 25 hours, 16 minutes. Clearly the cruiser hadn't stopped to look for her, or hadn't been able to find her. She wondered if the Ssli could sense such a small distortion in the fields they touched. Or could the Wefts detect her, as a living being they'd known? But that was idle speculation. She gave her arm to the med kit's blood sampler again; she remembered being told that each drug had a characteristic breakdown profile, and that serial blood tests could provide the best information on an unknown drug.

For a moment, the pod seemed to contract around her, crushing her to the couch. Had some unsuspected drive come on, to flatten her with acceleration? But no: the pods had the same artificial gravity as the cruiser itself, to protect injured occupants. She knew that; she knew the walls weren't really closing in... but she suddenly understood just how Ensign Corfin might have felt. She couldn't see out; she had no idea where she was or where she was going; she was trapped in a tiny box with no way out. Her breath came fast: too fast. She fought to slow it. So, this was claustrophobia. How interesting. It didn't feel interesting; it felt terrible.

She had to do something. Squares and square roots seemed singularly impractical this time. Could she figure out a way to ensure that the evidence couldn't be faked against her? Any worse than it already was, she reminded herself. That brought another chilling thought: maybe the cruiser hadn't come looking for her because Commander Fargeon was already convinced she was an enemy agent and had absconded with the pod.

Her stomach growled again; she set herself to enter the first stages of control Abe had taught her. Hunger was just hunger; in this case, nothing to worry about. But she did need to worry about her career.

In the long, lonely, silent hours that followed, Sassinak spent much of her time in a near-trance, dozing. The rest she spent doing what she could to make tampering with the evidence as hard as possible. If the pod were picked up by enemies, with plenty of time at their disposal, none of her ploys would work... but if a Fleet vessel, her cruiser or another, came along, it would take more than a few minutes to undo what she'd done and rework it to incriminate her.

When the elapsed-time monitor read 100 hours, and the time to exhaustion of her air supply was less than five hours, she pulled out the instruction manual for the coldsleep cabinet. Evac pods had an automated system, but she didn't trust it; what if the same person who had sabotaged the beacon had fiddled with the medications? She pushed aside the thought that sabotaging the entire coldsleep cabinet wouldn't have been that hard. If it didn't work, she'd never wake up, and that was that. But she had to try it, or die of oxygen starvation... and the films they'd been shown at the Academy had made it clear that oxygen starvation was not a pleasant way to go.

She filled the syringes carefully, checking and rechecking labels and dosages. With the mattress off the acceleration couch, she looked the cabinet over as well as she could. Ordinarily, cold sleep required only an enclosed space; she could go into it using the whole pod as the container. But for extra protection in the pods, the reinforced cabinet had been designed, and was strongly recommended. She looked into that blank, shiny interior, and shuddered.

First, the protocol said, program the automatic dispenser, and then have it start an IV. But she wasn't doing that. Her way would mean getting into the cabinet, with the syringes in hand, giving herself the injections, pulling down the lid, turning the cylinder controls, and then... then, she hoped, just sleeping away whatever time it took before someone found her.

Nor could she wait until the last moment. Oxygen starvation would make her clumsy and slow, and she might make fatal mistakes. She set the medication alarm in the medkit for one hour before the deadline. The last minutes crept by. Sassinak looked around the pod interior, fighting to stay calm. She dared not put herself in trance, yet there was nothing to do to ease her tension. There was the tape she'd made, her log of this unplanned journey with all her surmises about cause and criminal. In the acceleration couch mattress was a handwritten log, in the hope that redundancy might help.

When the alarm sounded, she snatched the syringe and reached for the alarm release. But it didn't work. Great, she thought, I'll go into coldsleep with that horrible noise in my ears and have nightmares for years. Then she realized it wasn't the same buzzer at all - in fact, it wasn't time for the med-alarm - she had fifteen more minutes. She looked wildly around the pod, trying to figure it out, before her mind dredged up the right memory. Proximity alarm: some kind of large mass was nearby, and it might be a ship, and they might even have compatible communications gear.

Only she had carefully set up the console to trap additional evidence while she was in coldsleep, and if she touched it now she'd be confusing her own system.

And what if it wasn't a Fleet vessel? What if it was an ally of her assailant? Or worse, suppose it wasn't a ship at all, and the pod was falling into a star?

In that case, she told herself firmly, you still don't have to worry; you can't stop it, and it'll all be over very quickly. She found the override switch for the proximity alarm, and cut it off. Now it was a matter of deciding whether to ride it out blind, or try to communicate. She decided to save her careful work, and then realized this meant she wouldn't know if whatever it was could rendezvous before her air ran out. It wouldn't take much error, on either side: ten minutes without oxygen would do as well as four days.

Ten minutes left. Five. She had left herself that safe buffer: dare she use it now? Zero. Sassinak looked at the syringe, but didn't pick it up. She'd feel silly if she lost consciousness just as someone came through the door. She'd be flat stupid if she died because she cut it too close. But she could - and did, quickly - tape an addition to her log.

Now she was using her safe margin. Minute by minute went by with no clue from without, of what was happening. She had just picked up the syringe, with a grimace, when something clunked, hard, against the pod. Another thump; a loud clang. Sassinak put the syringe down, lowered the lid of the coldsleep cabinet, and sat on it. She could not - could not - miss whatever was going to happen. What happened first was total silence as the blower in her oxygen system went out. She had a moment to think how stupid she'd been, and then it cut in again; the readout flickered, and shifted to green. "Exterior source" it said now. "Unlimited. Tanks charging." It smelled better, too. Sassinak took a second long breath, and unclenched her fingers from the edge of the cabinet. Other lights flickered on the control console. "Exterior pressure equalised" said one. She didn't trust it enough to open the hatch... not yet. "Exterior power source confirmed" said another.

Finally she heard various clicks and bangs from the hatch, and braced herself, not sure what she would do if she found enemies when it opened. But the first face she saw was familiar.

"Ensign Sassinak." Familiar, but not particularly welcoming. The captain himself had chosen to greet her, and behind him she saw both friendly and scowling faces. And a squad of marines, armed. Sassinak stood, saluted, and nearly fell as the hours of inactivity and fasting caught up with her all at once. "Are you hurt?" Fargeon asked when she staggered.

"Just a knock on the head," she said. "Excuse me, sir, but I must warn you - "

"You, Ensign, are the one to be warned," he said stiffly, that momentary warmth gone as if it had never happened. "Charges have been made against you, serious charges, and it is my duty to warn you that anything you say may be used in evidence against you."

Sassinak stared at him, momentarily speechless. Had he really believed Achael's (it must have been Achael's) accusations? Wasn't he going to give her a chance? She caught herself, shook her head, and went on. "Captain, please - it's very important that this pod be sealed, and all contents handled by forensic specialists."

That got his attention. "What? What are you talking about?"

Sassinak waved her hand at the pod's interior. "Sir, I've done my best to secure it, but I really don't know how. Someone knocked me out during evac drill, dumped me in this pod, jettisoned it, and planted it full of items I was supposed to handle, to incriminate myself. I believe those same items may carry traces of the perpetrator - " She nearly stumbled over the word, catching sight of Lieutenant Achael in the group behind the captain. His face was frozen in an expression of distaste. Then it changed to eagerness, and he leaned forward.

"That's exactly what she would say, sir. That someone tried to frame her - "

"I can see that for myself, Mr. Achael." Fargeon's expression soured even more.

"I could hardly have planted someone else's fingerprints on the interior of the console while disabling the beacon," Sassinak said crisply. Achael paled; she saw his eyes glance sideways.

"You disabled the beacon?" asked Fargeon, missing the point.

"No, sir. I realized the beacon was disabled, and also realized that if I made an attempt to repair it, I would destroy evidence pointing to the person who did disable it. That evidence is intact." She looked straight at Achael as she spoke. He flinched from her gaze, took a step backward.

Fargeon's head tilted minutely; she had surprised him with some of that. "There's a document missing," he said.

Sassinak nodded. "There's a classified document envelope, not quite sealed, in this pod. I found it when I woke - "

"Likely story," said Achael. This time the captain's response was clearly irritated, a quick flip of the hand for silence.

"And did you handle it?" asked the captain.

"No, sir, I did not. Although it's possible that whoever dumped me in there put my fingers on it while I was unconscious,"

"I see." The captain pulled himself up. "Well. This is... unexpected. Very well; I'll see to it that the pod is sealed, and the contents examined for evidence of what actually happened. As for you. Ensign, you'll report to Sickbay, and then to your quarters. I'll want a full report - "

"Sir, I taped a report while in the pod. May I bring that tape?"

"You did?" Again this threw him off his stride. "Very good thinking. Ensign. By all means, let me have it now."

Sassinak picked up the tape, and started forward. Her vision blurred, and she nearly hit her head on the hatch rim. A hand came forward, steadied her arm. She ducked under the hatch, and came out into the chilly air of E-bay. It smelled decidedly fresher than the pod. Fargeon peered at her.

"You're very pale - are you sure you're not ill?"

"It's just not eating." The bulkheads seemed to shimmer, then steadied. She was conscious of having to concentrate firmly on the here and now.

"You - but surely there were emergency rations in the pod?"

"Yes, but - to make the air last - " She fought to stay upright, with a soft blackness folding itself around her. "I didn't - trust the coldsleep cabinet - if the same person had tampered with it - "

"Gods!" That was Cavery, she realized as she looked toward the voice. But the blackness rose around her, inescapable, and she felt herself curling into it.

"Don't forget the blood samples," she heard herself say, and then everything disappeared.

The medician's face hung over hers, suspended in nothingness. Sassinak blinked, yawned, and found the rest of the compartment in focus again. Sickbay, clearly. An IV line ran from her left hand to a bag; wires trailed across her chest.

"I'm fine," she said helpfully.

"You're lucky," said the medician, pinching back a smile. "You came close to the edge - you can't use Discipline like that and not eat."

"Huh?"

"Don't try to tell me you weren't using it, either - nothing but a crash from it would have sent you that far down'. Here - have a mug of this." A flick of the hand, and Sass's couch lifted her so that she could take the mug of thick broth the medician offered.

"What did the blood samples show?" asked Sassinak between sips. She could practically feel the strength flowing back into her.

"You're lucky," the medician said again. "It was a coldsleep prep dose. If you'd hit the tank controls by mistake, you might have been in coldsleep immediately... or if you'd chosen to enter coldsleep early, the residual in your blood could have killed you. It didn't completely clear until the third day."

"The cabinet?" She remembered her fear of that featureless interior.

"Nothing: it was normal." The medician looked at her curiously. "You're in remarkably good shape, all things considered. That lump on the back of your head may still hurt, but there's no damage. You're not showing any signs of excessive anxiety - "

Sassinak slurped the last bit of broth and grinned. "I'm safe now. And not hungry. When can I get up?"

Before the medician could answer, a voice from the corridor said, "That's Sass, all right! I can tell from here."

"Not yet," said the medician to Sass. Then, "Do you want visitors? I can easily tell them to let you rest."

But Sassinak could hardly wait to find out what had happened so far. Mira, all trace of fashionable reserve gone, and Jrain, almost visibly shimmering into another shape in his excitement, were only too glad to tell her.

"I knew," Mira began, "that it couldn't have been your fault. You aren't ever careless like that; you wouldn't have hit the wrong button or anything. And of course you, of all people, wouldn't cooperate with slavers or pirates."

"But how did you find me without the beacon?"

Mira nodded at Jrain. "Your Weft friends did it. I don't know if Jrain can explain it - he couldn't to me - but they tracked you, somehow - "

"It was really the Ssli interface," Jrain said. "You know how they can sense other vessels in FTL space - "

"Yes, but I wasn't in FTL space after the pod went off, was I?"

"No, but it turns out they can reach beyond it, somehow. Doesn't make any sense to me, and what Hssro calls the relevant equations I call gibberish. The pod is really too small to sense - like something small too far away to see - but we knew exactly when you'd been dumped, and the Ssli was able to - to do whatever it does in whatever direction that was. Then we Wefts sort of rode that probe, feeling our way toward you."

"But you said - "

"Because you're alive, and we know you. We had to go in our own shapes, of course - " He frowned, and Sassinak tried to imagine the effect on Fargeon of all the crew's Wefts in their own shape, clinging, no doubt, to the bulkheads of the Ssli contact chamber. Or on the bridge? She asked.

"He wasn't pleased with us," said Jrain, a reminiscent smile on his face. "We don't usually clump on him, you know: he doesn't like aliens much, though he tries to be fair. But when it came down to risking the loss of your pod, or giving in to Achael's insinuations - "

"Kirtin changed right there in front of the captain," put in Mira. "I thought he was going to choke. Then Basil and Jrain - "

"Ptak first: I was the last one," Jrain put in.

"Whatever." Mira shrugged away the correction and went on. "Can you imagine - this was in the big wardroom, and there they were all over the walls! I'd never seen more than one Weft changed at a time - " She quirked an eyebrow at Sass.

"I have. It's impressive, isn't it?"

"Impressive! It's crowded, is what it is, with these big spiky things all over the walls and ceiling." Mira wrinkled her nose at Jrain, who grinned at her. "Not to mention all those eyes glittering out at you. And you never told me," she said to Jrain, "that you're telepaths in that shape. I thought you'd use a biolink to the computer or something."

"There wasn't time," said Jrain.

"But what about the rendezvous with the EEC ship? Did we miss that?"

"No. What we decided - I mean - " Mira looked sideways. "What the Wefts decided, was to let that go on, and then pick you up afterwards. It seemed risky to me - the further we went, the further away you were, the harder to find. It was a real gamble - "

"No," said Jrain firmly and loudly. Mira stared at him, and Sassinak blinked. He took a long breath, and said more quietly, "We don't gamble. We don't ever gamble."

"I didn't mean like a poker game," said Mira sharply. "But it was risky - "

"No." As they looked at him, his form wavered, then steadied again. "I can't explain. But you must not think - " an earnest look at Sassinak " - you must not think we gamble with your life, Sassinak. Never."

"I - oh, all right, Jrain. You don't gamble. But if one of you doesn't get all this in order and tell me what happened, and where we are, and where Achael is, I'm going to crawl out of this bed and stuff you in a pod."

Jrain, calmer now, sat on the end of her bed. "Achael is dead. That evidence you spoke to the captain about - remember?" Sassinak nodded. "Well, the captain had it put under guard. The pod, and the items removed, like the blood samples. Achael tried to get at it. He did get into the med lab, and destroyed one test printout before he was discovered. Then he broke for the docking bays - I think to steal a pod himself. When the guards spotted him, and he knew he was trapped, he killed himself. Had a poison capsule, apparently. The captain won't tell us, not all the details, but we've had our ears open." He patted Sass's foot under the blanket. "At first the captain wanted to think that you and Achael were co-conspirators, but he couldn't ignore the evidence... you know, Sass, you really did cram that pod with evidence. You did such a good job it was almost suspicious that way."

"Fleet Intelligence is going to get the whole load dumped on them when we get back to Sector HQ," Mira put in. "I heard Fargeon won't even trust the IFTL link."

"We'd better go," said Jrain, suddenly looking nervous. "I think - I think the captain would rather you heard some of this from him..." He grabbed Mira's arm and steered her away. Sassinak caught his unspoken thought... And he's had quite enough to put up with from Wefts already this week.

"Ensign Sassinak." Captain Fargeon's severe face was set in slightly friendlier lines, Sassinak thought. She was, however, immediately conscious of every wrinkle of the bedclothes. Then he smiled. "You had a very narrow escape. Ensign, in more than one way. I understand you've been told about the drug that showed up in the blood samples?" Sassinak nodded, and he went on. "It was very good thinking to take those serial samples. Although normally - mmm - there's nothing to commend in a young officer who manages to get sand- bagged and shanghaied, in this case you seem to have acted with unusual intelligence once you woke up. You have nothing to reproach yourself for. I know Lieutenant Cavery looks forward to your return to duty in Communications Section. Good day."

Following that somewhat confusing speech, Sassinak lay quietly, wondering what Fargeon did think of her. She had been expecting praise, but realized that to the ship's captain her entire escapade was one big head- ache. He'd had to leave his intended course to go looking for her, even if the guidance of Wefts and Ssli made that easier than usual. He'd had to worry about her motives, and the presence of unknown saboteurs in his ship; he'd had to assign someone else to cover her work; when they got back to Sector HQ, he was going to have to fill out a lot of forms, and spend a lot of time talking to Fleet Intelligence... all in all, she'd caused a lot of trouble by not being quicker in the evacuation drill. If she'd managed to turn and drop Achael with a bit of fancy hard-to-hand, she'd have saved everyone a lot of trouble. She shook her head at her own juvenile imagination. No more Carin Coldae: no more playing games. She'd done a good job with a bad situation, but she hadn't managed to avoid the bad situation. She'd have to do better.

So it was that Fargeon's annual Fitness Report, which he showed her before filing it, startled her.

"Clear-headed, resourceful, good initiative, outstanding self-discipline: this young officer requires only seasoning to develop into an excellent addition to any Fleet operation. Unlike many who rest on past achievements, this officer does not let success go to her head, and can be counted on for continued effort. Recommended for earliest promotion eligibility." Sassinak looked up from this to find Fargeon's face relaxed in a broad smile for the first time in her memory.

"Just as I said the first day. Ensign Sassinak: if you realize that you can't ever start at the top, and if you continue to show your willingness to work, you'll do very well indeed. I'd be glad to have you in my command again, any time."

"Thank you, sir." Sassinak wondered whether to strain this approval by telling him what she suspected about Achael and Abe's death. "Sir, about Lieutenant Achael - "

"All information will go to Fleet Security - do you have something which you did not put in your tape?"

She had included her suspicion that Achael had murdered Abe, but would anyone take it seriously? "It's in there, sir, but - about my guardian, who was killed - "

"Abe, you mean." The captain permitted himself a tight smile. "A good man. Fleet to the bone. Well, this is not for discussion. Ensign, but I would agree with your surmise. Achael was a prisoner on the same slaver base where you and Abe were; the most logical supposition is that Abe knew something about his conduct or treatment there which would have been dangerous to Achael. Perhaps he was deep-conditioned, or something. He killed Abe to keep his secret, and suspected that Abe might have told you something."

"But what might be behind Achael?" asked Sass. But with this question, she had gone too far. The captain's face closed again, although he did not seem angry.

"That's for Security to determine, when they have all the evidence. Myself, I suspect that he was merely protecting himself. Suppose Abe knew he had stolen from other prisoners - that would ruin his Fleet career. I would be willing to wager that the final report will conclude that Achael was acting in his own behalf when he killed Abe and attempted to incriminate you."

Sassinak was not convinced, but knew better than to argue. As Fargeon predicted. Fleet Security agreed with his surmise, and closed the file on the murder. Achael's attacks on Sassinak, and his suicide, made a clear pattern with his years as a prisoner: too clear, Sassinak thought, too simple. When she was older, when she had rank, she promised herself, she'd find out who was really responsible for Abe's death, who had set Achael on his trail. For now, she'd honor his memory with her own success.

BOOK THREE

CHAPTER Eight

The striking, elegant woman in the mirror, Sassinak thought, had come a long way from the young ensign she had been. She had been lucky; she had been born with the good bones, the talent, the innate toughness to survive. She had had more luck along the way. But... she winked at herself, then grinned at that egotism. But she had cooperated with her luck, given it all the help she could. Tonight - tonight it was time for celebration. She had made it to Commander, past the dangerous doldrum ranks where the unwanted lodged sullenly until retirement age. She was about to have her own ship again, and this one a cruiser.

She eyed the new gown critically. Once she'd learned that good clothes fully repaid the investment, she'd spent some concentrated time learning what colors and styles suited her best. And then, one by one, she'd accumulated a small but elegant wardrobe. This, now... her favorite rich colors glowed, jewel-like reds and deep blues and purples, a quilted bodice shaped above a flowing, full skirt of deepest midnight, all in soft silui that caressed her skin with every movement. She slipped her feet into soft black boots, glad that the ridiculous fashion for high heels had once again died out. She was tall enough as it was. Her comm signal went off as she was putting on the last touches, the silver earrings and simple necklace with its cut crystal star.

"Just because you got the promotion and the cruiser doesn't mean you can make us late," said the voice in her ear, the Lieutenant Commander who'd arranged the party. He'd been her assistant when she was working for Admiral Pael. "Tobaldi's doesn't hold reservations past the hour - "

"I know; I'm coming." With a last look at the mirror, she picked up her wrap and went out. As she'd half-expected, two more of her friends waited in the corridor outside, with flowers and a small wrapped box.

"You put this on now," said Mira. Her gold curly hair had faded a little, but not the bright eyes or quick mind. Sassinak took the gift, and untied the silver ribbon carefully.

"I suppose you figured out what I'd be wearing," she said, laughing. Then she had the box open, and caught her breath. When she looked at Mira, the other woman was smug.

"I bought it years ago, that time we were shopping, remember? I saw the way you looked at it, and knew the time would come. Of course, I could have waited until you made admiral - " She ducked Sass's playful blow. "You will, Sass. It's a given. I'll retire in a couple of years, and go back to Dad's shipping company - at least he's agreed to let me take over instead of that bratty cousin.... Anyway, let me fasten it."

Sassinak picked up the intricate silver necklace, a design that combined boldness and grace (and, she recalled, an outrageous price - at least for a junior lieutenant, which she had been then) and let Mira close the fastening. Her star went into the box - for tonight, at least - and the box went back in her room. Whatever she might have said to Mira was forestalled by the arrival of the others, and the six of them were deep into reminiscences by the time they got to Tobaldi's.

Mira - the only one who had been there - had to tell the others all about Sass's first cruise. "They've heard that already," Sassinak kept protesting. Mira shushed her firmly.

"You wouldn't have told them the good parts," she said, and proceeded to give her version of the good parts. Sassinak retaliated with the story of Mira's adventures on - or mostly off - horseback, one leave they'd taken together on Mira's homeworld. "I'm a spacer's brat, not a horsebreeder's daughter," complained Mira.

"You're the one who said we ought to take that horse-packing trip," said Sass. The others laughed, and brought up their own tales.

Sassinak looked around the group - which now numbered fourteen, since others had arrived to join them. Was there really someone from every ship she'd been on? Four were from the Padalyan Reef, the cruiser on which she'd been the exec until a month ago. That was touching: they had given her a farewell party then, and she had not expected to see them tonight. But the two young lieutenants, stiffly correct among the higher ranks, would not have missed it - she could see that in their eyes. The other two, off on long home leave between assignments, had probably dropped in just because they enjoyed a party.

Her glance moved on, checking an invisible list. All but the prize she'd been given command of, she thought - and wished for a moment that Ford, wherever he was, could be there, too. Forrest had known her, true, but he'd missed that terrifying interlude, staying on the patrol ship with its original crew. Carew, whom she'd known as a waspish major when she was a lieutenant, on shore duty with Commodore... what had her name been? Narros, that was it... Carew was now a balding, cheery senior Commander, whose memory had lost its sting. Sassinak almost wondered if he'd ever been difficult, then saw a very junior officer across the room flinch away from his gaze. She shrugged mentally - at least he wasn't causing her trouble any more. Her exec from her first command was there, now a Lieutenant Commander and just as steady as ever, though with gray streaking his thick dark hair. Sassinak blessed the genes that had saved her from premature silver... she wanted to wear her silver by choice, not necessity. She didn't need gray hair to lend her authority, she thought to herself. Even back on the Sunrose.... But he was making a small speech, reminding her - and the others - of the unorthodox solution she had found for a light patrol craft in a particular tactical situation. Her friends enjoyed the story, but she remembered very well that some of the senior officers had not liked her solution at all. Her brows lowered, and Mira poked her in the ribs.

"Wake up, Sass, the battle's over. You don't need to glare at us like that."

"Sorry... I was remembering Admiral Kurin's comments."

"Well... we all know what happened to him." And that was true enough. A stickler for the rulebook, he had fallen prey to a foe who was not. But Sassinak knew that his opinion of her had gone on file before that, to influence other seniors. She had seen the doubtful looks, and been subject to careful warnings.

Now, however, two men approached the tables with the absolute assurance that comes only from a lifetime of command, and high rank at the end of it. Bilisics, the specialist in military law from Command and Staff, and Admiral Vannoy, Sector Commandant.

"Commander Sassinak - congratulations." Bilisics had been one of her favorite instructors, anywhere. She had even gone to him for advice on a most private and delicate matter - and so far as she could tell, he had maintained absolute secrecy. His grin to her acknowledged all that. "I must always congratulate an officer who steers a safe course through the dangerous waters of a tour at Fleet Headquarters, who avoids the reefs of political or social ambition, the treacherous tides of intimacy in high places..." He practically winked: they both knew what that was about. The others clearly thought it was one of Bilisics's usual mannered pleasantries. As far as she knew, no one had ever suspected her near-engagement to the ambassador from Arion.

"Yes: congratulations. Commander, and welcome to the Sector. You'll like the Zaid-Dayan, and I'm sure you'll do well with it." She had worked with Admiral Vannoy before, but not for several years. His newer responsibilities had not aged him; he gave, as always, the impression of energy under firm control.

"Would you join us?" Sassinak asked. But, as she expected, they had other plans, and after a few more minutes drifted off to join a table of very senior officers at the far end of the room.

It hardly needed Tobaldi's excellent dinner, the rare live orchestra playing hauntingly lovely old waltzes, or the wines they ordered lavishly, to make that evening special. She could have had any of several partners to end it with, but chose instead a scandalously early return to her quarters - not long after midnight.

"And I'll wager if we had a spycam in there, we'd find her looking over the specs on her cruiser," said Mira, walking back to a popular dance pavilion with the others. "Fleet to the bone, that's what she is, more than most of us. It's her only family, has been since before the Academy."

Sass, unaware of Mira's shrewd guess, would not have been upset by it - since she was, at that moment, calling up the crew list on her terminal. She would have agreed with all that statement, although she felt an occasional twinge of guilt for her failure to contact any of her remaining biological kin. Yet... what did an orphan, an ex-slave, have in common with ordinary, respectable citizens? Too many people still considered slavery a disgrace to the victim; she didn't want to see that rejection on the faces of her own relatives. Easier to stay away, to stay with the family that had rescued her and still supported her. And that night, warmed by the fellowship and celebration, intent on her new command, she felt nothing but eagerness for the future.

Sassinak always felt that Fleet had lost something in the transition from the days when a captain approached a ship lying at dockside, visible to the naked eye, with a veritable gangplank and the welcoming crew topside, and flags flying in the open air. Now, the new captain of, say, a cruiser, simply walked down one corridor after another of a typical space station, and entered the ship's space by crossing a line on the deck planking. The ceremony of taking command had not changed that much, but the circumstances made such ceremony far less impressive. Yet she could not entirely conceal her delight, that after some twenty years as a Fleet officer, she was now to command her own cruiser.

"Commander Kerif will be sorry to have missed you, Commander Sassinak," said Lieutenant Commander Huron, her Executive Officer, leading the way to her new quarters. "But under the circumstances - "

"Of course," said Sassinak. If your son, graduating from the Academy, is going to marry the heiress of one of the wealthiest mercantile families, you may ask for, and be granted, extra leave: even if it means that the change of command of your cruiser is not quite by the book. She had done her homework, skimming the files on her way over from Sector HQ. Huron, for instance, had not impressed his captain overmuch, by his latest Fitness Report. But considering the secret orders she carried, Sassinak had doubts about all the Fitness Reports on that ship. The man seemed intelligent and capable - not to mention fit and reasonably good-looking. He'd have a fair chance with her.

"He asked me to extend you his warmest congratulations, and his best wishes for your success with the ship. I can assure you that your officers are eager to make this mission a success."

"Mission? What do you know about it?" Supposedly her orders were secret: but then, one of the points made was that Security breaches were getting worse, much worse.

Huron's forehead wrinkled. "Well... we've been out on patrol, just kind of scouting around the sector. Figured we'd do more of the same."

"Pretty much. I'll brief the senior officers once we're in route; we have two more days of refitting, right?"

"Yes, Commander." He gave her a quizzical look. "With all due respect, ma'am, I guess what they say about you is true."

Sassinak smiled; she knew what they said, and she knew why. "Lieutenant Commander Huron, I'm sure you wouldn't listen to idle gossip... any more than I would listen to gossip about you and your passion for ground-car racing."

It was good to be back on a ship again; good to have the command she'd always wanted. Sassinak glanced down at the four gold rings on her immaculate white sleeve, and on to the gold ring on her finger that gave her Academy class and carried the tiny diamond of the top-ranking graduate. Not bad for an orphan, an ex-slave... not bad at all. Some of her classmates thought she was lucky; some of them, no doubt, thought her ambitions stopped here, with the command of a cruiser in an active sector.

But her dreams went beyond even this. She wanted a star on her shoulder, maybe even two: sector command, command of a battle group. This ship was her beginning.

Already she knew more about the 218 Zaid-Dayan than her officers realized. Not merely the plans of the class of vessel, which any officer of her rank would be expected to have seen, but the detailed plans of that particular cruiser, and the records of all its refittings. You cannot know too much, Abe had said. Whatever you know is your wealth.

Hers lay here. Better than gold or jewels, she told herself, was the knowledge that won respect of her officers and crew... something that could not be bought with unlimited credits. Although credits had their uses. She ran her hand lightly along the edge of the desk she'd installed in her office. Real wood, rare, beautifully carved. She'd discovered in herself a taste for quality, beauty, and indulged it as her pay allowed. A custom desk, a few good pieces of crystal and sculpture, clothes that showed off the beauty she'd grown into. She still thought of all that as luxury, as frills, but no longer felt guilty for enjoying them in moderation.

While the cruiser lay at the refitting dock, Sassinak explored her command, meeting and talking with every member of the crew. About half of them had leave; she met them as they returned. But the onboard crew, a dozen officers and fifty or so enlisted, she made a point of chatting up.

The Zaid-Dayan wore the outward shape of most heavy cruisers, a slightly flattened ovoid hull with clusters of drive pods both port and starboard, aft of the largest diameter. Sassinak never saw it from outside, of course; only the refitting crews did that. What she saw were the human-accessible spaces, - the "living decks" as they were called, and the crawl-ways that let a lean service tech into the bowels of the ship's plumbing and electrical circuitry. For the most part, it was much the same as the Padalyan Reef, the cruiser she'd just left, with Environmental at the bottom, then Troop Deck, then Data, then Main, then the two Flight Decks atop. But not quite.

In this ship, the standard layouts in Environmental had been modified by the addition of the stealth equipment; Sassinak walked every inch of the system to be sure she understood what pipes now ran where. The crowding below had required rearranging some of the storage areas, so that only Data Deck was exactly the same as standard. Sassinak paid particular attention to the two levels of storage for the many pieces of heavy equipment the Zaid-Dayan carried: the shuttles, the pinnace, the light fighter craft, the marines' tracked assault vehicles. Again, she made certain that she knew exactly which craft was stowed in each location, knew without having to check the computers.

Her own quarters were just aft of the bridge, opening onto the port passage, a stateroom large enough for modest entertaining - a low table and several chairs, as well as workstation, sleeping area, and private facilities. Slightly aft and across the passage was the officers' wardroom. Her position as cruiser captain required the capacity to entertain formal visitors, so she also had a large office, forward of the bridge and across the same passage. This she could decorate as she pleased - at least, within the limits of Fleet regulations and her own resources. She chose midnight-blue carpeting to show off the striking grain of her desk; the table was Fleet issue, but refinished to gleaming black. Guest seating, low couches along the walls, was in white synthi-leather. Against the pale-gray bulkheads, this produced a room of simple elegance that suited her perfectly.

Huron, she realized quickly, was an asset in more ways than one. Colony-bred himself, he had more than the usual interest in their safety. Too many Fleet officers considered the newer colonies more trouble than they were worth. As the days passed, she found that Huron's assessment of the junior officers was both fair and leavened by humor. She began to wonder why his previous commander had had so little confidence in him.

That story came out over a game of sho, one evening some days into their patrol. Sassinak had begun delicately probing, to see if he had a grievance of any sort. After the second or third ambiguous question, Huron looked up from the playing board with a smile that sent a sudden jolt through her heart.

"You're wondering if I know why Commander Kerif gave me such a lukewarm report last period?"

Sass, caught off guard as she rarely was, smiled back. "You're quite right - and you don't need to answer. But you've been too knowledgable and competent since I came to have given habitually poor performance."

Huron's smile widened. "Commander Sassinak, your predecessor was a fine officer and I admire him. However, he had very strong ideas about the dignity of some... ah... prominent, old-line, merchant families. He never felt that I had sufficient respect for them, and he attributed a bit of doggerel he heard to me."

"Doggerel?"

Huron actually reddened. "A... uh... song. Sort of a song. About his son and that girl he's marrying. I didn't write it. Commander, although I did think it was funny when I heard it. But, you see, I'd quoted some verse in his presence before, and he was sure..."

Sassinak thought about it. "And do you have proper respect for wealthy merchants?"

Huron pursed his lips. "Proper? I think so. But I am a colony brat."

Sassinak shook her head, smiling. "So am I, as you must already know. Poor Kerif... I suppose it was a very bad song." She caught the look in Huron's eye, and chuckled. "If that's the worst you ever did, we'll have no problems at all."

"I don't want any," said Huron, in a tone that conveyed more than one meaning.

Years before, as a cadet, Sassinak had wondered how anyone could combine relationships both private and professional without being unfair to one or the other. Over the years, she had established her own ground rules, and had become a good judge of those likely to share her values and attitudes. Except for that one almost - disastrous (and, in retrospect, funny) engagement to a brilliant and handsome older diplomat, she had never risked anything she could not afford to lose. Now, secure in her own identity, she expected to go on enjoying life with those of her officers who were willing and stable enough not to be threatened - and honest enough not to take advantages she had no intention of releasing.

Huron, she thought to herself, was a distinct possibility. From the glint in his eyes, he thought the same way about her: the first prerequisite.

But her duty came first, and the present circumstances often drove any thought of pleasure from her mind. In the twenty years since her first voyage. Fleet had not been able to assure the safety of the younger and more remote colonies; as well, planets cleared for colonization by one group were too often found to have someone else - legally now the owners - in place when the colonists arrived. Although human slavery was technically illegal, colonies were being raided for slaves - and that meant a market somewhere. "Normal" humans blamed heavyworlders; heavyworlders blamed the "light- weights" as they called them, and the wealthy mercantile families of the inner worlds complained bitterly about the cost of supporting an ever-growing Fleet which didn't seem to save either lives or property.

Their orders, which Sassinak discussed only in part with her officers, required them to make use of a new, supposedly secret, technology for identifying and trailing newer deep-space civilian vessels. It augmented, rather than replaced, the standard IFF devices which had been in use since before Sassinak joined the Fleet. A sealed beacon, installed in the ship's architecture as it was built, could be triggered by Fleet surveillance scans. While passive to detectors in its normal mode, it nonetheless stored information on the ship's movements. The original idea had been to strip these beacons whenever a ship came to port, and thus keep records on its actual travel - as opposed to the log records presented to the portmaster. But still newer technology allowed specially equipped Fleet cruisers to enable such beacons while still in deepspace, even FTL flight - and then to follow with much less chance of detection. Now the plan was for cruisers such as the Zaid-Dayan to patrol slowly, in areas away from the normal corridors, and select suspicious "merchants" to follow.

So far as the junior officers were concerned, the cruiser patrolled in the old way; because of warnings from Fleet about security leaks, Sassinak told only four of her senior crew, who had to know to operate the scan. Other modifications to the Zaid-Dayan, intended to give it limited stealth capability, were explained as being useful in normal operations.

As the days passed, Sassinak considered the Fleet warnings. "Assume subversives on each ship." Fine, but with no more guidance than that, how was she supposed to find one? Subversives didn't advertise themselves with loud talk of overturning FSP conventions. Besides, it was all guessing. She might have one subversive on her ship, or a dozen, or none at all. She had to admit that if she were planting agents, she'd certainly put them on cruisers, as the most effective and most widespread of the active vessels. But nothing showed in the personnel records she'd run a preliminary screen on - and supposedly Security had checked them all out before.

She knew that many commanders would think first of the heavyworlders on board, but while some of them were certainly involved in subversive organizations, the majority were not. However difficult heavyworlders might be - and some of them, she'd found, had earned their reputation for prickly sullenness - Sassinak had never forgotten the insights gained from her friends at the Academy. She tried to see behind the heavy-boned stolid faces, the overmuscular bodies, to the human person within - and most of the time felt she had succeeded. A few real friendships had come out of this, and many more amiable working relationships... and she found that her reputation as an officer fair to heavyworlders had spread among the officer corps.

Wefts, as aliens, irritated many human commanders, but again Sassinak had the advantage of early friendships. She knew that Wefts had no desire for the worlds humans preferred - in fact, the Wefts who chose space travel were sterile, having given up their chance at procreation for an opportunity to travel and adventure. Nor were they the perfect mental spies so many feared: their telepathic powers were quite limited; they found the average human mind a chaotic mess of emotion and illogic, impossible to follow unless the individual tried hard to convey a message. Sass, with her early training in Discipline, could converse easily with Wefts in their native form, but she knew she was an exception. Besides, if any of the Wefts on board had identified a subversive, she'd already have been told.

After several weeks, she felt completely comfortable with her crew, and could tell that they were settling well together. Huron had proved as inventive a partner as he was a versifier - after hearing a few of his livelier creations in the wardroom one night, she could hardly believe he hadn't written the one about the captain's son and the merchant's daughter. He still insisted he was innocent of that one. The weapons officer, a woman' only one year behind her at the Academy, turned out to be a regional sho champion - and was clearly delighted to demonstrate by beating Sassinak five games out of seven. It was good for morale, and besides, Sassinak had never minded learning from an expert. One of the cooks was a natural genius - so good that Sassinak caught herself thinking about putting him on her duty shift, permanently. She didn't, but her taste buds argued with her, and more than once she found an excuse to "inspect" the kitchens when he was baking. He always had something for the captain. All this was routine - even finding a homesick and miserable junior engineering tech, just out of training, sobbing hopelessly in a storage locker. But so was the patrol routine... nothing, day after day, but the various lumps of matter that had been mapped in their assigned volume of space. Not so much as a pleasure yacht out for adventure.

She was half-dozing in her cabin, early in third watch, when the bridge corn chimed.

"Captain - we've got a ship. Merchant, maybe CR- class for mass, no details yet. Trigger the scan?"

"Wait - I'm coming." She elbowed Huron, who'd already fallen asleep, until he grunted and opened an eye, then whisked into her uniform. When he grunted again and asked what it was, she said, "We've got a ship." At that, both eyes came open, and he sat up. She laughed, and went out; by the time she got to the bridge, he was only a few steps behind her, fully dressed.

"Gotcha!" Huron, leaning over the scanner screen, was as eager as the technician handling the controls. "Look at that..." His fingers flew on his own keyboard, and the ship's data came up on an adjoining screen. "Hu Veron Shipways, forty percent owned by Allied Geochemical, which is wholly owned by the Paraden family. Well, well... previous owner Jakob Iris, no previous criminal record but went into bankruptcy after... hmm... a wager on a horse race. What's that?"

"Horse race," said Sassinak, watching the screen just as intently. "Four-legged mammal, big enough to carry humans. Old Earth origin, imported to four new systems, but they mostly die."

"Kipling's corns, captain, how do you know all that?"

"Kipling indeed, Huron. Our schools had a Kipling story about a horse in the required elementary reading list. With a picture. And the Academy kept a team for funerals, and I have seen a tape of a horse race. In fact, I've actually ridden a horse." Her mouth quirked, as she thought of Mira's homeworld and that ill-fated pack trip.

"You would have," said Huron almost vaguely. His attention was already back to his screen. "Look at that - Iris was betting against Luisa Paraden Scofeld. Isn't that the one who was married to a zero-G hockey star, and then to an ambassador to Ryx?"

"Yes, and while he was there she ran off with the landscape architect. But the point is - "

"The point is that the Paradens have laid their hands on that ship twice!"

"That we know of." Sassinak straightened up and regarded the back of Huron's head thoughtfully. "I think we'll trail this one. Commander Huron. There are just a few too many coincidences..." Even as she gave the necessary orders, Sassinak was conscious of fulfilling an old dream - to be in command of her own ship, on the bridge, with a possible pirate in view. She looked around with satisfaction at what might have been any large control room, anything from a reactor station to a manufacturing plant. The physical remnant of millennia of naval history was under her feet, the raised dais that gave her a clear view of everyone and everything in the room. She could sit in the command chair, with her own screens and computer linkages at hand, or stand and observe the horseshoe arrangement of workstations, each with its trio of screens, its banks of toggles and buttons, its quietly competent operator. Angled above were the big screens, and directly below the end of the dais was the remnant of a now outmoded technology that most captains still used to impress visitors: the three-D tank.

Trailing a ship through FTL space was, Sassinak thought, like following a groundcar - through thick forest at night without using headlights. The unsuspecting merchant left a disturbed swath of space which the Ssli could follow, but it could not simultaneously sense structural (if that was the word) variations in the space-time fabric... so that they were constantly in danger of jouncing through celestial chugholes or running into unseen gravitational stumps. They had to go fast, to keep the quarry in range of detection, but fast blind travel through an unfamiliar sector was an excellent way to get swallowed by the odd wormhole.

When the quarry dropped out of FTL into normal space, the cruiser followed - or, more properly, anticipated. The computer brought up the local navigation points.

"That's interesting," said Huron, pointing. It was more than interesting. A small star system, with one twenty-year-old colony (in the prime range for a raid) sited over a rich vein of platinum. Despite Fleet's urging, FSP bureaucrats had declined to approve effective planetary defence weaponry for small colonies... and the catalog of this colony's defenses was particularly meager.

"Brotherhood of Metals," said Sass. "That's the colony sponsor; they hold the paper on it. I'm beginning to wonder who their stockholders are."

"New contact!" The technician's voice rose. "Excuse me, captain, but I've got a Churi-class vessel out there: could be extremely dangerous - "

"Specs." Sassinak glanced around the bridge, pleased with the alert but unfrantic attitudes she saw. They were already on full stealth routine; upgrading to battle status would cost her stealth. Her weapons officer raised a querying finger; Sassinak shook her head, and he relaxed.

"Old-style IFF - no beacon. Built forty years ago in the Zendi yards, commissioned by the - " He stopped, lowered his voice. "The governor of Diplo, captain."

Oh great, thought Sass. just what we needed, a little heavyworlder suspicion to complete our confusion.

"Bring up the scan and input," she said, without commenting on the heavyworlder connection. One display filled with a computer analysis of the IFF output. Sassinak frowned at it. "That's not right. Look at that carrier wave - "

"Got it." The technician had keyed in a comparison command, and the display broke into colored bands, blue for the correspondence between the standard signal and the one received, and bright pink for the unmatched portions.

"They've diddled with their IFF," said Sass. "We don't know what that is, or what it carries - "

"Our passive array says it's about the size of a patrol craft - " offered Huron.

"Which means it could carry all sorts of nice things," said Sass, thinking of them. An illicitly armed patrol craft was not a match for the Zaid-Dayan, but it could do them damage. If it noticed them.

Huron was frowning at the displays. "Now... is this a rendezvous, or an ambush?"

"Rendezvous," said Sassinak quickly. His brows rose.

"You're sure?"

"It's the worse possibility for us: it gives us two ships to follow or engage if they notice us. Besides, little colonies like this don't get visits from unscheduled merchants."

Judging by the passive scans, which produced data hours old, the two ships matched trajectories and traveled toward the colony world together - certainly close enough to use a tight-beam communication band. The Zaid-Dayan hung in the system's outer debris, watching with every scanning mode it had. Hour by hour, it became clearer that the destination must be the colony. They're raiders, Sassinak thought, and Huron said it aloud, adding, "We ought to blow them out of the system!" For an instant, Sassinak let the old fury rise almost out of control, but she forced the memory of her own childhood back. If they blew these two away, they would know nothing about the powers who hired them, protected them, supplied them. She would not let herself wonder if another Fleet commander had made the same decision about her homeworld's raid.

She shook her head. "We're on surveillance patrol; you know that."

"But, captain - our data's a couple of hours old. If they are raiders, they could be hitting that colony any time... we have to warn them. We can't let them - " Huron had paled, and she saw a terrible doubt in his eyes.

"Orders." She turned away, not trusting herself to meet his gaze. She had exorcised many demons from her past, in the years since her commissioning: she could dine with admirals and high government officials, make polite conversation with aliens, keep her temper and her wits in nearly all circumstances... but deep in her mind she carried the vision of her parents dying, her sister's body sliding into the water, her best friend changed to a shivering, depressed wreck of the lively girl she'd been. She shook her head, forcing herself to concentrate on the scan. Her voice came out clipped and cold; she could see by their reactions that the bridge crew recognized the strain on her. "We must find the source of this - we must. If we destroy these vermin, and never find their master, it will go on and on, and more will suffer. We have to watch, and follow - "

"But they never meant us to let a colony be raided! We're - we're supposed to protect them - it's in the Charter!" Huron circled until he faced her again. "You've got discretion, in any situation where FSP citizens are directly threatened - "

"Discretion!" Sassinak clamped her jaw on the rest of that, and glared at him. It must have been a strong glare, for he backed a step. In a lower voice, she went on. "Discretion, Huron, is not questioning your commanding officer's orders on the bridge when you don't know what in flaming gas clouds is going on. Discretion is learning to think before you blow your stack - "

"Did you ever think," said Huron, white-lipped and angrier than Sassinak had ever seen him, "that someone might have made this decision when you were down there?" He jerked his chin toward the navigation display. She waited a long moment, until the others had decided it would be wise to pay active attention to their own work, and the rigidity went out of Huron's expression.

"Yes," she said very quietly. "Yes, I have. I imagine it haunts that person, if someone actually was there, as this is going to haunt me." At that his face relaxed slightly, the color rising to his cheeks. Before he could speak, Sassinak went on. "You think I don't care? You think I haven't imagined myself - some child the age I was, some innocent girl or boy who's thinking of tomorrow's test in school? You think I don't remember, Huron?" She glanced around, seeing that everyone was at least pretending to give them privacy. "You've seen my nightmares, Huron; you know I haven't forgotten."

His face was as red as it had been pale. "I know. I know that, but how can you - "

"I want them all." It came out flat, emotionless, but with the power of an impending avalanche... as yet no sound, no excitement... but inexorable movement accelerating to some dread ending. "I want them all, Huron: the ones who do it because it's fun, the ones who do it because it's profitable, the ones who do it because it's easier than hiring honest labor... and above all the ones who do it without thinking about why... who just do it because that's how it's done. I want them all." She turned to him with a smile that just missed pleasantry to become the toothy grin of the striking predator. "And there's only one way to get them all, and to that I commit this ship, and my command, and any other resource... including, with all regret, those colonists who will die before we can rescue them - "

"But we're going to try - ?"

"Try, hell. I'm going to do it." The silence on the bridge was eloquent; this time when she turned away from Huron he did not follow.

The scans told the pitiable story of the next hours. The colonists, more alert than Myriad's, managed to set off their obsolete missiles, which the illicit patrol craft promptly detonated at a safe distance.

"Now we know they've got an LDsl4, or equivalent," said Huron without emphasis. Sassinak glanced at him but made no comment. They had not met, as usual, after dinner, to talk over the day's work. Huron had explained stiffly that he wanted to review for his next promotion exam, and Sassinak let him go. The ugly thought ran through her mind that a subversive would be just as happy to have the evidence blown to bits. But surely not Huron - from a small colony himself, surely he'd have more sympathy with them... and besides, she was sure she knew him better than any psych profile. Just as he knew her.

Meanwhile, having exhausted the planetary defenses, the two raiders dropped shuttles to the surface. Sassinak shivered, remembering the tough, disciplined (if irregular) troops the raiders had landed on her world. The colonists wouldn't stand a chance. She found she was breathing faster, and looked up to find Huron watching her. So were the others, though less obviously; she caught more than one quick sideways glance.

Yet she had to wait. Through the agonizing hours, she stayed on the bridge, pushing aside the food and drink that someone handed her. She had to wait, but she could not relax, eat, drink, even talk, while those innocent people were being killed... and captured... and tied into links (did all slavers use links of eight, she wondered suddenly). The two ships orbited the planet, and when this orbit took them out of LOS, the Zaid-Dayan eased closer, its advanced technology allowing minute hops of FTL flight with minimal disturbance to the fields.

Their scan delay was less than a half-hour, and the raiders had shown no sign of noticing their presence in the system. Now they could track the shuttles rising - all to the transport, Sassinak noted - and then descending and rising again. Once more, and then the raiders boosted away from the planet, on a course that brought them within easy range of the Zaid-Dayan. Huron only looked at Sass; she shook her head, and caught her weapons officer's eye as well. Hold on, she told the self she imagined lying helpless in the transport's belly. We're here: we're going to come after you. But she knew her thoughts did those children no good at all - and nothing could wipe out the harm already done.

CHAPTER Nine

All too quickly the transport and its escort showed that they were preparing to leave the system. Powerful boosters shoved them up through the planet's gravity well - a system cheap and certain, if inelegant. Sassinak wondered if the transport that had carried her had had an escort - or if Fleet activities in the past twenty years or so had had that much effect. Considering the cost of each ship, crew, weaponry... if Fleet had made escorts necessary... then either the profit margin of slavers should be much narrower, or the slave trade brought even more money than anyone had guessed. And why?

"Commander Sassinak - " This mode of address, perfectly correct but slightly more formal than usual to a ship's captain on board, made it clear to her just how upset her bridge crew were. She glanced at Arly, senior weapons officer, who was pointing at her own display. "We finally got a good readout on their weapons systems... that's one more hot ship."

Sassinak welcomed the diversion, and leaned over the display. Since the escort vessel had tampered with its own IFF transmission, they had had to use other detection methods to figure out its class and armament... methods which were supposed to be indetectible, although they'd not yet been tested against any but Fleet vessels. Now she'd find out - in the fabric of her own ship if the designers were wrong - just how accurate and indetectible they were.

"Patrol class: 'way too big and too hot for anyone but Fleet to have legally," Arly went on, pointing out the obvious. "Probably modified and refitted from a legal insystem escort or patrol vessel... although it might be a pirated hull from something consigned to scrap."

"I hope not," said Sass. "If there's a hole in our scrap and recycling operation, we could find ourselves facing a pirated battle platform - "

"Best fit of hull and structure is to a Vannoy Combine insystem escort. Then if they retrofitted an FTL drive component - " The weapons officer's fingers danced over the controls, and the display split, one vertical half showing a schematic with the changes she proposed. " - and beefed up the interior a good bit - they'd lose crew space, but gain the reinforcement they need to mount these." A final flick of the finger, and the armament that the Zaid-Dayan's detectors and computer had come up with came up as a list.

"On that!" Sassinak stared at it. A vessel only one third the mass of her own was carrying nearly identical weaponry, with a nice mix of projectile, beam, and explosives.

"Just as well we didn't sail in to take an easy kill," said the weapons officer quietly. Her expression was completely neutral. "Could have been messy."

"It's going to be messy," said Sassinak, just as quietly. "When we catch them."

"We are following - " It was not quite a question.

"Oh, yes. And as soon as we have their destination coordinates, we'll be calling in the whole bloody Fleet."

But it was not that easy. The two ships moved away from the planet they'd raided, boosting toward a safe range for FTL flight. Sassinak would like to have checked the planet itself for survivors (unlikely though she knew that to be) and evidence, but she could not risk losing the ships when they left normal space. She waited as the ships built speed, until their own scans must be nearly blind as they approached their insertion velocity. The Ssli had queried twice when she finally gave the order to shift position and pursue. Just before they entered FTL flight, she had a burst sent to Sector HQ by low-link, explaining what happened to the colony and her plan of pursuit.

Then it was the same blind chase as they had had following the transport in the first place. Sassinak could only imagine how it must seem to the Ssli on whose ability to sense the trace they all depended. Their lives were hostage to the realities of such travel... the Ssli concentrated so on the traces of their quarry that it could not warn them of potentially fatal anomalies in their path.

With the Ssli controlling the ship's movement through its computer link, the crew had all too little to do. Sassinak spent some time on the bridge each shift, and much of the rest prowling the ship wondering how she was going to find her subversives - without driving the perfectly loyal and honorable crew up the walls in the process. Dhrossh, their link to their quarry, would not initiate an IFTL link without her direct command, but someone still might loose a message by SOLEC or high-link, not to warn the raiders, but their allies. That would require knowing the coordinates of either a mapped Fleet node or receiving station, but an agent might. She considered sending regular reports to Fleet by the same means, and decided against it. Better to have some conclusion to report, after that disaster at the colony.

Sassinak worked out a duty schedule that involved keeping a Weft on the bridge constantly - at least they could contact her, instantly, if something happened, and they were exceptionally able in reading the minute behaviors of humans. She had to hope that her human crew would not guess her reasons.

She was acutely aware of the crew's reaction to her decision not to engage the raiders before they attacked the colony, or during the attack. She imagined their comments... "Is the captain losing it? Has someone bought her off?" Volume 8 of the massive Rules of Engagement managed to be lying around the senior officers' wardroom more than once, although she never caught anyone reading the critical article. Some of the crew sided with her, and she heard some of that. "Pretty sharp, figuring out we were outgunned before we'd come in close-scan range," one of the biotechs was saying one day as Sassinak passed quietly along on a routine inspection of the environmental system. "I wouldn't have guessed that the initial readouts were wrong... whoever heard of someone fooling with an IFF?" Sassinak smiled grimly: that wasn't a new trick, and bridge crew all knew it. But it was nice to have credit somewhere. Too bad that she discovered a minor leak in the detox input filter line, and had to file a report on the very tech who'd been defending her.

The environmental system was, in fact, a nagging worry. Among the modifications made on station, a rerouting of most of the main lines had meant shifting them into cramped, hard-to-inspect compartments rather than out in the open where inspection was easy. Sassinak remembered her first cruise, and the awkwardness of it. Supposedly the equipment now mounted in midline was worth it, in the protection it gave from enemy surveillance, but if the environmental system failed, they would have a miserable trip back - if they survived. Sassinak glared at the big gray cylinders that lay in recesses originally meant for pipelines. They'd better work. In the meantime, either because of the less efficient layout, with its more variable line pressures, or because the line was harder to inspect, minor leaks repeatedly developed in one or another subsystem.

Of course, it could be sabotage. That's why she walked the lines herself, struggling to relearn the details of the system so that she knew what she was looking for. But in any complicated system of tubing and pumps, a thousand opportunities exist for subtle acts of sabotage, and she didn't expect to find anything obvious. She was right.

As the ship's days passed in pursuit, with the Ssli certain that it had a lock on the ships ahead, Huron finally came around. Literally, as he appeared at her cabin door with a peace offering: wine and pastries. Sassinak had not realized how much she'd missed his support until she saw the old grin on his face.

"Peace offering," he said. Typically, he wasn't trying to pretend they'd had no quarrel. Sassinak nodded, and waved him in. He set the basket of hot, sugary treats on her desk, and opened the wine. They settled down in comfortable chairs, one on either side of the pastry basket, and munched in harmony for a few minutes.

"I was afraid they'd split up, or we'd lose them," he said with a sideways glance. "And then when we got the final scan on the escort - that it might have been fatal to take it on - I knew you were right, but I just couldn't - "

"Never mind." Sassinak leaned back against the padded chair. Just to have someone to talk with, to relax with - it wasn't over, and it was going to get worse before it got better, but if Huron could accept her decision...

"I wish we knew where they're going!" He bit into his pastry so hard that flaky bits showered across his lap. He muttered a curse through the mouthful of food, and Sassinak chuckled. Problems and all, life was more fun with Huron in her cabin some nights.

"Huh. Don't we all! And I don't dare send anything back to Sector HQ in case something intercepts it..."

"Remember when Ssli and the IFTL system were new, and we were sure no one else had them?" He was still swiping crumbs from his lap, and looked up at her with the mischievous lift of eyebrow she'd come to love.

"Sure do." Sassinak ran her hands through her dark hair, and flipped the ends toward him. His eyes widened, then narrowed again.

"One track mind." He shook his head at her.

"You're any different?" Sassinak pointed to the now-empty pastry basket and the bottle of wine. "Think I can't recognize bait when I see it?"

"Brains with your beauty - and a few other things..." His eyes finished what she had started, and they were more than halfway undressed when Sassinak remembered to switch the intercom to alert-only. The bridge crew knew what that meant, she thought with satisfaction, before dragging the big brilliantly rainbowed comforter over the pair of them.

"And what I still don't understand," said Huron, far more awake than usual for 0200, "is how they could mount all that on a hull that size. Are they crewing it with midgets, or what?"

Sassinak had taken a short nap, and wakened to find Huron tracing elaborate curlicues on her back while he stared at the readout on the overhead display. She yawned, pushed back a thick tangle of hair, and reached up to switch the display off. "Later..."

He switched it back on. "No, seriously - "

"Seriously, I'm sleepy. Turn it off, or go look at it somewhere else."

He glowered at her. "Some Fleet captain you are, lazing around like someone's lapcat after a dish of cream."

Sassinak purred loudly, yawned again, and realized she was going to wake all the way up, like it or not. "Big weapons, small hull. Reminds me of something." Huron blushed, extensively, and Sassinak snapped her teeth at him. "Call your captain a cat, and you deserve to get bit, chum. If we're going to go back to work, I'm getting dressed." She felt a lot better, relaxed and alert all at once.

Now that she was awake, she realized that she had not followed through on the analysis of the escort vessel as carefully as she could have. She'd been thinking too much about her main decision and its implications. Together she and Huron ran the figures several times, and then adjourned to the main wardroom. She called in both Arly and Hollister. They arrived blinking and yawning: as mainshift crew, they were normally asleep at this hour. After a cup of stimulant and some food, they came fully awake.

"The question is, are we sure of our data, even that last? Is that thing built on a patrol-class hull, and if so does it really carry those weapons, and if so what's their crew size and how are they staying alive?" Sassinak took the last spiced bun off the platter the night cook had brought in.

Hollister shrugged. "That new detection system isn't really my specialty, but if that's the size we think - dimensional and mass - then it'll depend on weaponry. With up-to-date environmental, guidance, and drive systems, they'd need a crew of fifty to work normal shifts - plus weapons specialists. Say, sixty to seventy altogether. If they work long shifts, maybe fifty altogether, but they'd chance fatigue errors - "

"But they don't expect to need top efficiency for long," Sassinak said. "They come in, rout a colony, escort the transport to their base, wherever that is... and most times they never see trouble."

"Fifty, then. That means... mmm..." He ran some figures into the nearest terminal. "'Bout what I thought. Look - " A ship schematic came up on the main screen at the end of the table. "Fifty crew, here's the calories and water needs... best guess at system efficiency... and that means they'll need eight standard filtration units, eight sets of re-op converters, plus the UV trays - " As he talked, the schematic filled with green lines and blocks, the standard representation of environmental system units. "This is assuming their FTL route doesn't take more than twenty-five standard days, and they've got the same kind of oxygen recharge system we do. Most surveyed routes come in under twenty days, as you know. Now if we add the probable drives: we know they have insystem chem boosters as well as insystem mains, and FTL - " The drive components came up in blue. "And minimum crew space: access and living - " That was yellow. "Weapons?"

Arly took over, and the schematic suddenly bled with red weapons symbols. "This is what we got off the scans, captain. Their IFF was a real nutcase: no sense at all. But the passives showed two distinct patterns of radiation leakage: here, and there. And we saw how they knocked out those ground-space missiles... they do have optical weapons."

"And it doesn't fit," said Huron, sounding entirely too smug. "Look." Sure enough, the display had a blinking symbol in one corner: excess volume specified.

Arly looked stubborn. "I could not ignore the scan data - "

"Of course not." Sassinak held up her hand for silence when both mouths opened. "Look, Huron, both the scans and this schematic come in part from assumptions we made about those criminals. If they crew their ship to a level we think safe, if they aren't stressing their environmental system, if a few extra particles means that they've got a neutron bomb... all if."

"We have to make some assumptions!"

"Yes. I do. I'm assuming they sacrifice everything else to speed and firepower. They want no witnesses: they want to be sure they can blow anything - up to a battle platform, let's say - into nothing, before it can call in help. They want to be able to escape any pursuit. They're not out on patrol as long as we normally are: they sacrifice comfort, and some levels of efficiency. I will bet you that they're under-crewed and carry every scrap of armament our scans found."

"Less crew means they could have a smaller environmental system," said Hollister.

"And with any luck less crew means they're a little less alert to a tail."

"I wish I knew how good their fire-control systems were," said Arly, running a finger along the edge of the console. "If they've got anything like the Gamma system, we could be in trouble with them."

"Are you advising me not to engage?" asked Sass. Arly's face darkened a little. A senior weapons officer could give such advice, but under all the circumstances, it meant taking sides in the earlier argument: something Arly had refused to do.

"Not precisely... no. But they've got almost as much as we have, on a smaller hull with different movement capability. Normally I don't have to worry about something that size - with all its mobility, it still can't take us. But this - " She tapped the display. "This could breach us, if they got lucky... and their speed and mobility increase the danger. Call it even odds, or a shade to their favor. I'd be glad to engage them, captain, but you need to be aware of all the factors."

"I am." Sassinak stretched, then shook the tension out of her hands. "And you'll no doubt have a chance to test our ideas before long. If they're short-crewed and short on environmental supplies, surely they'll have a short FTL route picked out... it's been eighteen days, now."

"Speaking of environmental systems," said Hollister gruffly. "That number nine scrubber's leaking again. I could take it down and repack it, but that'd mean tying up a whole shift crew - "

Sassinak glanced at Huron. "Nav got any guesses on their destination?"

"Not a clue. Dhrossh is downright testy about queries, and about half the equation solutions don't fit anything in the books."

"Just keep an eye on the scrubber, then. We don't want Engineering tied up if we're suddenly on insystem drive with combat coming up."

Another standard day passed, and another. None of the crew did anything but what she expected. No saboteur or subversive stood up to expound a doctrine of slavery and planet piracy. At least her relationship with Huron was better, and the other hotheads in the crew seemed to follow his lead. She was squatting on her heels beside the number nine scrubber, with Hollister, looking at a thin line of greasy liquid that had trickled down the outer casing, when the ship lurched slightly as the Ssli-controlled drive computers dropped them out of FTL.

CHAPTER Ten

By the time Sassinak reached the bridge, Huron had their location on the big display.

"Unmapped," said Sassinak sourly.

"Officially unmapped," agreed Huron. "Sector margins - you can see that both the nearest surveys don't quite meet."

"By a whole lot of useful distance," said Sassinak. Five stars over that way, the Fleet survey codes were pink. Eight stars the other, the Fleet survey codes were light green. And nothing showed in the other vectors.

"Diverging cones don't fill space," said Huron. She glowered at him; she'd hit her head on the input connector of the scrubber when the call came in, and besides, she'd wanted to be on the bridge when they came into normal space.

"They could have, if those survey crews had been paying attention. This is one large survey anomaly out here." Then it came to her. "I wonder, Huron, if this was missed, or left out on purpose." He looked blank, and she went on. "By the same people who found it so handy to have an uncharted system to hide out in."

"Who assigns survey sectors?" asked Arly.

"I don't know, but I intend to find out." Huron had already put the cruiser on fall stealth mode; Sassinak now tapped her own board into the Ssli biolink. Two more screens of data came up in front of her, high-lighted for easy recognition. "But after we deal with this - and without getting killed. I have the feeling that their detection systems out here will be very, very good."

The ships they pursued had dropped out of FTL in the borders of a small star system: only five planets. The star itself was a nondescript little blip on the classification screen: small, dim, and, as Huron said, "as little there as a star can be." In that first few minutes, their instruments revealed three large clusters of mass on "this" side of the star - presumably planets or planet-systems toward one of which their quarry moved.

They were still days from any of them. Sassinak insisted that their first concern had to be the detection systems the slavers used. "They wouldn't assume anything: they'll have some way to detect ships that happen to blunder in here."

Huron frowned thoughtfully at the main display screen, now a shifting pattern of pale blues and greens as the Zaid-Dayan's passive scans searched for any signs of data transmission. "We can't hang around out here forever hunting for it - "