Elizabeth Moon - Rules of Engagement

“They don’t have any Arpetan marmalade in, and we need it for the captain’s birthday dinner. I always get it here; it’s better quality than out of stores at HQ. They say they don’t expect any until the Boros circuit ship comes in. You know how fond he is of Arpetan marmalade, especially the green gingered.”

“Odd. Wasn’t that ship supposed to be in already?” The cook glanced up at a schedule on the bulkhead. “We usually get here a week or so after her.”

“Yes, but she’s not. They don’t sound very worried, though.”

Esmay reported that conversation, minus the specifics of a treat for the captain’s birthday, to Captain Solis.

“They don’t seem concerned . . . interesting. I think perhaps we’ll have a word with the Boros shipping agent here.”

The Boros agent, a flat-faced woman of middle age, shrugged off Captain Solis’s concern.

“You know yourself, Captain, that ships are not always on time. Captain Lund is getting on a bit—this was to be his last circuit—but we are confident in his honesty.”

“It’s not his honesty I’m questioning, but his luck. What was his percentage of late arrivals?”

“Lund? He’s better than ninety-three percent on time, and in the last five years one hundred percent on time.”

“Which you define as . . .”

“Within twenty-four hours, dock to dock.”

“On all segments?”

“Well . . . let me check.” The woman called up a file and peered at it. “Yes, sir. In fact, on the segment ending here, he’s often twelve to twenty-four hours early.”

“When would you have reported an overdue ship, if we hadn’t asked?”

“Company policy is to wait three days . . . seventy-two hours . . . for any run, and add another day for each scheduled ten days. For Elias Madero , on this segment, that would come to ten days altogether. And from day before yesterday, when she was due, that’s . . . seven days from now.”

Captain Solis said nothing on the way back to the ship, but called Esmay into his office as soon as they arrived.

“You see the problem . . . scheduled transit time is seventy-two days, from Corian to Bezaire, dock to dock . . . most of that time spent on insystem drive. If you consider beacon-to-beacon time, she should have been off-scan only sixteen days.”

“What’s the scan data from Corian?”

“Normal exit from system. The approved course was like this—” Solis pointed it out on the charts. “That makes the scheduled transit fairly tight . . . if the company really schedules things that tight, then it makes sense to allow some overage. But I’d expect someone on this route to be over the alloted time at least thirty percent of the time. And the Elias Madero wasn’t. Does that tell you anything?”

“They’ve been using a shortcut,” Esmay said promptly. “They’d have to.”

“Right. Now we have to figure out where.”

“Someone at Boros should know,” Esmay said.

“Yes—but if it’s an illegal transit, unmapped or something, they may not want to tell us. Tell me, Lieutenant, who would you recommend for a little quiet questioning?”

The crew list ran through Esmay’s mind, unmarked by any helpful notes on deviousness; she hadn’t been with them long enough to find out. She fell back on tradition. “I would ask Chief Arbuthnot, sir.”

“Good answer. Tell him we need someone who would be confused with a shady character, someone who can get answers out of a rock by persuasion.”

Chief Arbuthnot knew exactly what Esmay wanted and promised to send “young Darin” out at once. The answer that finally came back several days later was expected, but not overly helpful.

“A double-jump system,” Solis said, when he had taken the data and dismissed the pasty-faced Darin. “Hmm. Let’s see if we can get confirmation out of someone at Boros. They probably ran into a shifting jump point.”

“Why would someone retiring risk that?” Esmay wondered aloud.

“He probably thought it was stable. Some of those systems are stable for decades, but that doesn’t mean they’re safe.”

Something tickled Esmay’s mind. “If . . . they were carrying contraband . . . then the time gained in a shortcut would give them time to offload it. Or if someone knew they had contraband, it’d make a fine spot for an ambush.”

“Well . . .” Solis raked a hand through his hair. “We’d better go take a look and see . . . I have to hope it’s not a shifting jump point . . .”

By this time, the local Boros agent was quite willing to list the Elias Madero as missing. Even so, it took Solis another two days to locate someone higher in the Boros administration who could confirm not only the existence, but the location of the shortcut.

“There’s an off odor about this whole thing,” he said to Esmay. “Normally I’d expect reluctance to admit to using a dangerous route, but there’s something more. Or less . . . I’m not sure. Now—how would you plot a course to this place?”

It was not, Esmay discovered, a simple matter. The shortest route would have been to reverse what the trader’s course would have been, but Fleet charts did not list any insertion data for the outbound jump point.

“Besides,” Solis said, “if we go in that way, we’ll cross any trail they made. We need to come in the way they did.”

“But that’ll take much longer.”

Solis shrugged, a gesture which did nothing to mitigate the tension of his expression. “Whatever happened has already happened. My guess is that it happened days before we got to Bezaire. So what matters now is to find out what happened, in as much detail as possible. That means approaching the system with all due caution.”

All due caution meant spending twenty-three days jumping from Bezaire to Podj to Corian, and from there to the shortcut jump points. Esmay set up each course segment, and each time Solis approved.

Shrike eased its way into the system with what Esmay hoped would be low relative velocity. So it proved . . . and as scan steadied, she could see that the system held no present traffic.

“But over here, Lieutenant, there’s some kind of mess—I can’t tell if it’s distortion from interaction of the two jump points or leftover stuff from ships. If it’s ships, it’s more than one.” The senior scan tech pointed to the display.

“Huh.” Esmay looked at the scan herself; ripples and blurs obscured what should have been a steady starfield. “What’s the range?”

“Impossible to say right now, Lieutenant. We don’t know how large it is, so we can’t get a range . . . but to me, the texture looks closer to this than the other jump point.” The scan tech glanced at the captain.

“We’ll continue on course for two hours, then see what parallax gives us,” Solis said.

In two hours, the area of distorted scan was hardly larger.

“Well, Lieutenant,” Solis said, “we can risk a micro-jump, run in a few light-seconds, and see what happens . . . or we can sneak up on it. What’s your analysis of the relative risk?”

Esmay pointed to the scan display. “Sir . . . this knot in the grav readings ought to be the second jump point, and if it is, it hasn’t shifted. Nor has this one. Which suggests that we’re definitely looking at transit residue . . . and therefore, unless it’s an entire Benignity battle fleet, it’s not that big. So . . . it’s close, but not within a light minute—we could jump in 15 second increments, and have a safe margin.”

“If it’s only transit residue, you’re right. If it’s also debris—it’s been expanding from its source—and we don’t know the location of its source—at some velocity we also don’t know, for at least—I’d say thirty days. Worst-case: Elias Madero was carrying the missing weapons, and for some reason they all detonated . . . how much debris, in how big a volume, are we talking about?”