She scowled. Ran the matching schema again with different tolerances. Behind her, Jim yawned. When he sat up, the sheets made a hushing sound. The Roci came back with a list of possibles, and she spooled through them. The Ankara Slough was an approximate match for the Rabia Balkhi, but looking through the differences she saw the drive signatures were wrong. It would have cost less to make a new ship than to swap a whole drive complex out of an existing one. In the front room, Alex said something and Amos answered. And then – to her brief surprise – Bobbie. Jim’s hand touched her shoulder.
“Hey. You all right?”
“Yeah,” Naomi said. “Fine.”
“How long have you been up?”
She checked the time and groaned. “Three and a half hours.”
“Breakfast?”
“God, yes.”
Her back protested when she stood, but only a little. Her mind felt focused and alive and wholly her own for the first time in weeks. Maybe since the first, toxic message from Marcos had come in. She wasn’t at war with herself, and it felt good. But…
Jim’s hair was in wild disarray, but he looked handsome in it. She took his arm. “Is something wrong?” he asked.
“Don’t know,” she said.
“Would coffee improve whatever it is?”
“Couldn’t hurt,” she said.
In the main room of the suite, Amos and Bobbie were talking about methods of unpowered travel, each of them subtly outdoing the other and both clearly aware of it and having fun. Alex grinned to her and Jim when they sat at the breakfast bar, and then poured them both demitasses of slow-pouring espresso with thick brown crème at the top. Naomi sipped, enjoying the heat and the rich complexity hidden inside the bitterness.
“You’re looking better,” Alex said.
“Feeling better. Thanks. Bobbie, the missing ships you were looking for. They were all MCRN, right? Navy?”
“Ships. Weapons. Supplies. The whole thing,” Bobbie said. “I guess we know what happened to them now.”
“No colony ships, though?”
The big woman frowned. “I wasn’t looking for any.”
“What’s up?” Jim asked.
Naomi swirled the espresso in her little bone-colored cup, watching the whorls form and vanish in the low gravity. “The missing ships come in two flavors. Military vessels from Mars that the Free Navy have now, and then colony ships that went missing on their way out to new systems. And I make sixty, maybe seventy percent matches with the Free Navy ships to old military records. I can’t find one match with the missing colony ships. I can’t see a pattern in what systems they were going to or what they were carrying. And I don’t know what hijacking them could have gained for Marco.”
Amos made a low grunting sound in the back of his throat.
“Yeah,” Naomi said, as if the sound had been words. “Something in the ring gates is eating ships.”
Epilogue: Sauveterre
“I
have a tracking number,” the captain of the little freight ship said for what had to be the sixth or seventh time. “I have landing papers and a tracking number straight from Amatix Pharmaceuticals. I know the shipment arrived on Medina six months ago. I have a tracking number.”
Sauveterre sipped smoked tea from a bulb as he listened. He would have preferred whiskey from a glass, but he was on duty and the Barkeith was on the float. The first did for the whiskey, the second for the glass. Granted, the captain’s office was private and he could have done whatever he pleased. And, he supposed, he did. Keeping to his duty was a more pleasing thing for him than whiskey, which was as it should be.
“Sabez you got a tracking number, Toreador,” the voice from Medina Station said. “Amatix, though? Esa es Earth-based. No Earth-based companies on Medina.”
The Barkeith was a Donnager-class battleship. A small city in space, run with machined precision and capable of turning not only the little freighter but Medina Station to particles smaller than grains of sand. But it and the rest of Duarte’s fleet were waiting for permission from traffic control on Medina to proceed through the next ring gate and begin the second, stranger leg of their journey. It was an overabundance of etiquette on the fleet’s part, but there were reasons for that. Not the least being the general reluctance to use heavy weapons too near the alien station that hung inert in the vast non-space between the rings. They weren’t ready for that to awaken again. Not yet.
A light knock came at the door. Sauveterre straightened his tunic. “Come.” Lieutenant Babbage opened the door, bracing with a handhold on its frame. She looked anxious as she saluted. Sauveterre let her hold the position for a moment before answering her salute and allowing her to enter.