"No," I said. "Although it seems to have been very few."
"Less than a hundred, including the seven from the Modesto," Newman said.
"And do you know how many made it to the Coral surface?" Javna said.
"My understanding is that only mine made it that far," I said.
"That's right," Javna said.
"So?" I said.
"So," Newman said, "that seems to have been pretty lucky for you that you ordered the doors blown just in time to get your shuttle out just in time to make it to the surface alive."
I stared blankly at Newman. "Do you suspect me of something, sir?" I said.
"You have to admit it's an interesting string of coincidences," Javna said.
"The hell I do," I said. "I gave the order after the Modesto was hit. My pilot had the training and the presence of mind to get us to Coral and close enough to the ground that I was able to survive. And if you recall, I only barely did so—most of my body was scraped over an area the size of Rhode Island. The only lucky thing was that I was found before I died. Everything else was skill or intelligence, either mine or my pilot's. Excuse me if we were trained well, sir."
Javna and Newman glanced at each other. "We're only following every line of inquiry," Newman said mildly.
"Christ," I said. "Think about it. If I really planned to betray the CDF and survive it, chances are I'd try to do it in a manner that didn't involve removing my own fucking jaw." I figured that in my condition, I just might be able to snarl at a superior officer and get away with it.
I was right. "Let's move on," Newman said.
"By all means, let's," I said.
"You mentioned you saw a Rraey battle cruiser firing on a CDF cruiser as it skipped into Coral space."
"That's correct," I said.
"Interesting you managed to see that," Javna said.
I sighed. "Are you going to do this all through the interview?" I said. "Things will move along a lot quicker if you're not always trying to get me to admit I'm a spy."
"Corporal, the missile attack," Newman said. "Do you remember whether the missiles were launched before or after the CDF ship skipped into Coral space?"
"My guess is that they were launched just before," I said. "At least it seemed that way to me. They knew when and where that ship was going to pop out."
"How do you think that's possible?" Javna asked.
"I don't know," I said. "I didn't even know how skip drives worked until a day before the attack. Knowing what I know, it doesn't seem like there should be any way to know a ship is coming."
"What do you mean, 'knowing what you know'?" Newman said.
"Alan, another squad leader"—I didn't want to say he was a friend, because I suspected they'd think that was suspicious—"said that skip drives work by transferring a ship into another universe just like the one it left, and that both its appearance and disappearance are phenomenally unlikely. If that's the case, it doesn't seem like you should be able to know when and where a ship will appear. It just does."
"What do you think happened here, then?" asked Javna.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"As you say, there shouldn't be any way to know that a ship is skipping," Javna said. "The only way we can figure this ambush occurred is if someone tipped off the Rraey."
"Back to this," I said. "Look, even if we supposed the existence of a traitor, how did he do it? Even if he somehow managed to get word to the Rraey that a fleet was coming, there's no possible way he could have known where every ship was going to appear in Coral space—the Rraey were waiting for us, remember. They hit us while we were skipping into Coral space."
"So, again," Javna said. "What do you think happened here?"
I shrugged. "Maybe skipping isn't as unlikely as we thought it was," I said.
"Don't get too worked up over the interrogations," Harry said, handing me a cup of fruit juice he'd gotten for me at the medical center's commissary. "They gave us the same 'it's suspicious you survived' bit."
"How did you react?" I asked.
"Hell," Harry said. "I agreed with them. It's damn suspicious. Funny thing is, I don't think they liked that response any better. But ultimately, you can't blame them. The colonies have just gotten the rug pulled out from under us. If we don't figure out what happened at Coral, we're in trouble."
"Well, and there's an interesting point," I said. "What do you think happened?"
"I don't know," Harry said. "Maybe skipping isn't as unlikely as we thought." He sipped his own juice.
"Funny, that's what I said."
"Yeah, but I mean it," Harry said. "I don't have the theoretical physics background of Alan, God rest his soul, but the entire theoretical model on which we understand skipping has to be wrong somehow. Obviously, the Rraey have some way to predict, with a high degree of accuracy, where our ships are going to skip. How do they do that?"