L’Ouverture Station
Torch Planetary Orbit
Congo System
Ruth Winton sat back and scrubbed her face with both hands, then stretched hugely. She’d been sitting at her console aboard L’Ouverture Station, the Congo System primary orbital station, for hours now, and her back was beginning to ache a little. Her butt ached a little more than that—although she allowed that the butt-ache was probably psychosomatic. The chair was designed for her backside, and was actually quite comfortable.
The real problem was that her whole life was a pain in the ass.
She lowered her hands and punched for the next screen of data.
“God forbid Princess Ruth Winton should have so much as one hair on her head put in harm’s way,” she muttered. “Evildoers abound everywhere, and the dynasty has to pile care upon vigilance lest I suffer the least misfortune from reckless—or not-so-reckless—adventures.”
She gazed at the data before her. No one could physically read through the mountains of captured data she was currently analyzing, but neither could she depend on even her algorithms to recognize the significance of every correlation they turned up. They were very good at spotting correlations within the parameters she’d provided, but defining the parameters was a major part of the problem. It was, in fact, one of the reasons her tendency to “think outside the box” made her so good at her avocation. For her, the entire universe was one huge data set, and—usually—she took an almost sensual pleasure from running her mental fingers through all that marvelous data. And, she acknowledged, she loved figuring out secrets. Which probably said interesting things about her basic personality.
“Don’t see what all the fuss is about, though,” she muttered as she glared at the output before her. She rather doubted that a close analysis of hydroponics consumption in a Mars-class heavy cruiser’s environmental plant was going to provide any mind-boggling revelations. “I’m—what, only fourth in line for the throne. Oh, wait—no! I’m not in the line of succession at all, because my biological daddy was a Masadan maniac. But does anyone listen when I point that out? No, of course they don’t!”
She scowled at the thoroughly useless analysis before her. Despite her fascination with ferreting secrets out of huge piles of data, she’d gotten to the point where she almost—not quite, but almost—wished Admiral Rozsak had just obliterated the PNE fleet when it attacked Congo. If he’d just blown them out of space, the Torch Navy wouldn’t have been able to salvage so many of their records.
Nothing here. Move on, she thought, and pulled up the next screen of no-doubt fascinating data.
“Bored, bored, bored. How many letters can be prefixed to that? Let’s see…Cored. Doored—no, that’s pushing it. Ford. Gored. Horde—hoard’ll work, too. Lord.”
A fresh analysis popped up before her, and she swallowed a groan. Logistic reports on ammunition were less boring than reports on environmental plants. She couldn’t think of anything else they might be less boring than, however.
“Can I get away with ‘moored’? No, that’d be cheating. Oared’s okay, though. So’s poured and roared. Sword…soared, too. Toward? No…don’t think so. Ward—maybe word. I think that’s—”
She broke off, frowning at a single line of the data.
“What the hell? Now, why was there that much discrepancy…?”
She tapped in an additional query, confirming the raw data, and her frown deepened. The PNE’s possession of the Technodyne-designed Cataphract had cost Admiral Luis Rozsak’s defending task force dearly, but she hadn’t realized that the advanced missiles had been delivered to Citizen Commander Luff quite as late in the game as they had been. Or, rather, she’d known when the Cataphracts had been delivered. What she hadn’t noted—and what the computers had just flagged for her—was how much earlier all of Luff’s other ordnance had been delivered. In fact, that big a discrepancy suggested…
She leaned back, cudgeling her brain, her ennui vanished as she hunted down the memory she wanted. Where had she stored—?
Aha! She chuckled in triumph and entered the search string that brought up the astrogation data captured along with everything else in the PNE database. Luff’s people had been meticulous about where they’d gone, but deplorably sloppy about recording why they’d gone some of the places they’d been while awaiting their orders for “Operation Ferret.” One would almost think they hadn’t been interested in helping someone like, oh, Ruth Winton, figure out what they’d been up to. Antisocial of them, perhaps, but then again, they had been unregenerate StateSec holdouts working for Mesa and Manpower and bent upon planetary genocide.
She snorted at the thought, but then her eyes narrowed as she found what she’d been looking for.
“I will be damned,” she murmured to herself. “Why would they have gotten their Cataphracts there? I mean, there’s nothing there. I think, anyway.”
She opened another window, brought up L’Ouverture’s astrographic charts, and entered the coordinates from the PNE database, then grinned as the chart blinked confirmation at her.
“Nope,” she muttered in the far more cheerful tone of a Ruth with a puzzle to solve. “This makes no sense at all. Oh, goody!”
“Are you talking to yourself again, Ruth?” a voice asked from behind her. “Better be careful, or people will start thinking you’re screwy.”
“Not a problem.” She never took her eyes from the display. “When you’re Princess Ruth, and your family’s as stinking rich as mine is, the term is ‘eccentric.’ Not ‘screwy.’ Besides, I’m the best conversationalist I can find.”
She gazed at the star chart a moment longer, tapping the tip of her nose with an index finger to help herself think, then turned her head as the person who’d spoken came forward to stand beside her. Even sitting, Ruth’s head was no lower than the young woman’s shoulder. Cynthia X was so short that, combined with her squat torso, she put Ruth in mind of a mini-Anton Zilwicki, female edition. Antonia Zilwicki, maybe?
A lot of the former Ballroom members had changed their surnames by now, but Cynthia hadn’t, and probably never would. Her experiences at Manpower’s hands had been worse than those of most genetic slaves—which was a very low bar to begin with. After her escape, she’d become one of the Ballroom’s most proficient strikers, as they called themselves. (Manpower—the entire establishment of Mesa—had preferred terms like “murderers” and “terrorists.”)
She’d never said it in so many words, but Ruth had grown to know her well enough by now to realize that Cynthia was almost sorry Manpower had finally been driven under. She wouldn’t be able to kill any more of the scorpions. There were plenty who’d survived the recent unpleasantness, but Jeremy X had placed a ban on revenge killings.
It wasn’t often that anyone applied labels like “spoilsport” to the galaxy’s most deadly assassin.
But however lethal Cynthia might be, and however disappointed the young woman might be at having to turn in her hunting license, she was also very smart and had a natural aptitude for intelligence analysis. That was why she’d become something in the way of Ruth’s understudy over the last few months.
“I want you to look at something.” Ruth rose and gestured for Cynthia to take her chair. “Start with—” She leaned over and brought up the logistics analysis which had initially piqued her interest. “This here.”
“What am I looking for?” Cynthia looked over her shoulder at Ruth, then chuckled at the look the princess gave her. “Okay, okay! I’ll find it,” she said, and started through the data. Then she frowned.
“I feel like I’m cheating. If you hadn’t been looking at star charts, it would’ve taken me a lot longer to find. But—” her eyes narrowed—“‘no sense at all’ is putting it mildly. NZ-127-06? There’s no habitable planet in that system. Nothing even close.”
“No.” Ruth shook her head. “Can’t be. It’s an M4V, both its planets are small and so close they’re tide-locked to the primary, and according to the astro database, it produces even more solar flares than most red dwarfs. So why—”
“—did the PNE get its Cataphracts in that system?” Cynthia finished.
“Exactly.” Ruth nodded. “I mean, part of the answer’s obvious. They had to rendezvous with whoever delivered the missiles to them, and NZ-127-06 made a handy navigation beacon. One with no inhabited planets to notice who might be dropping off or picking up cargo. But what’s really interesting to me is that—”
“—it’s nowhere near Mesa, Sol, or Yildun,” Cynthia said, and Ruth gave her another nod.
“Exactly,” she repeated. “We’d all assumed they had to come from Sol or Yildun, although they could have been transshipped through Mesa. But way out there?” She shook her head. “There are a bunch of equally useless stars that would have been more conveniently placed for a shipment coming from any of those three star systems.”
Cynthia swiveled the chair to face Ruth directly.
“Captain Zilwicki needs this information,” she said.
“So do Manticore and Nouveau Paris,” Ruth agreed. “But you’re right that Anton and Victor need to be brought up to speed as quickly as possible. So I’m thinking maybe I should—”
“Forget it, Princess. If you want to get onto that courier boat, you’d have to shoot your way aboard—and I didn’t sign up for that.”
Ruth glared at her. Then, at the display. Then, at the universe. As much of it as she could see, anyway.
Which wasn’t much, trapped aboard an orbital habitat.