A Matter of Oaths (18 page)

“Report, Rafe?” Vidar came through on the common channel.

Rafe switched to the same channel. “We’re in the web-room,”
he responded cautiously. His unproven suspicions were no subject for discussion
on an open channel with the whole of
Bhattya
’s
web-room listening in. “There are three dead here, all with head wounds.”

“We have two dead, also with head wounds,” Vidar said, the
tone of his voice making it clear that he had reached the same horrifying
conclusion about the wounds as Rafe had. “There’s nothing missing from the
cargo-holds. The seals hadn’t even been disturbed until we broke them,” he
added, putting the matter beyond doubt. “We’re going on to the engineering
section now.”

“We’re on our way up to the web,” Rafe replied. He switched
back to the private link to Peri. “I’ll get the log first.”

In the rest-room, he went immediately to the door to the
secure space beyond. It was still locked, to his intense relief, and there was
no other way in. The R-K-D kept inside had not been taken. The raiders knew
about web-seed, but they did not know about the drug that was needed to help
the seed establish itself in the body of a new host. As he sealed the log
inside a storage pocket on the outside of his airsuit, he wondered how long it
would take them to learn that they only had part of the secret.

There were four dead in the web, tethered in their wet-web
places by their web-contacts, surrounded by drifting globules of freeze-dried
shub. Rafe checked them each in turn, finding what he expected to find.

“I’ve got the web-reck,” Peri announced. “That should tell
us something about the scum that did this when we replay it.”

Rafe assented automatically as he disengaged the
web-contacts from what had once been a young man. The skin around the contacts
was blistered; the contacts themselves were blackened. Looking at the damage,
Rafe was almost reminded of something, something he had seen before if only he
could remember where and when, something locked away from him ten years ago.
Blackened web-contacts, and the tarnish on the hull…

“Input overload?” Peri said in puzzlement, seeing what he
had found. “The safety circuits should have operated long before that sort of
damage happened.”

“I don’t know.” Rafe gave up trawling his memory, knowing it
was useless. “The autopsy will tell, when we get them back to Aramas.” He
looked around sadly, knowing they could not take all the dead back with them. “We’ll
take this one and the woman from the web-room,” he decreed. “The others will
have to wait for the salvage tug.”

* * *

 
“Web-seed,” Rallya
said consideringly. “It’s not the first time it’s been tried.”

“It’s the first time it’s been tried by this method,” Vidar
said angrily. “And if the raiders are from within the Empires, where are they
getting their ships from?”

Rallya glanced at Rafe, curious to see if he had the answer
to that too, but he was still frowning at something unseen, as he had been
since dropping into his seat and making his report.

“Take your pick,” she told Vidar. “There are decommissioned
fleets in every outermost zone, left to rot in orbit when their owners were
absorbed by the Empires and found they couldn’t compete with the Guild.” She
weighed
Hadra
’s web-reck and log in
her hand thoughtfully. “Time somebody compared what we’ve seen of the raiders
with what we know about those fleets. And what we know about the Outsiders with
whom the owners of those fleets have contact. Only fools would use ships that
could be traced back to them and whoever is behind this, they’re no fools, to
have got away with it for so long. Even though they won’t have any success
without…”

She censored the end of the sentence and turned to their
silent companion. “I forgot to ask, Rafe. Had they been inside the secure
space?” Even if he did not know the significance of everything inside, he would
have checked.

“No. They left the R-K-D,” Rafe answered abstractedly.

Vidar looked at him in surprise. “How do you know about
that?” he asked. “It’s restricted information. Threes and above only.”

“Is it?” Rafe looked equally surprised. “I don’t know how I
know. I must have learnt it before I was wiped…”

“Over a Webmaster’s pillow,” Rallya suggested, heading off
Vidar’s curiosity. “Make yourself useful and play this.” She tossed
Hadra
’s log to Rafe. “Among the many
things we don’t know is how the crew died. There may be clues in there.”

As Rafe fitted the log into the rest-room’s reader, Rallya
thought with satisfaction that his awareness of R-K-D was confirmation that he
had been a Commander before he was identity-wiped, in spite of the discrepancy
with his apparent age. The drug was one of the Guild’s most closely guarded
secrets, its formula known only to a handful of the most senior members of the
Webmaster’s Directorate. Had it not been the only effective way to heal a
damaged web, even its existence would not be known outside that group.

Rafe triggered the play-back of the log and the reader’s
screen flickered with nonsense and error messages. Looking puzzled, Rafe
stopped the process and took the log out of the slot to examine it physically.

“No visible damage,” he observed.

“Let me see it.” Vidar made his own examination. “Looks
fine.” He elbowed Rafe out of the way and fed the log into the reader again, as
if his intervention would make it work. It did not.

“Verify the web-reck,” Rallya suggested, passing that to
Vidar. They could not interpret the data on it, except using
Bhattya
’s web’s central monitor, and
they required Joshim’s authorization to do that, but they could check that the
data was readable and consistent.

“Unreadable,” he reported tersely almost at once. “Both of
them.” He reread the labels on both recks, as if he suspected that Rafe had
brought back the wrong ones. “They’ve wiped them.”

“Easier to take them away,” Rafe said thoughtfully. “And
they’re not wiped, just scrambled.”

“As good as wiped,” Vidar said stubbornly.

“Be interesting to find out if any of the other recks aboard
are in the same state,” Rallya commented.

“You think they were affected by whatever killed the crew?”
Vidar asked.

“Could be.” Two mysteries aboard the same ship had to share
a single solution. Rallya studied Rafe, who had withdrawn back into his silent
preoccupation. “Care to share what you haven’t told us yet?” she challenged
him.

“I would, if I knew what it was,” he said bitterly. “My
memory isn’t what it used to be.”

“You remembered about R-K-D,” Rallya reminded him, “and this
is more important.”

Rafe smiled sardonically. “Importance doesn’t seem to have
dictated what they left me. Knowing about R-K-D obviously wasn’t personally
significant to me. Knowing the connection between that tarnished hull, and the
damage to those web-contacts, and the way those recks have been scrambled…” He
shrugged expressively. “If I remember, I’ll tell you. But I doubt that I’m
going to remember.”

“Some sleep might help,” Vidar suggested. “You’ve worked
right through your sleep period. Turn in. Joshim won’t expect you to join him
in the web for what’s left of your shift, and Rallya and I can cover your next
duty periods without you.”

“It might help.” Rafe sounded unconvinced. “If you’ve
finished with me here, I’ll get something to eat first.”

When they had both gone, Rafe to eat and sleep, Vidar to set
up some tests on the sample of hull metal that he had brought back from
Hadra
, Rallya put the log back in the
reader and played it through slowly, looking for anything decipherable amid the
nonsense. Not that she expected to find anything helpful: the placing of the
bodies Rafe and Vidar had found — in cabins and workshops as well as in the web
and the web-room — indicated that, when the raiders had attacked the ship,
there had been no warning, no time to record the attack in the log.

The web-reck might be more useful, if Joshim could dredge
anything from it, but that would have to wait until he came out of the web. And
Rallya was not hopeful that either Joshim or Vidar would find a solution to the
mystery, or even an intelligible clue. Perhaps the autopsies would help, but
they would not take place until
Bhattya
reached Aramas, and Rallya would not be the first to learn the results.

Rafe’s belief that he knew — had once known — something
relevant to
Hadra
’s fate was
interesting. Rallya had not given much thought to the way that identity-wipe
worked; she had not realized that Rafe was aware in the gaps in his memory. Of
course, they could not erase memories completely, not without destroying the
skills and knowledge that they sought to preserve. All they could do was make
the memories inaccessible, like unseen rooms behind locked doors. Finding a
door revealed the existence of a room, and the paths to the door were clues to
what lay beyond. It raised the possibility that Rafe could be brought to
remember what he had forgotten, both about the connection between
Hadra
’s multiple mysteries and about the
truth of his past.

Rallya locked the log away in a storage drawer and rubbed
absently at her hip. Rafe would continue to worry away at the missing memory
without prompting, but a few new pointers might help, if she could come up with
any. And she could not discount the possibility that he would never remember,
or that what he remembered would be of no use. Although he would not be so
distracted by it if he was not sure of its importance, and she was beginning to
value Rafe’s judgement. Her instincts and what she had seen of him said that he
must have been a damned good Commander in his time, almost as good as she was…

Predictably, the gathering in the web-room was talking its
way around the same questions. It had not been possible to keep secret the
raiders’ purpose, not when Peretya and Nikur had seen the head wounds, and to
suppress the idea that the guilt lay within the Empires would have wasted the
slight chance that somebody in the web-room would put the pieces of the puzzle
together. The initial mood of fury had simmered down into determination, Rallya
was pleased to find; they would think more clearly that way.

“You were told to go to bed,” she reminded Rafe mildly,
breaking into his conversation with Jualla.

“Yes, ma’am.”

It was said to pacify her, not as a statement of intent, but
Rallya let it go; Joshim would chivvy Rafe into compliance when he came out of
the web. She moved on to the cook-unit and filled a plate with fish stew. Rasil’s
effort, by the delicate smell of it; raised on a water world, he knew more
things to do with fish — and even mock-fish — than anybody else aboard,
including Joshim, who shared the same sort of upbringing but disclaimed all
knowledge of food preparation.

“Do you think we’ll find more of the missing ships in this
system, ma’am?” Jualla asked.

“It’s probable that they’re here,” Rallya answered. “I don’t
believe in the kind of coincidence that would bring us out of jump exactly on
top of the only one. Whether we’ll find them is another matter. We’re on a
tight schedule; we’ve only just enough time to drop the drones and jump on to
Aramas to meet the convoy. We won’t be making a search and, if we do come
across another by chance, we won’t have time to board.”

She noted that Rafe was frowning intently at something she
had said. It could not be their lack of time that had caught his attention; he
already knew about that. The coincidence that had brought them out of jump
almost exactly on top of
Hadra
… The
raiders were unlikely to move the ships that they captured any great distance
from their point of entry to the system, she realized.

“Bring the gravity stress chart for this system up on a
screen,” she ordered Jualla. “Focus on the area where we found
Hadra
.”

The chart was a patchwork of minor anomalies. Jualla
highlighted the point where
Hadra
was
still drifting. Rallya shovelled stew into her mouth as she studied it. There
was a pattern to those anomalies, almost centred on
Hadra
…

“Trans-space breakthrough point,” Rafe said crisply,
identifying it from his survey training a second before Rallya did. “
Hadra
came here through trans-space.”

It fitted: the damage to a hull never designed for exposure
to trans-space, the input overload in the web as the sensors went wild and the
safety circuits failed, the sudden death of the crew. Humans could not survive
in trans-space, the dimension or dimensions that underlaid jump-space; experiments
many years ago had demonstrated that. Rallya had never heard of any species who
could.

“Who are they?” she asked Rafe, seeing that the frown on his
face was deeper than ever, as if trans-space was not the answer he sought, only
another pointer to it.

“I don’t know.” He shook his head to emphasize his
frustration.

“If the raiders are making trans-space jumps, our drones
aren’t set to pick it up,” Jualla pointed out. “Ought we to adjust them?”

“Good thinking,” Rallya told her. “Although the gods know
how we’ll interpret the results when we get them. There are only a handful of
people in the Survey Directorate who know enough about trans-space to calculate
a jump through it. Unless Rafe…”

He shook his head again. “If I could only remember…” he
muttered.

“Remember what?” Jualla asked.

“I know of a species who use trans-space,” Rafe explained. “I
can’t remember who, or where.”

“How do you know about them?” Jualla asked impatiently. “Was
it something you read, or something you heard? If you can remember even that
much…”

Rallya saw the tension in Rafe’s back as he realized the
dilemma into which a combination of tiredness and preoccupation had brought
him. Jualla would badger him ceaselessly until he remembered, or convinced her
to give up. Rallya was curious to see how he would extricate himself.