Authors: Pauline Baird Jones
Both visible and audible swallowing was followed by wide-eyed nods. Nice when they were all on the same page. He moved to his next round of questions.
“I want immediate update on
any
ship movements, particularly any movement close to the Dusan frontier. I want a list of habitable but uninhabited planets in or near the frontier.” He paused, wondering how to phrase his last request. “I want to know if anything unusual has been or is detected near any of those planets.”
“Unusual how, sir?” a different geek asked.
“We know the pilot was removed from the planet following the attack.” Why was it that smart people were sometimes not that smart? “Had to have been moved by ship, but we showed no ship on tracking.”
The man frowned. “So you think the ship was cloaked?”
“Obviously.” Halliwell tried not to sound as impatient as he felt.
“I thought the outpost could track cloaked ships?”
Halliwell took a calming breath. It didn’t work that well. “Obviously this ship isn’t Garradian or the cloak has been modified somehow.”
“But if it’s cloaked so we can’t see it, how do we find it?” This from a third geek who should have known better than to say this out loud.
“We could search for unusual energy signatures,” James put in. “We’ve been studying the Garradian cloaks, to see if they can be tracked and found they do leave a slight energy pattern when they are used.” He shoved his glasses up on his nose. “It’s probably what the Gadi are looking for.”
That had occurred to Halliwell. He didn’t want to wait for the hack into the Gadi systems to begin searching. They’d need every edge they could get if they were going to beat Giddioni to the Doc.
“Even if we identify an energy pattern,” the glassless geek said, “it’s a big galaxy.”
“If they are using holes in our scanning to evade detection, isn’t that a kind of trail we can follow?” For the first time Colonel Carey joined the discussion. He moved up to the HUD. “We knew they were here.” He pointed to the Doc’s acquisition point. “There can’t be that many holes in this one area. And they had to know we’d be looking for them once we got the SOS from—”
“Our missing crewman,” Halliwell cut in, giving Carey a “keep your mouth shut” look.
James looked excited. “That’s not a bad idea, sir.”
“We can look,” a geek with a clue said, “but all they need to do is nothing and we have nothing to search for.” The geek wasn’t an optimist.
“Bread crumbs,” Halliwell said.
“Excuse me?”
“Didn’t you ever read
Hansel and Gretel?
Bet our crewman did and he’ll be trying to leave bread crumbs for us. Count on it. Watch for it. See it when it happens. And no one knows about it outside this room. I don’t have to tell you what I’ll do to you if this leaks out, do I?”
The geeks might have turned pale. It was hard to tell, since they started out pale. They all nodded.
“Then get to work.”
They filed out. Colonel Carey didn’t go with them.
“Sir, about the…crewman?” He hesitated, maybe hoping the General would remove the need to ask the question
“Yes?”
He hesitated, then said, “She remind you of anyone?”
Halliwell grinned. “Oh yeah.”
“Do you think whoever took her has figured out how screwed they are yet?”
* * * * *
Morning failed to make the encampment look less dreary
to Doc’s admittedly jaded gaze, though it had been a relief when she’d learned she was to bunk in Bana’s tent. Doc had refused to share the same bed, even if it meant she slept on the rustic tabletop. Doc didn’t sleep a lot anyway.
The three barbarians made it clear they considered that a temporary situation and that their lame courting efforts would break down her resistance. Bana was hoping for that, too. Doc was a lousy roommate. She didn’t like spending nights with herself, so why should Bana? Interesting that it was possible to low crawl like a ghost, but a few calisthenics sounded like stampeding dogs. Course, she hadn’t tried that hard to be quiet. She’d offered to go outside several times but had been ignored.
At one point Bana said, almost impatiently, “You are very headstrong.”
“You’re not headstrong enough,” Doc shot back. Doc felt and heard her response in the dark of the tent. A sort of tensing and a sharp inhale, as if Doc had shocked her but she needed to hide it. It might be part of her mind games as enabler-in-chief, but Doc still felt uneasy about the innocuous exchange, though she couldn’t explain why.
Even if Doc was tempted to give in to pressure—which she wasn’t—she couldn’t
do
this. The only way it could end was badly. Of course, if it was going to go badly anyway, it might be good policy to give bad a nudge in a direction that was bad for them instead of her. But, what was the right nudge in the bad-for-them direction?
She spent the insomnia portion of the night working out and considering various nudging options, while Bana put a pillow over her head and plotted her death. One idea was to play the three men off each other. Conan was hanging back, but giving off jealous vibes that he thought no one noticed. If she’d stopped to think about this, she’d have been stuck in shock at the idea of three men vying for
her
attention, so she didn’t.
The problem with playing the men off each other was
her.
She’d observed the process, but she had no practical experience. She did know her science. These men weren’t just an unstable element, but an unknown quantity of unstable. There was a less than ten percent chance of a positive outcome and that might be an optimistic projection. Even if she were close in her outcome assessment that left a ninety percent chance someone would get hurt.
Not that she minded hurting any of
them,
but it should serve a useful purpose. Doc wasn’t an assassin, nor was she into revenge, well, she tried not to be. She wanted a way off this rock. If she got to kick Conan’s ass in the process, that was a bonus, not the end game.
There were other ways to stir his pot. Conan looked like he’d hate uncertainty.
She had a gift for creating it.
Conan seemed certain he had the upper hand, that he had her boxed in. Changing that perception was as good a place to start as any.
She paused, not in doubt, but in an honest assessment of the risks. Bana had suggested killing Doc. It was a concern that she might push him too hard and trigger a hard termination, but that wasn’t the worst that could happen to her. If she doubted that, all she had to do was think about her brother.
Don’t let them get you, Del.
She added hard termination to the list of escape options. With a little experimentation, she should be able to determine Conan’s breaking point, though she might die doing it. She grinned. Dying doing something was the primary risk of any of her operations. The more her life changed, the more it stayed the same.
When they went through her stuff they left the stuff that looked harmless to them. A small, but powerful pair of binoculars lurked among the harmless stuff. She’d tucked them and her compass in a pocket of her ABUs before she left the tent.
The guys sans women were eating more sludge for breakfast, joined by Bana. She ignored them and the bowl waiting her attention. For the moment she was subsisting on her emergency supplies. Instead, she studied the trees surrounding the compound. She needed a big, sturdy one, kind of like the barbarians, only taller.
She identified a good prospect, then slanted a look Conan’s way through her lowered lashes. As soon as her gaze pinged on him, he pinged back. Interesting that he seemed to be so aware of her. It might prove useful—and annoying. It went against both training and personality to attract attention, though she wasn’t above doing it for operational necessity.
Once she was sure she had his attention, she crossed to her designated tree in long swift strides, not wanting to give him time to stop her. Her brain was already calculating the amount of thrust and the best angle to get her body on that lower branch. She hit the sweet spot, bent her knees and then surged forward, leaping at the optimal moment. When her hands hooked around the branch, her body swung up and over. Her legs straddling the branch, she held back a grin at the looks of shock on the various barbarian and girl faces, but it was Conan’s reaction that concerned her. As he approached, she lifted her legs up, then rose to a stand on the branch. Didn’t want him to yank her down until she was ready to come down.
“What are you doing?” His tone seethed with a frustration out of proportion to her action. He was an uber unstable element.
“I’m going to climb this tree.” She met his frustration with a cool tone and cooler gaze.
“Why?”
“Because it’s here.” She could see him consider the activity and conclude it was harmless, though he was still uneasy. She broke eye contact and started up, not stopping until the limbs were too small to hold her weight. She wedged herself in place and looked down. Conan waited at the bottom, staring up at her with what she was coming to think was his only expression—a scowl.
“Come down.” He’d ramped up again while she climbed, but it eased off when she looked at him.
That was interesting. Was he calmer because she wasn’t moving or did he like it when she looked at him? She broke eye contact and looked around. It was early, but the heat was already building. The humidity was in play, too. She wondered idly, because it wasn’t an operational necessity, what kind of variations there were in the climate. It had been freaking hot since her arrival. Her ABU jacket upped the heat factor, but she wasn’t comfortable stripping down to a tee shirt in front of three horny guys.
It wasn’t about her desirability factor, she’d decided sometime in the night. There was some kind of female deficit, either in their expedition or their society—and a huge arrogance surplus. Thinking about what could be happening and why with this bunch sent her mind into a tailspin of theories and spin-off questions.
Doc’s hands tightened around the branch, the pain a place to use to regain her focus.
“You are not well?” His voice was sharp and anxious.
That helped her get her focus back. She needed to learn their pressure points without giving away hers. She relaxed her body, then her hands and looked down.
“I’m fine.”
It was her attention that eased him. She could see it happen. She looked away, counted to ten and looked back. Tension eased back again. It was like a yo-yo, though she wasn’t sure who was doing the best job of playing whom since the intensity of his scrutiny made her feel on edge. Normally living on the edge helped her cope with
them
, but this was different. It had a draining component that was troubling. She felt a need to adjust her internal shield strength and integrity, if that was possible. There was a lot going on inside her head, even for her and not much was that useful.
Doc put the problem on a back burner, wedged herself to free her hands and pulled out the binoculars. As she studied the terrain, the intensity of his scrutiny faded to the back burner, too. The annoyance factor of her actions wasn’t the only reason to do this. She did need to know about her surroundings.
She felt his gaze leave her and took a quick look. Now he paced back and forth under the tree. He wore his rock-like expression but his body radiated tension. He tensed, as if he felt her watching and started to look up. Doc returned her gaze to what she could see through the binoculars.
They seemed to be deep in a forest. The terrain was diverse. There was a lake a couple of clicks to her right. It was pretty, but she had a bad feeling it doubled as a bathtub, so it was hard to appreciate it properly. Mountains loomed in the distance. No sign of any other human habitation. What she
didn’t
see was troubling. There was no clearing larger than this one where a ship might be parked.
It could be parked in a low orbit, if they had a remote transport device similar to the Garradian one. It could even be Garradian. It would also need a cloak if it were in orbit and not just any old cloak. Everyone had assumed the Kikk outpost could “see” cloaked ships, but evidence suggested they couldn’t see this one. A ship hovering over a habitable—but not inhabited—planet would have prompted a visit to check it out.
Doc was pretty sure this planet was located somewhere along what used to be the Dusan frontier. It could be in Dusan space, but it seemed unlikely. If this were about women, well, there were Dusan women left from the war, but they weren’t good breeding stock. None of the brides showed signs of having been Dusan companions, though Doc would need to chat with them to be sure. She was sure they’d been culled from the non-Dusan side of the galaxy.
Granted she could only see a small portion of the planet, but it appeared uninhabited and probably was. Conan and his merry band were hiding out and doing a pretty good job of it for Cro-Mag men. Using the frontier between Dusan and Gadi space made a kind of sense in the bride hunt, so lurking close to it made sense, too.
The planets on the fringe of no man’s land near the Dusan frontier were still pretty sparsely populated and isolated, though the inhabitants all had access to space travel and interplanetary trade resources. They’d be easy targets for someone jumping in from the Dusan frontier, and many of them were still fearful of traveling in Dusan space—with some cause. Pirates had quickly filtered into the void left by the Dusan defeat.
But a small settlement, protected by a cloaked ship, with inhabitants that were careful not to draw attention to themselves? And if pirates did notice them, their primitive profile would indicate a low profit potential not worth the bother. It was moderately clever, though the underlying premise was seriously flawed. There were better—and faster—ways to get girls.
She honed in on a rocky bluff, maybe twelve clicks from the encampment. If there were caves there, or even overhanging rock, it might screen her from the ship’s sensors. If their ship was in orbit, they needed a control device. Survey complete, she lowered herself down onto a sturdy branch and stared ahead, letting her mind spin with what she’d learned, looking for patterns and clues she might have missed in her initial assessment.