Vagabond did not have much in the way of long-range scanners. It had been a small Tadeshi military transport in its past life, and its scanners were mostly limited to can I shoot at that and will it shoot back and can I land there, all of which ran through a small (which is to say, intellectually limited) arms-turing. At Thorsdottir’s prompting, the arms-turing began looking to see whether or not any of the external aetherlocks were intact enough for Vagabond to dock.
Her screen erupted into a cascade of anxious orange numbers.
Thorsdottir swore under her breath. “We’re not looking at a Merchants League ship at all. That’s a Tadeshi warship running a false ID.”
Zhang glanced over. “Then I think we know why the ship got shot. That’s what happens to warships. What we don’t know is what it’s doing here. We are a long way from the front.” She put Vagabond into an evasive roll that got the ship pointed—as much as voidships point anywhere—on a vector aimed back at SAM-1.
“What are you doing?” Rory’s voice cracked, sharp with old habits of command. “Bring us back around. If that’s a Tadeshi warship, we need to know what it’s doing out here.”
Zhang stabbed a look at Thorsdottir in the screen’s reflection.
Thorsdottir sighed. “We don’t know about any passive defenses G. Stein may have left. Warships always have redundancies. Its arms-turing could still be tracking us, even if its primary turing’s offline.”
Rory shot a glance at the center console, where the ship’s main turing lived, and smiled. “Vagabond would’ve noticed that.”
Vagabond’s primary turing (third-hand, independently manufactured by Johnson-Thrymbe) was a little less intellectually limited than the arms-turing, and responsible for synthesizing whatever information scans brought to it, and for navigational calculations. It tolerated Zhang and Thorsdottir, and seemed marginally more fond of Jaed, but it liked Rory. In return, Rory seemed to think of it as an ally, rather than a collection of code. Thorsdottir thought that was romantic and not especially helpful. A turing was limited by its hardware, much as people were. Whatever a turing wanted to do, there were limits to what it could. This turing wanted to please Rory, and Thorsdottir suspected it might fudge data in order to do so.
Zhang did not take her eyes off her controls. “Whoever did this to G. Stein could come back. Since they destroyed a warship already, I think it is safe to assume they could destroy us, too. We’re not dealing with simple pirates, pri—Rory.”
Rory made that noise in the back of her throat that meant she was trying to be patient with these objections, and that patience was starting to slip. “Begging the question why they left in the first place, and who they are; if they’re shooting royalists, they might be friends of ours. Or perhaps no one did this. Perhaps it’s a catastrophic equipment failure.”
Thorsdottir side-eyed Zhang. “I see a hole in the engine core. That suggests a torpedo’s involvement. But it could be a ruse. An ambush. A ship meant to look crippled, to lure people in. The attackers might be leaving it as bait.”
“Bait for who? There are no Confederation outposts in Samtalet.”
“There’s us,” said Thorsdottir.
“We’re not technically rebels. We’re independent contractors employed by the stationmaster. And besides, you don’t really think that ship was meant for us.”
Thorsdottir wished, not for the first time, that she knew how Rory did that: how she always knew when someone was hedging the truth, or saying something they didn’t quite believe, or flat-out lying. “No. But I think it’s indicative of bigger problems than someone dodging system tariffs.”
“Exactly,” said Rory. “I was prepared to think a floral delivery vessel out here must be smuggling something interesting. But a royalist warship, masquerading as a delivery vessel—I think we’ve interrupted an operation of some kind, and I think we need to know what it is. So. Let’s prepare to board.—What?”
Thorsdottir and Zhang looked at each other. Zhang let her breath out. “There could be survivors, and they could be expecting a boarding party.”
Rory took a bite of air, precursor, Thorsdottir thought, to another But you don’t think so. And then she blinked, and let the air out, and stared, narrow-eyed, at the bulkhead, as if she could see through to the ship drifting outside. “All right. Then we’ll be prepared for that, too. But first, Zhang, find us a useable aetherlock.”
That took a moment, and it was not Zhang who found it, but rather Thorsdottir’s trusty arms-turing, still looking for things to target and shoot. It beeped an alert, and then red-lined the aetherlock and inquired whether or not it could fire.
“No,” Thorsdottir told it, unnecessarily (arms-turings did not have audio receptors) and a little bit testily. She fed G. Stein’s aetherlock’s coordinates over to Zhang, who brought Vagabond alongside. The primary turing would deal with the actual business of docking, the fine and minute adjustments for which Zhang had not yet developed the reflexes (she had been trained for atmospheric piloting; the void-piloting was a skill-in-progress). Zhang, meanwhile, engaged the external video feeds. At this distance and these speeds, the turing could actually render an image. Seeing where they were going always reassured Zhang, even if it was blurry variations on grey.
Thorsdottir ignored the image; it gave her a headache. She wished, not for the first time, that Grytt could be pried out of retirement (“I like my sheep”) on Lanscot. A former Kreshti marine would be far more useful than a Royal Guard in a hostile boarding situation. Oh, privateers boarded ships all the time, and this would not be Thorsdottir’s first boarding, either; it was just that most of Vagabond’s vict—er, targets—were not interested in a straight-up fight. They preferred to sneak around, and when cornered, preferred surrender to violence.
There came a distant, metallic clang, and a grinding sound that would have been alarming if Thorsdottir hadn’t heard it before.
“We’re locked on.” Zhang looked unhappy.
“Excellent. Then let’s get ready to board. Thorsdottir?”
A Royal Guard would say Yes, Highness. A Royal-Guard-turned-privateer said instead, “On it,” as she released her harness.
She squeezed past Rory and the comm-station and dogged the hatch between cockpit and Vagabond’s very small, very cramped crew section, where the final crew member remained in his harness, both hands clamped to the arms of his chair.
“You can let go now,” said Thorsdottir.
“Huh,” said Jaed Moss. He did not move. “What just happened? There was rolling. And a bang. Did we dock?”
Thorsdottir squinted at Jaed. He was pale, but not especially green, and there were two fever-bright spots on his cheekbones. Excitement, fear, but not explosive nausea. She grunted, shrugged, and shot a look at the cockpit.