“You see? They accessed our system.”
Podolski squinted at the display and moved very quickly after that, windows opened and closed in quick succession. He entered passwords, accessed screens and icons that Lem had never seen before. He scrolled through long lists of what appeared to be random numbers and code. He worked for several minutes in silence, his eyes racing up and down through the holospace. Lem tried to keep up but couldn’t.
Lem’s first thought was for the gravity laser. Had the free miners seen it? Had they accessed its schematics? Were they after those files? If so, if they had seen them, if the secrecy of the glaser had been compromised, Lem would be ruined. His father and the Board would never forgive him. It would be devastating to the company. And what about the videos of the bump? The files he had erased. Had El Cavador seen those?
Podolski stopped typing suddenly and stared at the dozens of different windows and lines of code in the holospace. “Oh,” he said.
“What?” said Lem. “What does ‘oh’ mean? What are you oh-ing about?”
“The system does a backup every forty-five minutes, sir. It’s procedural. But it looks as if the system did an unscheduled backup recently.”
“What does that mean? ‘An unscheduled backup.’ What are you saying?”
“I can’t be certain, sir,” said Podolski, turning to Lem, “but I think it means some of our files were copied to a foreign target.”
“Foreign target? What? Like a snifferstick? When? When did this happen exactly?”
Podolski tapped the keys again to find the answer. “Exactly twenty-three minutes after we bumped El Cavador, sir.”
CHAPTER 9
Scout
One week after the corporate attack, Victor was in the engine room making needed repairs to the generator when Father came for him. “How close are you to getting this thing back online?” Father asked.
“A day,” said Victor. “Maybe less. Mono’s in the workshop now fixing the last of the circuits. I’m putting in some new rotors. Barring another breakdown, we should be good to go. Why? What’s wrong?”
“You better come with me.”
Father didn’t even wait for Victor to follow. He simply turned and left the engine room. Victor, sensing Father’s urgency, quickly put his tools aside and caught up with him in the corridor. They both were wearing greaves, and they moved down the corridor in long, leaping strides.
“Have we detected the Italians?” Victor guessed. “Is that what this is about?”
The ship was speeding toward the Italians’ position-or rather, what everyone hoped would be the Italians’ position. With communication still down, El Cavador couldn’t send a message ahead to confirm that the Italians were still at the location. There was a good chance they’d get there and find nothing but empty space.
“No idea,” said Father. “But I don’t think it’s good. Concepcion called a few minutes ago to ask if the PKs were ready.”
“Why should that alarm you?” asked Victor. “We’ve got two working PKs out of six. That’s hardly an adequate collision-avoidance system. Maybe we’ve got a debris field ahead. Maybe Concepcion wants to be certain we don’t hit anything.”
“Maybe,” said Father. “But I don’t think so. It was the way she asked. She sounded concerned. Afraid even.”
Afraid? Concepcion? Victor couldn’t imagine it. “Of what? Another corporate? The starship?”
“I don’t think it’s the starship. Toron and Edimar said it was several weeks away at the earliest, and more likely several months away. This is something else.”
After the corporate attack, Victor and Father had divided up the repairs. Victor and Mono were to focus exclusively on the generator, while Father would put all of his efforts into repairing the sensors the corporates had cut away from the ship. The miners had successfully plucked a few of the sensors from space, but many of the most critical instruments, including the laserline transmitter, had never been found.
Father didn’t even knock before entering Concepcion’s office. Inside, Concepcion and Toron were gathered around Concepcion’s desk, studying a mapped quadrant of space floating above the desk in the holospace.
Concepcion only barely looked up when they entered. “Close the door,” she said.
Father did so. Victor glanced at Toron, but the man’s face was unreadable.
“There are ships at the Italians’ position,” said Concepcion. “We’re close enough now for the Eye to detect them. It’s not the cleanest data, and without communication we can’t confirm their identity, but what data we do have suggests that they are in fact the Italians.”
“That’s good news,” said Father. “We desperately need help with repairs.”
“And a new laserline transmitter,” said Victor.
“Even if the Italians don’t have a spare transmitter,” said Concepcion, “we can use theirs to send as many laserlines as we need to, I’m sure. But that is not why I called you in here. Edimar and Toron have made another sighting.”
“A second starship?” Victor asked.
“We don’t know what it is,” said Toron. “But I don’t think it’s a starship.” He maneuvered his stylus in the holospace. A dot appeared in the top corner. “This is the starship, or what we’re all assuming is a starship.” He moved his stylus, and a second dot appeared at the opposite end of the holospace. “This is the Italians.” Toron made another hand gesture, and a third dot appeared between the first two dots, though relatively close to the Italians. “And this thing is a giant question mark. It’s something, but we don’t know what. We know it’s small, at most the size of El Cavador, but probably smaller. Which is why we didn’t see it before now.”
“You think it’s related to the starship?” Victor asked.
“Maybe,” said Toron. “Edimar is more certain than I am, but we’ve been following its trajectory for a few hours, and it looks as if it came from the direction of the starship.”
“That could be a coincidence,” said Father. “It could be a family or clan ship coming in from way out whose angle of approach makes it seem as if they’re coming from the starship. Look at the distance between the two anomalies. That’s a lot of space. Connecting the two is kind of a leap, don’t you think?”
“That was my reaction,” said Concepcion. “But Toron made me think otherwise.”
“It’s way too fast to be human,” said Toron. “We’ve picked it up at a few spots now. It’s moving at fifty times our top speeds, easy.”
Victor was surprised. There were plenty of ships much faster than El Cavador. But fifty times faster? Unheard of.
“Could it be a comet?” Father asked. “Or some other natural object?”
Toron shook his head. “It’s no comet. The Eye recognizes comets easily. This is something else. It’s tech. It has a heat signature.”
“A scout ship,” said Victor. “From the starship. Has to be. Whoever they are, they’ve sent out a scout to scan the area. This is new territory for them, and they’re playing it safe. They’re getting the landscape.”
“That’s a possibility,” said Toron. “But if it’s true, that puts us in a very precarious situation. Let’s assume for a moment that this is in fact a scout ship. If so, why is it heading straight for the Italians?”
“Maybe it can detect life-forms,” said Victor.
“At that range?” said Father. “I doubt it. It’s possible, I suppose. If it can travel at near-lightspeed, who’s to say what it can do? But it’s more likely that it can detect movement in much the same way the Eye does.”
“The Italians aren’t moving,” said Victor. “They’re stationary; have been for at least ten days now. If the scout were attracted to movement, it would come to us instead of them. We’re the ones who are moving. Maybe it picked up the Italians’ radio frequency. Radio is tech. Radio implies intelligent life. If I picked up radio waves in another solar system, I would definitely want to check them out. And the Italians use radio all the time. They have four ships. That’s how they communicate with each other.”
“And our radio is down,” said Father. “Which would explain why it didn’t come to us.”
“How soon could you have our radio up?” asked Concepcion.
