when the time came for the regular officer corps to be completely suppressed at last.
'Thank you, Citizen Commander,' he replied with a graciousness as false as her own, and cut the com link.
Citizen Lieutenant Commander Heathrow sat up in bed when the com warbled at him. The CO and XO of a courier boat were the only members of its complement who actually had cabins to themselves, which was a luxury beyond price. Unfortunately, the designers had been forced to squeeze those cabins into an oddly shaped section where the hull narrowed dramatically towards the after impeller ring, with the result that the curved deckhead offered barely sixty centimeters of headroom above Heathrow's bunk. Under normal circumstances, it was second nature to remember that and allow for it when getting up. He had a tendency to forget when awakened in the middle of the night, however, and he yelped as his skull smacked into the deckhead.
Fortunately, the designers had padded it—presumably to avoid killing off captains in job lots. He smothered a curse as he rubbed the point of contact, but he hadn't done himself any lasting damage, and he reached for the audio-only com key.
'Yes?' he growled.
'Sir, it's Howard. I— Sir, we've got a problem up here, and I—'
The citizen ensign broke off, and the ache in Heathrow's head was suddenly forgotten as he heard the barely suppressed panic in her voice. He could actually hear her breathing—she sounded as if she was about to go into hyperventilation any moment—and he slammed the visual key.
Howard blinked as her skipper's bare-chested image appeared on her screen. It was highly irregular for the citizen lieutenant to accept a visual com connection out of uniform, and the fact that he'd overlooked the minor consideration that he slept in his briefs, not pajamas, added to the irregularity, but vast relief bloomed in her eyes as she recognized the supportive concern in his expression.
'What's wrong, Irene?' he asked, racking his brain for possible answers to his own question even as he spoke. But nothing came to him. After all, what could be wrong sitting here in Danak orbit?
'Sir, it's Groundside,' Howard said. 'I told them we didn't have any— But they wouldn't listen, and now Citizen Colonel Therret says Citizen General Chernock himself is— But I don't have any more traffic for them, Sir! I sent it all down yesterday, when we arrived! So—'
'Hold it. Hold it, Irene!' Heathrow managed to sound soothing and firm and commanding all at the same time, though he wasn't quite certain how he'd pulled it off. Howard slithered to a stop, staring at him pleadingly, and he drew a deep calming breath. For both of them, he thought wryly.
'All right,' he said then. 'I want you to begin at the beginning. Don't get excited. Don't run ahead. Don't assume that I know anything at all about whatever is going on. Just tell me what's happened step by step, okay?'
'Yes, Sir.' Howard made herself sit back and took a visible grip on herself. Then she, too, inhaled deeply and began in a voice of determined calm.
'I didn't want to disturb you, Sir, or... or make you think I wasn't willing to take responsibility, and everything started out sounding so routine that I thought I could handle it.' She swallowed. 'I was wrong, Sir.'
Her expression showed the humiliation of a bright, eager young officer who'd wanted to do her job and win her CO's approval only to see the attempt blow up in her face, but her voice was unflinching as she admitted her failure.
'As you know, Sir, we transmitted all the message traffic for Danak on our arrival in Danak Alpha orbit.' She paused, and Heathrow nodded encouragingly. 'Well, that was all the traffic there was, Sir. There wasn't any more at all, but they don't believe me Dirtside.'
'They don't?' Heathrow raised a perplexed eyebrow, and she shook her head.
'No, Sir. First, I got a standard request from StateSec Sector HQ for a recheck of the message storage files to be sure everything had transmitted. So I did that, and told them everything had gone, and they went away. Only then, about fifteen minutes later, some SS citizen major turned up and demanded another recheck. And when I told him I'd already done it, he insisted on remote access to the message files. But he didn't find anything either, and when he didn't, he accused me of having somehow screwed up the message storage. But I told him I couldn't screw it up, that it was all automated. So then he accused me of having done it on purpose, if it couldn't happen by accident, so I told him that I couldn't deliberately tamper with the files because I didn't have a list of their contents—that I didn't even know how many messages had been loaded to the Danak queue, much less what those messages were about! Sir, I can't even unlock the central directory without the authenticated security code from the ground station the traffic is intended for—you know that!'
'Of course I do, Irene,' he said soothingly, drawing her gently back from the brink of fresh hysteria.
'Well, I told him all that over and over—I don't know, maybe as much as nine or ten times and in five or six different ways—and he finally went away. But then this Citizen Colonel Therret called. He's Citizen General Chernock's chief of staff, and he started out just like the Citizen Major. Sir, he insists there has to be a message we haven't delivered, and... and he says he's sending a full security detail up here to 'talk' to me about it!'
She stared at him with huge eyes, panic once more hovering just under the surface, and now Heathrow understood completely. He didn't understand what was happening, or why—or even how, for that matter—but he understood Howard's terror only too well. And, truth to tell, he felt a swelling panic of his own, for if StateSec decided something had happened to its secure traffic aboard Heathrow's ship, there was no way their headhunting would stop with the lowly citizen ensign serving as his com officer.
'All right, Irene,' he said after a moment of furious thought. 'I want you to pull a complete copy of all com traffic between you and Dirtside on this. I'm going to get dressed while you do that. When I've got my clothes on, I'll buzz you to pipe the copies down here and let me view them. Then I'll want you to connect me directly to this Citizen Colonel Therret. I'll take it from there, and any further traffic from on this is to be routed directly to me as it comes in. Is all that understood?'
'Yes, Sir. It's on the com log, Sir.' He heard the enormous relief in her voice, but her eyes were troubled. 'Sir, I swear I didn't do anything to their message files. You know that.'
'Of course I do, Irene. Hell, like you already told them, you couldn't have done anything without their own authentication codes!'
'I just— I'm sorry, Sir,' she said in a small voice. 'Whatever happened, it was my job, and—'
'Irene, we don't have time to sit here and let you beat yourself up for something you didn't do, couldn't have helped, and aren't responsible for,' he told her. 'So hush and get started on those copies ASAP.'
'Yes, Sir.'
He killed the com, rolled out of his bunk, and reached for the uniform he'd discarded three hours earlier.
'—so I assure you, Citizen Colonel, that I've looked into the matter thoroughly. There are no additional messages for Danak in our banks, no messages for Danak have been erroneously transmitted at any of our earlier stops, and no messages have been tampered with in any way.'
'So your citizen ensign has already told me, Citizen Commander,' Citizen Colonel Brigham Therret said coldly. 'I must say, I find this all extremely suspicious.'
'If I may be so bold, Sir, could you tell me anything at all to explain what, precisely, you're looking for?' Heathrow asked as courteously as he possibly could. 'At the moment, we're shooting blind up here. We know you're looking for something, but we've checked all the places that something ought to be without finding it. Maybe if we had a better idea of what we were trying to find, we could make some educated guesses as to where and how it might have been misdirected, mislabeled, or misfiled.'
'Um.' Therret frowned, but his expression actually lightened a tiny bit, as if he hadn't considered that. He pondered for several moments, then made a face that might have indicated either indecision or annoyance. 'Hold the circuit,' he said abruptly, and his face disappeared, replaced by a standard com link engaged, please stand by image.
Heathrow looked up from it to smile encouragingly at Howard. After viewing her message logs, he'd decided to conduct this conversation from the bridge rather than his cabin terminal for several reasons, not the least of which was a desire to place himself in as official a setting as possible. Not that he expected an SS citizen
