“Xcil?”
Rezi shrugged.
Van nodded slowly. “The other datacard?”
“It contains information that may be of use to IIS.”
Van continued to press Rezi for almost two hours, but the man continued to impress him as generally honest. It would have been far easier for Rezi simply to wait and take all of the IIS local assets and future retainers—assuming the Equalization Act did in fact allow that.
In the end, he just thanked Rezi and saw him out the ship lock.
Then he made sure the Joyau was ready for emergency delocking before he began a second search, this one heading straight for the public law sections of the Quorum’s public access section. Public Law 24-21 contained all the provisions Rezi had cited. It also contained a provision stating that out-system ownership by entities with legal status in either the Rev or Hyndji systems would not be covered by PL 24-21 until two years after the initial effective date of the law.
Another hour later, Van walked out of his stateroom.
Eri was in the mess. “Now?”
“Let’s hope they’ll let us depart peacefully. But we’ll strap in in case they don’t.”
Van did so, then brought both fusactors on line, throwing more power to the ship’s secondary shields—the ones that ran under the thin outer ablative layer of the hull. He dropped the ship grav to nil and unlinked from station power.
Sandurst Orbit Control, this is Coalition ship Joyau. Preparing for departure. Request departure clearance this time.
Joyau, control, wait one.
Van prepared to use full power on the thrusters if the station didn’t depower the lock magholds and dampers.
Joyau. Reduce ship grav to nil and report.
Ship grav at nil.
Depowering dampers. You are cleared for separation and low-power departure this time.
Van did not leave the cockpit until they were a good two hours outbound from Islyn.
Then, he went back to his stateroom to check over the cards Rezi had left. Van did not insert the cards he had received from Rezi into the ship system, nor into the separate IIS system in his stateroom, but into a third reader. The third reader was isolated physically and electronically from all other systems in order to determine data compatibility and to ensure that any datacard read contained no VDAs or the equivalent.
Van transferred the data on the first card to another card, running all the information through an assembly-disassembly and vetting process that separated the data from the structure beneath it before making the transfer. He did the same for the second and third cards.
The first card seemed to be exactly what Rezi had claimed. The second card contained information on every major business and multilateral on Islyn, including the share of out-system ownership and the name and home system of the owner. Even with a brief survey, Van could see that most of the key formulation, energy distribution, and communications multis had significant Revenant ownership.
For a time, he just looked blankly at the bookshelves.
Then he returned to the cockpit and began to set up the jump coordinates for Beldora.
Chapter 53
At the edge of the Islyn system, Van checked everything—accumulators, fusactors, and all the internal systems one last time, and then the jump coordinates for Beldora once more. Recalling his last nightmare, he ran a separate diagnostic on the jump generators before looking across the cockpit to the second seat where Eri sat. “Make sure you’re fully strapped in for high gee.”
“You sound more and more like Commander Desoll,” she observed, tightening her harness.
Did years of jumping into unfamiliar or semifamiliar systems do that? Van squared himself in the command couch and actuated the jump generator—implant/net driven on the Joyau, rather than manual as on an RSF ship. The cockpit turned inside out, black becoming white, white black, and grays and colors some inverted shades that were not colors at all for the endless instant that was a jumpshift.
Once back in normspace, even before checking the comparator inputs and coordinates, Van was checking the monitors, scanning all the EDIs as they registered—one frigate, and two corvettes, all with Revenant drive signatures. There were no other interstellar ships, but Van could make out fusactor drive in-system ships, ships that looked like mining tugs, but the tugs were well in-system, well inside the belt, and well away from normal system mining areas.
Why would so many mining tugs be that far in-system?
Van’s guts tightened. He could only think of one reason—using the tugs to gather system debris to bombard Beldora itself. Dealing with the tugs would have to wait because one of the corvettes was less than a thousand emkay away, turning from a parallel course toward the Joyau.
He glanced across the cockpit. “Eri…Rev ships all over the place. Prepare for high gee.”
“Yes, ser.” A faint smile crossed her face.
Van turned the Joyau toward the corvette, keeping his screens at standard, but accelerating toward the Revenant and widening the photon nets to full intake.
Five minutes passed, the two ships moving inexorably toward each other, before the corvette fired a single torp at the Joyau.
Van continued to accelerate toward the smaller Revenant ship, shifting power to the shields only as the torp neared the Joyau. The shields didn’t flicker with the explosion, and there was no strain on the accumulators as they picked up the mass and energy caught by the nets and funneled to them. At less than a quarter emkay the Revenant loosed two more torps, and shifted course slightly, off a head-to-head course.
Van turned the Joyau back onto a collision course.
The corvette swept into a tight turn away from the Joyau, angling on a cross-orbital course in-system, but more directly toward the Revenant frigate.
Both torps flared harmlessly against the Joyau’s shields.
Van eased the Joyau directly onto a stern chase, diverting more power into the drives and cutting out the Joyau’s artificial gravs, but the acceleration was only two gees, since that was enough to overtake the corvette long before the other Revenant ships could reach them. While the Joyau could hold her own against
