“Put Lyssa onto it,” Jai said. “She’s smart, and she’s got good instincts.”
“Awww…” Lyssa said and batted her lashes at him. She held her hands around a steaming mug of coffee.
“The object was to determine where they come from,” I said. My tone came out grumpy, because damn it, I was hungry, but it didn’t feel appropriate to chow down on sourdough toast and tart blackberry jam right now. “As you’ve stepped out of the map room, I presume you’ve figured that out?”
It was only Jai, Lyssa and me at the table, and Lyth hovering next to it. Everyone else was still asleep. Sleep had been an absent companion for me the last few nights. Mostly because the other side of the bed was empty and the person who used to use that side was just on the other side of the wall. But once awake, my mind would not stop turning over the few facts we knew about the blue-black guys, and what might happen next. In the dark hours of a sleepless night, my imagination wandered along depressing routes.
Jai never seemed to sleep, either. I suspected his thoughts were as bleak as mine. He was never an openly jovial man, but the silent humor which normally lit his eyes was absent.
Lyth didn’t object to my snappish tone, although if he had I wouldn’t have blamed him. He simply sank onto the bench opposite me and Jai. “I found three ships which seem to have disappeared into thin air. They left their departure point and as far as I can figure out, they never arrived at a destination, anywhere.”
I absorbed that. “They were reported missing?”
Lyth shook his head. “They weren’t reported as arriving anywhere. Their failure to arrive was overlooked because no one was informed about their arrival so they could watch out for them. Their point of departure didn’t check in with their arrival point. They didn’t know what their arrival point would be, because no one is required to lodge itineraries anymore. I only found them missing because the virus caught a mention of someone failing to come home, so I traced it back. I found others the same way.”
“You used to track people following the data trail they left,” I pointed out.
“This is almost the complete opposite. I’m tracking missing ships by the lack of data trail.” Lyth scraped his thumb over the tabletop. “There have been three that I’ve found, so far, going back three years. Put together with the Ige Ibas, that gives me a distinct direction.”
“All out on the fringes of the Carinad arm?” Jai guessed.
“A specific area along the edge of the arm,” Lyth replied. “All the ships, including the Ige Ibas, did pass through or might have passed through that section.”
“Might?” Jai rubbed his jaw doubtfully.
“No itineraries, remember?” I said.
“I had to extrapolate where they might have been heading,” Lyth said. “Based upon common routes in the past. There’s a lot of guesswork involved.”
“We can’t take this to anyone,” I said to Jai. “Not based on guesswork. Not even Lyth’s guesswork, which is almost bankable. No offence, Lyth.”
“None taken,” Lyth replied. “In this case, I’m guessing more than usual. The lack of documentation, of histories, is…” He twisted his mouth. “Hampering. Plus, we’re dealing with only a handful of ships, so randomness is a major factor.”
“Incoming call for you, Colonel,” Lyssa said from overhead.
“Me?” Jai said, surprised.
“Danny,” Lyssa corrected.
“On the table here, please,” I replied.
A flat screen formed over the emitter. Sauli Mullins smiled at me. There was a twinkle in his eyes. “Wanna scooch over a smidge, Danny? We’re landing.”
I sat up. So did Lyth. “You’re what?”
Sauli’s smile evolved into a huge grin. “The Omia Zaos just passed through the inner lock and we have a platform assigned. I don’t know if it’s right next to you, but traffic control muttered something about ‘you people’, so I’m going to guess it probably is. Have you been stirring up trouble again, Danny?”
I scrambled to get my thoughts straight. “It’s Lyth stirring the trouble this time,” I replied. “How the hell is it you are here?”
“That’s easy. Jai called and suggested I should get my ass to wherever you ended up. Apparently, you might be in need of a couple of excellent engineers.”
Lyth and I both shifted to look at Jai.
He just smiled.
—20—
The Omia Zaos was a luxury class private yacht, one of Sauli and Kristiana’s top-end crescent ships and tended to draw gazes wherever it landed.
Crescent ships, with their swinging arms, looked clumsy and clunky even if they weren’t retrofitted. Sauli and Kristiana had worked for thirty years to smooth out the design of crescent ships and theirs managed to avoid the appearance of a grasshopper ready to leap.
Purpose-built crescent ships were generally narrow at the nose of the ship so the crescent arms had less distance to cover to draw a forming wormhole over the front end of the ship. Darius Industry ships had, instead, an elegant curve to the nose, instead of using the common arrowhead shape. The ships did not expand behind the nose, either. They were sleek torpedoes.
We stood on the edge of the platform where the Lythion was parked and watched the Omia Zaos lower itself down onto the neighboring platform. Sound baffles—which were a new development built upon molecular barriers—stopped the wind and beating roar of the ship’s navigation engines from reaching us, even though we stood barely fifty meters away from the landing ship.
It was unusual to watch a ship land from such close quarters. In a standard landing bay, massive shield doors protected the public from the noise, toxic exhaust fumes, heat and cyclonic winds, while the ground crew stayed behind physical shields and watched on screens.
“This is one of Sauli’s designs?” Anderson Marlow asked, beside me.
I nodded.
“She’s beautiful,” Dalton
