Thus it was that Jules and Captain Fortier, flying at top speed, returned to the region of space where they’d witnessed the “Gastaadi War” just a few weeks earlier. This was a spot well outside imperial territory, and was utterly deserted except for the floating wreckage of the hundreds of ships destroyed in that monumental battle.
Fortier eyed the scene with dismay. “Her pod will be mostly invisible. How can we find her in the midst of all this debris?”
“That’s why 1 brought you along,” Jules said. “You were there when the battle was taking place. You know where her ship was and what its trajectory should have been. You’ll have to do the calculations to find out where she is.’
That task, though, was much more easily said than done. There were no landmarks in interstellar space, no point of reference from which to get exact bearings. An astrogator would know which direction he’d been facing – but the nearest beacons, the stars, were all so far away that an error of hundreds of thousands of kilometers would make no difference. And in this vast volume of space they were searching for an almost invisible ovoid pod just a few meters in diameter.
Captain Fortier had to use the floating wreckage to guide him. As well as he could remember the formation in those tense moments before combat, this destroyer had been in such a position relative to that cruiser, and both of them had been angled in such a way as to make a triangle with that battleship over there. It was an intricate three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle that relied heavily on the captain’s all-too-human memory; Fortier found himself constantly revising his estimates of where everyone was at any given moment so he could pinpoint where Lady A’s ship must have been when she began her flight for freedom.
To complicate the matter still further was the physical fact that nothing remains fixed in free space. Everything drifts depending on its original momentum and any sub sequent forces that act upon it. Many of the ships had been blown apart by opposing blasterfire, and the shattered wrecks would drift depending on the seventy and direction of the force they received. The two men had to identify the present wreckage, calculate its velocity, and trace its path back to where it must have been while the battle was raging. Only then could they hope to obtain a true picture of the way the formation had looked as the imperial fleet had prepared for war.
Not only was the work tedious and painstaking, it was depressing as well. So many people on both sides of the conflict had died here, pointlessly; so much money had been spent, so much material had been thrown away and wasted. This battlefield, like all battlefields in human history, was a tribute both to the valor of individual people and the stupidity of mankind as a race – and now that a computer was involved, it also testified badly to the nature of machine intelligence.
Spaceship wreckage drifted past, dead hulks whose names conjured images in the two men’s minds. There was the Constellation, there the Duke Gregori – silent and still, their hulls gutted, their crews dead. There the MacArthur had taken an enemy torpedo, and there the noble Shimatsu had exploded when its generators overloaded and the shields went out. This was a roll call of space naval history, a tragedy of high proportions. The victory for the Empire here had been great – but in light of subsequent events, it had also been terribly futile.
Hour after wearying hour went by as Jules and Captain Fortier searched through the emptiness of this space battlefield, trying to deduce where Lady A’s ship must have been. Finally, after a full day’s work, they thought they had the area located. Now began the equally frustrating task of finding the pod itself – if, in fact, it did exist.
“We’ll never spot it visually,” Fortier lamented, “and there isn’t enough metal in it for the sensors to pick it up.”
“The pod isn’t metal, but she is,” Jules said. “That’s the one flaw in her scheme. By her very nature, she can’t disguise herself beyond a certain point.”
Even so, Lady A represented a very small piece of metal, and Jules had to set the sensors on their narrowest scan so he wouldn’t miss her. The narrowness of the scan meant he had to sweep essentially the same volume of space many times to cover what he could normally cover in a single broad sweep.
The two men spent hour after hour hunched over the scanner, looking for any trace of their adversary. Every time the sensor spotted a small fragment of metal they had to stop and examine it closely for any sign that it might be the one they were interested in. But this region of space was filled with small drifting pieces of metal, shards of the larger wrecks that inhabited this site. Time after time the searchers turned away from their find disappointed, and began the tedious process all over again.
Eventually they abandoned their original spot and looked along what Fortier calculated was the trajectory of Lady A s ship as it tried to escape, figuring her pod might not have been ejected until the ship was already in motion They were now into their third day of searching, and both men were going cross-eyed from staring closely at the screen for any positive signs. They had already reached the unspoken conclusion that if they found nothing by the end of this day, they would have to assume that Jules’s suppositions were in error and Lady A had not survived the death of her ship after all.
The sensor beeped once more, and once more Jules focused on that spot and increased the magnification. He was so tired that he found himself staring at the object for a full minute before he realized he’d found what he was looking for. He straightened his posture and gestured for Fortier, who was napping in the adjoining couch, to come over and look for himself.
There, surrounded by the darkness of interstellar space, were the faint outlines of an ovoid pod reflecting dimly in the ambient starlight. There were no lights within the pod-but Lady A would need no lights. She would be content to sit in the darkness and hatch out plots for years, if that was how long it took to be rescued.
Jules edged the Comet closer to the pod, taking up a position a few dozen meters away. He managed to shine a landing light directly at the floating object, which now stood out quite clearly. At the same time, he began broadcasting a radio message on the standard ship-to- ship frequency. “Hello, Aimée. It appears we’re going to work together again.”
There were a few seconds of hesitation as Lady A decided whether to give in and admit her presence. Finally, realizing she had indeed been discovered, her voice came back over the radio. “If you expect to be applauded for your cleverness in finding me, you’ll be disappointed. What makes you think I’d care to work with you again?”
“Because your options are very limited. My ship’s guns are trained on you this second, and you don’t have any more back doors to slip through. If I don’t hear the sounds of cooperation very soon, you really will be blown to pieces. I don’t think that’s part of your ultimate plan.”
“Destroying me won’t save the Empire.”
“You don’t have to waste time with cryptic innuendos. We know about the PCC. We tried to stop it, but it activated its doomsday plan. The Empire is in pieces, but it’s holding together. We’re patching as best we can, but we could use your help.”
Jules could imagine a tight smile spreading at the corners of Lady A’s mouth, but her voice was level as she said, “My help doesn’t come cheap.”
“I’m setting the price,” Jules told her, “and it’s your continued survival: I consider that more than sufficient payment for you.”
“My continued survival for how long?” Lady A sneered.
“The Empress decides that, not me.”
“For as long as I’m useful to you, then,” she guessed.
“Were you any more merciful with your employees?”
“No, and I don’t expect it from her.” The Empire’s arch-enemy paused and changed the subject. “But even with your oh-so-generous offer, I don’t see how I can help you. If the PCC has done its savaging, there’s nothing I can do to undo the damage. What’s done is done.”
“I’m willing to bet you know where the PCC went when it left Earth orbit,” Jules said. “I think there must have been some safe point already set up in case of such an emergency. You must know where it is.”
“And you think I’d betray my partner after all these years?”
“In the blink of an eye, if you got some advantage out of it,” Jules said coldly.