Her face didn’t have much expression, which she supposed was normal for her. The vessel’s identification transponder said it was the freighter Citoyen out of Kostroma, but the locator beacon—which normally wouldn’t be tripped unless the ship were crippled or derelict—said it was Alliance Fleet Ship Bluecher, as they’d feared and expected.
“It’s the Bluecher,” Adele said on the two-way link. If Daniel wanted the rest of the crew to know the situation, he’d tell them. Beneath her the thrusters changed note, cutting and then blipping several times before roaring at high output.
“Citoyen, this is the Parsifal out of Bryce,” Adele announced calmly, using the main transmitter and her upper-class Bryce accent. “Have you met any other Alliance vessels? We were to rendezvous with the Goldenfels out of Pleasaunce. Over.”
When the Bluecher pinged them, their identification transponder would announce that they were the Parsifal. If the Bluecher’s signals officer was as skilled as Captain Semmes obviously was and therefore knew how to trip the locator beacon, it would tell him the same thing. Obsessive behavior is a desirable trait in librarians—and spies.
The pause this time was one Adele expected. At last a female voice said, “Freighter Parsifal, this is Citoyen. What is the ship in orbit with you? We can see there’s a second ship. Answer immediately, over!”
A text message from Daniel crawled across the bottom of Adele’s display:
can you remote from helmets so we leave soonest most urgent
The letters were in puce, though how Daniel’d managed to do that was beyond Adele. It was clever of him to have picked up on text as a way of not interfering with critical radio traffic.
Adele made several adjustments to the communications system, using her wands to control the console. Her handheld unit was already stowed in a pouch attached to her equipment belt. She slipped the wands in their slots and said, “Citoyen, it looks like a derelict warship. Captain Vanness is aboard now, taking stock. He won’t be able to reply until he’s back aboard. We don’t have suit radios. Over.”
Certain that the hookup worked, she unlatched her shock harness. She would’ve floated away if Daniel hadn’t grabbed her and propelled her toward the airlock. Hogg and Tovera sandwiched them, as usual. There was nobody else left on the Goldenfels’ bridge or in the A Deck corridor.
Adele felt deaf and blind with only the clumsy helmet link to connect her with the outside world. She could shift between communication modes, but she wasn’t in touch with all portions of the electro-optical spectrum simultaneously. At a time when she and her companions were within a heartbeat of destruction, she desperately wanted the connection as a security blanket. It gave her the hope that she might be able to do something to help.
Adele didn’t try to control herself, simply allowed Daniel to muscle her through the hatches like a sack of grain. Weightless or not, her suited body was of respectable mass. He gripped the equipment belt in the middle of her back, then simply shoved and jerked. They moved as fast as the unburdened Hogg did in the lead.
The airlock was open, inner and outer hatches both, turning the chamber into a passage. That made sense since they were abandoning the Goldenfels, but it still shocked Adele’s sense of rightness.
“Parsifal, this is AFS Bluecher,” a male voice said abruptly. “Shut down everything but your auxiliary power unit. Do not light your thrusters or High Drive. You will be destroyed if you do not obey these instructions to the letter. Do you understand, over?”
This system’s sun was a tiny dot in the black heavens but so brilliant that Adele’s faceshield darkened automatically to save her retinas. The light turned the antennas and rigging into knife-edges where it struck them, but left them rifts in existence when they were in shadow unrelieved by the softening of an atmosphere. Adele had spent little time on the hull in normal space. Its appearance in the Matrix was a liquid, ever-changing thing far different from this harshness.
“Good God, Bluecher!” Adele said as Daniel dragged her to a line that she wouldn’t have seen if he hadn’t bent her arms around it the first time. “Have you gone mad? We’re Alliance merchants, we’re from Bryce! What do you mean by threatening us, over?”