The Fleet 01 by David Drake (ed), Bill Fawcett (ed) Read Free Book Online Page B

Port that tried to reconstruct it afterward. The most baffling mystery of all was this: what made her overlook the possibility that Chrysanthemum’s CPs, even though they had indeed been launched, might have been destroyed before they had the, chance to achieve FTL? After all, had either of them reached its destination, it should in principle have arrived before the search party was organised.
    One obvious possibility was an overweening desire for glory, to be the one who identified the home world of the unknown enemy and led the warships of the Fleet to it. However, this did not match her previous record. She was young, with a promising career before her, and uncountable options open whether or not she decided to continue in the service—was she the sort of person to gamble everything on a thousand-to-one, maybe a million-to-one, chance? People like that weren’t recruited!
    No, it didn’t fit.
    Many of the simulations they ran at Port wound up in futile recurrent loops hinting at incestuous attachment, her brother acting as a mental father-substitute ... but all this was abstract and artificial, testifying rather to the ingenuity of the psychologists who had compiled the Fleet’s personality profile programs than to what had really transpired in Yuriko’s not unattractive head.
    Closest, perhaps, came one who said, “I think she simply wanted vengeance.”
    But he was shouted down by colleagues and Fleet officers who cried, “Against her brother’s killers whom she served so well? Or us, because she thought we’d failed in our duty to protect him and his ship?” (That, though, was when the war was fully under way.)
    And nobody—not at the time, nor for a long while after—hit on the explanation that could be summed up in one single word: Grief.
    The Nag complied, though as it were suspiciously. The extra CP tipped the balance. And, miraculously (or was it? Surely if one met a new race among the stars one would expect to do so close to their home world, where humans still were all things considered!) after allowance had been made for every factor—the course Chrysanthemum had been embarked on, the detours she had been obliged to make due to the recent nova, the impact of the onslaught she had suffered that had hurled her across a light-month of real space, the effect of all the stellar masses in the neighbourhood, the drag of interstellar gas—there was one, and only one, unexplored system within the scoutship’s range from which the enemy might reasonably be thought to hail, unless of course they dwelt between the stars: one, and only one, that hinted at an oxygen-high planet.
    “Make for it!” Yuriko directed.
    “If the system is inhabited by hostile entities,” said the Nag, and her tone was incontestably less abrasive than in the past, “the risk of being destroyed is incalculable.” Pause. “Owing to lack of data.”
    “We have two CPs,” Yuriko answered stonily. “If it turns out that that is the home system of the enemy, our arrival”—she had never grown used to saying “I” when the ship seemed to have such a personality of her own—“will trigger their defences. They omitted to remove the CP that you retrieved from the wreckage. That indicates they may not have understood its function. Program it with all data concerning our destination including the likelihood of its being the enemy’s lair. Prime it to launch itself if they attack us, using maximum acceleration until it enters FTL. Set the other, the issue one, to do the same if it appears likely that without overt attack we’re being lured into a trap. Program yourself to go to FTL and make for the nearest Fleet base as soon as both have been launched, whether or not I am conscious at the time.”
    “Analysing,” said the Nag, which indicated that Yuriko’s commands so far were questionable but not a priori unacceptable in the light of her built-in principles.
    But abruptly the pilot grew impatient. She recalled something she