Returning to Laconia was almost certainly the right thing, but it felt like admitting defeat. She had put it off until now, and she still chafed at the idea. She pressed at her broken orbit with the tips of her fingers, checking to see how hard she could push before the pain came.
“For the time being,” she began, “we should assume that the ship resupply will—”
Her comms chimed. A high-priority message had just arrived from the Laconia system. From Admiral Trejo. She let whatever she’d meant to say trail off and die, then looked up at Mugabo. He raised his eyebrows a millimeter like the waiter at an expensive restaurant waiting to see whether she approved of the wine.
“Let me get back to you on that, Captain,” she said.
“Of course,” he said with a sharp, professional nod. If he was annoyed at being put off yet again, he didn’t show it. She had the sense that she could prevaricate and delay forever and never get more than polite acceptance and a repeat of the question an hour later. Mugabo was a man without passions as far as she could tell. He’d wear her down like water eroding a stone.
He closed the door behind him, and Tanaka put her system on a do-not-disturb setting that would keep anyone from intruding. Trejo’s message wasn’t large, but it had a datafile linked to it. A message within the message.
Trejo, looking out from her screen, seemed older than a few weeks could justify. It was all in the tone of his skin and the paleness of his lips, though. His eyes were still as sharp and bright as ever, and his voice belonged to a man thirty years younger than he was. She wondered if he was taking stimulants.
“Colonel,” he said, looking into his camera. “I have reviewed your report, and . . . I think we can agree that could have gone better. We lost some good people on this, and you didn’t secure your target. But I’m not sure we came away exactly empty-handed.
“For what it’s worth, I would also have expected Nagata to put the girl someplace besides the gunship that the head of the underground was flying. But since she’s chosen to keep so many of her eggs in a single basket, certain opportunities may be open to us that wouldn’t have been otherwise.”
Tanaka scratched her bandages. All she felt was a little pressure. The itch didn’t subside at all. Trejo shifted in his chair and vanished. The image before her changed to a grainy visual telescopic view of a ship. It was hardly more than a dark shape against its own drive plume.
“I wanted to pass this along.” Trejo’s voice was calmer than she was. “It’s from the Derecho. Botton’s commanding it on a mission in Freehold system. Traffic analysis thinks they’ve still got the Storm hidden there, and he’s trying to flush it out. A ship made an unscheduled transit into the system in the time period your alert specified. It’s the right tonnage for the Rocinante, and the drive signature . . . Well, it doesn’t match, but it’s close enough that they could be running it dirty to throw us off. Thermally, it’s the same story. Close enough to be faked. And the silhouette is very close. It reports—”
Tanaka stopped the playback. Her heart was going fast, and she was trying hard not to grin. It would hurt like hell if she did, and maybe even dislodge some of the regrowth matrix. But oh, she wanted to.
Mugabo accepted her comm request as soon as she’d made it. “Colonel?”
“Resupply is going to have to wait,” she said. “We’re going to rendezvous with the Derecho in Freehold system. All deliberate speed.”
“Yes, Colonel,” Mugabo said. “I shall inform the navigator.” She dropped the connection and let herself smile until it hurt just a little, savoring the moment. She tabbed Trejo’s message back and started it playing again.
“。 . . silhouette is very close. It reports itself to be a survey ship on contract out of Auberon, and there’s a paper trail to support that. But Auberon system is so deeply infiltrated by the underground, I have to take that fact very, very lightly. I don’t know if this is a lead you’ll choose to follow, but it looks promising to me. And if it is Teresa Duarte’s ship, and if Teresa’s ship is James Holden and Naomi Nagata’s . . . Well, then I might have a strategy we can try.”
Tanaka leaned forward. There was something in Trejo’s voice that caught her. She didn’t know if it was regret or anticipation or something of both.
“Everything we’ve done with these people up to now has been less effective than I’d hoped. They’re smart, and worse than that, they’re fortunate. I know it sounds like superstition, but some people are just born lucky. I believe that. Regardless, I think there’s some value in changing our tactics. I’ve included a datafile for you to review.”