Cryptikon Far Freedom Part 2

by Warren Merkey

too. The missing person must be very important."

  Freddy had to remind himself that, as capable as he was at multitasking, he needed to give highest priority to the sensor signals. He wondered how humans coped with their thoughts, knowing they, too, could have more than one stream of thought at the same time.

  "Why aren't we starting to get any correlations with the navigation data from our lost ship?" Iggy complained. "We should be close enough."

  "Patience, Uncle Iggy," Jamie said. "You know we must go slowly and silently."

  "Don't tell me about slowly and silently! Phuti and I had to push that cryptikon all over a dark little ship, stopping every few meters to come back here and reset the connection. And we had to operate in vacuum half the time and in freefall all the time, to look for some kind of signal Direk couldn't describe very well. Then, when we found it, Direk joins us and gets all the credit for dumping the data to the Freedom!"

  "Well, remember the Titanic, Uncle Iggy," Jamie advised. "The Freedom is an even bigger target for being eaten by little jumpships."

  "If we had armaments we wouldn't need to go so slowly."

  "I'm not certain of that."

  "Are you taking your mother's side? I thought you were in favor of arming the Freedom."

  "The more you sit in this chair and let your mind look at all the possibilities, the more you think about the safety of ten thousand people. Are they safer with or without the armaments?"

  "They didn't stay on this mission because they wanted to be safe."

  "Perhaps they're enthralled by the romance of it and by the chance to meet the legendary father of the infamous Jamie Jones," Jamie said.

  "I think they want to fight!" Iggy argued. "Many are very upset over the atrocities the barbarians have committed. Every day another record from the lost ship becomes the subject of discussion. It's always a gruesome tragedy."

  "I think you want revenge, Iggy."

  "Those who killed Ana are long dead. I want to prevent such a thing from happening again."

  "Two pulsars with required frequencies," Freddy advised, not really wanting to interrupt, but he felt the data was statistically relevant.

  "These aren't the same ones we saw two hours ago?" Iggy asked.

  "The search pattern has brought them near us again," Freddy explained. "This pair does match frequencies better than any trio we've seen, and their sweeps intersect at a good angle."

  "Then where is the third pulsar? Damn! It's near the end of the watch and I'm tired. Put them in the tank. We'll look at them again."

  "Paint the sweep of their emissions, Freddy," Jamie said. "Let's pretend they're the right pulsars."

  Freddy made the holographic navigation tank in front of the captain's chair show two luminous disks representing the areas where the spinning stellar objects broadcast their energy eruptions. A bright line marked their intersection.

  "Let's assume there are not three pulsars but only two," Jamie said.

  "Why assume that?" Iggy asked. "And it doesn't give us a point of intersection, just a long line, because they're so damned far apart!"

  "It may be intentional, due to paranoia," Jamie said. "That's the feeling I got from their later journal entries. They had become actively hunted by the Fleet. They had other starlight-drive ships they had stolen or purchased, probably with hiding places for each. If the Fleet found one of those other ships the data would have confused them and at least delayed them finding their home base of operations."

  "Too bad encryption is no longer effective," Iggy said. "But it doesn't seem likely they would have lost a ship. And wiping all the data would have been... I forget how difficult that is to do! There are centuries of data safeguard protocols aimed at keeping careless humans from deleting stuff they think is useless!"

  "Setek-Ren did get captured once, and died as he was rescued," Freddy said. "They did lose a ship."

  "You read their journals?" Jamie asked. "All of them?" When Freddy nodded his reply, Jamie said, "I think you are too young for such violent subject matter, Freddy! Setek-Ren died?"

  "It was his journal, but many years into it he began referring to himself in the third person. Still, I'm sure it was himself he wrote about, even though he called himself The Torturer. Sammy wanted to know what the journals said, and I thought I would try to abridge them for him. Yes, I wish I had not read them. It made me... sick."

  "Alex and Setek died several times," Jamie said.

  "Yes," Freddy said. "They did. And Koji always rescued them and kept their bodies viable until Patrick Jenkins could restore them to life."

  They were all silent for several moments. Freddy wanted to return to the problem at hand. He was resolute in not activating another run of consciousness to analyze the journals. He thought he had learned much of what it meant to be like a human by reading the extensive library of classic fiction Mother possessed. As disturbing as some of the literature was, it was still fiction. The journals were real and not products of imagination. He had to stop thinking of these things, especially with his primary run of consciousness.

  "Okay," Jamie said. "The other markers. There should be three close binaries."

  "There are two," Freddy answered.

  "Are they near the intersection of the pulsar sweeps?"

  "Yes."

  "How do the four objects fit the location plot?"

  "Perfectly," Freddy replied, "except for the missing objects."

  "Form a triangle with the two binaries and the closest point to them on the pulsar intersection line," Jamie said. "Then jump to where the triangle meets the line."

  They jumped. They waited, watched, and listened.

  "It's noisy here," Freddy said. "We won't be detected except by active scanning."

  "Nor can we detect the Fleet," Iggy said.

  "Let's see what kind of objects we have in the plane of the triangle," Jamie said. "Plot a jump to a point about ten parsecs normal to the center of the triangle on one side of the triangle."

  Freddy communicated the jump instructions to the Freedom and Jamie initiated the jump.

  "I see nothing promising," Freddy reported. "I advise increased caution. It's possible we are looking at a Fleet navigation reference point. There is a trinary star system at the center of your triangle."

  "Display the Fleet navigation reference points we know from the journals," Iggy said. "Are there any in this volume of space?"

  "Just outside of the current view," Freddy replied, resizing the navigation tank to show six points. "They are all trinary star systems. The Fleet has a preference for the number three."

  "Those barbarians apparently do very little navigation," Iggy said. "They use known objects to make the longer jumps. I doubt they even take a peek with a preview gate before they jump."

  "The trinary system ten parsecs ahead is nicely located to be a crossroads to the six surrounding navigation points," Jamie said. "Why isn't it included in the data we downloaded from the lost ship?"

  "It might have been a good place for Alex's crew to observe traffic and perhaps listen to communications," Iggy suggested.

  "Let's take a look," Jamie said. "We can always jump right out of the galaxy if we need to. Plot a jump less than a light-year from the trinary."

  They jumped.

  "Still no obvious signs of the Fleet," Freddy said. "No navigation pings."

  "One more jump," Jamie said. "Go to Second Stage Alert. Jon needs to wake up for his shift, anyway. Let's jump to the gravitational center of the trinary."

  They jumped.

  "Close target!" Freddy called. "Too small to be spherical, but it is."

  "Jumpship dimensions!" Iggy warned. "Warm body! Unshielded jumpfield accumulator!"

  "We're too close!" Jamie declared. "It must have felt us! Give me cutting range, hull perimeter to perimeter plus twenty meters!"

  Freddy computed the numbers, delivered them to helm. He saw what Jamie wanted to do: intersect the jumpship with the Freedom's echo jump shell. Kill it. Freddy felt fear an
d excitement, and something that must be analogous to a surge of adrenaline. That he was a participant in the killing of other sentient beings also presented itself to his attention. He had to ignore such a distraction. He had to assume their own survival was at stake. "Ready!" Freddy reported.

  They took a peek with their small gate and Jamie made the Freedom jump.

  "Ping!" Freddy warned. Another vessel in the region had probed for them. "Source located."

  "Another jumpship," Jamie said. "Where is it? I lost it."

  "It jumped! Secondary ping scatter may paint it. There. Range plus twenty. It jumped to scan for the first jumpship."

  Jamie jumped the Freedom into the second Fleet ship, cutting it apart.

  "Yes!" Iggy shouted. "Two kills! How many more?"

  "At least one," Jamie said. "They like the number three. Go to Third Stage Alert. Ready Marines for possible action. Jumping at random."

  "I want the pieces of those jumpships!" Iggy declared.

  "There's one more out there," Jamie said. "We'll sit here until we can see it."

  "I can see where it was," Freddy said. "The ping scatter also illuminated a dense accumulation of Oort-type interstellar mass that we may want to inspect."

  "A hiding place?" Iggy wondered aloud.

  Zakiya arrived on the bridge and Horss followed her by a few seconds. Jamie briefed them.

  "Do you take command?" Jamie asked Horss.

  "Keep your hand on the helm," Horss said. He could see by her blank stare that she was intent on the data in her ocular shiplink. Freddy was linked in to help her if she needed him. "I'll wait until we know we can change bridge crews safely. Let me get into the data stream."

  "I've located a third