Nimisha's Ship

The nearest naval unit, a destroyer on a routine mission, caught another of the pulses and the two warnings reached the Naval Base at Dalonaga.

"Send those coordinates to the plot," the officer of the watch said, wasting no time to get to the transparent three-dimensional sphere that was used during manoeuvres.(Wars were few in this century.) The sphere could be adjusted to any given area of space and display it three-dimensionally. It also pinpointed the present position of every naval unit in that area. Of which there were currently none of these when the appropriate section appeared on the sector and with it the position of the buoy, a tiny blinking red asterisk.

"The gods wept!" cried the jig. "We had a routine signal about a trial run for a Rondymense yacht out that way. What could have happened? I'll have to bother the captain with this."

"I'd've killed you if you hadn't," was the response as the captain swung onto the bridge, his cheek bearing crease marks from his interrupted sleep. "Crappit! The ID's for that long-distance yacht Vegan Fleet's keen on. Now what the frag could have happened to it? What have we got that's fast enough to get out there and see, Addison?" he asked the duty officer.

"Sir, there's nothing close enough, sir," Addison replied, depressed. Then he brightened as he added, "The base at Coyne III has one of the Mark Twos that came out of the Rondymense Yard."

"Send a Flash Override to Coyne Ill's base commander, requiring him to send the Mark Two with all possible speed to these coordinates." The captain's finger was shaking just a little as he tapped the plot and the winking light. "The Mark Two can be Net Control and do a standard search pattern until we can get more units out there to help. No one's going to hang about when they see who sent that Mayday."

Rubbing his face as if that would assist clearer insight into the emergency, the captain increased the magnification of the targeted zone and began to scratch his skull in perplexity. It was a sparsely occupied area, which is why it was used for testing new ships, and occasionally for naval manoeuvres. Could the Rondymense ship have blundered into a missile left over from the last Games? He shook his head at that unlikelihood. If the test ship were an advance on the design of the Mark 2, it would have sensors capable of detecting a missile. After ail, the pilot had had time to shoot off a Mayday beacon, so he hadn't landed on the missile to set it off. For which mischance the odds would be in gigabytes.

The Mark 2 from Coyne III was the first to arrive, its captain having had the distinct pleasure of an excuse to redline the engines. It was joined by half a dozen other vessels, four naval, one commercial, and one luxury yacht that had altered course from a hunting preserve to answer what might be a much more exciting adventure for its First Family occupants. All participated in the standard 3-D search pattern, with the Mark 2, Swallow, acting as NETCOS.

The Swallow, commanded by a senior lieutenant on his first assignment, had followed all the recommended search procedures, starting with a long-range scan for a life pod, for debris, for traces of an ion trail. He did find that. Or, rather, traces of the ship's reentry into normal space.

The emissions were clean enough, what one would expect of a brand-new ship. But there wasn't so much as a cinder of debris or a pellet of melted metal to be found. Hailed by the incoming naval ships, one with an admiral aboard, Swallow handed over the NET-COS to the flagship while he continued on his search pattern. By now all the ships had moved well beyond the beacon. The one thing he should have tried to find was any discontinuity in the space near the beacon, but at that point in time no one had thought to check for a wormhole.

Fretting during the long sleepless days it took Caleb Rustin to reach the beacon, even redlining the Mark 4 he "borrowed" from the Rondymense Ship Yard, he had time to check for reports on any anomalies, of any kind, reported in that sector of space.

He groaned as the report divulged that eighteen ships had been reported "last heard from" in this general area. The latest one had been fifteen standard years previously, an exploration ship, the Poolbeg, FSPS 9K66E, ten aboard, Captain Panados Querine commanding. The ship and crew had been deemed officially lost in space seven years ago. The other ships listed as missing ranged back through the nearly two hundred and fifty years of space history.

No debris of any of the missing ships had ever been found, even at the Moon Base of the notorious Ebevyr Pirates who had terrorised commercial shipping for three decades over a hundred years before. However, many previously "missing" ships, or fragments thereof, including descendants of crews and passengers reduced to slavery by the pirates, were found and accounted for.

When Caleb reported his findings to Admiral Gollanch on his flagship, the admiral immediately set the more powerful search units of his database to sift possibilities.

"Wormhole?" Caleb suggested, wincing.

The admiral looked pensive. "None ever reported at those coordinates, Rustin."

"Possibly why this particular area is one of the more deserted sectors?"