“Do you have any idea why she would have taken the ship? Or where she would have gone with it?”
“On that score, your guess is as good as mine. You did know her more intimately than any of us.”
The barb landed, just as it was supposed to. If it were not for his genuine concern for Jerri, Atlas would have told the captain where to stick her mission, a most un-Kitari impulse. The human had rubbed off on him in more ways than one.
“I should start the hunt,” he said, wanting nothing more than to leave Captain Janus’s presence. This was her fault in every tangible way, besides the one in which Jerri actually stole the ship.
“You should.”
His search craft was prepared, stocked, and humming on the launch pad. Atlas boarded it, launched the craft, and set the sensors to scan. They lit up immediately with an ion trail from the Audacity, though it was dissipating fast. It would have been easier to follow it if chase had been given immediately instead of a cover-up being perpetrated instead.
He set a course for the last observable point. An Authority ship being piloted by a single crew would have drawn attention from many quarters. Atlas had no doubt Jerri would have made a scene wherever she ended up. And that’s why the Authority didn’t want to send a full fleet after their missing ship. He was supposed to keep this quiet, though he did not like his chances. Where Jerri was concerned, nothing was quiet for long.
“Anything to report, Atlas?”
“Not yet,” Atlas replied for the dozenth time that day. “I have scanned and questioned every nearby station and located many of the ships who passed through this region during the time Tessil was traveling through it. There have been no sightings of the Audacity.”
“That’s not possible.”
But it was possible. And not only was it possible, it was reality. There was no way for her to have bribed every single human and alien in the region. As far as anybody could tell, she’d simply disappeared.
“We are deploying bounty hunters with shoot to kill orders,” command said.
“Thanks for the notification, command. I will continue the search.”
“Your orders have also been amended. Destroy the mutineer.”
Atlas turned the ship’s speakers off. He did not need to hear any more bad news.
There was absolutely no sign of the Audacity. It seemed to have disappeared entirely. He knew Jerri was capable of piloting the craft through deep, dangerous space, potentially outside plotted boundaries.
“Please don’t have done something even more stupid than you already did,” he murmured to himself.
It was taking him some time to come to terms with what she had already done. Stealing a ship was one of those things that was talked about on very drunken nights. Once in a while someone would go AWOL with a shuttle and that would be considered a scandal. This was possibly the worst thing anybody in the Authority had ever done within the Authority. He was impressed in a way he did not want to be.
The speakers were off, and yet somehow a new signal managed to break through. That’s because it wasn’t coming through on the command frequency. It was coming through on the war band, which was never off, due to people generally wanting to know if war things were happening.
Atlas took the call.
“Atlas!” The face of the Dinavri lord appeared on his console screen. It was the last call Atlas expected to be taking, from the last entity in the universe he wanted it to be. Sithren could not help looking cocky, it was the way his face was constructed. Or perhaps one day the wind changed and it stayed that way.
“Lord Sithren. To what do I owe the honor?”
“We have someone you’re looking for, I believe.”
A mixture of relief and horror washed through him. “You captured Jerri?”
“Not precisely.”
“But you have her.”
“Yes. We have her.”
Another surge of relief smashed its way through his chest. He had to work to keep from slumping down in his chair from the sheer release of it.
Sithren was keeping something back from Atlas, and making it quite obvious.
“Come and get her, Kitari,” Sithren said. “We can talk when you return.”
Sithren ended the call, leaving Atlas to marvel at the brazen madness of it all. It made sense that she was in Dinavri space. It was the one part of space no Authority ship would dare follow. He was suddenly astounded that he had not considered the possibility before. Of course, he had not considered the possibility because it was pure insanity for any human female to enter Dinavri space alone. Practically suicide. Then again, so was stealing an Authority ship.
A week or so earlier
Jerri had the very best of ideas, quickly following her very worst of ideas. She’d realized almost immediately that stealing the whole Audacity was a huge mistake on her part. But it wasn’t like a candy bar from a store. She couldn’t just put it back and hope nobody noticed. They were going to come after her, and they were going to come hard. The fact that she didn’t detect any pursuit right away probably only spoke to their state of shock that she’d had the nerve to do it at all. And, of course, their desire to cover things up. The Authority loved a fucking cover-up.