By this time, the local Boros agent was quite willing to list the Elias Madero as missing. Even so, it took Solis another two days to locate someone higher in the Boros administration who could confirm not only the existence, but the location of the shortcut.

"There's an off odor about this whole thing," he said to Esmay. "Normally I'd expect reluctance to admit to using a dangerous route, but there's something more. Or less . . . I'm not sure. Now-how would you plot a course to this place?"

It was not, Esmay discovered, a simple matter. The shortest route would have been to reverse what the trader's course would have been, but Fleet charts did not list any insertion data for the outbound jump point.

"Besides," Solis said, "if we go in that way, we'll cross any trail they made. We need to come in the way they did."

"But that'll take much longer."

Solis shrugged, a gesture which did nothing to mitigate the tension of his expression. "Whatever happened has already happened. My guess is that it happened days before we got to Bezaire. So what matters now is to find out what happened, in as much detail as possible. That means approaching the system with all due caution."

All due caution meant spending twenty-three days jumping from Bezaire to Podj to Corian, and from there to the shortcut jump points. Esmay set up each course segment, and each time Solis approved.

Shrike eased its way into the system with what Esmay hoped would be low relative velocity. So it proved . . . and as scan steadied, she could see that the system held no present traffic.

"But over here, Lieutenant, there's some kind of mess-I can't tell if it's distortion from interaction of the two jump points or leftover stuff from ships. If it's ships, it's more than one." The senior scan tech pointed to the display.

"Huh." Esmay looked at the scan herself; ripples and blurs obscured what should have been a steady starfield. "What's the range?"

"Impossible to say right now, Lieutenant. We don't know how large it is, so we can't get a range .

. . but to me, the texture looks closer to this than the other jump point." The scan tech glanced at the captain.

"We'll continue on course for two hours, then see what parallax gives us," Solis said.

In two hours, the area of distorted scan was hardly larger.

"Well, Lieutenant," Solis said, "we can risk a micro-jump, run in a few light-seconds, and see what happens . . . or we can sneak up on it. What's your analysis of the relative risk?"

Esmay pointed to the scan display. "Sir . . . this knot in the grav readings ought to be the second jump point, and if it is, it hasn't shifted. Nor has this one. Which suggests that we're definitely looking at transit residue . . . and therefore, unless it's an entire Benignity battle fleet, it's not that big. So . . . it's close, but not within a light minute-we could jump in 15 second increments, and have a safe margin."

"If it's only transit residue, you're right. If it's also debris-it's been expanding from its source-and we don't know the location of its source-at some velocity we also don't know, for at least-I'd say thirty days. Worst-case: Elias Madero was carrying the missing weapons, and for some reason they all detonated . . . how much debris, in how big a volume, are we talking about?"

"I don't know, sir," Esmay said, feeding numbers into the calc subunit as fast as she could.

"Nor do I, and that's why we'll jump in one second bursts, with the main shields on full."

Solis brought Shrike toward the anomaly in repeated small jumps. At twenty-one light-seconds in, the scan was markedly different. Now they could see clearly that more than one ship had been involved.

"Let's just sit here and look at this," Solis said. On insystem drive, Shrike was hardly sitting still, but it would still take her hours to reach the distortion. "Do we have any indication at all of an original track?"

"Very attenuated, sir, but this might be the merchanter's original trace-" Scan switched filters and enhancement to pick out, in pale green, a faint, widened trail. "If we take the centerline of that, we get appearance at the incoming jump point, and progress consistent with an insystem drive of its class up to this point-" He pointed to the confusion of stronger traces. "But there's a more recent trace, much smaller."

"So . . . assume for the moment that we have found the merchanter's incoming trace, and it's a perfectly straightforward course toward the second jump point, just as they'd done before. There's no bobble indicating slowdown until the mess?"

"None, Captain, but the traces are so old I can't be sure."

"Right. But I'm assuming that for now. She comes in, she heads for her outbound jump, and . . .

runs into a bunch of other ships. Trouble, no doubt. Do we have any older traces?"

"No, and from this angle it'd be hard to see 'em."

"Fine, we'll go up and take a look there." Solis put his finger on the chart. "A thirty-two-second jump to these coordinates. I want to be well outside the zone of distortion."

Scan blurred and steadied again. "Now," Solis said, "I want to find out where those other ships came from, and in what order."

Esmay found this tedious, but knew better than to say so. Surely the fastest way to find out what had happened to the Elias Madero would be to go in and look. The system was empty-what could be wrong with that?

The scan tech raised his hand. "Captain, the merchanter-or the ship that made the incoming trace-left by the second jump point."

"What!"

"Yes, sir. Look here. There's five outbound traces: three maybe patrol-size craft, one very

small-my guess is it's whatever little ship overlay the merchanter's trace on the way in-and the big one, the merchanter itself."

"Then why hasn't it shown up?" Solis muttered.

"They . . . raiders don't steal entire ships, do they?" Esmay asked.

"Not . . . often. But . . . if she was carrying weapons . . . they might. Let's think this through. We have one large ship-we're assuming for now it was the Boros ship-coming in, running into something, and then leaving by the second jump point. One little ship, sometime later, following it in and out-"

"Excuse me, Captain, but the little ship's departure trace is the same age as the others. Within a few minutes, anyway."

"So . . . they had arranged a cleanup? Someone to follow behind and make sure the merchanter went through?" Solis shook his head. "But then we still don't know who the other three ships were.

Which way they came in. Any other traces?"

More color shifts on the scan monitor, as the tech cycled through all the enhancement possibilities. Suddenly three pale blue tracks showed up, angling from the second jump point to make a wide circuit and end up positioned along the merchanter's track.

"There they are, sir. Came in by number two . . . and set up an ambush, looks like."

"So I see. Good job, Quin. Well, that seems clear enough. Someone knew the merchanter was coming, and wanted it; someone came in and set up either an ambush or a rendezvous." He grinned at Esmay.

"Now, Lieutenant, we'll go in and see what evidence we can pick up."

The first evidence was a scatter of what was clearly debris.

"So the ship blew?" Esmay asked. "Or was blown?"

"No-not enough debris." The scan tech pointed out figures along the side of the screen. "I've been keeping track of the estimated total mass of all fragments, and it's less than would fit into one of the five cargo holds of the freighter we're hunting. Moreover, if it was from an explosion, it would be much more scattered by now. This was dumped from something with very low relative vee, perhaps given just a little push in addition. My guess is that someone captured it and took it."

She reset one of the fine-grain scans. "Let's see if we can find any bodies."

Hour after hour, then day after day, the painstaking work went on. The SAR ship located and identified one piece of debris after another, all the while plotting location and vector on a 3-D display. Hundreds, thousands, of items . . . and then, the bodies they had known must be there, that they had both hoped and feared to find. They gathered the bodies into one of the vacuum bays, tagging them with numbers, the order in which they were retrieved. Men, women . . . the men in shipsuits, with their names stenciled on back and chest, as expected; the women . . .

"Their tongues have been cut out," the medic said. "And they're naked." Esmay could hear the strain in his voice. "I can't tell, out here, if it was done before or after death."

"I never heard of the Bloodhorde making it into this sector," someone said.

"This isn't Bloodhorde work . . . they mutilate males as well, and this isn't their typical mutilation anyway."