Raising Caine - eARC by Charles E. Gannon Page B

The pilot of the lead fuel barge was a rather annoying perfectionist, her many minute corrections accumulating into noticeable delays.
    “No, Ms. Ho is right on schedule. The difficulty is with Deal Two.”
    “Piloting errors?”
    “No, sir. Mr. Vindar reports that the starboard fuel transfer umbilicus seems loose. He has been taking extra care attaching and detaching from the skimming drogues. He fears that any imprecision during those maneuvers may torque the mating rings and tear the umbilicus free of Deal Two.”
    Jorge nodded, checked the feed from the long-range camera that was tracking Deal Two. The tanker-tender, shaped like a bus half-transformed into a lifting body, would have to initiate a fuel-costly burn in order to keep its rendezvous with one of the Arbitrage ’s four smaller, flatter skimmers. The skimmers were remote-operated vehicles designed to move deep into a gas giant’s exosphere and lower a drogue into the predominantly hydrogen soup below, drawing it up via pulsed electromagnetic tractoring. Any delay in transferring the harvested hydrogen meant a delay in them returning to their next run, and so on and so forth, causing the logistical dominoes to fall ever further and faster.
    “No,” Jorge decided. “We’re cutting our losses. Bring Deal Two back now. Inform Deal One that she is to finish her current fuel transfer from skimmer three and follow Deal Two back to the barn.”
    “Sir, that will seriously impact our projected refueling time.”
    Jorge nodded. “Agreed, but tell me: if we lose one drogue’s load, how much will our mission be impacted?”
    Ayana returned his nod. “Yes, sir. You are correct: the time it would take to replace the umbilical would be worse.”
    Piet shook his head. “Much worse. I’m not even sure we have a spare umbilical in stores.”
    Jorge stared at the deck, was suddenly struck by a mental image of the pale, jaundiced gas giant looming far beneath his feet. “And CoDevCo managed to blank much of that data before Arbitrage was impounded for use as a military auxiliary.”
    Ayana looked at Velho out of the corner of her eye. “Kozakowski might know.”
    Yes, indeed he might, Jorge allowed, but I hate having that man within ten meters of me. Aloud: “Kozakowski might know, but I’m not sure he’d tell the truth.”
    “So what’s new?” Piet asked sourly.
    Jorge smiled. “My point exactly. Mr. Kozakowski’s loyalty is to the Colonial Development Combine—”
    “—which makes him a traitor,” Piet supplied.
    “—and he has not been forthcoming, despite being granted immunity from prosecution.”
    Ayana had finished sending the new orders to Deal One and Deal Two. “What exactly did he do, more than any of the other executives, that helped the invaders?”
    Jorge shrugged. “I am not sure. Any specific charges were suppressed by the time the Auxiliary Re-crewing Command forwarded his dossier to me.” But there was scuttlebutt, as there always is between captains, military and civilian alike. And I would not be at all surprised if the rumors are true: that Kozakowski had been a CoDevCo liaison to, and factotum for, the Arat Kur, and maybe even the Ktor. Although it was hard to see how a human would have come to serve the Ktor, who were reputedly ice-worms that traveled about in environmental tanks that resembled oversized water-heaters on treads.
    Kozakowski had been CoDevCo’s master aboard (but not captain of) the Arbitrage when she was intercepted by a Russlavic Federation cruiser, so it was quite probable that he knew if spare fuel transfer umbilicals were in the ships’ stores. But still—
    Piet Brackman jutted his prominent chin toward the ventral view monitor: the ever-approaching rim of the gas giant seemed to be fading away, being consumed by the blackness of space itself. “Approaching the terminator, Captain.”
    “Ten minutes to loss of lascom and line of sight back to the fleet assets near planet two,” Tagawa added.
    “Very