Ruler of Naught by Sherwood Smith, Dave Trowbridge

approach had let the
fivespace well created by the trojan attractor pull them into the system.
    “No alerts on local widecasts. No links found,” reported
Ammant at Communications. The local authorities were either not alarmed
or playing it safe.
    Ng glanced at the sigma plot, reading the Tenno glyphs
overlaid on it with the facility born of twenty-five years’ practice. The
asteroid belt sunward of their position was indicated on the plot by a series
of faint green ring segments—k-zones—separated by the Kirkwood gaps where the
periodic interaction with Wolakota Six swept away the debris left over from the
system’s formation. The rings’ patterns, and various glyphs, indicated probable
density, composition, and other tactically important information. A few yellow
dots marked the position of major asteroids.
    The plot had one lobe flaring the red of maximum
probability, about fifteen light-minutes away, concentrated in the ecliptic in
the closest k-zone to Six. Nothing there we didn’t already know—the average
calc time for commercial traffic is about thirty minutes or so—probably more
given the fivespace conditions in this stellar neighborhood.
    Commercial traffic at the leading trojan was ships passing
through the system, who couldn’t skip locally any great distance without
further compromising their safety on the next leg of their fivespace journey.
That’d give their hypothetical Rifters—no doubt hiding behind a chunk of rock
or ice, as usual—sufficient time intercept their prey.
    It also meant that the Grozniy now had something less
than fifteen minutes to find the intruders—if the beacon’s destruction had
indeed been deliberate.
    Rom-Sanchez tapped his console and a countdown windowed up
in a corner of the main screen, starting at ten minutes. Good! He was
settling into his role as acting captain, and pushing the crew. His next order
was crisp.
    “Navigation, take us in to within five light-seconds of the
attractor point. Siglnt, run a scan for debris and radiation. Extrapolate time
of destruction if you find traces.”
    The plot shifted as the fiveskip burped. One glyph indicated
the presence of a Fleet tactical transponder nearby. Rom-Sanchez tapped at his
console, highlighting the tacponder.
    “SigInt, pop that tacponder and update Tactical immediately
for threat assessment. Check its monitor status.”
    Ng saw the impact, minor as it was, of the unnecessary last
order: a slight hitch in the otherwise smooth flow of activity on the bridge.
There was a brief silence on the bridge as Ensign Wychyrski began the scan. A
window from Communications popped up on Ng’s console.
    “No data from transponder,” she said. “Last update plus four
months, no new threats reported, monitor mode off. Latest Wolakota data plus
seven months, Pulwaiya tacponder.” That had been on their way out-octant.
    “Tactical, assessment?”
    “Worst case, Eichelly’s back, sine lege . Four Alphas
in his fleet, three of them third-tranche.” It took a minimum of three
destroyers to take on a battlecruiser, so the possibility they were facing a
renegade Writ-holder with four of them made Eichelly a credible threat, even
though one of his destroyers was more than 400 years old.
    Rom-Sanchez’s eyes flicked towards Ng, and this time he
hesitated a bit longer— too long—but then his shoulders straightened. “Very
well. Take us to threat-level two.”
    By the book, so far. “AyKay. Ship status to
threat-level two.” Rom-Sanchez betrayed mingled relief and desperation as Ng
fell into bridge alert cadence and echoed his order, followed by the other
stations’ secondary confirmations: relief that she hadn’t countermanded him,
desperation that she wasn’t taking the con back.
    I’m not taking you off the hook yet. They still
didn’t have confirmation of hostile activity, and tactically, it was impossible
that more than one destroyer would be able to take a shot at them at the
beginning of an engagement, given