[Black Fleet Crisis] - 02(54)
Just then a sweet-toned signal sounded from the console, startling Akanah. “What is it? What’s that?”
“Nothing to worry about,” Luke said as he leaned forward. “Incoming hypercomm file transmission. A re port on the Star Morning. I requested it from Coruscant while you were napping.”
Her eyes flashed angrily. “I asked you to wait until we’d jumped.”
“You also asked me to use my judgment,” Luke said. “We can’t do a quick jump-and-go if we’re sitting out there somewhere waiting for a report to come in.
And I thought this report might have information we’d want in hand before we commit to Atzerri.”
“We’re already committed to Atzerri,” she said stiffly. “That’s where the scribing at Teyr told us to go.”
“I want to look at the report,” Luke said. “The way I see it, the more information we have, the better.”
“All it can do is mislead us,” Akanah said. “I told you that we leave no trail an outsider can follow.”
Another, low-pitched tone signaled the end of the transmission.
“Then I’ll count on you to keep me from getting lost,” Luke said, bringing up the secondary display panel. “You can look at this or not—but I have to. I never have liked making decisions in the dark.”
Luke had anticipated two possible reasons for the delay in the report’s arrival—and either a very thin or a very thick file, depending on which was to blame.
It was a thick file, almost overwhelming with detail. Star Morning, a.k. a. Mandarin, a.k.a. Pilgrim, a.k.a. Congere, had had a long history before passing into the hands of the Fallanassi and a busy history since.
Built by the Koqus Design Syndic as a variation on an even older Republic Seinar design, it was classed as a short-route liner despite the sleeper configuration of its fifty-eight-passenger main cabin. At forty-four meters long and twenty-eight meters across the spade-shaped twin-deck main hull, it was readily capable of planetary landings at even the smallest spaceports and a good pilot might even try a dirt-field touchdown and get away with it. The hyperdrive was a rather ordinary Block 1, with dual fusion generators. But the ion engines, a pair of SoroSuub Viper 40s, would have been adequate for a ship with a keel mass half again greater.
With legs like that, she could give the Falcon a run for her money, Luke thought.
More interesting than the specifications, though, was confirmation that Star Morning was still the property of Kell Hath Corporation of Teyr, and had been so continuously for the past fifteen years. The port call list for that period ran to more than two hundred entries, with no single port appearing more than three times, and most entries unique.
You’ve tramped around, Luke mused as he skimmed the list. I haven’t even heard of most of these places.
The list was spotty, obviously incomplete. There were many stretches of a month or longer—well more than the ship’s rated stand-alone endurance—with no port calls listed. But a footnote explained that early records from some Alliance worlds were unavailable, records from worlds heavily involved in the war were incomplete or had been destroyed, and some recently acquired records hadn’t yet been processed.
“THE ABSENCE OF DATA SHOULD NOT IN AND OF ITSELF BE CONSIDERED INDICATIVE OF PROSCRIBED TRAVEL OR ILLEGAL ACTIVITIES,” read the disclaimer at the top of the port call list.
That didn’t stop Luke from wondering and speculating.
The longest gap, a few days short of a year, started just three months after the name Mandarin had been burned off the hull. The gap began weeks before the Battle of Endor and continued through the worst of the fighting of the last year of the war against the Empire.
According to the record in front of Luke, Star Morning had left Motexx fully loaded, heading for Gowdawl under a charter license. The liner wasn’t seen again until she turned up, cabin and cargo holds empty, at Arat Fraca some three hundred days later.
All things considered, that was a good time for an unarmed liner to lie up in port or another safe haven. But where had she gone? Motexx and Arat Fraca lay nearly two sectors apart, separated not only by thousands of light-years, but also by the unnavigable Black Nebula in Parfadi, with its twin supermassive neutron stars. And what had happened to the passengers from Motexx?
There was no record that Star Morning had ever berthed at Gowdawl.
Another port conspicuous by its absence was Atzerri. Star Morning’s first destination after Teyr had been Darepp. In the weeks that followed, it wandered erratically toward the Rim, stopping at colony worlds named 23 Mere, Yisgga, New Polokia, Fwiis, and Bab-badod before turning back toward the heart of the galaxy and, in time, its appointment at Motexx. As best Luke could determine with the Adventurer’s navicom, the closest Star Morning had come to Atzerri was en route to Fwiismbut without enough unaccounted time for it to have made a 150-light-year side trip.