"What? What's up?" screamed Telegrand, as he burst through the hatchway, stumbling onto the bridge. Startled Mus of assorted sizes and ranks leapt nimbly out of the way. Bridget sat aghast with eyes glued to the monitor, trembling with shining fright.
"Collision alert!" yelled a mouse. They braced against bulkheads and consoles, for a crash that never came.
After breathless, sweat-rank eternities during which few heartbeats actually passed, Telegrand rose from the kneespace in front of Bridget's station. She half-smiled down at Tele, with a shrug that said she could absolutely do without the puzzlement as to why they were all still alive. Then, as the tension broke, Bridget threw back her head and moaned, pressing the negalion's face between her legs. Telegrand laughed, too. Though realizing it was an impolite thing to do with one's muzzle full.
"What the hell happened?"
"Unidentified pursuer, Captain," Primus reported crisply. "Executive Officer Bridget noticed the visual distortion in the starfield aft, the trail of probability engines."
Tele nodded, turned to Bridget. And remarked she had stayed at her place, hadn't ducked for cover. As if she'd known something different? Her flight harness, securely fastening her to the seat, escaped his attention.
"What did you make of it, Bridget?" Not that Tele didn't trust the mice. He'd just known the ligna feline much longer, had developed a working comfort in her observations, if not her judgments.
She cocked her head, stuck out an impudent tongue.
"Probability drive, ayah." Non-committal.
"Did you do a scan?"
"Can't," Bridget stated. "It's just a minor disturbance in reality - the distortion - not real matter yet. At least the pursuer hasn't popped out of hyperspace long enough to scan us, either."
She suddenly looked troubled. "At least, I don't think so..."
Tele nodded. It didn't make him feel any safer, though. "Have we gotten any signal from them? Contact?"
"No, Captain. Shall I open a hailing frequency?" The speaker was a mus of obviously tropical origins.
"That's alright, belay please. Maybe they're not hostile at all." He didn't quite buy that, himself. But, still a smuggler at heart, Telegrand mistrusted opening the dialog with an unknown adversary, giving away even that first point of tactical advantage. "But why the collision alarm?"
Bridget blushed. Primus held firm, chest up, chin out, ready to face a commendation or a firing squad with equal aplomb.
"It was me, Tele," Bridget confessed, sheepishly. "I got scared, lost it. We can't see the thing, just the distortion it leaves against the background of stars." She fitted a demonstration to her words, and instantly the monitor displayed the aftward starfield, flecks and pinpoints of light receding to the infinite parallax of memory in their wake. "There! You can just make it out..." She pointed with one paw to a spot where a standing ripple seemed to hang in space, like a bulge of glass in a cheap windowpane. As stars passed into this region of corruption, they appeared to deform, to wiggle out of their eternal, doubtless courses - then once again take up the self-conscious rectitude of things celestial when they had passed beyond that iniquitous place.
Telegrand studied the monitor, watching stars fall to the temptation of the probability field, be redeemed by distance and the grace of the inverse square rule. It was with an heisenberg difficulty that one tried to scan such a place in space. Technically, you could be assured it existed, but never quite certain just where.
"Any estimate of size?" he followed.
Bridget shuddered. "Sorry about that part. See, we can't bounce anything off it, like radio waves or laser, for range. So it could be very big, but an awfully long way off; or small, and at a middling distance."
Tele nodded. Basic engineering. "But why the alarms then?"
Bridget didn't blush this time, and a trail of cold ran to the tip of his tail. "Because! It looked like this - like it does now - when I first spotted it. Then it looked like..." With an arch of a paw, she replayed the image. The distortion suddenly filled the screen.
Telegrand started back suddenly from the sight. The instantaneousness was as a physical blow. The thing out there had not only straddled the barrier between normal- and hyper-space, but had effectively, through yet another dimension, managed to get from there to here without crossing the intervening matrix of space. The captain whistled nis admiration.
"What's the probability field's activity now? Is it still following?"
Primus spoke up. "Aye, Captain. No repeat of the attempt to ram - if that's what it was..." He glanced in Bridget's direction, indicatively.
She caught the mus' maneuvering, replied with a predator's eager scowl. Bring it on, Tele thought. That's what Bridget's look seemed to be saying.
But she continued evenly, professionally. "So here's the rub. It's really fast, whatever it is. If we can outrun it - if we have to - it had better not be a long chase. But for anything known, to be that fast, it would have to have to be huge... and so it can't be fast."
There was a sound from Primus, cough or scoff. Telegrand turned on him.
"First Officer, do you have anything to add to the Exec's analysis?" He was cold, yet unappraising, amused as only a disinterested lion can be.
"No sir, Captain," the mus snapped. "I concur wholly with Officer Bridget's conclusion. As she notes, for the known tradeoff of size and speed, the attack...," he almost tittered at this point. "The near collision, it just didn't happen."
Bridget realized what he meant, turned silently back to her instruments and controls. Tele knew she wasn't hurt, really. Or hoped that she wasn't. He had thought he could read her, once. But that was so long ago, back before other loves had rent space itself between them, an ever expanding universe of unspoken doubts and self-recriminations.
Yet discipline demanded he not upbraid Primus too severely. The mus was, fortunately or unfortunately, only doing his job.
The captain wished he might not do it so well, at least when there were feelings to get in the way.
"First Officer," Telegrand ruled, "please monitor the anomaly - that may not exist - fursonally, until further notice. Don't take your eyes off it, or your paws off the alarm. It's too important to trust to anyfur else. If it tries to do something, we will need every moment we can get."
"Aye, Captain." No trace of sulk in the reply. Professional. Tele wondered for a moment if the sarcasm had been lost on Primus.
Bridget glanced up as the negalion moved into her zone of privacy. She didn't seem to have perceived the deliberate slight against the mus either; her needy eyes sought only reassurance for herself. She had not been this disturbed, off her game, even during the close call, Telegrand noted.
"Just like old times, huh, B?" Telegrand's smile was wistful, a kind-hearted dissemblance from the anxiety he felt. He knew the last time he and Bridget had been in a spot like this, unluckily pursued by what they thought was an Enforcer's vessel on the return leg of their last cheese run. His glance fell automatically, a summer's apple onto an English down, to Bridget's paw. She would carry the reminder of his folly with her to the end of her days.
"Old times..." Bridget seemed to be in genuine remembrance, delving for gold in the sediment of archived years. Sometimes it was hard for Telegrand to watch her like that.
He needed more privacy than the bridge afforded, but loathed to leave the Sherpa in Mus paws. And certainly at a time like this. For not only was there an unknown somefur trailing them, and Bridget not her usually reliable (if somewhat odd) self, but Tele was also sensing invisible currents in the political ductwork, odors he found unpleasant. He needed to consult with her as much as she needed his own attention.
"Executive Officer, with me to my ca... the Command Suite."
As one, the Mus officers stopped their work, turned to stare. Tele was sure they'd figured he was invading their requisitioned quarters. And smirked. But when Primus moved to center deck, the captain's pointing paw was even less discrete.
"Remain at your station, First Officer. Secundus, you have the conn." A surprised meep behind him from the communications officer almost brought a smile to the lion's black muzzle.
"Aye, Captain."
"Aye, Captain."
When they were alone together, behind the security hatch of the engineering space, Bridget almost came to him, almost sought his arms. Yet their eyes had met, and things beyond speech passed between. Strength, trust, but things - other things not so welcome, too, impossible to articulate without a lifetime between them.
Nothing Telegrand hadn't resigned himself to years ago.
"Bridget, are you ok?" She broke the gaze at his asking, he saw.
"Of course I'm ok. Why wouldn't I be?" Tele suspected she was telling the truth, relating her heart as she believed it was.
"Well, I'm not. Something's out there!"
She shook her head, jaw lax and wagging slightly.
"You heard Primus. He's right. Nothing capable of moving that fast through hyperspace could move through hyperspace that fast. Impossible!"
"But you played it back on the monitor!"
Bridget was silent.
"Look, I believe you. There's something out there, and we've got to pay attention." She nodded, bucked up a bit at Tele's smile. "I can even prove it, I think."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah! We'll show that cheese-eating..." He broke off, suddenly unprepared at a place he wanted to approach with more caution. Division was only too easy to sow, and civil hostility worse than outright mutiny. Tele assessed the situation coolly before broaching the topic again.
"Bridget, what do you think of Primus? Professionally, I mean." Tele watched carefully. A smirk would have been expected. Yet all he saw was anxiety.
"I don't know, Tele. I can work with him, if that's what you're getting at. He knows so much more than me."
The negalion really then did want to take her into his arms, risk demeaning her even. He knew she was sensitive to her limits, the limitations Nature and Accident, twin sisters to Death, had imposed upon Bridget especially. She, the mate he could never have, his strength; she, still such a child.
"Bridget, you're my Exec. We've been through it all together. A mus isn't going to come between us. Nothing is! Look, I need you. I need your eyes and your wits. And I need your opinion here. Can I trust Primus? What does your gut tell you?"
Bridget dropped her head, studied that reflection of reality that lives within, the mirror of honesty. And nodded, with a sigh.
"I think... he's young. Ambitious. He'll come around. He's a bright fur, too, and he'll make a top notch commander someday."
If he doesn't kill you first, Tele, she wanted to add. But Bridget knew silly fears when she heard them, especially when they were her very own. And knew that she needed to pull herself together. I've just had a bad morning, that's all, she rationalized. One too many scares on watch.
Tele nodded.
"Good, Bridget. Best Cat, I'd give you a promotion if you weren't already Exec." He settled for a hug instead. Telegrand was proud of her, too. She'd been offered the noose for Primus' neck, had demurred at the same. I don't deserve you, he thought; I never have.
"You could appoint yourself Admiral, leave a bit of upward mobility for me," she giggled.
Smiling, he showed her to the hatch, followed her tail. In a moment, they were on the bridge.
"I have the conn," the captain announced, with quiet authority. He stood tall, realizing uncounted beady eyes on him, as Bridget laid a gentle paw on the Secundus' shoulder, relieving her. The mouse slid easily to the side, off the console seat. She never once took her eyes from the monitor screen, and Telegrand wondered just whether that was a sign, and for good or ill, of the sturdy mouse's loyalty.
"We know," he projected above the musculine heads, "that whatever is out there - if there's something out there - following us, it must be using a probability drive. And a big one." He waited for contradiction. In the strictest of senses, they didn't know that for a fact, only assumed based on known technology. About unknown technology, however...
"Now with a probability drive, there's always leakage. Always. That's why we see the starfield behind us distorted. That's why we saw the approach of the thing, and recorded it on the monitor - even if the disturbance wasn't actually that near us. With probability, things aren't sure and predictable. It's like a coin," he said, taking one from the pocket of his tunic. The profile of the Vice-Consiliar adorned the face (how Tele hated her furstyle, let alone her politics); a symbolic tail graced the reverse.
Why anyfur would think of putting a tail on valuta, he couldn't imagine. At least they'd had the good taste to use a stylized tail.
"Now if I toss this coin," he continued, making eye-contact about, " -barring the instantaneous reversal of cosmic expansion and ensuing reshuffle of the laws of physics - the coin will land heads-up, or tails-up. The chances of one or the other are extremely close to even, fifty-fifty. Let's say I did that very thing, flipped, and got a tails. Ok, now what are the chances that when I toss the coin again, I should get heads instead this time?" Telegrand scanned faces, actually spotted a nod.
"Nope. The odds are still fifty-fifty. It's totally conceivable that I could get five tails in a row. The laws of the universe aren't violated by that. Of course, the gamers and oddsmakers don't want you to know that: they'd like you to believe that the cosmos has to balance somehow, to make a heads more likely the second time. But it doesn't work like that. Each toss of the coin is separate and independent." He paused, seeking to touch drama, find a vein to infuse hope and focus and shared perspective into his crew. "And that's how we find who's chasing us."
Puzzlement, not excitement, washed the faces of the Mus, and Bridget, too. He was losing them, Tele knew.
"Like this: I'm going to toss the coin, and do it again and again. Now we know that it could come up all tails. But we know that's not at all likely, and we know how to ask the computer to calculate the actual chances." A couple of listeners nodded, many more pairs of glazed eyes yet remained.
"Secundus, you keep score." Telegrand tossed the coin, catching it secretly in a paw. It felt good to be moving, pressing forward now, and the audience responded in kind. "If there is a massive probability engine sitting out there beyond the edge of our sensors, we should still see the effects here. If we see fifty-fifty, or something very close, we'll know we're alone. If not..." He let the conclusion hang in the air. "Ten tosses, that should be enough."
Nods of recognition - or that alternative: blind faith - passed about the bridge. Secundus drew close, bowed Tele to proceed.
Her Honor appeared as the coin stopped upon the deck.
Her Honor appeared again. Two in a row is not unlikely, Secundus reminded herself.
Her Honor appeared, a probabilistic encore.
The fourth toss was a tails. Secundus noted it, calculated odds. Seventy-five percent of the time, it just shouldn't be happening like that. Too soon to tell, though.
Then, to everyfur's astonishment, tails hit - three times in a row!
The count now even. Secundus scowled severely, knowing that the test was beyond the halfway point, approaching criticality. It was down to the acid. Telegrand, too, wondered - and asked himself if he wasn't doing this to vindicate Bridget, show up Primus. At the present score of fifty-fifty, Primus' explanation was probably right.
Her Honor's countenance.
Her Honor the Vice-Conciliar, en revoir.
It was now three to five. The distribution was leaning, and the next toss would tell.
Then the one after that would prove or disprove the very confidence itself they could have in their experiment, Secundus calculated, puzzling at what that might mean. She glanced at Bridget, far from unaware of what was transpiring here.
Foxhead. Definite trend.
Bridget sighed, didn't know if it were better to have been wrong in this case. The present result meant they were definitely being pursued, by furson or fursons unknown. She glanced from the corner of her eye, caught Primus unaware of being watched. It didn't look to her as if he'd realized that he'd been bested by the odds.
Heads.
Seven heads, three tails. Margin enough to call, Secundus realized. She looked to the monitor screen.
"There's something out there," the Second Officer whispered.
It was hard to tell if the tension level in the compartment dropped or rose, Bridget acknowledged. They all feel it, realize the same. Better that Tele and I should have been humiliated, she added.
And when Telegrand looked up, it was directly into the face of Primus the Mus.
"Respects, Captain... But your experiment is flawed." He seized the coin from the negalion, flipped it in quick succession. Four tails in a row.
"What are you doing?" challenged Secundus. Challenge - yes, Bridget thought. Telegrand only heard it as query.
"It's simple," the chief mouse replied. "The captain ordained ten tosses; no more, no less. He got a seven-three split. Indicative. But the cosmos isn't obliged to accept the captain's orders! In fact, by simply tossing four more times, the score evens out: seven-seven. There is no basis in fact to stop at ten tosses. And therefore no basis to believe there exists a local probability distortion caused by a nearby star engine."
Telegrand clamped his jaw. Bridget could not restrain herself.
"How dare you! How dare you call the captain's method and conclusion into question! You... you... rude furson!" She'd come a tongue's breadth from saying "rodent".
Secundus stared at Primus, apparently reserving judgment.
And Primus... smirked.
Bridget's fists were clenched, Telegrand saw. Time to diffuse, restore the situation. Be captain again. He only hoped he hadn't lost as badly, in the big picture, as it seemed right then.
"Bridget, Secundus... he's right. There's no basis, I guess, for what I just did." He sat back on haunches, rolled his head, freeing up tension from uses he now saw as unimportant.
Bridget nodded, acquiescing silently. Secundus' brow remained furrowed. They most carefully did not look at Primus.
Telegrand shook his head.
"I'll be in my cabin if anyfur wants me."
Bridget watched the hatch seal behind him. And then she lost control.
Fangs bared, she snatched Primus by the tail, lifting him clear of the floor. His paw shot to the light saber at his side, but temporarily disoriented by the sudden reorientation, he couldn't clear it from his belt. Bridget's rock maple fist closed painfully over the mouse's, and the weapon was jerked away, sent spinning. Primus landed right-ways up, but a meter above the deck, on the opposite wall. He obliged gravity by sliding the rest of the way, himself.
"Listen close, Primus," Bridget whispered through clenched fangs, kneeling close to his apparent aid. "I don't like you. And I don't trust you. And I'm not for one minute taking my eye off you, you stinking cheese-rind bastard. I'm the Exec here, and part of that duty is discipline. Your discipline. And discipline's going to be something you'll be hearing about a whole lot, these days. Even if you Mus happen to own this..."
"Executive Officer: stop this." It was Secundus. She was eye to eye with kneeling Bridget, firm and convicted in her course. "This must stop. Let him up."
It was then that it hit Bridget. She'd succeeded in losing more for her side than Tele and his carnival coin toss. How she'd figured that Secundus would side with her and the captain, turn against one of her own, Bridget at that moment didn't know. But the damage was done. She was sure every mus on the bridge would be staring at her when she rose.
"Back to your stations," she said quietly, careful to rake the crew with her gaze. Careful, too, to make eye contact with nofur. She almost added: please.
Her heart knew. Knew what she'd lost them, in her instant of anger.
Control of the Sherpa.
Telegrand lay on top of his bunk, feeling strangely like he'd been sent there. By whom? The answer was obvious. He thought it over, worked it out, and still he couldn't tell when things had gone wrong, when Primus had gained the upper hand. Surely it hadn't been today. The subtle challenges had predated this by weeks. Maybe it started with looks, glances from the mouse from even the first day after embarkation.
He did not enjoy this part of captaincy, judging the geist of the crew, gauging the political currents beneath the surface, looking out for hidden effects and agendas and alliances. Piloting was what he liked best: driving the ship, exploring the galaxy. It would suit him so well, he mused, to be able to spend the rest of his life searching for just the perfect planet, seeing the sights, going where nofur had gone before.
And, sadly, that future wasn't to be his. For with the collapse of cheese trafficking, one of the deals that had funded his meteoric rise to the top had imploded scandalously. The Dawn Treader was gone, and the days of fat credit balances, history. Not that Sherpa was anything to complain about. And tooling through space with Bridget, on errands for whomever had the credits to contract them, wasn't a bad life at all. But at times like this, what he'd lost came back to him more real than what he'd worked so hard to rebuild.
There was a knock at the hatch. The engineering room was on a security protocol, and such thing as a doorbell, useless. Tele rose, triggered the mechanism by paw.
"It's Stuart," announced the mouse, balancing a large and heavy tray.
Telegrand nodded, stepped aside. He would have helped with the tray, at least to carry it to the erstwhile workbench that had been promoted to mess table and captain's desk. But he'd tried that once, and Stuart had become depressed and despondent. Crazy mice, thought Tele.
Stuart. The only mus with a real name, Telegrand mused. Imagine calling the First Officer "Primus", and the Second Officer, "Secundus" - which were, apparently, their given names. Stuart. Telegrand liked that. Until he realized what the littlest mouse's job description was often titled.
The mus laid the tea tray carefully on the floor, unable to reach the table surface with the full load. Telegrand returned to his berth, not exceedingly interested in refreshment, but unwilling to hurt Stuart with a repeat of the sort of numb-sheathed performance he'd just given on the bridge.
"You know," remarked Stuart casually, as he lifted the heavy teapot, depositing it with a clunk on the deck beside the tray. "I liked your coin trick. You don't mind if I call if that, do ya? All that hyper-dimension stuff just makes my tail knot."
The negalion began to regret that he hadn't refused tea service at the door, turned Stuart back towards the galley.
"I was thinkin', ya know, like what went wrong wasn't that you didn't flip enough coins in your test, like Preemie said. I think what happened is that ya didn't do enough tests."
Telegrand couldn't tell if despair or anger was more appropriate. All he did know is that he wasn't in the mood to be taught statistics by his fursonal yeoman.
"So, like, instead of flipping ten times, you flip ten times, like, ten times! Now that's not the same as flipping one hundred times, cause, like, you wouldn't want to mix up the results between sets of ten, the tests. But I bet if you did it that way, you'd find exactly the results you were looking for."
Tele was silent. Damn. The little mouse had the answer.
"Stuart? How did you know about that?" The captain sat up, footpaws edging towards the deck.
"Oh, me? Oh, I just pick up a thing or two, here and there. I get to listen to all sorts of stuff, being what my job is and all. Plus, after you explained what you were looking for up on the bridge, I figured it had to work out something like that. Order of integration, or some such. And so then I went to the galley, and tried it out."
Telegrand was on knees beside the little mouse now. "And what was the result, Stuart? What did you get when you tried it?" His eagerness was hard to restrain.
"Well, I tried it, and again just to be sure. But, well, I was getting nine-and-one splits on average."
"Yes!" Telegrand slapped a paw on the deck. And would have hugged the little mus, if he hadn't been afraid of giving him a complex. That was it, then. If Stuart was telling the truth, then there really was a probability-drive starship on their tail!
Stuart struggled the tray, now lightened by the water-weight of tea, onto the workbench. Telegrand watched, considering where the new information put him. Not much different a place than where he'd been before, Tele concluded. Sure, he had Stuart's experiment, and the correct interpretation to show why his own attempt failed. But what had been lost was so much more than apparatus and hypothesis. He'd lost the confidence of the crew. It would take more than a savant room steward to bring light to this predicament.
The workbench was simply too high for Stuart to manage. Telegrand, against better judgment, and perhaps in misplaced gratitude for the support that the mus had shown, was going to go help with tea, maybe invite Stuart to share a cup. It was at that point that Stuart seized the teapot by the bail handle at the top, and swung it around his furson. Faster and faster he spun, the pot d' the' lifting by centrifugal force. With a grunt and a thud, he hefted it onto the table. Stuart smiled hugely, then, surreptitiously checking to see if any of the tea had been spilled.
Tele howled with joy, catching the mouse up in his arms.
"You did it! You did it! You showed me the way to catch the other starship!" He was out of the cabin, en route to the bridge, before Stuart realized he'd been left standing on the table, one paw in the butter, the other on the scones.