Intellivore - Diane Duane [7]
“They’re not,” Ileen said. “There’s piracy out this way, a fair amount of it. Not just raiders who come looking for undefended newly settled planets, or lightly armed colony ships in transit, but more of your grave robbers, Jean-Luc—all kinds of opportunists, drawn by all these sketchy legends of vacated planets left full of ancient treasures ripe for the looting. So—” Ileen stretched, smiled. “To ‘pull our weight,’ Marignano does a fair amount of convoy work in this sector—escorting trading ships coming through, colony vessels, you name it.”
“Must be interesting,” Clif said.
Ileen gave him a look suggesting what he could do with his definition of interesting. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to break off a line of investigation into something really interesting to go escort some goddamn warp-driven shopping center. That’s why our course keeps sprouting those little curly bits, here and there.” She waved at the screen. “However, doing that work enables me to do my real work, so I’m satisfied.”
“I take it, though,” said Picard, “that things have been getting too hot for a pure science vessel’s armaments to handle.”
Ileen looked rueful. “Afraid so. We’ve been here long enough to make some judgments about how many ships ‘ought’ to go missing in a given period. A baseline estimate, anyway. Well, over the past year I’ve been noticing that baseline edging up a little, and then over the last three months, we lost three ships, two merchants and a colonization vessel, bang, bang, bang, one after the other. That made me twitchy, and I had words with Starfleet about it. Too many ships were becoming statistics … and I’d sooner we didn’t become one, too. Something else started, though, which may have tipped them over the edge as regards doing something—though I would have thought the ship disappearances would have been enough. I mentioned that there’s a fair amount of archaeological work going on out this way. There are usually about ten digs going on at any one time, and keeping an eye on them all has always been difficult. Well, in the past six months, four digs, all very remote from one another, have been attacked and plundered. Sometimes with loss of life: the dig at Sixteen-sixteen Ophiuchi Six was not only stripped bare, but the raiders killed Saeo Uristilaen.”
“Heavens about us,” Clif said softly.
“Ileen, I hadn’t heard,” Picard said softly. “And after all that groundbreaking work on the Infarret …”
“He’ll never finish it now,” Ileen said sadly.
“Do they have any idea who did this?”
“We. No. We got the distress call from the survivors, all right, but by the time we got there, the trail was cold. Ion-trail residues in the area had been wiped out by the local solar wind—the damn star’s too active for its own good anyway, which may have also been the reason why the Infarret aren’t still around. We did some cursory searching, but we knew it would do no good, and finally, so did Starfleet. I just wish they would have realized this increase of local piracy was a problem before Uristilaen had to convince them of it by dying.”
The three captains looked grimly at one another. All of us, Picard thought, have been in situations where we warned Starfleet that something bad was about to happen, and they wouldn’t believe us until it did, and then it was too late, the damage done.
“So,” Ileen said. “We have to finish the investigation surrounding the Infarret dig. It’ll take a while to get over there from way over here, of course. But meantime, we three ships are to begin aggressively patrolling this sector of space, visiting all local digs and making it plain to anyone out there who’s watching that the level of protection has been stepped up considerably. Starfleet puts a lot of credence in the idea that the simple added presence of your two ships here will cut in on the number of attacks on both archaeological digs and transient ships.”
Clif nodded. “We’ll be patrolling