Read The Fleet 01 for Free Online Page B

Yuriko’s also, though they had been born some twenty years apart.
    Did they realise, back at Fleet Command, how grave a burden they were laying on her mind when they included her in the search party? Well, what a stupid question! Yes, of course! All such data must be instantly available from their enormous memory banks. Therefore she was being put to a test, to see whether emotional commitment would disturb her judgment during a long period alone in space. In a sense that was flattering, for it meant they had their eyes on her with a view to further promotion. Only the coolest-headed, only those who proved most resilient in the face of stress, could make it to the highest echelons of Fleet Command.
    But my own brother ... !
    Sighing, she turned her attention back to immediate tasks.

    Of the fates that might have overtaken Chrysanthemum, the likeliest was an accident when dropping out of FTL drive. Not even the fastest computers could reconcile all the differences between ordinary space and that weird zone beyond the speed of light. Now and then, even in the volume where the Fleet held sway, something went wrong: the mass of a miniature black hole, left over from the beginning of time, might distort the readings that indicated where to bring the ship back into the normal universe, or a fragment of undetectable antimatter might turn out to be adrift at the arrival point, which reacted with the hull or some other part of the ship and saturated its circuitry with wild particles and sleeting radiation ...
    But of late there had been rumours of another kind of threat, and most often in just that zone Chrysanthemum had traded through. (She was growing used to thinking of the ship in past tense—and her brother.) It was suspected that some unknown predatory species might be on the move, attacking human ships and even the most distant human planetary settlements. So far there were only the rumours to go by, or hints and clues at best, but a few seemed solid enough for the computers that ceaselessly ran simulations of all events throughout the volume of known space to signal low-grade warnings: fifteen, eighteen, maybe twenty percent credibility. Recently, though, the incremental rate had slowed to zero.
    Four chances in five, therefore, that this was just another foolish bout of panic, triggered by a handful of accidents that happened to occur in the same region. When there were hundreds of them every year, most of them more nuisance than disaster, and primarily attributable to poor maintenance or radiation damage in computer circuits, what were the chances for even fifty ships, darting hither and yon through such immensity, of tracing the lost vessel, its distress beacon radiating at the dilatory speed of light? There had been no news of her courier projectiles! Every craft aspace carried a stock of miniature FTL message-bearers designed to home in automatically on the nearest Fleet command post, or the ship’s base. But if any of Chrysanthemum’s had shown up, the searchers had not been told.
    Thinking of CPs—
    Too late. The Nag’s harsh tones were assailing her ears, reminding her that it was past time for her to dispatch another of her own courier projectiles, the last but two, in order to report her status and position. She was strictly enjoined not to continue the search past the expenditure of the last but one, the last being reserved for ultimate emergencies. And indeed by now she was growing weary and resigned. She was looking forward to returning to Port—horrible though it might be objectively. At least she was assured of human company back there, amid the crackling of the energy weapons that defended its perimeter. One day they might even cure the stink that always leaked, molecule by molecule, through its protective screens …
    So …
    She authorised the ship to copy her accumulated data into the missile and send it on its way. Then she resumed her habitual but most likely futile review of the known facts about