Corporal Steiner, her number two on C Watch, came up to the platform, pulled a chair close, and sat beside her.

"Well? How did it go?"

"You want some coffee?" Bach asked him. When he nodded, she pressed a button in the arm of her chair. "Bring two coffees to the Watch Commander's station. Wait a minute... bring a pot, and two mugs." She put her feet down and turned to face him.

"He did figure out there had to be a human aboard."

Steiner frowned. "You must have given him a clue."

"Well, I mentioned the airlock angle."

"See? He'd never have seen it without that."

"All right. Call it a draw."

"So then what did our leader want to do?"

Bach had to laugh. Hoeffer was unable to find his left testicle without a copy of Gray's Anatomy.

"He came to a quick decision. We had to send a ship out there at once, find the survivors and bring them to New Dresden with all possible speed."

"And then you reminded him..."

"...that no ship had been allowed to get within five kilometers of Tango Charlie for thirty years. That even our probe had to be small, slow, and careful to operate in the vicinity, and that if it crossed the line it would be destroyed, too. He was all set to call the Oberluftwaffe headquarters and ask for a cruiser. I pointed out that A, we already had a robot cruiser on station under the reciprocal trade agreement with Allgemein Fernsehen Gesellschaft: B, that it was perfectly capable of defeating Tango Charlie without any more help; but C, any battle like that would kill whoever was on Charlie; but that in any case, D, even if a ship could get to Charlie there was a good reason for not doing so."

Emil Steiner winced, pretending pain in the head.

"Anna, Anna, you should never list things to him like that, and if you do, you should never get to point D."

"Why not?"

"Because you're lecturing him. If you have to make a speech like that, make it a set of options, which I'm sure you've already seen, sir, but which I will list for you, sir, to get all our ducks in a row. Sir."

Bach grimaced, knowing he was right. She was too impatient.

The coffee arrived, and while they poured and took the first sips, she looked around the big monitoring room. This is where impatience gets you.

In some ways, it could have been a lot worse. It looked like a good job. Though only a somewhat senior Recruit/Apprentice Bach was in command of thirty other R/A's on her watch, and had the rank of Corporal. The working conditions were good: clean, high-tech surroundings, low job stress, the opportunity to command, however fleetingly. Even the coffee was good.

But it was a dead-end, and everyone knew it. It was a job many rookies held for a year or two before being moved on to more important and prestigious assignments: part of a routine career. When a R/A stayed in the monitoring room for five years, even as a watch commander, someone was sending her a message. Bach understood the message, had realized the problem long ago. But she couldn't seem to do anything about it. Her personality was too abrasive for routine promotions.

Sooner or later she angered her commanding officers in one way or another. She was far too good for anything overtly negative to appear in her yearly evaluations. But there were ways such reports could be written, good things left un-said, a lack of excitement on the part of the reporting officer...

all things that added up to stagnation.

So here she was in Navigational Tracking, not really a police function at all, but something the New Dresden Police Department had handled for a hundred years and would probably handle for a hundred more.

It was a necessary job. So is garbage collection. But it was not what she had signed up for, ten years ago.

Ten years! God, it sounded like a long time. Any of the skilled guilds were hard to get into, but the average apprenticeship in New Dresden was six years.

She put down her coffee cup and picked up a hand mike.

"Tango Charlie, this is Foxtrot Romeo. Do you read?"

She listened, and heard only background hiss. Her troops were trying every available channel with the same message, but this one had been the main channel back when TC-38 had been a going concern.

"Tango Charlie, this is Foxtrot Romeo. Come in, please."

Again, nothing.

Steiner put his cup close to hers, and leaned back in his chair.

"So did he remember what the reason was? Why we can't approach?"

"He did, eventually. His first step was to slap a top-priority security rating on the whole affair, and he was confident the government would back him up."

"We got that part. The alert came through about twenty minutes ago."

"I figured it wouldn't do any harm to let him send it. He needed to do something. And it's what I would have done."

"It's what you did, as soon as the pictures came in."

"You know I don't have the authority for that."

"Anna, when you get that look in your eye and say, 'If one of you bastards breathes a word of this to anyone, I will cut out your tongue and eat it for breakfast,'... well, people listen."

"Did I say that?"

"Your very words."

"No wonder they all love me so much."

She brooded on that for a while, until T/A3 Klosinski hurried up the steps to her office.

"Corporal Bach, we've finally seen something," he said.

Bach looked at the big semicircle of flat television screens, over three hundred of them, on the wall facing her desk. Below the screens were the members of her watch, each at a desk/console, each with a dozen smaller screens to monitor. Most of the large screens displayed the usual data from the millions of objects monitored by NavTrack radar, cameras, and computers. But fully a quarter of them now showed curved, empty corridors where nothing moved, or equally lifeless rooms. In some of them skeletons could be seen.

The three of them faced the largest screen on Bach's desk, and unconsciously leaned a little closer as a picture started to form. At first it was just streaks of color. Klosinski consulted a datapad on his wrist.

"This is from camera 14/P/delta. It's on the Promenade Deck. Most of that deck was a sort of PX, with shopping areas, theaters, clubs, so forth. But one sector had VIP suites, for when people visited the station. This one's just outside the Presidential Suite."

"What's wrong with the picture?"

Klosinski sighed.

"Same thing wrong with all of them. The cameras are old. We've got about five percent of them in some sort of working order, which is a miracle. The Charlie computer is fighting us for every one."

"I figured it would."

"In just a minute... there! Did you see it?"

All Bach could see was a stretch of corridor, maybe a little fancier than some of the views already up on the wall, but not what Bach thought of as VIP. She peered at it, but nothing changed.

"No, nothing's going to happen now. This is a tape. We got it when the camera first came on." He fiddled with his data pad, and the screen resumed its multi-colored static. "I rewound it. Watch the door on the left."

This time Klosinski stopped the tape on the first recognizable image on the screen.

"This is someone's leg," he said, pointing. "And this is the tail of a dog."

Bach studied it. The leg was bare, and so was the foot. It could be seen from just below the knee.

"That looks like a Sheltie's tail," she said.

"We thought so, too."

"What about the foot?"

"Look at the door," Steiner said. "In relation to the door, the leg looks kind of small."

"You're right," Bach said. A child? she wondered. "Okay. Watch this one around the clock. I suppose if there was a camera in that room, you'd have told me about it."

"I guess VIP's don't like to be watched."

"Then carry on as you were. Activate every camera you can, and tape them all. I've got to take this to Hoeffer."