Part II. 'Departure'

Kei and Yuri were at their apartment at Damocles Tower. Various items of lingerie and dresses were tossed across chairs and beds while they was packing their travel bags.
"Stupid job," Kei stated in a bored tone. "Are there at least decent warm beaches on Trofar?"
Yuri smiled. "Yes. I checked."
"That's one point in favor of this job."
"I don't wish to be rude, but if we are chasing pirates, we won't have time to visit the beach."
"Aww... I still say there must be some other explanation... The last pirate we dealt with was some poor SOB in an old miner's ship, preying on other poor SOBs."
"Let's wait till we see for ourselves," Yuri observed, checking her electronic tools and stack of memory chips. "Don't forget Shasti."
"Yeah, and Lord Robin. How long till we get in?"
"Long. A day to clear Elenore, and a week to get into Trofar."
"Why is that?" Kei complained, as she dithered between a laser pistol and a microplasma gun. In the end, she packed them both.
"Eleven planets and two asteroid belts."
"Damn. Got anything for killing time?"
"Will a D&D set be good enough?"
"Forget it. Every time I see it now, I remember Tarc," Kei sighed.
"Really?" Yuri smirked. "You felt differently when Tarc was with us. Then you were willing to play..."
"Shut up or I'll clobber you."
"Ohh… I'm so scared," Yuri straightened, a devilish smile on her lips.
"Wipe that grin off your face!" Kei hissed.
"I'm terrrifiied..."
In the next moment, Kei flung her half-packed bag at Yuri.
She dodged it easily, snatched her own up, and jumped over the bed. At the doors, she turned to face her partner, as they opened automatically. "I will see you on board, dear. After you get packed again." Before Kei could catch up with her, she was off down the corridor, running toward the elevators and laughing.
"Rrrr…Come back here, you!" Kei's roar echoed after her.

A small red-painted starship was departing from Elenore. Anyone who happened to be close enough could read Lovely Angels in golden letters on its aft. Below them, there was also a large black area where the paint had been burnt off.
Inside the ship, emotions were at a boil.
"When I get my hands on the slimeball who painted that on our ship..." Kei cursed.
"Calm down."
"No! What a buster!!"
"It wasn't necessary to burn it off with a hand laser."
"The hell it wasn't! Not for a nanosecond will I fly under the name 'Dirty Pair'!!"
"We could have had it painted over as soon as we got to the UG space factory."
"Think of all those looks and wisecracks we'd get! No way! I'm gonna dredge that creep up from hell when we get back!!!" Kei fumed.
Yuri sighed. While she'd been waiting for Kei, she had already released a tracking program into the spaceport's computer. It would monitor all communications and, by their return, might possibly give them the name of the offender. She too was angry, but she would be ready to forgive if it turned out to be some good-looking boy. Kei was another story.

After four hours, Kei calmed down, mostly because she didn't have anything to do, while Yuri was working with the ship's computer. And the stop at the Gibraltar space dock was very short - too short to get on a shuttle and jump back to planetary port...
"How much longer?" Kei asked from her bed in a chamber aft.
"Another eighteen hours."
"I'm bored..."
"Find some job to do," Yuri raised her head from the screen. "Perchance, you could run a diagnostic on Angel's weapons."
"Already done."
"Then go read a book..."
Kei yawned her response to that suggestion.
Yuri heaved a sigh and returned to her program.
"What are you doing?" Kei asked, suddenly slipping up behind her.
"Some of the latest hacker stuff. Got this from Mary Grinsted."
"The TC who arrested that hacker team last week?"
Yuri nodded.
"Wasn't all their stuff classified 'top secret' and locked away?"
Another nod.
"Got anything interesting?"
"This is an AI program that's capable of persuading ordinary computers that it's a human using a brain-link, rather than that it's a piece of software."
"And what's so great about that?"
Now it was Yuri's turn to raise her eyebrows.
Kei groaned. "Okay, okay. I don't understand and I don't care. How much longer..."
"Seventeen hours, forty-nine minutes."
"Gawwd, I'm so bored..."

It was a nuisance, the long distances that needed to be traveled using ordinary drives in order to get clear of the gravity wells of planets and stars, before hyperjump could be engaged safely. And it needed to be done at slower-than-light speeds.
There were already experimental devices that allowed the gravity well effect to be nullified, but they were still in development and the few tests that had been made had ended in disasters. The murders of a few of the major specialists at the hands of criminals who wanted such devices for themselves didn't aid progress either.

Kei awoke and stretched. They were still in the Elenore system, but its sun was now only a small star on the screen, one like so many others.
She looked over at her partner's place. It was messy, but currently empty.
"Yuri!"
"I'm at the control station."
Kei stood up, tossed a short halat? over her top, and walked out from the sleeping chamber.
Yuri was linked into Angel's main computer.
"How much longer?"
"Three hours."
"Ugh, another three damn boring hours... Want to do some combat sparring?" Kei asked lazily, looking through the windows out at the stars.
"You'll break something." Yuri replied absently, concentrating on her task.
"You saying I'm clumsy?" Kei's gaze snapped over to her.
"I mean there's no room for it."
"You're just afraid of me."
"Aha!"
"What?" Kei asked.
"Remember what Goulet told us at the briefing?"
"About what?"
"What were you doing there, Kei?" Yuri turned to her partner. "Daydreaming about that boy you picked up at Sammy's Bar last week?"
"And if I was? You left by yourself!"
Yuri's look turned colder.
"You..."
"What were you starting to say about the briefing?" Kei quickly changed the subject.
"The Trofarians are concealing something about their mystery."
"Maybe they themselves are the mystery?"
"If so, they're crazy to ask us to investigate it. I've pulled up the WWWA archive files about all cases of missing ships in that region. The first reports go as far back as twenty years."
"What?" Kei leaned on her partner's shoulder. Yuri gave a command and data started scrolling along a screen.
"They've hushed this up for twenty years?"
"Seems so."
"I think I'm gonna need the biggest gun I can carry to sweep that place clean. Jesus Christ, twenty years! Wait a sec - it says there that the colony itself was only founded twenty-nine years ago!"
"Right. Guess what the first ship to go missing was?"
Kei blanched.
"You mean... a colonist transport?" she whispered. "That's... They had... several thousand people on board... That's mass murder..."
"Ten thousand, it was a small one. But that's not the main item of interest." Yuri added calmly. "The report was deleted from UG databases. When I compared their listing with the WWWA's, I found a few other missing reports. It's fortunate that "C.C." was duplicating everything."

Kei was washed and refreshed when she returned to the bridge. Yuri was still at the computer.
"Jump in 50 minutes" appeared on one of the screens. As Kei watched, it changed to "Jump in 49 minutes".
"How much info have you dug up?" Kei asked.
"Want to hear the total so far?" Yuri got to her feet, pulling the link from the socket behind her ear.
"Over a hundred?"
"So far, two hundred eighty-seven ships. And I haven't finished yet."
Kei opened her mouth, then closed it.
"I don't get it. How they can hide all that?!"
"Most of the reports were deleted from the databanks. Without them, the figures were much less alarming. On the reports that remained, 'natural' explanations were appended. Outbursts of stellar activity back when that cargo ship had the old-style screens. Errors in navigation. And so on."
"This is starting to stink worse and worse."
"Hmph, speaking of smells, I think I'd better get to the shower. Keep an eye on the bridge, though I doubt anything will happen before we reach Trofar."
Yuri exited, leaving Kei alone with her worries.
The line on the screen read "Jump in 45 minutes".