The answer, it turned out, was "yes and no".
I got to Jenny before they did, surely enough. The spaceport was half pressurized with various mixes of air, and half open to the liquid environment. The portion of the mission ship crew - definitely tribunal, they had the uniforms and everything - assigned to bringing Jenny on board were in the former area.
Myself, I'd suited up once again and docked down near the latter. The tribunal's investigators were known to be relentless in their pursuit of those who they believed had information, but they didn't know much about the Last Great Race or its people. For instance, the simple concept that suborbital flights for beings which breathed water might just disembark on the level of the spaceport with an atmosphere never occurred to them.
It was still a gamble; I'd asked her if she had brought her land-suit, and she may have taken that as an indication that I was expecting to find her up top. The shuttle would arrive here first, though, so I'd at least get a chance to intercept her.
Even ignorant about local customs as they were, the investigators were unlikely to not notice the ship once it docked, and they'd be quick to correct their mistake. I had a very short window of opportunity. Thankfully, if there's anything Jenny's species can do well, it's swim. They were adapted to it, after all. The idea that Jenny would get away was a comforting one, the fact that it would be quite a bit more difficult for myself to get out less so.
The suborbital docked and an announcement came over the public address system that it had arrived, and its next stop would be somewhere on the other side of the world. My mind kept a running tally of how long it had been since that announcement. My soon to be pursuers would have to go back to their ship and suit up, which would take a while. The suborbital passengers still had to disembark, which would also take a while. Personally, I hate being in situations where I've only got a certain amount of time to get something done, there's a number of things which have to happen before that can take place, and I have absolutely no control over it.
"(1) Alan, didn't expect to see you on this floor! (2) Good God, what now? (3) Let's get moving."
I let her know that I agreed wholeheartedly with her 'get the hell out of dodge' attitude and started leading her back to her ship.
"Attention all traveler, will Jenny the Amazing Research Squid please prepare for suiting and come to the atmospheric deck."
The PA sounded and everyone in the terminal turned to look at Jenny. There was a moment's pause where the chatter of other minds could not be heard, which is something of an oddity among her kind. It's almost never quiet. Then, having apparently come to a collective decision on one of the levels that I can't hear, they all turned and started heading toward my ship. At the moment, I wasn't too interested in asking questions though I was likely to do so later. Right now, I had to get out of here.
"(1) Everyone here's interested in seeing us succeed, mainly because of the way our visitors upstairs seem to be trying to throw their weight around. The announcer was relaying the message under duress, and he wanted to make sure we knew it. (2) You can always count on us to tweak the arrogant. It's just so much fun! (3) I'm in so much trouble right now. No reason not to keep going!"
Apparently it wasn't that the announcement channel was filtering out everything but first-level thought, but rather muting everything else that was translatable to the outside world. The Last Great Race apparently had quite a few tricks up their sleeve.
I relayed, via the suit's miniature panel, instructions to the ship's computer to flood the cargo compartment. I then relayed, via the translator and speaker in my suit, this fact to Jenny. She smiled - or the equivalent for her species - and followed the half of the school which immediately split apart to head for the outside. The other half paced me on the way to the docking ring where I'd first emerged. The announcer repeated his initial call, and by the sudden increase in my escort's pace I gathered that whatever subtext I couldn't hear indicated that the investigators were getting less and less patient.
I boarded my ship and my cohorts turned around quickly and sped back down the corridor. They hadn't said a word the entire time, at least not one on a level my translator was set up to interpret. Given the subtle hum in the air, they were no doubt quite loud amongst themselves.
The airlock cycled the water out and the air in, and I could finally get out of the clunky pressure suit. My first act was to run to the pilot's seat and get on the local comm to the cargo bay.
"(1) Made it in, Alan. Let me know when I need to prepare for takeoff. (2) My pressure suit's diagnostic seems okay, maybe I can get moving soon. (3) That was entirely too close."
My head was starting to ache with the effort of keeping up Jenny's translation. I dialed the translator back to just the first layer and hoped I wouldn't miss anything. I then told her that takeoff would be the instant I sat down, which was as I was talking to her.
We took off.
The mission ship took off after us.
Powering up in such a hurry destroyed any semblance of stealth that I'd managed to cobble together, but my ship was likely to be far more maneuverable than theirs. I'd already switched from fully stealthed to going fully offensive, at least as far as sensors go. The investigators would be seeing hundreds of images of my ship, their targeting systems would be utterly useless, and if I was especially on top of my game, their vending machines would take their money but not dispense drinks. Unfortunately for me and Jenny, I was not on top of my game, at all. It wasn't my fault, really, except I hadn't exactly considered the fact that the mission ships might have been updated in the past three decades. My countermeasures had been updated, sure, but the tribunal could afford quite a bit more than I could, and they could acquire it legally to boot. They knew all the tricks, too. The instant I lit off, they powered up and followed suit. I strongly suspect they left their contact people who'd come out to intercept Jenny behind when they did so. Obviously, as a ship they had no idea had existed previous to now had lit off, and coincidentally the people they were chasing had disappeared, they had a more important target. It never occurred to them that the launch might be a diversion. I certainly wish it had occurred to me.
Instead, I was in far too much of a rush to get out. Rather, I had to rely on a backup plan I had, wherein I ran like hell. My ship was more maneuverable, as I'd hoped. It wasn't enough, though, the mission ship was surprisingly swift given its bulk. I'd cleared orbit by the time they'd broken out of the ocean and launched into the atmosphere. This didn't give me much of a lead; with no sentient life to speak of at that particular level of the planet they'd be able to kick in a drive that much earlier. I had too, naturally, but a drive which could move around something so massive was going to be orders of magnitude faster than mine. My advantage was in the ability to quickly change course. I radioed down to the cargo bay and asked Jenny if she could suit up quickly, to which she replied by walking over to me, having apparently been prepared beforehand. I found myself wondering if I was broadcasting the lower-levels of my own thought, given that Jenny seemed to be a step or two ahead of everything I came up with. I was in the process of suiting up myself when the transmissions came over the comm.
"Unidentified vessel, stand down and prepare to be boarded - this is an official investigation of the tribunal."
"This is Eye of the Orca control, we're going to have to request you power down and dock immediately. You are in violation of your landing assignment."
Of the two things I was likely to be in trouble for, landing assignment violation was the less severe. That wasn't saying much - not following instructions when entering an atmosphere could result in a collision, and any collision at those speeds was likely to be fatal. The Last Great Race took it seriously even though traffic around their spaceport was usually less than congested, and they'd likely argue for suspending my landing privledges once I appeared there. Assuming, of course, that the tribunal didn't catch up to me in the meantime, which they almost certainly would. Jenny's people on the surface had acted quickly to keep me shielded from them, but so far as I knew they were just ordinary citizens with a penchant for thumbing their equivalent of noses to authority. Station control, being bureaucrats, was more likely to give the mission ship what they wanted. The situation did, however, give me an idea. I set the ship to head toward the station and flipped all the stealth on. I didn't think that this would fool them for very long at all, but it would be enough. I ran the ship through automatic docking procedures and headed toward the airlock. Jenny was already there, and according to my translator she was grinning like a fiend. She'd been mysterious on the project, but I'd never seen her doing it on purpose. Usually she had been talking about her research, there hadn't been many opportunities for her to play "put one over on Ledford". I was starting to get the impression that her whole species liked being tricksters.
The ship came to a halt and the airlock started cycling. The door opened, and Jenny and myself launched ourselves simultaneously into the void. The ship relayed the comm to my suit, so I got to hear the station running me through the proper procedure for surrendering. It sounded to me like they expected me to put up a fight. They'd be surprised when I didn't, but they'd be even more surprised when they discovered my seeming passivism was due to my not actually being there.
At this particular moment, Jenn and I were moving through space toward the station. I'd been suited up for Jenny's world several times at this point, but I hadn't been in hard vaccum for years. I took a moment to appreciate the view; our inertia would carry us where I wanted to go, all I had to do was enjoy the ride. For once I felt I could relax.
"What are you doing? Power down and dock now!"
I smiled to myself as the relayed comm sounded in my helmet. That would be Eye of the Orca discovering that my ship had suddenly taken off when it was supposed to be docked. I imagined comm traffic between the station and the mission ship being of a similarly irate nature.
A jet of air shot from my suit and I decelerated as Jenny and I drifted closer to an empty docking bay. Her mechanical tentacles wrapped around a protruding antenna and she spun in a lazy circle while I did all the hard work.
That doesn't sound very fair to Jenny until you consider that this station was made by her people, and I had only the most cursory familiarity with how it worked. In order to allow ships of any type to dock there was at least some standardization, but it was going to take me a while to open it manually while also trying to make it appear as though it were a malfunction and not someone trying to sneak in. Granted, only some sort of lunatic would launch out into raw space from a moving vessel, latch on to an unused docking port, and then try to fool the computer there into thinking there was actually a ship that wanted to board. Chances were good that the door would open, station authorities would see that there was not actually a ship there, and they'd discount it and get back to the more pressing matter of the disobedient vessel. Of course, given how far Jenny herself been ahead of me in my plans I couldn't help wondering if the folks here might be on to me as well.
The airlock slid open and Jenny, moving faster than I would have given her credit for in the pressure suit, climbed down and tumbled in. I was after her quickly, hopefully before the technical crews decided to re-set the dock. Thankfully, that didn't appear to be high on their priority list. The air cycled in but the suit told me it wasn't suitable for breathing. I hadn't done well enough at my computer fakery for it to know what species I was, but that might end up working in my favor and further distract the folks in charge from suspecting I was on board. Jenny took the lead, presumably because she'd been on this station before. I wanted to tell her which docking ring to head for, but that would require me to put the comm on active, and that would alert the authorities to the fact that there were actually people in their up-until-then presumed empty corridor. We'd have to find a more congested area to talk; the station was likely to be quite a bit more busy than the planet surface had been. Most species met here for trade, after all, rather than heading down into the atmosphere. As soon as Jenny or myself could get to a panel, we could figure out how to further navigate.
Jenny was thinking much along the same lines, and I felt a moment of glee knowing that, for once, I was ahead of her. She stopped near a wall-mounted panel and quickly tapped a number of instructions into it.
"I'll arrange us a room with an atmosphere you can breathe. They're usually cheaper than the liquid rooms anyway, even at this station. We'll be able to talk there."
I was about to panic, thinking that she'd activated the comm to say that, when I realized that half of her typing at the wall panel was actually her relaying this information to me. My good feeling at having been ahead of her evaporated completely. I wondered if, after all this chaos were over, she might be looking for a job in the freelance industry. I could use someone who thought this far ahead; I'd been in more than one situation, the current one included, where I wish I'd thought a bit in advance.
Jenny headed ahead again and I tried to keep up. Despite the fact that her species was not adapted to moving on land, she was surprisingly fast in her powered suit. We passed through another airlock and the ambient volume increased quite a bit. Jenny had led us to one of the many bazzars in the corridors. I could switch on the comm now, and I opened with an observation that she'd seemed to have planned this rather well.
"Alan, I never know what to plan for when you're around. I tend to come up with about a dozen plans whenever I see you, and you surprise me every single time."
I liked the translator being limited to just the first level; the results tended to be more verbose.
Jenny took the lead again, winding among the various species who were haggling or talking amongst themselves while I was left to try to shoulder my way through. It was a welcome change of pace to be surrounded by people who weren't trying to catch and interrogate me for once. Their ignoring me did have the unenviable downside of forcing me to push my way through.
Jenny ducked down a side passage and I followed suit just in time to catch her entering what was hopefully our room.
"So, how are you getting us out of here?"
Jenny had found a chair and wrapped herself around it. She was facing me impatiently; the translator didn't have to tell me that the twirling motions she was making with her foremost tentacles were one indicating that I should hurry the hell up, I'd seen that particular gesture a number of times before.
I spent a moment recovering the good feeling of being ahead of the game once more, then told her where the ship was docked. This provoked more questions than it answered, of course, but I was feeling too good at being the one with the plan for her irate responses to get to me. Finally, after she got done complaining at me, I explained what was going on.
My ship was currently docked at the bay nearest the one that we'd entered. At the moment, it was very loudy negotiating over contracts with the local job board. The probe which until very recently had that job was currently pretending to have lousy stealth and speeding as far as it could away from the system. This would work up until the point where the probe pretended to be activating its Lane drive and then pretending that it had failed for some reason. The mission ship would then attempt to board it. The fact that the entire probe would fit in their airlock could possibly be a clue to them that they'd been decieved. At that point I was hoping to be on board the real ship and heading in the opposite direction as fast as I could go.
"So there's no time for you to tell me what's happening just yet? Because the suspense is killing me. All this running around, it'd be nice to know why."
I apologized and confirmed that, no, we had maybe fifteen minutes before the big ship caught up to my imaginary little ship and it'd take that plus however long we'd been ambling around the station for the investigators to head back our way.
"All right then, write in your journal in case we don't make it, then we'll get going."
I wanted to ask how she knew I was keeping a journal, but I could tell even without the translator's help that she was enjoying having moved ahead of me once more. So instead I finished dictating this and sent it to the ship - I found it a lot easier to remember what I needed to say later when I had my actual voice notes to remind me. Now wasn't the time for editing, though, I plan to do that once I'm done. Besides, if I don't make it, it'll just look sloppy is all. Plus I'll be dead, but that won't really affect the journal very much.