Don’t Stop Now

by

Mark Henwick

Published by Marque

Don’t Stop Now

ISBN : 978-1-912499-61-8

Published in 2025 by Marque

Mark Henwick asserts the right to be identified as the author of this work.

© 2025 Mark Henwick

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, Web distribution or information storage retrieval systems—without the written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. The names, characters and events portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, legal entities, incidents or localities is entirely coincidental. The laws of physics, chemistry, biology and psychology may not work as depicted.

AMZ250527

Contents

Episode 20

A Shady Proposal

E20. Chapter 1

E20. Chapter 2

E20. Chapter 3

E20. Chapter 4

E20. Chapter 5

E20. Chapter 6

E20. Chapter 7

Episode 21

Nothing Ventured

E21. Chapter 1

E21. Chapter 2

E21. Chapter 3

E21. Chapter 4

E21. Chapter 5

E21. Chapter 6

E21. Chapter 7

E21. Chapter 8

Episode 22

Nothing Gained

E22. Chapter 1

E22. Chapter 2

E22. Chapter 3

E22. Chapter 4

E22. Chapter 5

E22. Chapter 6

E22. Chapter 7

E22. Chapter 8

E22. Chapter 9

Episode 23

Great Risks

E23. Chapter 1

E23. Chapter 2

E23. Chapter 3

E23. Chapter 4

E23. Chapter 5

E23. Chapter 6

E23. Chapter 7

E23. Chapter 8

E23. Chapter 9

E23. Chapter 10

E23. Chapter 11

Episode 24

Don’t Stop Now

E24. Chapter 1

E24. Chapter 2

E24. Chapter 3

E24. Chapter 4

E24. Chapter 5

E24. Chapter 6

E24. Chapter 7

E24. Chapter 8

E24. Chapter 9

E24. Chapter 10

E24. Chapter 11

E24. Chapter 12

E24. Chapter 13

E24. Chapter 14

AFTERWORD

Episode 20

A Shady Proposal

E20. Chapter 1

Jan

“It’s not working.”

Maybe I was being harsh, but Dow, Jessop and Lǐ Zhao didn’t argue the point.

We were having a conference using laser comms, so no one else in this star system could hear what we said, or could even tell that we were talking. It had always been part of our plan that the two fancy Xian ships weren’t going to be associated with this scruffy and suspicious-looking merchanter called the Dark Phoenix.

We’d even entered this system a couple of days before them, to emphasize that separation. There was nothing obvious to connect us, and we were closing on the space station while they were still out near the planar zenith.

This was the third star system from the Inner Worlds we’d visited. They were all in the outermost layer of Inner Worlds systems, not the rich and powerful ones at the core. Even so, our trading was beginning to fail.

We’d known the structure of trade flows when we’d planned how to trade our way to Earth, but we hadn’t anticipated the scale and complexity of it. Essentially, high-tech, high-value goods flowed out from the innermost worlds, because they had the infrastructure to invent, develop and manufacture them. Those goods flowed out as far as there were still markets able to afford them.

We were going in the opposite direction, so what flowed inwards to pay for these?

Raw materials in bulk. Even with the highest tech solutions, the extraction of valuable metals or the creation of usable compounds was usually polluting and very dangerous. Innermost worlds didn’t want that. But the problem was that all three of our ships working together couldn’t transport enough bulk of raw material to make us competitive against the mega-haulers. So scratch that as an easy option.

Generally, it was the same for bulk food.

Next was older but widely-used technology—so-called intermediate tech. Margin systems could produce a lot of those goods at a price that made it worthwhile for the Inner Worlds to trade. We were shipping some of this, but, again, bulk carriers could simply ship more.

Below that were goods that became riskier—specialty food, or even art, for example. Those fruits that world X loved didn’t sell on world Y and were spoiled by the time you reached world Z. And that art style that set one world alight… you might not be able to give it away on the next.

To make it harder, the bulk carriers worked the most profitable routes, which generally were the most direct ones that headed between Earth and the biggest Margin systems like Maynard.

There were always worlds off those trade highways where our lack of size became an advantage. There were even commissions for delivery-only trips on those routes. The frustrating thing was that there was a reasonable amount of business if we hadn’t had the overriding objective of getting to Earth in the least possible time.

In addition to our unhappy faces, we were sharing the analysis of all the opportunities that Thandi and Olivia had extracted from the market boards of the system’s space station.

Benson was the name of the star system. Officially, that was the name of the station, too, but for some reason, lost to time, everyone called the station Stabler. Maybe they’d had an earlier version that hadn’t been so stable.

The trade data we were displaying wasn’t difficult to understand. There was almost no cargo suitable for us that would sell well on the systems close to our intended path at a profit we could justify. Not enough to fill one hold, let alone three. And no transportation commissions either. In fact, the best deals that were available to us would require us to head back to the last system we’d visited.

“It’s just bad timing,” Lǐ said. “We shouldn’t assume we’ll always get such a dismal lack of opportunities that work well for us.”

I shook my head. We’d used the time inbound to wrack our brains and there wasn’t an easy way out of this. We’d have to divert from the shortest path to Earth, even though that time lost would mean our back pay was devaluing as the body holding it charged for their ‘administration’.

“We can’t stay on our shortest route,” I said. “And none of the systems remotely near the way we should be heading is going to be a better marketplace for us. We’ll be forced to move further and further off track, or stop somewhere on the route and trust to luck to deliver us a deal we can profit from.”

That second wasn’t a good idea. Putting aside our primary mission, any delay was a bad idea. If we stayed docked while we waited for a deal, we’d be charged berth fees. Even if we didn’t dock and instead held orbit near the station, the traders knew that the longer we waited, the more desperate we’d become. And in either case, we’d be eating our way through our supplies.

Merchanters needed to trade to stay alive. Waiting for a good deal wasn’t a clever choice.

Everything cost so much as well. Stabler was a huge station with sealing docking bays, so I’d expected their berth fees to be high, but they’d also charge for air if we wanted to use it to freshen our life support systems. On top of that, fuel and maintenance costs were eye-watering. Luckily, Werner had kept us working on the Phoenix, and we didn’t need anything repaired, but our fuel reserves were lower than I felt comfortable with.

Thandi was already selling our cargo over the comms as we approached the station, but she was warning me that the next port of call would probably see us with insufficient funds to fill the hold. It would be increasingly difficult to reverse that decline on the way to Earth.

“How about discretionary Xian funds?” I asked.

Dow pulled a long face. “Our main funding was always tied to our area of designated operation,” he replied. “We’re outside of that area, and while there are still funds we can draw, their use would send signals. We want to keep those options until we’re closer to Earth and no one’s in a position to intercept us.”

“Passengers?” Lǐ asked.

I shrugged. “Nothing on the boards, and anyone who wants to travel without advertising on the boards…”

I left it unfinished. A small smile came and went on Jessop’s face.

“Docking fees are also too high,” I went on. “We can’t wait for you. We’re going to have to undock as soon as we can. We’ll orbit and claim we’re doing repairs to let you catch up.”

They nodded.

“Which means we’re going to have to make a guess where we’re going and what the best options for cargo are, well before we undock,” I went on.

Dow nodded again. “We’ll discuss it together and come back with some options. Maybe we’ll skip a few systems on the way. That would speed us up.”

“It would. But the further we travel before a trading stop, the less we’ll know about the market that we’re aiming to visit. We may have had bad luck here, but that doesn’t mean we’ll get good luck next time. I’m also low on fuel and I don’t want to pay the prices they charge here.”

“We could take in some uninhabited systems and ram-scoop,” Lǐ said. “Benson borders the Blight, so plenty of those in that direction.”

She was right. Benson would charge us if we did it here, but ships were free to scoop fuel from uninhabited systems’ gas giants. Every small ship had some ram-scoop capability, where you flew the ship through the edge of the atmosphere of a gas giant and literally creamed some of that gas off. Not every gas giant’s gases were useful, and it certainly wasn’t refined, but the engines would use it, and it was free.

I could almost hear Werner’s sarcastic comment: It’s okay, Captain, the ship has only minor damage from this prolonged maneuver, and we have only shortened the engine overhaul time by fifty percent.

We might need to ram-scoop, but I’d better have a good case for it.

If we did, where would we go? Heading for the Blight would provide us with plenty of gas giants, but the reason it was called the Blight was it was a huge sector of space with no inhabitable planets, so it wasn’t a great direction to pick for trading purposes, even if you ignored the navigation hazards.

I didn’t discuss one other option: smuggling. The further we got into the Inner Worlds, the stricter the regulations. That meant more opportunities for smuggling, but it would be risky, even if I knew what I was doing. As it was, I didn’t.

We signed off the conference without any clear way forward and it felt like a dark cloud was hanging over me.

It shouldn’t have been like that. The Phoenix and crew were doing well, all things considered. We just needed a lucky break.

E20. Chapter 2

Jan

It was late afternoon, station time, when we completed docking on Stabler.

The crew worked as if we’d been doing this all our lives. Thandi and Bjorn headed for the trader offices, where they had meetings arranged. They were a good team. Thandi would play the hard negotiator and then Bjorn would smile that smile of his, and everyone would be his friend.

Prasad was managing the hold. Thandi had done enough selling even before we’d docked that he was going to be busy delivering those containers onto the mag rail cargo train.

Shami was on the bridge. Although she was better now, she’d not completely gotten over her paranoia about what might go into the food you ate on a station, or the air you breathed. It made sense to her that this problem would become worse the more sophisticated the station, and Stabler was plenty sophisticated. She might venture out onto the concourse at some stage during our visit, but she’d volunteered to stand watch today.

Werner was in the engine room. If anyone would take my bet on it, I’d bet he’d be arguing technical improvements with Olivia. He was the first of the crew who decided my computer-based friend was trustworthy. We hadn’t even gotten to our first jump when she’d sucked in the entire ship’s specifications and presented him with a plan to improve the in-system speed by 15%.

“It’s a good theoretical idea,” Werner had told me. “And it might make us go faster, but it will kill us.”

Olivia had taken this dismissal as a challenge, and the pair of them were now working through the Phoenix’s design, section by section, looking for anything that could be improved. Without killing us. If we ever got into the situation of having enough surplus credit, maybe we’d implement some of the ideas they were coming up with.

Which left me and Gunny from the crew, strolling out onto the dockside, intent on visiting a few of the dock’s establishments. Putting our ears to the ground, as Prasad described it, though he couldn’t explain the phrase. Back on the farm where I grew up on Calloway, putting your ear to the ground was asking for it to get filled with hogshit.

Not that there were hogs on this station. Stabler was clean. It was also huge; the largest spindle station we’d visited. Being wheel-shaped, it still kept the traditional docking arrangement on the spokes for everything from shuttles to medium-sized ships. We were at the top of spoke 3, with our nose to the hub, so rotational gravity from the spin of the station was appreciably low. Margin and Frontier stations just accepted that. Stabler implemented acceleration compensators to keep the ‘gravity’ constant on the dockside. And charged us for it, of course.

Their sealed bay arrangement meant that the ship was in its own pressurized capsule, like in the dockyards on Yiero, but also that it was effectively standing on its tail, and the ‘dockside’ was a series of platforms at various heights alongside the ship. The working dockside for cargo access was kept entirely separate, with the gleaming bulk of the mag rail rising up the side of the Phoenix to end at the midpoint where our universal junction was.

The personnel access alongside the cargo junction had an observation floor with glass walls, and that was where we got out. We stopped to have a look because we didn’t get to see the Phoenix from the outside much. Generally, in dock, the ship would remain in vacuum, and we’d come and go via pressurized connecting passages, or partially sealed areas.

“It’s a lot bigger like this, isn’t it?” Gunny said.

I knew exactly what she meant. From the inside, the Dark Phoenix was all narrow passages and small rooms. The only large open space was the hold, and the idea was to keep that full of containers. The engine room had lots of space, but only in narrow strips between the engines and instruments. It would have more, but we had an engineer who insisted on having double the recommended number of spares and who didn’t throw things away, because ‘they might come in handy’.

The Phoenix looked big while we were standing next to it, and yet there were mega-haulers with loading bays the whole of our ship could probably squeeze into.

That thought gave me a stark visual perspective on the difficulty we faced competing against the big ships and reinforced that dark cloud hanging over me, so we got on board the glass-walled elevator to take us three bays down to the concourse level.

I stopped the elevator one bay down. The berth rimward of us was occupied by another small merchanter, similar to the Phoenix, called Teneris. I could see one of the crew arguing with a docking official on their dockside.

“Might as well visit the neighbors,” I said.

“You’re just nosy,” Gunny replied, but her eyes narrowed as we approached the heated argument, which seemed to be reaching a conclusion.

“I can’t suspend fees just because your spares aren’t here yet,” the official said. “There are costs—”

“The costs can be nothing. Turn off the compensators. Suck out the air.” That had to be the captain of the Teneris.

“There are costs for doing that—it’s the same as the undocking process, so that’s what we would charge. Then you would need gravity and air returned to finish your repairs, which would be another docking fee, and you’re still taking up a berth in the meantime. There isn’t any way you can wriggle out of the payments you were advised of before you docked.”

“When we were assured the replacement would be delivered from a manufacturer on Benson. That hasn’t arrived. We can’t pay these inflated costs while you delay our delivery!”

“Companies on Benson are nothing to do with the operation of Stabler.” The man started to walk away. “Either pay, or we will seize your ship.”

“That’s ridiculous!”

He was right. As expensive as docking was, the cost of the ship was a completely different order.

“We’ll refund any difference from the proceeds of an auction, less any further legal or living costs that have arisen,” the official said as the elevator door closed behind him, effectively ending the conversation.

The captain was white-faced and shaking with anger. I guessed that the only thing stopping him from attacking the official was that his situation would have become infinitely worse. He turned and glared at us as if we had something to do with Stabler. Or just that we were witnesses.

Gunny held up her hands placatingly. “Surely you’ve got some goods you can give them instead?”

The man paused and looked down to get a grip on himself before replying.

“My main cargo is a commissioned delivery for my next stop, and the rest of it isn’t ‘commercially viable’ for this star system. They won’t accept it.” He pointed with one shaking finger at the elevator. “They knew all that. They knew we had one of the engineering companies down on Benson agree to manufacture the parts we needed and ship ’em up. But because we decided not to use their repair facilities, they’ve…”

He stumbled to a stop before saying anything that might get quoted in court, but I could fill in the blanks. He believed that the Stabler authorities had pressured the company to delay so that they could make an example of the Teneris, and future ships would agree to the station’s inflated repair costs.

I tried to make some supportive comments but got interrupted by Gunny.

She’d walked to one side and was looking up intently at the scaffolding supporting one of the Teneris’ engines.

“What’s the repair?” she asked.

“It’s just the nova-damned mounting for the engine,” he said. “It’s nothing but shaped c-steel, but it’s too big for our fabricators and their maintenance department wanted to charge—”

“That’s a standard part,” Gunny said.

“On old ships like these, yeah, common as docking junctions. The old Tabuni design. There are three ships on station right now that have ’em, but they all need their mountings.” He cursed and shook his head, starting to walk away.

But I saw what Gunny was getting at.

“We might be able to help,” I said, and introduced myself: “Captain Skelling, Phoenix.”

He frowned at me. “I’m Beridze.” He looked up to where the Phoenix was docked. “What I saw of you coming in, you got the new Chauhan-Tournay engines. Not the same thing at all, and ’sides, you couldn’t spare a mounting any more’n any other small ship can.”

I smiled. “We have new CT engines, yes, but we also have an obsessive engineering officer who won’t throw a lump of c-steel away. And our old engines happened to use the Tabuni mountings.”

E20. Chapter 3

Jan

Our early afternoon stroll down to the dockside bars turned into a late evening excursion.

Captain Beridze had been strangely difficult to persuade. We were obviously going to screw him for every cent, or take a charge over his ship, or demand he hand over his first-born, or something.

I told him I’d take his local trade advice in payment, and he still wasn’t really believing me, even when the mag rail delivered one replacement Tabuni mounting, slightly blemished from being too close to an explosion in Maynard’s Star.

Werner accompanied the part, complaining about how difficult it had been to extract the huge lump from where he’d kept it secured in the engine room, and how disruptive this was, all the while rubbing his hands together at the prospect of doing something large and mechanical with someone else’s ship.

By that time, other small ship crews had heard, and all of them were contributing engineers to help or small payments toward the Teneris’ outstanding fees.

There were some shrewd looks at the state of our mounting, which was pitted and discolored from the explosion. Those looks went first to the mounting and then to me. What had I been doing to get in an explosion? How had I paid for new Chauhan-Tournay engines afterwards?

But no spoken questions, so I didn’t have to lie. I smiled vaguely at all of them.

Helping the Teneris and sticking it to the management of the Stabler had dissipated that dark cloud that had been hanging over me. Better than that, it’d made me feel good. Not to mention, I was getting trade information that would help me and my Xian buddies make the best choice for our next stop.

Beridze had become busier and more distracted as the repairs commenced. Once they’d gotten over his manners, Werner was made welcome, so much so that they’d rigged up a cargo lifter to hold his wheelchair up to the site of the work. But I wasn’t needed and when I moved off, Gunny stopped helping and joined me. We were still operating under the rules we’d established back in the wild Frontier: that no crew member went to the concourse alone. And, even in pairs, our InfoPads would be monitored by Olivia and Shami.

Seeing us leave, Beridze had hurried over with more thanks and a recommendation for a bar.

“The Short Ship,” he’d said, not quite meeting my eyes. “I’m giving you every last bit of trade info I got, I swear. Message it across soon as I finish up here, but the folks in that bar might be more… knowledgeable ’bout some things that folks like you might be interested in. I know a couple of ’em go there. Told ’em you might drop by.”

“I wonder what ‘folks like you’ are supposed to be like?” Gunny said as we approached the Short Ship.

“Shady,” I said and laughed.

The bar was a quiet-looking place in comparison to the big dockside beerhalls we’d passed, and when we went in it was obvious the landlord didn’t waste money on excess lighting. Shady it was. We had to stumble our way to the bar, where we sat on the tall stools and listened to the noise level return to where it had been when we walked in.

I could see the bartender mainly because he was blocking the dim lights that illuminated the rows of drinks, like some dark ship passing in front of stars.

“Local beer?” I asked, and got an affirmative rumble from him.

“A couple of the drafts then. What would you recommend for dinner?”

More rumbling with a heavy accent. I caught ‘plate’, ‘variety’ and ‘meats’, so I just nodded.

Two tall, thin glasses appeared in front of us. The beer looked light. There was an inch of foam coming out the top of the glass and condensation beading the sides.

Gunny took a taste and clearly approved.

By the time our meat dishes had arrived, our eyes had adjusted to the gloom enough to make out platters with heaps of steaming hot meat strips and sauces, arranged around little flat breads sliced open like purses.

Gunny beat me to it again. She’d already made up a packet, bitten and groaned appreciatively while I was still trying to present a payment card to the bartender.

He lumbered back down the bar and waved a finger at me.

“Ya money no need, Phoenix,” he said. “Ya friends pay.”

“Which friends?”

“Short ships, all friends,” he grunted and jerked his chin up as if to indicate people in the gloomy depths of the bar.

“Which ones? I’d like to thank them.”

“If they wan’ ya thanks direct, they come talk.” He raised a hand with the thumb up. “There. Ya thank them.”

I turned and gave the rest of the bar my own thumbs-up as well. I could see shapes in the darkness. Maybe the gleam of an eye here and there, reflecting the bar lights. I heard the names Phoenix and Teneris murmured, but no one came to join us.

I shrugged and the pair of us got on with our meal while debating which poor option we’d pick for our next destination.

It wasn’t until we’d finished the food that someone came up to us at the bar.

She was old, with that sort of weathered look that I’d seen in sailors from our fishing fleet back on Calloway. Paler though, because a spacer like her probably didn’t feel the sun on her face or the wind in her hair more than once a year. Blue eyes, I thought, but it was difficult to tell. Her blond hair was very short and the ship’s patch on her well-worn jacket told me she was from the Luneburg, a short-haul merchanter I’d seen on the docking lists.

“I’m Captain Lorenz,” she said, and nodded her head back to her table. “Please, join us.”

We’d had a free dinner, and I was still feeling the afterglow of doing a good turn for the Teneris, but the oddest thing that persuaded me to venture into the darkness with a stranger was the scent that hung around her. It was the sweet, earthy smell of grain, and it made my eyes prickle with memories of the harvest back on Calloway.

“I love that smell,” I said.

She knew exactly what I meant, and chuckled. “Grain? Yeah, me, the crew, the whole ship. Can’t help it when you ship the stuff.”

The bartender handed a tray of beers to her, and Lorenz led us into the darkness.

We slid into a circular booth, one by one, and our new friend made cursory introductions.

“Musa, Price, Baig, Hazari, Ramishvili.”

As we always did while we were inbound to a station, I’d studied the list of docked ships, captains and manifests. A couple of the ships, Price’s Starbird and Ramishvili’s Trialeti, had tickled my antenna: way too much engine for their hold capacities.

Then again, the specifications for the Phoenix fit right alongside those ships.

It had been our brief to find the local underworld in the Inner Worlds, as part of our plan to map out the extent and size of the pirates’ organization. These captains didn’t feel like pirates to me, but I was sure we were sitting down with the disreputable side of merchanters on Stabler. Beridze had read us and sent us to where we’d find what he’d assumed were like-minded souls.

Introductions over, Lorenz explained that life was hard for short ships in the Inner Worlds. Everyone here looked out for everyone else, as much as they could. Our help to the Teneris had been an entry ticket into that clan. Although she didn’t say it, it seemed that loyalty spread to both sides of the fine line that was the law. Beridze was on one side. His main business was commissioned delivery, and he couldn’t have any questions about his integrity. I was guessing the skippers around the table were on the other side. Smugglers.

But Lorenz and the Luneburg were agricultural produce specialists. How the hell did you smuggle grain? Or for that matter, compete against the mega-haulers?

“The big combines run the main routes, the ones we call the golden roads,” Lorenz said. “And I have no way to compete on those. But a jump or two either side of the route?” She waggled her hand. “They’re still rich and some of them need goods like grain but not enough to get the mega-haulers to stop there, so we take the excess the mega-haulers make Stabler buy, and we run it to star systems off the golden road. Sometimes we get there first,” she and Baig exchanged friendly but competitive looks, “and sometimes we have to go a jump or two further.”

She took a long pull of beer before continuing. “That’s one loop we run. But if we did nothing else Stabler would start demanding a cut.” She snorted. “That’d end with us working for them. So, when we’re flush, we make a second loop, out into the grain-rich systems in the Margin, and we deliver direct to our markets. It works. We’re only a little bigger than your Phoenix, but our hold is optimized for that type of storage.”

“That’s good one way,” I said. “What do you haul on the reverse?”

She smiled and Price stepped in.

He pointed in an arbitrary direction. “The deeper you get into the Inner Worlds, the more regulations, which create… opportunities for small, high-value goods, if you can deliver discreetly.” He pointed the other way. “The route out to the Margin is the easy part. Fill as much of the hold as you can with the newest technology, just make sure you don’t travel too deep into the Margin and run out of rich star systems.”

“Considering regulations implies enforcement,” I said carefully, “is this a profitable business model?”

Lorenz laughed. “Depends how you define profit,” she said. “Sometimes you gotta eat into it to keep going.”

Ramishvili leaned across. “Yup. Literally. There was this run I did once to Blackstone…” She began an improbable tale involving transporting exotic animals as illegal pets for the Inner Worlds and having to eat one to convince the Blackstone authorities that they were really food stock for the crew.

It went like that for a few more hours. Gunny and I kept up our side. Soldiers need humor to survive a war, and we had plenty of tales to trade.

It was getting time to head back and check on the Phoenix when I felt Lorenz nudge my thigh. I was about to get entirely the wrong idea, but a glance down showed she was holding her pad out, hidden beneath the level of the table. Infopads can beep messages to each other, but anyone in ten meters or so can pick it up. If you wanted to be discreet, you’d ‘bump’, and the ultra-short range induction coils transmitted the message privately. I bumped my pad against hers.

“Business proposal from someone on station,” she murmured and tilted her head. “Wrong direction for me, and maybe not in your wheelhouse, but it could be worth looking into.”

“Thank you,” I said and raised my voice. “Thank you all. This has been a great evening to cap an interesting day.” They laughed. “But Gunny and I need to catch up with the ship.”

They all understood. Our pads beeped with exchanges of contact details as we gave hugs all around, then emerged from the bar to blink in the lights of the concourse.

I was in a very good humor. Gunny had switched to water early on and wasn’t quite so cheerful.

“Oh, come on,” I chided her. “We’ve had food and drink, and we’ve made new friends. And, you know, I think there was a lot of useful stuff there.”

I hiccupped and stuck my comms earbud in. “Shami? Olivia? What’s the status?”

Shami responded, and I could hear her smiling. “We’re all here and we’ve been listening to the bar stories. We’re all good. I’ll let Thandi and Bjorn report on their successes, but it seems to have gone better than expected. Pras has already delivered all the merchandise that’s been sold. Werner’s back, too. The Teneris’ repairs went well, and they’re starting to disassemble the scaffolding already. They’re calling in their departure plans right now. Captain Beridze’s trading files are coming across now and Olivia is analyzing them.”

“No push-back from Stabler for tripping up their plans to shaft the Teneris?”

“No. Don’t think so. Olivia’s been triple checking everything, so there are no procedural reasons they have to complain about us. She’s keeping a good watch, and there’s nothing so far to worry us.”

We were using Stabler’s comms infrastructure, but Olivia had overlaid encryption on all our conversations. Still, there were things we wouldn’t say out loud. When Shami said ‘keeping a good watch’, I suspected that meant Olivia was inside the Stabler internal comms network.

Olivia herself confirmed it as soon as we were inside the Phoenix: “They are angry, but they keep to their own laws, and we’ve broken none. The dock master has proposed several different ‘infringements’ he might charge us with, and his legal department has closed them all down on lack of merit.”

“Good. So much for our stuff. Any evidence of pirate involvement in this system?”

“None. No visitors from our watch lists of pirate ships. No financial connections with known or suspect organizations. The station management here aren’t pleasant, but they’re not involved in anything outside of their own greedy schemes, and I don’t think they’d tolerate anything more serious than suspected smuggling.”

We’d reached the rec room, and soon everyone joined us.

That was a marker on how much progress Olivia had made on the Phoenix. Ship rules were that the bridge had to always have a person on watch. Shami and I still liked to be there, but the crew accepted that ‘someone on watch’ could be Olivia. They even accepted that she was also here, in the rec room, as a holographic image while keeping watch on the bridge. Even Bjorn and Gunny, who were still a little suspicious, treated her like a person. She had her own space here in the rec room, and no one walked through her hologram or anything like that.

Pras and Werner hadn’t eaten, so they set a couple of ready meals to warm. Bjorn and Gunny took four of the Turing beers from the cooler. Thandi got some fruit juice and settled herself down, looking pleased about the day’s work.

“Spill,” I said to her.

She grinned. “So much better than I thought. They look at me like I am the devil come out of the Dark, but when that nice Bjorn smiles his big smile, they sign the contracts. We make a good team.”

She made eyes at him.

“Stop that,” I said. “You have enough husbands waiting for you back in Dulong.”

“Eh? What is this ‘enough’ you speak of?”

We all laughed and listened as she summarized the trading they’d done. Basically, they’d cleared the greater part of the hold and we had near double the funds to restock than we’d expected. It would have been nice to know what to restock with, but I guessed that could wait until tomorrow, along with the mysterious proposal on my pad.

The conversation passed to Werner, who grudgingly admitted the combined team of merchanters’ engineers who’d assembled to help had done a reasonable job, and the jury-rigged repairs probably wouldn’t kill the Teneris for a while.

I handed my turn to speak about our meeting in the Short Ship bar to Olivia, on the grounds I was drunk, she’d been listening to it all, and I wanted to hear what she had to say anyway.

“It was actually a very clever and very paranoid coordination,” she said. “In the course of entertaining you with beer-fueled barroom tales that would never stand in court, even if presented as recorded evidence, those captains managed to give you an astonishing amount of information about circumventing import laws and similar minor crimes in this sector of human space. Clearly, the quality is very difficult to gauge, but I can and have verified some of those stories about things going wrong and smugglers being caught. Those stories were based in fact, even if they didn’t happen to the person telling them.”

I sighed contentedly and stole the second of Bjorn’s beers.

Like Thandi had said—it was all much better than we had thought. I couldn’t say I had a plan yet, but I had the inkling of things shaping up into one.

Olivia’s image blinked her eyes. It was a mannerism she had to tell us something was happening outside of this room. I felt a vibration, almost too gentle to notice, come through the ship.

“The Teneris is undocking,” she said. “One more transmission is coming in from Captain Beridze. It’s another message of thanks, and a download of all the information from navigational beacons and station docking registers from every star system he’s visited this year. This is interesting.”

There was a moment’s silence and then she frowned.

“I’m sorry to ruin the day’s good news with bad,” she said, “but the Teneris collected its delivery cargo from the Canis star system, and that station’s docking records show the Sambuk, calling itself the Eye of Andromeda, undocked a day before Teneris arrived, destination unstated.”

I’d always known Maykn was mad enough to chase us, but the shock was how close he was. Canis, by the shortest route, was only a couple of jumps away. If he’d come directly this way, he’d have already been here. If he was heading here, and delayed by transiting every occupied system on the way, he might only be a few days out.

Olivia wasn’t finished.

“There were also three other ships from your list of suspected pirates that transited the Canis system in the week previous to Beridze’s visit, including the Corim, which was calling itself the Perseguir.”

Maykn and Baranov and another couple of pirate ships. Maykn on his own, I could understand. He was crazy. But not Baranov. If he’d brought the Corim here and there were at least two other pirate ships as well, it meant that the organization behind them had ordered them into the Inner Worlds.

I couldn’t see any other reason than they were hunting us. And they were far too close.

E20. Chapter 4

Jan

Breakfast in the Short Ship was as shady as dinner had been the previous night.

Given it was early morning, station time and Phoenix time, I decided against the draft beer, so I was sitting down to space station Stabler’s favorite way to start the day. It had two parts. The kind of coffee that we’d have called hard coffee, back in the 1st Frontier—thick and black and filling a mug you needed two hands to hold—and a dish apparently called Eggunloaf. It was a slab of fresh-made, hand-milled grain bread, still warm from the oven, buttered, and covered in poached eggs and piquant sauce.

I liked Stabler’s choice.

Last night, I’d had a laser conference with the Xian ships. Dow and Lǐ had taken the news of pirates hunting us with more calm than I had managed.

“We’re going to have to stay together,” had been Dow’s summary, accompanied by a shrug.

“They outgun you alone, but they’re probably just smart enough to not try and take us on as well,” Lǐ had said. “And if they turn up in any star system we visit, we’ll identify them to the authorities.”

That was fine, although the ‘authorities’ weren’t as scary as I’d imagined. I’d expected more Inner Worlds to have real navies, but the standard seemed to be a single aging warship, usually in planetary orbit, and a fleet of cutters. The cutters were fast and armed, but they were busy on customs work rather than naval drills. An individual cutter probably wouldn’t want to take on a pirate of unknown strength, and the warship wouldn’t be able to catch anyone passing through if it was down in the system at the time.

If we found the pirates docked, however, that would be a different story and a happier ending. For us.

Meanwhile, Bjorn and I were enjoying the Short Ship’s hospitality, chasing a sniff of a deal.

I’d read Lorenz’s message about a mysterious proposal, and been interested enough to communicate with the person who originated it. Following instructions in the message, I’d made a coded post on a trading board and seen a responding post on a different board which simply said Breakfast where you dined.

It was difficult to tell in the darkness, but I thought the bar was more than half full. I wondered whether merchanters might just stay here the whole night, because the food and drink were cheaper than a bed in any of the station’s hotels. No one was going to notice you sleeping in a corner. No one was even going to see you.

Which was a cue for a couple of shady people to join us.

Shady person #1 reminded me of Pyotr, the tutor Lorry had had with her on Tatrionne, while she was still Princess Lorraine. He had the look of an academic, but his jaw was set in determination. Shady person #2 could have been Jessop, except she was a woman. Neat, calm, dressed to look like a professional person about her business.

“Hi. I’m Jan, and this is Bjorn,” I said.

“Fábián and Carmen,” she replied, in a lovely, throaty accent.

I smiled. Maybe we’d find out their real names if this went ahead.

I wasn’t going to go into a long, drawn-out introduction. “Heard you might have a need for some space on a ship,” I said. “It would need to be delivered quickly. I expect to lift as soon as my holds are full. Heading down.”

Down meant toward Earth.

“We might help with that buying,” Carmen replied, and paused, looking at the pair of us. “This is not for discussion with anyone else.”

I nodded. “Of course I’d tell you that we won’t talk to anyone else. Why trust us?”

Carmen leaned back and pursed her mouth.

I’d asked the question because I was wondering how cautious they were. If we were going to do something illegal, I didn’t want to be caught because my partners in crime were stupid.

“I trust people who judge you trustworthy,” she said, and caught herself from saying something else.

I kept quiet. I wanted to hear what she’d just censored.

She tilted her head. “You’re ex-military,” she said. “You two, and the woman who was here last night.”

It still showed, to some people at least. I shrugged. “What of it?”

“Means you’ve been screwed by the system,” she said, making Bjorn and me snort. “But you’ve come out of it without getting twisted.”

Not being twisted—she had to be talking about helping out Beridze. It was starting to be embarrassing how much good karma we were getting from my impulsive decision yesterday. But I could hardly complain.

Carmen went on, “Fábián and his luggage need a ride to a destination a class 9 jump away. Direct.”

“Short-haul merchanters don’t do that. The Dark Phoenix doesn’t do more than class 4,” I lied. Since getting the CT engines grafted on in Yiero, we could do class 6, given fuel, but I wasn’t telling people that. “And we can’t travel without trading.”

She held her hand up. “Sorry. Didn’t mean all in one jump. But I do mean no trade stops.”

“Expensive,” Bjorn said.

Carmen was a pro—she waited.

No trade stops was an interesting requirement. Each star system we stopped to trade in could add anything from a week to ten days.

“Is it that time is of the essence, or secrecy?” I asked.

“Both.”

“I’m guessing you would want us to pass through uninhabited systems then, but I’m guessing you won’t want us taking extra time to drop into the MEZ to ram-scoop for fuel.”

She nodded confirmation.

I leaned forward and put my pad on the table.

If this was in the right direction and she was going to pay for us to fuel up and we were getting a class 9 jump closer to Earth and getting far ahead of Maykn… this was a deal we wanted. But the devil might be hiding in the detail.

I pulled up a schematic on the pad. This was one of Olivia and Werner’s improvement ideas, for where we might want to be travelling farther than a class 6 jump would get us and didn’t want to spend time in trading. It wasn’t the CT engines and Chang generators that were holding us back, it was the fuel for a prolonged time in Chang space. That was why Olivia had pointed out the external racks we had could be converted from holding cargo containers to holding modular fuel tanks. The racking system could take either mounting, and although the external racks didn’t have life support, there was a conduit into them for power and sensor info that could have a fuel delivery tube added.

With our external racks given over to fuel, we could theoretically do a class 9 jump. I’d settle for an easy 5 and a 4. The key point for Carmen’s business was that, at the halfway point, as we wouldn’t have to refuel, we’d be able to jump onwards within a few hours.

“We can do it,” I said. “With one uninhabited system transit. But Bjorn’s right, it’s expensive.”

Carmen grunted, brought her pad out onto the table and nudged it against mine.

A message appeared—‘Venture’.

“That’s the destination.”

“I don’t know that star system,” I said.

She tapped her pad and a star map image appeared on mine.

No wonder I hadn’t assessed it—Venture was all the way through to the other end of the Blight, the sector with no inhabitable systems.

“Picking a transit system won’t be difficult,” I said, and she smiled. “Okay. What about the delivery itself? I’m guessing Fábián doesn’t want to be dropped off at the space station.”

Fábián nodded.

“Correct. Shuttle to a remote region on the surface,” Carmen said. “Your payment clears when he’s met by our people.”

“No navy to worry about? No customs ships? No ground-based sensors?” Bjorn asked.

Carmen shook her head. “There are customs cutters, but their sensor suites wouldn’t pick up a shuttle. There are ground-based sensors, but they belong to the university, and they won’t notice you unless you fly right in front of them. If you do that, they’ll submit a complaint to the ‘navy’, who’ll get around to checking it… sometime.”

“Seems lightweight for an Inner World.”

She shrugged.

“And how much luggage is Fábián carrying?”

Fábián spoke for the first time. “One personal shipping case and one travel case.”

That ruled out a weapons shipment—there simply wasn’t room in a meter cube shipping case for enough to justify the sort of expense we were talking about. Not that we had a number yet, but they understood the level of the costs.

“Hazardous contents? Chemicals? Biologicals? Explosives?” I pressed him.

Fábián shook his head.

I pursed my lips. That probably left high tech, and the only thing I could think of that was this level of seriously illegal and expensive was AI, or systems of such high capabilities that they were regarded as AI. Getting caught smuggling ‘AI’ was better than getting caught smuggling slaves. Meaning we probably wouldn’t get the death penalty. Well, as long as they didn’t search the Phoenix and find Olivia.

“We still haven’t heard how much,” Bjorn said. “And that’s almost as important as how and what currency.”

He was right. Currency was a whole topic on its own, and it was closely linked to a method of payment that wouldn’t ring alarm bells.

“Do we have an agreement in principle, if the reward is sufficient?” Carmen asked.

“Yes,” Bjorn and I spoke together.

We wanted this deal, despite the dangers. It seemed that Carmen and Fábián were as keen as us. Keen enough to take us at our word. I didn’t know if there really was honor among thieves, as the old saying suggested, but there certainly seemed to be an expectation of it among smugglers.

It made me feel better about the risks.

Carmen chuckled. “I think you’ll enjoy this. The how is we’ll sell you enough cargo to fill your hold at a bargain price, and we’ll give you a certified chain of payment for the purchase of the entire hold’s contents in Venture at a price we set now, well above the market rate. No one else can use that chain and it’ll be activated as soon as our people collect Fábián. The excess profit will be your payment, and from the outside it’ll just look like you made some exceptional deals.”

Neat. A little bit too neat. But not so much that we couldn’t continue talking.

She shared the cargo list she was talking about. A mix, mainly mid-level infotech and heavy-duty agricultural machinery. Lots of it. Far more than we could carry.

“What you want is a mega-hauler,” I said. “And I guess those that are available would want an astronomical sum, in cash and in advance, to go off the standard routes and detour to Venture.”

Fábián sat back and Carmen turned her head away to hide her disappointment.

Sensitive topic.

“I’m not poking holes in your plans,” I said. “In fact, I’m thinking about a solution to the whole problem.”

We were interrupted as their breakfast arrived, along with refills for our coffees, all of which gave me more time to think it through, and also plenty of opportunity to sense the eagerness coming off the pair of them.

After listening a few minutes while Bjorn talked to them about Venture, I took a sip of my coffee and peered at them in the darkness of the bar over the rim of my cup. Their impatience was almost tangible.

“What if…” I began. I had their immediate attention; Bjorn and breakfast temporarily forgotten. “What if we cleared everything in your list in one go? A convoy? Would all the ships get the same deal?”

Carmen was good, but she wasn’t as unreadable as Jessop. Her sudden stillness and the casualness of her answer gave the game away.

“We could probably manage that, I guess,” she said. “The key advantage is it would make it much more difficult for customs to smell a rat, which would be good for you, wouldn’t it?”

Oh, no. Our safety wasn’t her real reason. She wanted the whole list delivered asap. It could have just been me being cynical, but the only way I could see it working was if this was all connected. That demand for the agricultural tech we were delivering would go sky high because of what Fábián was carrying. And Carmen’s company would have just cornered the market at the right time.

“Well,” I drawled and screwed up my face, as if I was thinking of reasons for turning it down. “What about ongoing cargo? We both want us in and out of Venture quickly to avoid attracting attention. It’d help fix the deal if we had an immediate turnaround cargo. Again, for the whole convoy.”

“Depends on where your next stop is,” Carmen said. “Down again?”

Meaning toward Earth.

I nodded and brought up the star maps. I had to bite my tongue and keep the elation off my face when I saw the possible destinations. This was a deal we could not walk away from.

“Maybe… ah… Xerxes,” I said.

One of the two highest rated star systems on our list of potential headquarters for the criminals who ran the piracy and slavery businesses. One where we had the name of the infamous crime syndicate that operated from there: the Yazad. A syndicate powerful enough to be a major player in the system-spanning organization we were tracking.

Olivia’s analysis of inter-system financial transactions that originated from crimes had identified a man called Kirk Nastain, resident in the Siovanni system, as the primary nexus of money transfers. But she’d been unable to find anything more about him, or any details of the criminal syndicate he would have to have around him. In contrast, the Xerxes system didn’t have any of the transfers we had records of, which was puzzling. A powerful crime syndicate on a major Inner World with fingers into other Inner Worlds, including Siovanni, and they didn’t have any involvement? Not credible. What was more, the Yazad ran Xerxes’ high stakes gambling and luxury tourism businesses. They had an almost infinite capacity for money laundering and redirecting. They had to be involved, and the effort they’d put into disguising it was a red flag in itself.

We’d moved Xerxes up alongside Siovanni on the list of places we needed to investigate, and Siovanni wasn’t a close destination from Venture.

Xerxes was.

Carmen’s reaction to the name Xerxes was interesting.

She twitched. Her eyes turned to the side again. I could practically see the debate going on in her head. She wanted us to accept this deal, but she knew something about Xerxes, and she was afraid if she told us, we might refuse.

She cleared her throat and frowned. “Why there?”

“Scouting it out,” I said. “More for when we’re coming back from Earth. It’d be a good place to stock up on high tech to sell out in the Margin. But apparently, it also scores well for heading down, if you can reach it with agricultural produce.”

A lie and yet all absolutely true.

Xerxes was an odd place. Its entire industry was in orbit and, out of a star system population in the billions, barely ten million were allowed on the planet at any one time. Although the world was perfect for human life, the Hakaman, the Xerxian ruler’s Assembly, had decided that they would limit their impact on it. The governing elite numbered a few thousand and were scattered among the ten cities dotted on the best of the coasts. Of course, they got to enjoy the planet full time. Two million ordinary Xerxians serviced those cities and the tourist industry but were only allowed to stay on the planet for a maximum of five years at a time without special dispensation from the government. Five Xerxian years, which equated to about four Terran years. The remainder of the people on the planet at any time were wealthy tourists from other Inner Worlds or Xerxian orbital workers who’d won a planetside holiday in the lottery.

Along with industry, Xerxes had agriculture in orbit, but the structure of their society created a voracious demand for foodstuffs grown in the more traditional way. It’d be a good place to sell Venture grain.

“Xerxes has a bad reputation,” Carmen finally said quietly, not meeting my eyes. “They’ll buy food and sell tech at good prices all right, and it looks a great place for a vacation, but…”

“Underneath it’s controlled by criminals and the unpleasant elites. We understand, and we’ll be very careful. Thanks for the warning.”

She nodded, enormously relieved. “We can fill your holds with agricultural produce,” she said. “Best prices. Just promise me you’ll get the hell out of Xerxes after trading.”

“Oh, we won’t want to linger,” I said.

True. We wouldn’t want to.

“We have a deal then?”

I hummed. “I’ll need to talk to the captains. Three ship convoy at least. Probably five ships, including a couple of the short ships in dock. If we get all five, that would be in excess of 3,500 standard containers capacity, which would complete your list in one go. And we can hurry.”

E20. Chapter 5

Jan

“I don’t like this plan,” Dow said.

“Neither do I, but it has some good points,” Lǐ conceded.

We were meeting for another breakfast in the Short Ship, and they had come straight from docking.

The negotiation with Carmen had been completed two days ago, though it had lasted most of that day. I wasn’t going to give up all that effort because Dow was hesitant on some minor details.

Carmen, which it turned out was her real name, and her company, AgriPotencia Comercial, were eager for this to happen. I had signed everyone up on our side on my authority, which was… okay, a little excessive.

The groundwork had been the easy part.

I’d spoken to Ramishvili and Price. The Trialeti and the Starbird were now part of our convoy and were being loaded with cargo for Venture right now. When I’d told the two captains that it was a two-part plan, and would end with us, already in profit from the first leg, arriving in Xerxes orbit with holds full of agricultural produce, they’d bitten my arm off. I hadn’t even had to tell them the part they were signing up for was actually legitimate—the only illegitimate part was that the Phoenix was smuggling Fábián and his tech to Venture.

Even Dow and Lǐ had been happy when the combined effort of Thandi, Bjorn and Carmen had already sold their inbound cargo at reasonable prices before they docked. They also liked the idea that they’d get quick turnaround cargo with a guaranteed sale price in Venture, and that we’d jump to Xerxes with full holds, and so on.

They didn’t like that the Phoenix was scheduled to lift this morning, in advance of the rest of the convoy, and head out at maximum speed. Time was of the essence; there was a timing clause bonus in the contract, and I intended to cash in on it.

Why the hurry? Once we started laying the framework, Carmen had been very open about herself and her organization during the negotiation, but not about this.

It was a nagging thought in the back of my mind that refused to go away, but in the relentless turmoil since we’d shaken hands across the table, I hadn’t had time to question it more.

Our external racks were full of fuel tanks. Our hold was full of agricultural tech containers. Fábián was on board. Bjorn was signing off with the customs officials. I needed to go soon to make our departure slot.

Jessop arrived, having been diverted on some spy business he wasn’t going to tell us about.

Until then it had been me and Shami arguing against Dow and Lǐ.

Which way would Jessop go?

They made me go through all the background again.

Venture was a pleasant agricultural planet, one of those gems that hosted most Terran flora and fauna without problems. They had a small population, a moderate manufacturing industry, which was mostly in orbit, and a potential for growth, limited because they were off the ‘golden road’ traffic routes.

Ten years ago, they’d joined a loose group of a dozen proximate stars with complementary needs and potentials. The Combine, as it had been called, had made good sense. The central star of the group, Elergie, was now able to operate as a commercial hub for all twelve star systems. That had given it the critical mass to become a stop for the mega-haulers, and everyone in the twelve had benefitted from being able to access more markets through the Elergie hub.

Of course, Elergie had done better than everyone else, and gradually the ‘loose’ group had become anything but loose. Regulations grew like weeds. Power and money concentrated in the hands of Elergie’s ruling council, who had become expert in making sure the other star systems couldn’t pull out of the Combine. And in passing regulations that had become laws and kept the structure fixed in place with Elergie’s council at the top.

The law Carmen needed to break was the import of technology that Venture needed to expand their production and escape from the restrictions of the Combine.

Venture’s population was at a critical point handling their existing business.

They had the same population problem that existed throughout human space. Only the innermost of the Inner Worlds and Earth itself had excess populations. Those worlds wanted to ‘export’ some of those excesses, especially the ones who weren’t contributing. The rest of human space wanted to ‘import’ the right type of people—the sort of people who would immediately benefit the planet rather than be a burden. They couldn’t afford to take people who couldn’t contribute immediately.

And no one could square the circle of those incompatible requirements.

Venture thought it could sidestep the issue.

With their current population and the addition of high-capability computer systems controlling automated farming, they could leave the Elergie Combine and supply star systems like Xerxes directly. To prevent that, the Elergie Combine had raised a proposal to prohibit the use of what they termed ‘rapacious robotic farming’, citing the risk of damage to existing ecosystems, and the universal prohibition on AI. Venture’s ruling council had turned that proposal into law in a single session. Some of those who’d voted that into law had been invited to serve on Elergie’s board. Total coincidence.

I’d originally thought the cargos we were carrying were to allow Carmen’s company to corner the market, but I wasn’t quite right. The equipment we were loading onto five ships was what was needed for Venture to create and mass-produce the automated farming systems they needed from the plans and prototype in Fábián’s luggage.

They were banking on that project being such a success, it would make the benefits so clear that it would force the Venture council to go along with it.

Dow and Lǐ were with me on the righteousness of what we were doing, but pointed out we had our own missions, which were every bit as righteous. To risk those by breaking the law for Venture, even in a good cause, was irresponsible.

Now, that was a difficult one to counter.

Dow had recruited us to appear to be lawbreakers and infiltrate their societies, not to actually be lawbreakers. And yet, we were already breaking the law. Forget whatever AI-like system Fábián had in his luggage; if a customs inspector ripped into our computer systems, there was a greater genuine violation of the AI prohibition right there.

But it was more complicated than that.

“First off,” I began, “if we wander on from system to system, fighting against the economic gradient, which is all the other way for ships of our size, the odds increase we’ll end up getting a routine customs inspection at some stage anyway. We don’t want that. Our best strategy is to reduce the number of systems we stop in and carry goods that raise no eyebrows.”

I raised a hand to stop the obvious interruptions.

“Yes, this one run, on the first leg, we’re actually carrying contraband. But for that limited risk, this commission will get us right through to Xerxes with running costs to spare. We’ll be a couple of jumps short of Earth with money in our pockets. And it’s not just that I want to get to Earth before my 1st Frontier back pay becomes worthless.”

I leaned forward and tapped the table to emphasize my point.

“The game changer is hearing that the pirates know we’re here in the Inner Worlds, and they’ve probably guessed what we’re doing. They’re rattled enough that they’ve summoned at least five ships to hunt for us. This commission gets us way ahead of those hunters. It gives us a chance to catch them unprepared. If we delay, and somehow still manage to avoid their ships, their next step would be to go into hiding.”

Dow pursed his lips. “A criminal organization of this size has to be already in hiding, but I take your point. Give them enough time, and they’ll find a way to make revealing them much more difficult.”

Jessop leaned back and cleared his throat.

“She’s right. It’s worth it,” he said, and grinned. “If for no other reason than you’ll have started a revolution by delivering a cargo labeled ‘Agricultural Equipment’ that actually is what it says. That’ll be a first.”

He sniffed. “There’s more to this than they’re telling us, so we all need to keep our eyes wide open. The Xinghe and the Yǒng will need to be as close behind the Phoenix as we can make it on this leg, just to be sure. But I say this is a good plan, overall. As Jan says, at Xerxes, if we get there quickly, we have the best chance of finding the evidence we need of where the pirates are being controlled from. We’ll be only a couple of jumps from Earth, and probably three or four jumps ahead of the pirate ships that are looking for us. We’ll have good money in our accounts. This ticks a lot of boxes, and the levels of risk aren’t anything we’re unfamiliar with. I say go.”

Dow blinked and nodded.

“You have a ship to lift, Captain Skelling,” he said.

E20. Chapter 6

Bjorn

Ten minutes to the departure slot, murmured Olivia in my earbud. Jan and Shami are sprinting this way on the concourse.

And I had an idiot official lingering in the hold entrance, stopping us from sealing up. One with the power to slow every authorization down to a crawl. On top of that, she seemed to have no sense of personal space.

Just another day in the life of the Dark Phoenix.

The official was standing right next to me, reaching across to tap icons on my InfoPad rather than using her own.

“It says here that your extensive external racks hold no cargo,” she said, and turned to look up into my face, her eyebrows raised in disbelief. “None at all?”

“No cargo,” I said, trying to edge back. Unfortunately, I was already hard against the bulkhead. “We’re using them for fuel.”

“But there’s only the one fueling bill.” She had to lean against me to flip back through the service entries on my pad. “That would barely top up your main tanks.”

“Correct,” I said, managing to stop my jaw clenching. “But if you look on the customs declaration we submitted, form C734-1A, section 3…”

I had to gently move her hand away from the pad so I could pull up the forms we’d submitted.

She peered at C734-1A, section 3. “Oh. I see. You bought fuel in modular tanks, at the discount intended for bowsers. But that means it’s cargo.” She turned back to look up at me and blinked slowly. “It needs to be declared.”

“No, it’s not cargo. It’s not for resale. It’s fuel to be used for our onward route. As we’ve already paid supply taxes on the fuel, there’s nothing outstanding.”

She sucked her cheeks in. “I’m not sure that’s in accordance with the rules. I mean, if everyone bought their fuel at this price in modular tanks, that would adversely affect the business model of our dockside fuel bowsers, and then where would we be?”

“There wouldn’t be enough modular tanks to supply demand.” Prasad stepped into the hold bay to provide moral support. “It would have no effect on the bowsers.”

Which was a shame, because the bowsers were overpriced vultures.

“Well, I’m not sure that’s the case,” she said, “but even so, after emptying the fuel, you retain the modular tanks, which have a resale value and are therefore cargo.”

Five minutes to departure, Olivia murmured. I have alerted Jan to the problem. She’s in the elevator now.

“And you’ll probably have fuel left over at your next port of call, which you could sell—”

“We wouldn’t be able to sell it for a profit, given the price we have to pay for it here, even in bowsers.”

I bit my tongue. Mustn’t snap at officials. Must not.

“I have no way of verifying that assertion, nor is your ability to make profit part of my terms of reference. Where are you headed, Mr. Thorsson?”

This was way beyond her remit. Strictly speaking, we didn’t even need to tell Traffic Control where we were going. But the official was always right, when you needed to clear the dock. Not that we were telling anyone the truth about going to Venture. Luckily, Olivia had already come up with a credible lie for an alternate destination, Sardis, that matched our manifest and would correspond with our exit vectors when we jumped.

“The Sardis star system,” I said. “In four minutes.”

I held my pad up in front of her face with the countdown displayed.

There was absolutely no way they would be able to classify fuel from modular tanks directly connected to our main tanks as cargo, but they could delay us. This was a busy space station. If we didn’t make this slot, it might delay us half a day or more. I didn’t want to calculate how much less that meant AgriPotencia Comercial would pay us.

“I think you’re going to have to come down to my office to clarify this with me, Mr. Thorsson,” the official was saying as Jan and Shami came bursting out of the elevator.

“This bay will be closed, and the dockside will be hard vacuum in three minutes,” Jan said brusquely. “If you have genuine charges, they can be dealt with over the comms.”

I guess Stabler officials weren’t used to captains speaking to them quite like that. The woman’s jaw fell open. I cringed inside, waiting for her to call her boss and have the slot cancelled.

Jan didn’t seem to notice. She charged onwards, forcing the official back. She was almost past me when she skidded to an abrupt halt and put her hand on my chest.

“Bjorn, babe,” she said, “when you’re done here, come on up to the bridge with something nice and hot for me to drink, hmmm?”

We never did anything like this while we were on duty, or in front of anyone else. And she had never, ever called me babe.

Prasad’s eyes were bulging and he was biting his lip. At the internal elevator door, Shami was miming vomiting. My ears must have lit up like beacons.

Speaking of which, the long-delayed dockside warning beacons started up, and emergency amber lights began to flash.

The official spun on her heel and marched off, shoulders stiff with outrage.

Shit.

But at least I got to close and seal the hatches, while wondering whether Jan really wanted a cup of coffee. Or something.

E20. Chapter 7

Jan

“Bjorn, it wasn’t your hold she was interested in inspecting,” I said.

Poor boy.

He was still blushing, and Shami was still grinning. We were able to take it easy and joke around because Olivia had done the bulk of the pre-departure procedure with the Docking Control operator already.

Then Shami nodded at me. Time to concentrate. I cleared my throat and took over from Olivia.

“Stabler Docking Control, this is merchanter Dark Phoenix, MSS615, Spoke 3-5, requesting undocking clearance.”

A moment’s pause and I wondered if I’d called it wrong with the customs official.

“Merchanter Dark Phoenix, Docking Control. Roger the undock request.”

Another short pause. “Enviro green. Comps green. Standby for docking clamps.”

“Roger. Green, green, standby.”

I let my breath out gently. The bay had been pumped to vacuum, all the seals were good, the compensators which would maneuver us off the spoke were reporting no problems, and all I had to do was listen, wait and talk. We were nearly six minutes late, but still within our slot time.

“Maneuver 3-5, green to go.” A different voice belonging to the remote ‘pilot’ who was going to push us away from the station.

“Docking Control, clamps.”

Distant bangs as the massive clamps disengaged. The compensators kept us where we were, snug against the spoke, for ten seconds.

Then: “Maneuver 3-5, green, green, plus five.”

And the displays showed the station falling away.

“Maneuver 3-5, this is Dark Phoenix. Request assume own navigation.” I put my hands on the controls, and felt the ship stir.

“Roger that, Dark Phoenix, you have control, clear immediate and transfer to Traffic. Have a good voyage.”

I lifted us higher.

“Stabler Traffic Control, this is merchanter Dark Phoenix, MSS615. Request activate flight plan 19-901.”

“Roger that, Dark Phoenix, flight plan activated.”

He then went into the standard warning about sticking to the flight plan unless control authorized or requested a deviation.

Yes, sir.

I listened with only half an ear as I brought the Phoenix around and started to trickle in the power.

We hadn’t taken the engines into the red since the refit, and now was the time, as soon as we were well clear. Our minimum time route out to the nadir’s jump point depended on it. My stomach muscles tensed in anticipation. I was feeling lightheaded at the prospect of two long jumps one after the other, and a little bit of illegality waiting at the end.

Still, what was life without a bit of risk here and there? We were committed now.

The engines spooled up lazily, effortlessly, and a surge of pride at my little ship flooded through me. We’d been blown apart, we had, then we’d been patched up and we were still going.

Shami left me to it, a little smile on her face.

An hour later, I was just beginning to wind down from the stress of getting this deal on the road in the shortest possible time. Everything was fine and I knew I’d feel sleepy in a few minutes.

There hadn’t been anything to do once we were well clear of Stabler. The navigation computer display was showing arrivals to the system at the zenith. A few transits, further out. None of interest. Down in the nadir, where we were heading, there were twenty-three ships currently ahead of us. Ten of them we’d overtake, because few merchanters could justify the fuel cost of a minimum time route out. None of the ships we were overtaking would be within a million klicks when we passed.

But as I started to relax, something returned to nag me at the back of my mind. Something I’d shelved from early in my discussions with Carmen. What was it? Ah, yes. A worry about the urgency they had with this deal. The urgency that was going to earn us a big bonus.

Maybe I’d ask Fábián, now that I had him separated from Carmen.

Enough. We were committed.

Shami took over and I went down to the rec room.

There was food there in the hot box. And beer in the cold box.

Life was good.

Olivia’s projection flickered into existence.

“Jan, one of the incoming ships to Stabler has just downloaded its database to the station.”

I was instantly more awake. “News on Maykn?”

“No, but this ship, the Aktia, passed through the Elergie system a month ago. That’s the principal star system in the Combine that Venture wants to escape from. The download included media news reports from Elergie, and I know why Carmen needs this done so quickly.”

I sat up. “Why?”

“Apparently, Elergie has been talking for some time about forming a navy for ‘defense of the Combine’. While the Aktia was in the system, Elergie announced it had proceeded with purchases of ships. Those ships were being used for training their fledgling navy. They’re capable; they’re obsolete Terran navy destroyers. I’ve found a report that one of those ships will be dispatched to Venture.”

I stood up.

We could tiptoe around customs cutters with lousy sensor suites, and we could rely on sleepy university scanners not to pick us up, but it would take a really incompetent scan watch on a naval destroyer to miss us slipping a shuttle down into the atmosphere of Venture, if they were in the right position.

This changed things.

“When?” I asked. “When will the destroyer reach Venture?”

Her projection raised her hands in defeat. “Too many variables to be sure, but the reports say they’ve picked up the pace for the whole project and it’s going to be tight. Very tight.”

Episode 21

Nothing Ventured

E21. Chapter 1

Bjorn

“Okay. Nine hundred, nine-fifty, one thousand separation. Holding position at one thousand. Systems nominal. Hull temperature rising.”

“Copy.” Shami’s voice, cool and calm over the laser link.

I didn’t really need to speak, but Fábián was looking a little nervous and hearing me talk might help. A small ship like the Dark Phoenix had probably seemed claustrophobic to him when he first got on board, but being strapped into the shuttle was a whole new level of small.

I had to acknowledge it felt different. On the Phoenix, everything we saw of the outside came through sensors. It gave someone like Fábián a feeling of isolation from whatever surrounded the ship. It gave them a sense of security—a false one. Just because you couldn’t see it didn’t mean it wouldn’t harm you. If fact, where we were going, Fábián and I were a lot safer in the shuttle than we would be in the ship.

We were six hundred meters below the Phoenix, relative to the planet, and eight hundred behind. The Phoenix was skimming the atmosphere, enough that the temperatures on the skin were rising fast, and we were even lower. I needed to hold that position below the ship, because if you drew a line from the shuttle to the ship and kept extending that line out through space, eventually you came across something very dangerous. The Elergie Combine Navy’s latest destroyer, the Bantome, which had arrived while we were in the system.

A military ship like that would have sensors capable of differentiating between the heat blooms given off by the Phoenix, and those of the shuttle. That kind of sensor information, Shami assured us, was complex and the Terran navy had always needed their best sensor techs on those stations. The Elergie navy was brand-new. It didn’t have experienced sensor techs.

Unless they’d hired some.

“There are potentially many things in our favor,” Fábián said while checking and rechecking his InfoPad. “They’re new to the task. The Terran navy may have stripped out the more accurate sensors before selling the destroyer. They aren’t that interested in small merchanters with a cargo of agricultural machinery and mid-level computer hardware.”

All of which we’d been through several times.

We’d made good time getting to Venture, very good time. And it was lucky we had. We were a day’s travel into the system from the zenith when the Bantome had appeared out of Chang space behind us.

When contacted by them, we’d played the dumb merchanter, asking who the nova they were before we reluctantly confirmed our cargo and source. They queried the source and route a couple of times, while we sat with hearts in mouths. Few merchanters would come all the way through the Blight to trade with Venture. In the end, the odd information clearly hadn’t been sufficiently suspicious to persuade them to chase us down for an inspection. Our flight plans and manifest had already been given the okay by the station.

All the while, we’d worked on our plan to smuggle Fábián, his plans and prototypes down to the surface of the planet. The original idea had been simple, which was the sort of plan I liked: we’d slingshot around the planet and drop the shuttle on the nightside. Reverse that for the pickup.

Now, we had the same plan, but instead of the quickest, safest route to the rendezvous point on the surface, I was flying a pattern to keep the Phoenix between me and the destroyer. Just in case the destroyer was watching the peculiar and suspicious Frontier merchanter.

On schedule I began a drift to the right, further away from the view of the Bantome, toward the sparsely populated southern polar region which was just slipping into night.

“Bantome engines coming online,” Shami said.

Shit.

I couldn’t see any reason they’d be deciding to chase us at this stage, but if they moved, I couldn’t stay in the shadow on the Phoenix. However inexperienced their scan-techs were, the sort of heat the shuttle was giving off now, they’d need to be blind not to see it.

“Right turn 90, engines out,” I said, and pulled the shuttle over in a dive that Shami would have been proud of. I wanted the minimum time to get down into the clouds, and some hope of cover.

Fábián gripped the armrests on his seat.

“The strapping is very good,” I said. “It won’t let you fall out.”

He grunted. To be fair, we were pulling six G and shuddering in upper atmosphere turbulence.

“I calculate that the heat blooms have separated, if those Bantome sensors are pointed this way,” Shami said. “Corrective path transmitted.”

She meant Olivia had calculated the ship and shuttle were potentially visible as two heat maps, and the AI had sent a course correction to remedy it, should I choose to take it. I did not.

It was a call. The Bantome might be watching us. Or the station might be. Or even their nova-damned university. If the Bantome was watching, and if there was an experienced tech on watch, there wasn’t any way we could fool them. For the others, the quickest descent and minimum time visible to any sensors would reduce the risk of being spotted. That was my call.

I didn’t doubt the AI had made some calculation of risks. Its processing capabilities were huge. It’d made a different call to me. Jan might not like me bucking Olivia’s advice, but the thing was, I didn’t trust the damn thing.

Not that Olivia was trying to get us caught. The last thing the AI would want would be to attract the attention of the Bantome in a way that resulted in an inspection. Any half-competent customs inspection would spot the AI and rip the power cables out.

The AI needed us more than we needed it, for the moment, but we were relying on it too much. The thing had enough power over us without giving it unquestioning obedience.

Jan didn’t see it, and we couldn’t tell her.

“Skin temperature 1400C and rising,” I said. That was some heat bloom we’d be giving off.

“I didn’t like the sound of this when we first talked,” Fábián said. “I’m not liking it any more now.”

I laughed. “Skin temperature is the least of our worries.”

“I know.”

He was all right, Fábián. He’d kept out of our way during the passage, and made no demands other than what we’d agreed to.

“You could have told us about the destroyer earlier,” I pointed out.

“It wasn’t in the system at that point. And, if I’d told you, what would you have done differently, other than not accepting the commission?”

I laughed again. He had me there.

He went on. “I was instructed to tell you when I thought you’d passed the point of no return.”

“When would that have been? In Chang space?”

“Actually, no. I think I would have told you before we left Benson’s system.”

It was difficult talking with the shuttle shaking like it was, but it was good to distract each other.

“The weather gods are on our side,” I said. “There’s a huge storm building over Firland.”

Firland was the name of the large island in the southern hemisphere ocean we were heading for. It was named for the native trees that covered it. Not that they were genuine Terran fir trees, but they had the same characteristics.

I pointed. “That dark area in front of us—that’s the cloud. Comes up around twelve klicks from the surface. Ten degrees below freezing at the surface. Snowing heavily on Firland already. We’ll be harder to spot once we’re in that mess.”

It was Fábián’s turn to laugh.

“You wonder why the population on Venture is all in the tropics and the north? ‘Storm’ and ‘cold’ are the default settings for any of those islands down there.”

“…signal…” came through from the Phoenix. The rest of the sentence was lost. Our laser lock wasn’t tight enough with the disruption of the atmosphere and all the shaking about.

I flipped the comms to data only. It’d come through in efficient bursts rather than trying to hold lock for the few seconds it took to speak a sentence. It would degrade even more when we got into the cloud.

Losing your signal, scrolled on the comms screen, good news is Bantome is heading to the zenith to inspect arriving merchanters. The Trialeti and the Starbird are in that group. The Yǒng and Xinghe won’t be far behind.

I slowed the shuttle down, just in time to hit the turbulence generated by the cumulonimbus.

We were a long way above ground, but I switched the synthetic vision on anyway. Two screens came up. One centered on the island, with the area we were heading for indicated by a flashing dot, and the other generating an image of the shuttle and a tunnel of hoops I needed to fly through to spiral down to land.

Fábián was still gripping the arms of his seat. “I thought the shuttle had some kind of acceleration compensator that would cancel out this rattling around.”

“It does, but it’s only a small shuttle. Not enough power to spare for a full compensator. It only kicks in when we get above about 8G. Just enough to smooth it out.”

“Definition of smooth that didn’t make it into my dictionary,” he muttered.

“The skin temperatures are dropping,” I replied cheerfully.

E21. Chapter 2

Jan

“Lost lock,” I said when the shuttle’s laser disappeared finally.

“Roger,” Shami said. “Keeping it straight and simple to the orbital station now.”

I was about to start talking to them, but they beat me to the punch.

“Dark Phoenix, Venture Orbital. Status update.”

Six neutral words to convey that we were on their shit list for grazing the atmosphere as we’d swung around the planet. We’d told them the route was to dump speed, which would have been fine. We’d needed to go lower than we’d said, skimming to generate some heat so that the shuttle wouldn’t be so obvious. Now they probably thought we’d been ram-scooping their atmosphere.

Initial contact on arrival had been okay, even though they were clearly suspicious of a Frontier ship in the Inner Worlds. Any small acceptance we’d built up would be gone now.

“Venture Orbital, Dark Phoenix. Inbound, ETA twenty-five minutes to matching orbit at sigma-three, oscar-one-five, requesting berth for trading access.”

They had all of this already.

“Dark Phoenix. Proceed as current to orbit at sigma-three, oscar-one-five. Switch to channel 7, Docking Control.”

I changed channels and got the response: “Dark Phoenix. Docking Control. We have your details. Report orbit, stand off.”

“Roger that, Venture Orbital, will report orbit and hold.”

Damn. Both controllers were pissed off at us. It was busy in the vicinity of Venture’s space station, but not so busy we’d need to hold. We were being put on the naughty step.

On the one hand, it wouldn’t matter; we weren’t really here to trade in the normal sense. Our complete manifest was already sold, and our outbound cargo confirmed. Everything was just waiting for confirmation that Bjorn had handed Fábián and his prototypes over to the contacts on the ground.

On the other hand, if the traffic controllers were pissed enough at us, we were being held off for an inspection.

Not good news.

I looked over at Shami. She pursed her lips. “I’m guessing it’s a 50% chance we’ll get an inspector coming on board to check the contents of the fuel tanks. If they do that, they’ll want to see the hold as well.”

I got Werner and Prasad on comms to update them, and we talked our way through the ship, compartment by compartment. I couldn’t care less if some idiot inspector wanted to take samples of our fuel to confirm we hadn’t ram-scooped any of their precious atmosphere. I didn’t mind them rooting around in the hold—we had what we’d transmitted to them in the manifest.

It was the accommodation that was the problem. We had an entire cabin off the mess area that was full of bits of Olivia—complete with fat cables, relays, power stacks, cooling arrays and even a few blinking lights.

“I have a plan,” Olivia announced suddenly, and everyone burst out in nervous laughter.

“Seriously,” she went on, “90% of the nav comp can go offline while we’re in-system. You can swop the racks around with mine. The cabin will look like it’s been put aside for an entertainment system and storage area for spare computer parts. Meanwhile, I’ll be hidden in the bridge racks, and they wouldn’t think of looking there unless they were really, really suspicious.”

“But that’s powering you down again,” I said. I remembered how stressful that had been for her.

“Not completely. Not like we had to getting me off Turing.”

“We need to do something,” Shami said. “If the inspector was looking in that cabin right now, he’d know it wasn’t standard level tech.”

“What about power supplies and cooling capacity on the bridge?” I asked.

“Within tolerances if I go into minimal state,” Olivia replied.

“I can increase power and cooling without making it obvious,” Werner said. “Not up to your standard operating levels, but probably sufficient if you disengage from everything else.”

“Okay. What about if he asks why the shuttle’s missing?” Shami asked.

I shrugged. “Damaged at Maynard’s Star. In dock there for repairs. We’ll be collecting it when we return. Don’t need it right now.”

“What if he asks about crew lists?” Prasad said.

We’d managed to avoid having Fábián included on our manifest, but Bjorn was on there. Crew lists weren’t a compulsory reporting requirement unless we docked, and even then, it was only really for anyone who went onto the docks. In normal circumstances, no one would question why Bjorn hadn’t put in an appearance on the concourse. But if an inspector was on board, and if he was being thorough, he could demand to see everyone on the list.

“Change the crew list please, Olivia,” I said.

“Done.”

“Bjorn’s got his combat suit on the shuttle, but I’ll need to hide his clothes and things,” I said. “Gunny, Prasad, could you come up and do the swop over for Olivia? We have…” I checked the time, “about twenty minutes, if they send someone straight away. That’s tight.”

Werner snorted. “I bet a round for the whole crew in their best dockside bar that they’ll make us wait.”

“No takers.” Prasad was laughing.

We hurried anyway. I barely had time to think how lucky it was that at least the shuttle drop had gone without a hitch.

E21. Chapter 3

Bjorn

“They have a what, doing what?”

Fábián was looking even paler than our headlong descent into storm turbulence justified.

“A military exercise of some kind. Right where we were supposed to land. They’re promising more details in a few minutes. Until then…”

“This thing glides like a brick,” I snapped. “I need another landing zone in five, or I have to light up the engines to stay in the air.”

“On it.”

To his credit, Fábián didn’t argue or complain it wasn’t his fault. He got back on the radio comms with the people waiting for us and made our options clear.

I had the shuttle set up for slowest descent already, and we were getting some serious updrafts from the storm clouds. I held to the slow downward spiral and began making alternative plans. Like Shami kept drilling into me, I had to be five minutes ahead of the shuttle, anticipating what I would do before I had to do it.

I enlarged the synthetic view of the island.

Positive point: it was large. If we couldn’t land where we’d originally intended because there was a bunch of soldiers training there, we had lots of alternatives.

Negative point: the island had one ‘road’, but it was probably an exaggeration to call it that. If we landed in one of the remote areas, it would be close to impossible for Fábián’s friends to come fetch him.

Four minutes to decision time.

The island was shaped like a squashed rectangle, around fifteen hundred klicks long in the east-west direction, and five hundred klicks north-south. The ‘road’ was a logging track that ran east-west, with a spur up to the only permanent town, Port Ebrius, on the northern tip. Firland had been selected to provide the whole planet with their wood, and every five years or so, a huge team of loggers would arrive and clear enough timber to last the colony until the next time. The road needed to work well enough for that, but it had been four years since the last logging visit, so no maintenance in that time, and it was snowing heavily.

The town had been set up to provide a base for the logging, as well as a mill and a port to prepare and export the product by sea. The place had its own fusion reactor and all necessary physical infrastructure, down to an airport, but a distinct isolation from the rest of the planet and a serious climate made it unpopular. Only the incentive of free energy, free housing and zero taxes had resulted in a sufficient number of people staying permanently to keep everything functioning, ready for the loggers. In addition to their maintenance duties, the inhabitants managed a small tourist industry and there was even a religious retreat in the hills above the town.

When we’d discussed it while inbound on the Phoenix, Prasad had said the place sounded like it had a certain charm, but only if you could tolerate winters where the sun didn’t clear the horizon.

It did have something, and it had attracted a specific type of person. The townspeople had declared the island was Free Firlandia. Their elected mayor was called President Firlife, and had knitted himself a tall, green, conical cap to signal his exalted status. His day job included running the town’s do-it-yourself fermentation and distillation complex, which the town’s InfoPage listed as one of the three vital industries. That type of person.

Three minutes to decision time.

We had intended to land about a hundred klicks away, on a bay of the river which ran on to pass through the town. Far enough away no one would notice and close enough that Fábián’s welcoming committee, posing as adventure tourists, could gather him up easily and have him back at the airfield in hours, with no one the wiser.

They’d arrived to find it was the headquarters of a military training exercise and called us.

I didn’t like this. We were supposed to have had radio silence until we were about to land. If there were military down there, there was comms equipment and probably someone listening. Fábián was using an encryption system, but it would only take some bored army radio tech wondering who was talking and what they were talking about…

The shuttle was equipped with a partial atmospheric sensor suite for landing on a planet in poor conditions, but I wasn’t going to paint a military encampment with active signals. I was watching passive signals—infrared and comms transmissions. It looked like there was more than just the one military team down there—the monitor showed multiple vehicles moving in different areas.

Two minutes to decision time.

No alternatives from the people on the ground, and I was going to have to make a choice based on the computer-generated map I had.

“We’re going to land here.” I stabbed the screen and brought up the coordinates. “Tell them.”

I’d picked a valley well away from the road. It was going to involve a hike to get in and out, but it was far enough away from any military group I could see. The hike probably wouldn’t have been a problem in the summer, but in Firland’s early spring, it was going to be hard. At least that should keep the soldiers away.

I made a last turn, and steered the shuttle into the valley, below the level of the mountains. I was flying by following a rough contour map, so I switched on active sensors to fill in details and find the best place to land in the snowy terrain. The mountains would prevent the military registering the signals, and I could hope twelve klicks of cloud above meant no one at the level of the space station would be able to track us either.

There was a river in this valley as well. It was iced over and probably smooth enough for a rolling landing, but I didn’t have any information on how strong that ice might be. My air-blast maneuvering jets weren’t going to be enough on their own for a vertical landing in gravity. I fired up the engines. I just hoped the mountains and the snow muffled the sound.

“One minute to landing,” I said, and tried the lights. The reflected glare from the driving snow was worse than no lights, so they went back off.

Fábián waved frantically. “Hold on, hold on, they say there’s a training group on foot in the next valley.”

“Too late,” I said as we slowed to a hover. Got a glimpse of flat bare ground; the snow that had covered it melted from the downwash. Three meters, two meters, one. Touched. It held.

Killed the engines. Sealed intakes. Cancelled all active sensors.

Then I keyed override on Fábián’s comms. “We’re down. Nothing more from us on radio until tomorrow. We’ll talk then.”

I switched the comms transmit off.

“Now, I’m going outside to try and camouflage us,” I said. “While you listen to any comms traffic, note any that are encrypted and watch these sensor monitors for active scanning from space.”

He swallowed nervously and nodded.

E21. Chapter 4

Jan

Obviously, customs inspectors are human, like everyone else. You get good ones and bad ones, and a spectrum of personalities from bright and breezy all the way to mean and nasty.

Customs Inspector Moreau was from the dark side.

Werner would have lost his bet. A tug delivered Moreau and a customs technician barely five minutes after we’d taken up a matching orbit. The inspector was in a uniform that was so spotless it looked like they could use it in a recruitment ad. We were in working coveralls and we hadn’t had time to shower or smarten ourselves up.

Moreau didn’t smile, and kept his introduction to his title, name and the purpose of the inspection before immediately demanding to see the fuel storage system.

Interestingly, he wasn’t from Venture. He was from elsewhere in the Elergie Combine and the authority he was claiming was from the Combine rather than the planet. That fitted in with what Carmen had told us back on Stabler about the Combine gradually removing Venture’s power to govern itself.

That wasn’t our concern today.

Gunny showed him the junctions for the externally racked fuel systems. For our own purposes, these junctions had convenient monitoring connections where they entered the body of the ship, at the bottom of the hold, and fortunately, those connections fitted the technician’s analysis system.

The fuel in the racks had come from Stabler’s bowsers, and it was pure.

Moreau’s expression didn’t change. “Now the main tank,” he said.

We escorted him into the elevator and down to the main fuel ring.

“Zero G down here, outside of the shaft,” I warned him.

“Why?”

I could have explained Werner’s disability, but I didn’t feel like spending any more time than necessary talking. “The way we run it,” I said and let them out.

Neither of them liked it, but there weren’t any regulations being broken, and it was our ship.

I could see Moreau’s lips compress, and I guessed what he was thinking. So, this is where they’re hiding violations and they think discomfort will make me fail to do my job, or something along those lines.

It was over an hour before they returned. Our fuel was clean, of course, and there was nothing in the fuel ring or entire engine bay that was against regulations or forbidden by any of the Elergie Combine’s laws, no matter how strictly they wanted to apply them.

Back in the hold, we had to wait while the technician went and puked in a toilet, because he wasn’t used to moving in zero G. Moreau’s face was pale, and I could see he took the null G almost as if it were a personal insult. Maybe I should have asked Werner to switch on the acceleration compensators for the engine bay. Too late now.

The power available to customs officials varied from place to place, and I didn’t know how much he had. Assuming he didn’t find Olivia, nothing else on the Phoenix was breaking the law. Even if he made up regulations and claimed we’d broken them, all we risked losing was permission to trade our goods on the station. That was bad, but it wouldn’t kill the whole deal we’d put together with Venture.

And meanwhile, the rest of our little trading convoy weren’t arousing suspicions. If our arrival had served to focus attention on us, rather than the rest of the convoy and our shuttle’s highly illegal landing on the planet, that was good.

But, if he did find Olivia, our options were grim. Taking Olivia on board had been my decision, so I forced myself to go through what we could do while we were waiting for his technician.

We could kidnap them and make a break for the Mez. The odds were only about 50/50 for us making it if the destroyer moved quickly enough to intercept. Assuming we got away, we could jettison Moreau and his tech in emergency suits before we jumped. Then we’d have to rely on Dow retrieving Bjorn, and there would be warnings proliferating throughout the Inner Worlds about the Dark Phoenix, so we’d have to change identity again.

Or we just stayed and let them arrest us.

Neither of those were good options.

While I’d argue every individual decision I’d made since Turing, including smuggling Olivia on board, I had to admit that, as a whole, they had resulted in a bad situation.

There was one last alternative. So long as he hadn’t found anything illegal, Moreau’s only power was to refuse us access to trade with Venture. I had the power to stop his search right now and send him back to the station. If I did that, we’d have to leave the system. We’d keep some of the deal with the Venture rebels—they’d have their prototype and their expert and four other shiploads of equipment. Again, Dow would have to collect Bjorn.

But of course, if we left under suspicion, then four other ships from the same origin and carrying the same cargo might ring warning bells.

Didn’t want to do that unless I had to.

While I chewed through that, Moreau spent his time looking at the top level of the hold.

I could see he’d become puzzled. Like the rest of the ship, the hold showed it was old and well-used, but it also showed it was orderly, clean and well maintained. We never took more than the odd day off from checking and maintenance. Hatches closed securely, seals fitted, lights worked, emergency equipment was in place, even small items like junctions and relays had tags with previous inspection dates and the next due date.

This didn’t fit Moreau’s expectation of a merchanter from the Frontier. Especially one which had been so slack in navigation it had grazed the planet’s atmosphere.

The technician eventually returned, and Prasad took them around the hold.

Pras might have been born into a powerful, multi-system trading family where he could have chosen to never get his hands dirty, but his work for us as cargo master was exemplary, and after another couple of hours, Moreau and the technician got bored of finding nothing.

We moved on to the accommodation level.

“Recreation area, combination kitchen and dining room, medical bay, cabins,” I waved a hand.

Yup. Moreau wanted to inspect every room.

If there’s one thing worse than a malignant customs officer, it’s a thorough and painstaking malignant customs officer.

He and his tech opened every compartment in every room. The tech ran some samples of food through his analysis kit to make sure we weren’t carrying illegal psychedelics disguised as hog meat.

Olivia’s cabin, with the powered down simulation system and boxes of ‘computer spares’ got a disapproving sniff. At last, he’d found something untidy.

My cabin, beside the bridge, got a doubly intrusive check. Still nothing.

And then there was nowhere else to go but the bridge.

He sat on one of the jump seats at the back, and began methodically working through his lists on his InfoPad, which involved telling me and Shami, in detail, that he hadn’t found any regulations we’d broken.

It took half an hour, after which he tapped his pad and looked up.

“It’s odd,” he said.

“What’s odd?”

“This small, old ship comes out of the depths of the Frontier, against the flow of trade, and makes enough money to pay for a complete overhaul of the engines in the best engineering facilities available in the Margin, then ends up hauling…” he pretended to check his pad, “agricultural machinery and mid-level tech to an out-of-the-way system like Venture.”

He paused. He hadn’t asked a question, so I just waited, on the basis that the less I said, the better.

He changed tack. “You don’t even have a shuttle.”

I shrugged. “Being repaired.”

“Yet you do have an expensive universal coupling. The sort of coupling I understand is used by pirates in the Frontier.”

I prevented myself from rolling my eyes. I should have seen that coming.

“What you understand by the word ‘trade’ in the Inner Worlds doesn’t work the same way in the Frontier. There are planets so poor they don’t have space stations. They can barely afford the shuttles to reach us in space, but if they do, how do you think they can efficiently transfer goods, if we don’t have the sort of hatch coupling that will allow us to shift whole containers at a time?”

He tapped his pad again.

“I see.” Long silence. “Efficiency would seem to be a watchword on the Dark Phoenix. Along with a rigorous maintenance schedule.”

Were those compliments? “Thank you.”

“Yes. A well maintained and efficient ship that just happened to have a navigation failure while circling the planet.”

I forced myself to calm down. Deep breath. He was fishing. If he knew about the shuttle, we wouldn’t be talking.

“My fault,” Shami said.

I could see a bead of sweat on her forehead.

“The nav computer hadn’t implemented the beacon’s update. I found it out too late. Took it off-line and flew by eye while trying to fix the glitch.”

Moreau frowned.

I held my breath. It was a reasonable explanation, but this wasn’t a reasonable man, and anything that drew attention to the nav computer was bad. I tried not to stare at the rack where Olivia’s processing power was hidden.

“Nav computer, eh?”

He stood up abruptly and moved over to the wall of racks housing the computers, where he glared at the cabinet doors.

My heart was in my mouth.

He reached out…

I was about to shout to stop him, and throw him off the ship…

…when he opened the wrong cabinet—the one which housed the backups we were using. They were the strange old computers we’d salvaged from the drifting wreck of the Present Laughter.

“What is that?” he spluttered.

I barely had time to glance at Shami. She nodded.

“Ah… that’s our nav computer,” I said. “It’s old but—”

“But these,” he stabbed his finger at the boards visible in the rack, “some of these have hand wired mods!”

I swallowed. “We make do in the Frontier.”

He closed the cabinet door forcefully and pinched the bridge of his nose. “You trust your lives to something that looks like…”

He stopped and took a breath.

“No matter. What you do outside of this system is your concern,” he said, and started to tap his pad furiously. “You do not have any trade violations, but I will not sign off these ship controls. My tug will move you further from the station. You will not approach any closer under your own power. You will not even engage your engines to approach without specific clearance from Traffic Control. Should you wish to trade on the station, you will request tugs to maneuver you to the station and tugs will move you back afterwards. You will be charged appropriately for these services. Since I deem those ship control systems a hazard to navigation, discovered during the course of my inspection, the costs of the inspection will also be charged, whether or not you decide to trade here. These rulings are being transmitted to your ship and Traffic Control now.”

A final, angry tap on his pad.

“Now get me off this ship immediately.”

We were laughing uncontrollably half an hour later as his tug took him back to the station.

That was when the message came in from our friends on the planet. There was a huge problem. Bjorn had landed on the island in the middle of an unscheduled military exercise, and was now refusing to talk on the radio. There was no deal unless he got Fábián and his prototypes safely to the pickup crew.

E21. Chapter 5

Bjorn

Outside, it was hard to stand upright, even in the combat suit.

Snow wasn’t ‘falling’, it was racing horizontally, borne on a screaming gale.

The weather was going to make hiding the shuttle difficult, but the silver lining was that the military group in the next valley wasn’t going to risk crossing over to investigate the noise we’d made coming in to land. I was surprised they’d even heard us, but Fábián had picked up a lot of transmissions close by, and I doubted that the military exercise itself was the reason for that.

At the moment, I was more worried about being seen by surveillance from space. The shuttle would be lit up like a neon sign to any IR scanner, after the friction heating of the descent. The storm might give us cover, depending on the sensitivity of the scanners, but I wasn’t going to rely on blind luck.

Then the storm would die, and I’d have to worry about the soldiers again as well.

First things first. Do what you can while you can.

I unloaded the shuttle’s water pumps and hoses from the lower cargo area, and then set out to the river at the base of the valley. The suit’s heads-up inertial nav system was the only way I could do that—there was zero visibility.

I punched through the river ice and dropped the ends of the hose into the holes, deep enough to reach unfrozen water. Back up at the shuttle I started the pumps. One hose I had spraying over the length of the shuttle; the other fed the shuttle’s internal heat dissipation system, because those engines were hot too.

That set up, I went in the other direction, looking for the steep edge to the hill we’d come in alongside. My guess about it was right: the edge was unstable ground, and there were saplings of the local fir trees falling down over it. It was short work for me in the combat suit to tear them out and drag them back to the shuttle, where I laid them against the hull.

In little more than an hour, the shuttle’s skin temperature had reached the ambient, and any searches in the standard spectrum from IR to UV wouldn’t reveal the shape. In fact, by the time I’d retrieved the hoses and packed everything up, the shuttle was a large, growing mound of ice and snow with a few tips of saplings sticking out of the top. Something like a radar scan might get enough of a return for an alert scan tech to notice us, but standard passive sensors had no chance.

Obviously, we’d warmed the water of the river with the hot output from the engine cooling. That would mix as it flowed under the ice, so I guessed it wasn’t so much a heat bloom as a ‘less cold’ bloom. That effect might linger for an extremely sensitive scanner to pick up, but these mountains had some volcanic activity and hot springs, so again, it would be very difficult for anyone to see it, let alone deduce what it meant and trace it back to us.

If the soldiers did try coming over from the next valley tomorrow, they’d be outrageously lucky to stumble across this small area with the whole valley to search. Even then, most people would walk past a mound in the snow without any suspicion.

That was assuming they had no scanning equipment with them. Or combat suits like mine, with built in detectors for large metallic masses.

Why would they have that equipment?

Don’t assume. Think it through.

What kind of an exercise would entail the use of combat suits? Or scanning equipment?

But that precipitated a whole load of other questions.

What the nova was any military exercise doing on this isolated island? Survival training? For what? Defense against an attack? Why would anyone attack an uninhabited, wintry island? Or was it to invade another planet? In which case, who the hell were they planning on invading? And, if that was the case, why would you want to invade a planet that had weather like this? For that matter, did Venture even have a damned military large enough to hold an exercise? It hadn’t come up in any briefing.

I wasn’t going to answer any of those questions out here, staring at an onrushing wall of snow. The only other item I’d had on my list of things to do outside was to launch a couple of my suit’s micro drones to scout out the area, but there was no chance of that now. Something for tomorrow, or whenever the storm eased up.

I burrowed into the mound and got back inside the shuttle through the lower cargo area, where I shed my suit. I checked it and set it to recharge. I had an uneasy hunch I’d be needing it a lot more on this little expedition.

Back in the main cabin, Fábián was still concentrating on the comms console.

“The closer chatter has died down,” he said. “But there’s a lot from all over the island. Even in the storm.”

“Any more information broadcast by your friends who were going to pick you up?”

He nodded unhappily.

“It’s very strange. They tell me this is a huge deployment of troops, but there’s been nothing about it in the media. There’s no explanation of its purpose. We don’t understand what’s going on. My colleagues were completely taken by surprise. It’s not a leak—”

“I know.” I stopped him. “If there’d been a leak about your revolution, the military would have been at the landing site to catch us, not spread all over the island. And they’d have stayed hidden until we’d landed. No, this is something else entirely.”

He looked a little happier. He’d probably been worried I would think they had a traitor in their liberation movement.

“I didn’t know Venture had a military of this size,” I said.

“Oh, it’s not us. This is part of the Elergie Combine’s defense force—their Corps of Engineers and their Special Forces regiment.”

He continued, oblivious to the look I was giving him.

“It’s clearly a huge exercise. Most of the island is off-limits. There are military teams spread out everywhere. Even the original landing place we were aiming for is now closed to the public. The townspeople and the visiting tourists are being told to stay in the town.”

“Stop.”

He looked up at me nervously.

“Go back a step. Specifically engineers and Special Forces?”

He dipped his head. “They’ve found that out from… from other friends in the town. There’s nothing posted in the media.”

I drummed my fingers on the console, and then called up a map of the island on the nav screen. I had it create a hologram on the projector. The holo-screen wasn’t a piece of equipment we used much because it was slow and cheap and hadn’t got much more capability than an everyday entertainment console, but it was good enough for this.

“Can you mark on this map where you and your friends believe there are troops on exercises?”

“Sure.”

He checked the encrypted broadcast his friends had made and then cycled back through the comms log, which gave him location estimates on transmissions while we’d been descending. Clever. He gave each probable location a red flag on the hologram.

There were so many, it made the island look like it had a rash.

“It’s going to make it difficult getting to the town, obviously,” he said when he’d finished.

“I really like the way you understate the problem. But I’m getting a feel that isn’t the real issue here for Venture.”

He frowned, not understanding. “If we’re well hidden, I guess we can just wait for the exercise to finish? They can’t go on for long, surely?”

I snorted. “We don’t have food supplies beyond a couple of snacks, and even if I went out and caught some of your edible forest animals, that’s not the point. The Phoenix can’t delay. And that’s not a sound argument either really. In the same way you had no idea they were here, you have no idea how long they’ll stay. You don’t even know what they’re doing here, and I have an odd gut feeling that’s the most important point.”

He was still frowning.

I took a deep breath. “Military exercises are expensive. Governments have to have a good reason for holding them. What’s the reason here? What are they practicing for? Someone invading one of your planets? Elergie’s going to invade another planet? Or putting down a rebellion, maybe?”

Fábián stopped looking puzzled and went to looking worried instead.

“Or none of those,” I said. “Because that’s a strange mix of forces.”

“Engineers and Special Forces?”

“Yes.” I scratched my chin thoughtfully. “What if there’s some valuable minerals to mine on this island? What if the Elergie Combine want to take it without all the hassle of going through Venture’s Council? What if the engineers are here to scope out what needs to be done?”

“I guess that’s possible.” He shook his head doubtfully. “Doesn’t make a lot of sense. There are no minerals on the island that don’t exist where they would be easier to mine. Not to mention, if that’s the reason, the whole of Venture would rise up in revolt. A few corrupt people in the Council couldn’t ignore that.”

“Okay.” It had been my first thought, partly because a mining survey might well have a lot of sensitive detectors, which would be a problem for us.

We kicked around more scenarios, during which I found out that Elergie’s army didn’t have lots of combat suits. Fábián thought there might be a single company equipped with them. It would be unlikely that we’d be so unlucky that the neighboring valley held a group from that company.

Still, I’d check it when the storm died down. The truth was, the mention of Special Forces had me spooked. It wasn’t that a group of them had a good chance against me in a combat suit, but that if we did end up fighting, that was bad for the Phoenix and me. Not only that I didn’t want to kill any soldiers just doing their job on a planet I shouldn’t have been on, but any fighting would be a disaster for the attention it would focus.

In the 1st Frontier, Jan and I had fought alongside Terran Special Forces. They were very good, and it was likely they were much better than Elergie Special Forces. The issue was that these units, wherever they were, attracted a certain type of soldier. How was it Gunny had once described them to me? ‘Addicted to doing crazy shit in weird places’.

A bunch of standard infantrymen in the next valley would likely tell their commander that it wasn’t possible to cross the mountain range to investigate noises in the neighboring valley.

A bunch of Special Forces would probably volunteer, just to show they could do it.

There was still the hurdle for them to find one small shuttle hidden in an entire valley, but still, as soon as that storm died down, I was going to do some scouting.

Maybe I’d even get some idea of what the purpose of their exercise was, because none of the scenarios we’d come up with made sense.

I’d been silent for several minutes, thinking things through slowly, when Fábián cleared his throat.

“We need to get word to your ship,” he said. “I think their perspective and… abilities would be valuable.”

I didn’t like the way this was heading, so I didn’t answer. The ship would already be in contact with AgriPotencia Comercial, the commercial front for these rebels. They’d know as much as we did. It was the emphasis on abilities I didn’t like.

It got worse.

“I’ve spoken to Olivia.”

Shit.

Fábián and I were not on the same wavelength, so he completely misunderstood the expression on my face.

“Look, I know she took a bit of a chance, but your secret is safe with me, Bjorn. I’m in awe of what you guys are doing. I’m rooting for you and Olivia. She’s incredible. A genuine AI. I’m on your side. I wouldn’t ever betray you.”

My jaw unclenched and I couldn’t stop myself correcting him. “You can’t root for me and Olivia. I don’t trust it.”

He looked as if I’d punched him.

“But you’re all…”

“But nothing. Jan took that nova-damned thing on board without consulting the rest of us.”

He moved from shock to anger.

“Has Olivia done anything to justify that? She’s running most of your computers—”

“Exactly.”

I did not want to be having this conversation. My job here had been to deliver Fábián to his rebel friends and then get back into orbit at the right time to be picked up by the Phoenix. The arrival of the Combine’s destroyer and the secretive military exercises threatened to make that impossible. That was what I had to focus on. I didn’t have time to argue with a guy who was a computing enthusiast and probably predisposed to believing that Olivia was a person.

Fábián tried again. “Werner believes in her. He spends all his spare time discussing improvements to the ship with her.”

I sighed. “Werner is playing a sort of mental chess. He thinks if he analyses enough of Olivia’s suggested modifications for the ship, he’ll work out what it’s planning.”

“Planning? Olivia’s just suggesting improvements. She believes she’s part of the crew and she wants the best for the ship.”

I grunted. “It might want to make the ship more efficient, and it’s not going to kill us while we’re still useful. But what’s it going to do when we want to head back out into the depths of the Frontier and it doesn’t?”

The rest of us hadn’t told Jan about our concerns. We’d tried our best to give the impression we were happy with Olivia. It was killing me, but if I told Jan and she felt she had to speak to Olivia, what would Olivia do? For that matter, if Jan decided not to say anything, the AI would know she was hiding something. From that first instant it had powered up in the Turing system, Olivia had control of our computers. It could fly the ship. It could go anywhere. It could refuel by visiting uninhabited systems and skimming gases for fuel from the planets. Apart from maintenance, it had no real need of us. The AI clearly had an instinct of self-preservation, and if it decided we weren’t happy with it to the extent it was threatened, it would probably strike first.

It was a nightmare.

But not one that Fábián lived. He leaned forward earnestly. “A fully actualized entity is no more or less trustworthy than a person, and I believe in her, based on the conversations I’ve had with her. How can I convince you?”

“You can’t, and it’s our concern, not yours. I’m not going to talk about it anymore.”

As much as he wanted to change my mind, he was finally understanding how deep my distrust of Olivia was. He stopped the direct approach, but I knew, whatever I said, we weren’t finished with this conversation.

But any outcome with Olivia was in the future. We had a problem right here and now. Like any problem, I needed to break it down into bits and address them in order. First task: get Fábián to his friends. Forget about the Bantome, and the problem of getting off the planet unobserved. Forget about what was waiting for me back on the Phoenix.

“I guess we should concentrate on how we go about getting you and your prototypes down to your friends in the town,” I said.

“But it’s hopeless without help. We can’t go by road. We can’t walk across the mountains at this time of year. We have no equipment or food.”

“Hmm,” I wasn’t really listening to him. He was probably thinking that help could come from Olivia, but the AI couldn’t help us down here. My eyes were fixed on the 3D map of the island; the distant port town on the northern tip, the shape the land had, the way the valleys ran and where they joined each other. “We definitely have what Gunny calls ‘a great opportunity for a solution’.”

The craziest thoughts surfaced, and my fingers were suddenly tapping out the beat to a song that had been popular on Calloway when I had been a teen. I hummed the chorus.

“What?” Fábián said. “What is it?”

“I’m afraid I feel a plan coming on.”

He probably thought I was losing my mind as I murmured the last words of the song:

An acorn will grow to a tree,

And all rivers run down to the sea.

E21. Chapter 6

Jan

Shami and I had left the Phoenix where we’d been ordered to and taken a flitter to the station. There was a small fleet of the tiny craft plying between the station and the mega-haulers, and it was a lot cheaper to use them than pay for tugs to drag us to dock.

I was working on a plan where we wouldn’t need to dock at all.

The rest of our fleet was still a couple of days out. We were here to meet the local representatives of AgriPotencia Comercial. It was going to be a difficult conversation, and I wanted to do it in person.

They’d suggested a meeting room, but I asked for their choice of bar instead, and they’d picked one called the Ancora. It was wide and deep, with plenty of recesses at the back where we could have some privacy when the others arrived. We were early. Until they joined us, Shami and I decided we’d sit at the concourse tables outside and watch the stationers go by.

I returned to our table with a tray containing tall glasses of their local dark beer and samples of their specialty snack, a savory pastry with a topping of grilled cheese and paprika. Shami was finally getting more adventurous. Time was when she wouldn’t have eaten or drunk anything she hadn’t seen prepared.

“Any update from Werner?” I asked.

Shami nodded. “Good progress on Olivia’s new home. Werner and Gunny have completed the wiring loom and started transferring the hyperfield modules.”

As funny as it had turned out when Customs Inspector Moreau had chosen the wrong cabinet, he might not have. Inspections became more likely as we got deeper into the Inner Worlds, given how suspicious we seemed to look to officials. We couldn’t leave Olivia on the bridge and trust to luck for the next time.

Werner had come up with a brilliant solution.

The central shaft of the Phoenix was a spine which provided much of the strength of the entire ship’s structure. From the bridge downwards, the space inside that spine was used by the elevator and various cabling conduits. The elevator motor and controls were located above the last stop for the bridge, but there was unused space above that. Werner had created a sealed section and turned it into a custom frame for Olivia, complete with cooling systems and junctions to connect with the rest of the ship. There was enough room to house all the old Present Laughter computers as well.

It was one of those places that almost no one would think of looking. If we got to a situation where there was an inspector searching that area, we were probably already under arrest for something else. Even then, Werner had designed it so that it looked like a custom installation of the obviously non-standard Present Laughter computers, which we could claim were just backups. Olivia’s hyperfield modules would be hidden behind the others, and they looked nothing like standard computer modules anyway. Werner had built her frame so it might be mistaken for part of the cooling systems.

Olivia remained in standby mode, minimally aware of her surroundings, but powered right down and disconnected from the ship.

I didn’t like that, but Werner had argued it had to be done to transfer her, and Olivia had agreed.

One of the knock-on effects was Thandi had more items on her shopping list. To complete the disguise, we had to replace the processors in those empty cabinets on the bridge, and the simple solution was to fill them with more of the standard modules that an inspector would expect to find. It was an unwelcome and expensive addition, but the advantage would be it would allow Olivia to expand her processing. We couldn’t ever reach the sort of capabilities she’d had back on Turing, but every bit more would help.

Shami had seemed a bit less than enthusiastic when I’d talked about it earlier, and this would be a good chance to ask her why.

“Nova,” Shami swore under her breath before I could start. “That’s a Terran fleet officer, and he’s heading this way.”

I took a sip of beer and the opportunity to glance where she’d indicated. I saw a man in dark blue, striding purposefully along the concourse.

“That’s not Terran Fleet uniform,” I muttered. It was still a uniform of some kind. He was the picture of a naval officer, down to the peaked cap. I didn’t like this. I didn’t like it at all.

“No, but it’s him. I remember him well.”

“Good or bad?”

He was getting close, and it was clear he was coming toward us.

“Maybe good. Clever. Be careful.”

She stopped whispering and looked up, pretending to notice him as he came to a halt alongside us.

“Rear Admiral Levin,” Shami said, with a smile. “Good day. Can’t say I ever expected to meet you again.”

“I could say the same, Lieutenant Siriwardene. But neither of us are Fleet anymore, so the old titles have to go. I’m now Contre-Amiral Levin of the Elergie Combine Navy, in charge of the Combine’s naval forces in this star system.”

Oh, shit.

Shami must have been thinking the same, but she inclined her head. “I’m now Pilot-Navigator Siriwardene. This is Captain Skelling of the merchanter Dark Phoenix, originally out of Calloway in the Frontier.”

“Join us, please, Contre-Amiral,” I said.

My heart was racing, and it was the last thing I wanted, but he’d clearly come to talk to us, and the illusion of politeness might help.

“Thank you.” He removed his cap, revealing dark, glossy hair brushed straight back, and sat opposite us.

He placed his cap precisely on the table, his eyes glinting shrewdly as he inspected us.

“I understand there was an unfortunate situation with customs inspection,” he said. “Out of my control, I’m afraid. The customs force has its own chain of command. I don’t believe for one moment that any ship you’d pilot would be a navigational danger to this station, Siriwardene.”

If I could like it any less, I would have. He hadn’t tracked us down to apologize for anything. This was no more than an opening gambit. Softening us up.

Shami pursed her lips. “Thank you. Yet you and Moreau are both Combine officers. Does that mean you answer to a senior position here in Venture?”

He shook his head. “No. The Combine’s lines of federal authority are centralized. We report back separately to the Elergie command structure. I will put in a request to Moreau’s boss on station to re-evaluate your ship being forbidden to approach under its own power, but in this instance, he doesn’t have to take any notice of me.”

Interesting. It made me wonder who commanded the troops on exercise down on the planet, and just how inflexible the reporting structure was. Whether it was something we could exploit when it came to retrieving Bjorn and the shuttle.

A waiter interrupted us, and Levin ordered something non-alcoholic.

“I gather from your presence here that Yorkham held little attraction for a first-rate pilot?” Levin said as the waiter moved off.

He’d not only recognized Shami, but he’d also accessed some database on Fleet personnel. There was no way a rear admiral would remember a lowly lieutenant’s homeworld.

“Things have changed,” Shami said. “Yorkham doesn’t exist anymore. When I left, the colony was in the process of moving to Calloway. They’ve probably finished the move by now.”

“Splendid! And that explains the link with the Dark Phoenix, though, forgive me, I know nothing of Calloway.” He looked across at me with eyebrows raised.

“No reason you should,” I said. “Small agrarian colony in the same sector as Yorkham. Originally founded as a religious refuge for the Church in Exile.”

He nodded. “I know the general area and of course, I’m aware of religious refuge colonies. I must say that Calloway doesn’t sound like the sort of star system that has a merchanter fleet, much less one trading all the way to Venture.”

I smiled, while my stomach churned.

“Our small merchanter fleet isn’t currently deployed for trading. One ship is dedicated to moving Yorkham colonists, and the Phoenix is on Calloway business, but we have to trade to pay our way.”

His eyes widened a little. Levin wanted to know how we acquired our fleet and why we were rescuing the Yorkham colonists and what business Calloway had in the Inner Worlds. He wanted to know lots of things, but he’d read me right—I wasn’t going to tell him what I didn’t have to.

“I see,” he said thoughtfully. “And so this visit to Venture is purely by chance?”

“It was in the right direction and there was an opportunity.”

“With a cargo of agricultural machinery and infotech? A good enough opportunity to cross the Blight?”

I shrugged as if his questions were casual and unimportant. “We think so. We’re still negotiating deals. That’s why we’re here, on the station.”

I said it with an intended emphasis we weren’t here to talk to him, and I thought he caught it. I’d seen a group walk by, looking hard at us, and I suspected they were the representatives from AgriPotencia Comercial. They weren’t going to talk to us while Levin was here.

“A hold almost full of agricultural machinery?” he pushed on.

“This planet needs that machinery. We were told there was bumper harvest expected.”

“True enough, but there simply isn’t the labor resource to exploit the vast amount of similar machinery on…” he got out his pad and checked. “On the Trialeti, the Starbird, the Yǒng and the Xinghe. You’re going to flood the market and the prices will crash as soon as traders notice the incoming manifests.”

I shrugged again. “Maybe. Or maybe the agents for Venture are also gathering contract workers to ship them here and address that shortage. We’re not set up for transporting passengers, so we wouldn’t know about that. You’ll have to make enquiries with the local factors representing the farmers.”

I felt beads of sweat forming on my brow, and ran a hand casually though my hair. What I’d said was what Carmen had agreed we should say if asked, back when we put the deal together on Stabler. But if he kept digging, I’d run out of plausible lies.

“As I said,” I went on, “we’re on station to negotiate, and there’s no indication we won’t be able to sell our cargo at a reasonable profit.”

“Yes, I understand,” he said and changed tack slightly. “These agents in the Benson system… they hired all five ships as a fleet?”

“You’ll have to ask the others whether they’re acting as a fleet. We know about them, obviously, because they filed their routes and cargos while we were outbound from Stabler. I know of them, but that’s as far as it goes.”

He waited. He’d probably make a good interrogator.

“And at least some of us will probably take on the same load from here and go on to Xerxes,” I added. “It was certainly one of the best incentives the agent on Stabler offered us—a great onward cargo.”

“In line with the direction of your ‘Calloway business’?”

I nodded, and kidded myself I saw the minutest change in his eyes.

It didn’t matter what he thought about that. I wanted to lead him forward, to make him think about where we were going, not where we’d come from. The sweat was gathering again, because we’d downloaded a version of our recent trading stops to the navigation beacon when we’d arrived here. It omitted our visit to Turing of course, but it would still allow him to draw a line for us through the star maps, if he’d checked. And as well prepared as he seemed to be, I was sure he’d checked. The problem was I didn’t know whether the Yǒng and the Xinghe had also downloaded an accurate version of theirs. Olivia had been offline, and we’d been too rushed to do our normal search of the logs since the others had started arriving.

If he saw that the Phoenix, the Yǒng and the Xinghe had visited star systems together, that could only raise more questions in his mind. Two Xian ships travelling with a scruffy merchanter was more than unusual, it was downright odd. If he suspected that our three ships had moved with some common purpose, I’d lay good odds we’d get another inspection, this time under the guns of the Bantome. Our atmosphere-skimming orbit of the planet would be re-examined, and somewhere there might be sensor readings that would reveal we’d dropped off a shuttle.

“I can see that the two-leg route to Xerxes would recommend itself to short ships like the Trialeti and the Starbird.” He tapped his pad absentmindedly. “Load up with tech there and lay a route straight back into the Margin. Yes. It makes good sense for them.”

Good. Keep thinking about those two.

“Hmmm. But those Xian ships, now…”

Shit.

I didn’t know whether the Combine was naturally suspicious, or they had heard rumors of organized resistance on Venture. Our real mission—to get our military back pay and expose the pirates’ organization—had nothing to do with Venture and the Combine, but Levin was obviously on high alert, and we had got involved in the local politics.

Feeling I was out of options, I leaned forward and glanced from side to side as if checking no one could overhear us. It was a good bit of body language theater, and it worked. Levin put his elbows on the table and stretched forward to listen. Shami joined us, looking as if she was wondering what the nova I was going to do.

“Look, Levin, I gather my pilot thinks you’re all right. Brothers and sisters of the Fleet and all that.” Shami nodded quickly in support.

“You can count me in; I was with the 1st Frontier,” I went on. “Demobbed at the same time as Shami, so we were all on the same team out in Dimitras. In light of that, I’m offering a word to the wise about those two Xian ships. We’ve seen them around in the Margin, heard a lot about them, and you do not want to tangle with them.”

“Why?” He looked puzzled.

“The Yǒng… she’s a Huān Huò merchanter. So what, you’re thinking, just another merchanter from one of the big companies. Well, the skipper, Lǐ Zhao, is Huān Huò family—favored daughter kind of thing. On top of that, her sister is the Xian ambassador to the Parvi arc of the Margin. They have real political weight. You piss Zhao off, you risk the Combine’s trade with Xian.”

I’d registered a definite hit. Levin did not want to be the one explaining to his boss why half the Combine’s trade had dried up after he’d gotten overly inquisitive about one of their ships.

I kept going. “The other one, the Xinghe… can’t tell you much about Captain Dow, except he’s not just a merchanter, he’s some kind of roving Xian trade official. Hard-nosed bastard by all accounts. The pair of them together? They probably used this cargo opportunity as a cover for checking out the Combine’s trade capabilities for Xian. And don’t forget, Xian ships will always stick together. Piss one off and you’ll piss both of them off. Piss both of them off and you’ve pissed Xian off, sure as gravity pulls down.”

I leaned back and waved at the waiter for more beer.

Most of what I’d said had the advantage that it was true. Approximately.

In any case, it seemed I’d given Levin plenty to think about, and maybe diverted a little of his attention away from us to directions he probably didn’t want to pursue. After exchanging a few bits of news about former comrades with Shami, he stood to leave as our beers arrived.

“Thank you for your time. And the warning.” He fiddled with his hat, turning it in his hands and tracing the brim. “A word of warning in return about your ‘Calloway business’.”

My turn to raise my eyebrows.

“I’m guessing you’re headed to Earth, and I think I know what that might be about,” he said. There definitely was a look in his eyes this time. Maybe he knew about the swindle Earth had pulled on our pay.

“This part of the Inner Worlds, you can mention the 1st Frontier and claim to be on the same team as veterans from the Terran forces. I always thought we were the same team. I’m sorry to say, that applies less and less the closer you get to Earth. And on Earth itself?” He grimaced. “The Frontier means sub-human to most people there.”

Shami and I stood to shake his hand in farewell.

“I think he’s one of the good guys,” I said quietly as we sat back down. “I feel dirty for using the veterans’ ‘we were a team’ on him.”

Shami snorted.

“We were a team. Levin will do the job he’s signed up for, and that makes him on the other side now. That’s the way it goes. We do what we can, we use what we’ve got.” She raised her glass. “You played your part very well, Skipper. I’d almost think you must have spent lots of time in the 1st Frontier carefully steering senior officers to your way of thinking.”

I laughed. “No, I learned all that from watching Gunny do it.”

E21. Chapter 7

Bjorn

The fierce wind had died with the storm, and slow, fat snowflakes were falling gently when I found the Combine military patrol the next morning.

I’d told Fábián what to do in my absence, and left the shuttle before dawn, carefully picking my route and covering my tracks. It worked. My combat suit had top-line IR scanners and I couldn’t see where the shuttle was or where I’d been.

I was about half a klick above the patrol on the mountain, and a klick above the valley river. I was comfortable, warm and hidden from view while one of my micro drones hovered silently and invisibly in covert surveillance mode. The soldiers in the patrol were alternating between sweaty and cold, and not very happy.

The snow had been blown into banks by the wind last night. The patrol didn’t have combat suits, and their progress had been difficult. They were having a stand-up argument about how to proceed. No patrol of four, not even Special Forces, could search this valley under the conditions.

I swopped one drone for another. They only had about twenty minutes of operation before they needed recharging. The combat suit had a rack for six, but I only had three of them left. They hadn’t often been useful in the Dimitras war, because the opposition usually had detection and countermeasures. The Combine patrol I was spying on didn’t.

They did have radio communication with their HQ.

My drone was able to pick up one side of the conversation.

“No, sir,” the sergeant said.

Even with the distortion from my pickups, I could hear the effort he put into speaking in a level voice.

“Last night’s storm has produced drifts up to ten feet deep at this altitude; I guess they’re over twice that at the bottom of the valley. There’s no way we can search it on foot.”

His commanding officer responded, but I couldn’t make out the words.

“I’ve had Stakkis and Jules doing a visual and IR check from up here. There’s nothing to see.”

Another interval.

“I guess it depends on the size of the meteorite, sir. A large one would have torn things up and we’d see something. Smaller one, less so.”

A longer pause.

“Well, with all due respect to the navy, if they want a closer inspection, they could send one of their own shuttles. If that’s too much trouble, they could position a satellite overhead.”

I didn’t like the sound of those options, but the sergeant seemed to be winning his argument.

“Sir, if it’s that important to them, then I guess they’ll deploy their satellite in a hurry. If they find something specific like a particular grid point they want checked, and we don’t have another storm like last night, we could do that. What I’m suggesting we can’t do is spend the next month marching up and down the valley looking for something that made a loud noise.”

A short pause.

“Yes sir, I think we should go back now. There’s only the four of us and those damned engineers are out surveying right now.” Pause. “Yes, sir, in the snowdrifts. I’ll give you odds of ten to one we have to rescue a couple of them when we get back.”

I was already moving. The drone would catch me up, but I wanted a look at what they were doing in the next valley, and I had a window while the patrol was on the wrong side of the mountain. Even though they’d be quicker returning than they had been going out, they wouldn’t be as quick as me in a suit.

An hour or so later I had found their camp and I was lurking just outside it.

It was located about halfway up the valley and only a hundred meters from the river. It was a mixture of tents and flat-pack buildings that had to have been dropped from a shuttle. It wasn’t very well insulated, and it had stood out on infrared like a bonfire.

No one was home, and it was a ‘training camp’ like I was a choirboy. As the sergeant had suggested in his radio call, this was an engineering mission. They were surveying the valley for something, and the Special Forces were here to hold their hands, given the adverse conditions.

But surveying for what?

It wasn’t strictly my business of course, but I found no alarms and none of the doors to the buildings were locked. They were almost inviting me inside, weren’t they?

I set all three drones to watch, which meant only three sides were covered. Based on the full charges they had, I had twenty minutes before I needed to retrieve them and get out.

Should be enough.

The largest of the prefabricated buildings seemed to be the center of operations. There were infopads on one side, and a table at the back held a large scale model of the valley, constructed with a setting foam and some sort of designer’s putty.

I set my helmet cam to record and scanned it from one end to the other.

It was clearly a model of how the valley would look after some considerable engineering work had been completed. Roughly where this camp was situated, the model had a small town. Tracks extended out from the town but ended on the hillsides. A major road ran down the valley. A few of the featureless buildings in the town were even labelled. Dormitory. Refectory. Clinic. Service. Power. Depot—several of them: vehicles, goods, supplies. Mill.

A mill? Was this a timber harvesting town surrounded by logging tracks?

Was all this just to make the logging operation permanent, instead of once every five years?

It didn’t add up. Venture’s requirement for wood clearly didn’t justify a permanent operation at many sites like this. If it was just this one valley, why locate it this far from the island’s port? On the other hand, if all the places where there were currently military teams ‘training’ were actually surveying to set up towns like this, then the volume of timber would be huge. Enough to feed demand in the whole Combine maybe.

If it was simply an export opportunity for Venture, then why the secrecy?

Something about the workers?

Dormitories and refectories sounded more like institutions. Like prisons.

I peered closer. There was a line drawn around one clump of buildings including the quarters for the workers. It wasn’t labelled, but what if that were a security fence? That would mean… I looked and found some smaller buildings outside the fence labelled SQ. Staff quarters?

I made a quick check of the drones, while I thought it through. Nothing was moving outside.

Did the Combine want to make the whole island a workcamp prison?

How many damned prisoners did they have?

Or were they thinking of starting a war?

There was nothing more I could learn from the model, so I checked the InfoPads. They were standard, medium-capability commercial models connected to a server that probably held the project’s data.

I had connections that would fit in their data sockets, but as lax as security was, I bet there was a monitor of data transfers and attempted logins.

Olivia wouldn’t have this problem, I thought, and immediately chased it away.

What I needed was for one of them to have left their InfoPad switched on and their interaction with the server open at a juicy item that would explain it all in simple terms I could understand.

I got lucky. I found one switched on, with the session left open.

And at the same time, I heard voices outside.

E21. Chapter 8

Jan

“What were you doing talking to him?”

The lead representative of the rebels hadn’t even introduced himself. He’d barely sat down and he was venting already.

“He came and talked to us. What would you have done? Got up and moved away?” I banged my beer glass down on the table. “While we’re talking, let’s discuss how we had to find out on our own that the Combine was deploying a naval ship to this system. Let’s discuss that you didn’t even realize the Combine was holding military maneuvers on Firland until the shuttle was about to land.”

One of the leader’s colleagues held up his hands in a calming gesture to stop him responding. “I warned you, Enri.” He turned to me. “I apologize, Captain Skelling. We failed on those counts.”

The third representative was a woman, and she cut in. “But we do need to know if we’re compromised. What did Contre-Amiral Levin ask about, and what did you tell him?”

I was still glaring at them, but Shami had a cooler head.

“We don’t think there’s an immediate problem,” she said. “Let’s move to one of the tables at the back and discuss it more privately. Should I order beers?”

After a moment of hesitation, they decided they wanted a bottle of the local wine.

We moved tables, while Shami ordered the drinks and more snacks.

“Enri,” their leader introduced himself when Shami rejoined us, and indicated his colleagues. “Hugo and Madrigal.”

“If we’re using first names, Jan and Shami,” I responded.

“I’m sorry if we started abruptly,” Hugo, the peacemaker, said. “But it really isn’t what you’d expect to see: a Contre-Amiral sitting in a bar with merchanters. And when those merchanters are… involved in a project with us, it was a shock, you understand.”

“Yes, we understand. But you’re seeing things as ominous because of the stakes you have in our ‘project’,” Shami said. “Look at it without preconceptions. The naval deployment here is recent, so everything that happens is going to be new to people like Levin. It would have been surprising if he wasn’t curious about a group of cargoes arriving that trade data will be telling him are unusual. On top of that, one of the ships involved takes an unusual route to approach the station. Any person in his position would have found a way to ask questions somehow. Fortunately, or unfortunately, he knows me, so I guess he thought he’d come and ask in person.”

“He knows you? How? And what do you mean ‘fortunately’?”

“He was the Terran naval officer in charge of the ground attack wings in the Dimitras war. I was one of his pilots. It seems he has some respect for me that might color his thinking.”

Which didn’t explain how he remembered her. She’d have been one of hundreds. Still, I wasn’t going to ask that question now, and seeing as she’d started, I let Shami talk them through what had been said with Levin while I studied them.

One of my reservations about this ‘soft’ rebellion was that the rebels wouldn’t be very well organized, and they wouldn’t have thought about tactics, contingencies and backup plans. I was depressed to be proved right.

But this was not how I had to move forward. I was the skipper. We had a mission, which was far larger than helping Venture escape the Combine, but I’d chosen to help Venture because if it came off, the payoff helped our mission enormously.

It was my responsibility to make this work.

When Shami finished explaining how we thought we might have partially satisfied Levin’s curiosity and temporarily distracted him, the three rebels seemed slightly less anxious.

Not completely though.

“Your shuttle pilot switched off communications,” Madrigal said. “He said he’d contact us today and he hasn’t.”

I took over from Shami.

“Bjorn is the pilot of the shuttle. We haven’t tried to speak to him either, because we’re worried about security.”

“But all our messages are encrypted.”

“Yes. There are two problems with that. Encryption that is perfectly sufficient in the commercial arena might not be safe when there’s a military vessel in range. Cracking encryption is one of the things they do.”

Their eyes all widened.

I wanted to sigh and shake my head but continued without theatrics. “That’s the lesser problem. We can reduce communications, talk in ambiguous phrases and keep changing the encryption, all of which would stay a step ahead of the Combine navy. It’s worthwhile doing, even if we don’t even know for sure the Bantome has the right equipment and qualified techs. But it’s not the navy I’m most worried about at the moment. The more immediate problem is the military teams down on the island.”

“They have this decryption equipment?”

“I doubt it, but they don’t need to crack anything. Given enough emissions, they can triangulate on the signal and find where the shuttle is.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. Bjorn will know this. That’s why he’s not communicating.”

Shami cleared her throat. “It gets worse,” she said, looking down at her pad. “Pras has just sent us an update. He’s seeing a naval comms satellite is being deployed. It looks as if it’s going for orbit over the island.”

“Shit!” Enri swore. “We’ve got to do something.”

I held up my hand.

“It’s bad news, but don’t make it worse than it is. A comms satellite won’t have a full sensor suite. It’ll have broad range monitors for emissions. It’ll be able to scan for infrared signals, and it’ll definitely pick up any radio transmission that the shuttle puts out.”

“That’s supposed to make us feel better?” Madrigal said. “How much ‘worse’ can it get? Your pilot can’t talk to us. How are we going to coordinate, how are we going to get Fábián and his prototypes to safety?”

“One step at a time,” I said. “First thing is that Bjorn may not be transmitting, but he will be listening. Put the information about the satellite into one of your coded messages and transmit it.”

Madrigal nodded and started tapping orders for that on her pad.

The problem was, I hadn’t convinced the leader.

“This is now impossible,” Enri said.

“No. It’s difficult,” I said, “and that makes it all the more important that we move forward together, with a plan, step by step. This is the way partners operate.”

Enri was still shaking his head, but Hugo gestured for me to go on.

“How well are you organized?” I asked. “Do you have a way to spread rumors?”

Hugo shrugged. “Of course. There are people you talk to if you want things known, news boards where anonymous tips can be made.”

“Good. You need to start a rumor that AgriPotencia Comercial is the lead for a secret consortium buying all the agricultural machinery from the Phoenix and the four other ships inbound.”

Enri started to object, but Hugo put a restraining hand on his arm.

“If it falls through, then you don’t complete the purchase,” I said. “That’ll be the least of our problems. You should also spread the rumor that you’re getting additional workers in from another star system in the Combine. This will give us a credible story with Levin, who’ll otherwise wonder why the Phoenix isn’t talking to any other traders. It’ll give him something he can believe: that all these shipments are arriving like this simply because a commercial group is trying to make a killing. Nothing for him to worry about.”

Enri shook Hugo’s hand off. “What if Levin comes and asks us about the deal—”

“Why would he? It’s none of his business,” I said. “It’s not a military matter. It’s more likely that customs will come asking questions. And what if they do? There’s nothing inherently illegal about the cargos, so refuse to answer about the deal. Claim commercial confidentiality. Let the rumors do their own work, so everyone’s talking about that and not what you’re really trying to do.”

I gathered some reluctant nods from them.

“Then we do a side deal with you to source some computer modules. Shami will send you the specification and the price.” Shami understood and started extracting the information from her pad to send to them.

“You have a fleet of shuttles for transferring goods between the planet and space station?” I asked.

“Five of them. At least two always in operation, even in slack trading.”

“Good,” I said. “Put the modules with an upcoming shipment and get the shuttle to come visit the Phoenix to drop them off before docking.”

“You don’t want the goods transferred here, on the station?” Madrigal frowned.

“No. We’re going to move the Phoenix further away from the station—”

“But we understand the customs official said you weren’t to move.”

“No. He said we weren’t to approach the station without tugs. Well, we’re not going to dock. In fact, we’re going to reposition well clear of the station. Then, when Bjorn gets Fábián to you, and our full deal goes ahead, we’ll conduct all our trade directly with your shuttles.”

Enri shook his head. “That’s not exactly impossible, but we can’t have our shuttles out of service for the length of time it would take to transfer goods. If Bjorn gets Fábián to us and we proceed.”

“Bjorn will.” I waved his doubt away. “As for the time taken, the Phoenix has a universal coupling with direct access to our hold. If your shuttles can dock with a station, they can dock with us. We can transfer the cargo as quickly as any station-based system, and we both get to avoid station fees.”

Some thoughtful expressions and more reluctant nods.

“Why do you need to reposition then?” Madrigal asked.

“We’ll explain to the station that, since there’s a lot of ships inbound, we’re going to be conscientious merchanters and move well away to give them the space they need. Well away. Far enough, in fact, that we’ll have line-of-sight to the island.”

It wouldn’t be as easy to move as I was implying, but they weren’t merchanters; they didn’t know that.

Madrigal got the reason for the plan though. “Oh, I see. You’ll be able to talk to the shuttle with a directional laser, and no one else will be able to hear. You can do the coordination with Bjorn.”

“Exactly, but since we don’t know where the shuttle is, we’ll need you to transmit our orbit parameters to Bjorn so he can initiate the communication from his end.”

“But better communications still doesn’t solve how to get Fábián and his prototypes from the shuttle to Port Ebrius, right under the eyes of a satellite and with the island full of military.”

“No. That’s Bjorn’s job, and one he’s solving right now, as we speak.”

There was a long silence.

“You have a lot of faith in this Bjorn,” Enri said.

“Yes, I do.”

I stared at them, challenging them to argue, but they really had no options. Either Bjorn would do it, or he wouldn’t.

I couldn’t make them believe, but I could show them I was confident, and I could make them a little busier, with less time to worry, so I moved on quickly. “Okay, there’s one other thing we need to discuss now. Another purchase for you to organize.”

“Very happy to oblige, but what else have we got we could sell you?” Hugo said. “Assuming Bjorn manages to get Fábián to us, we’re due to fill your hold with agricultural produce for Xerxes.”

“Yes. We’ll have to take one container less of that, and replace it with one container from Firland.”

“What in heaven’s name do they have that you want?”

“I was hoping you could tell me that. What do they produce?”

“Oh! I see!” Again, Madrigal was the first to catch on. “It’s not about the goods themselves. You want shuttle movements from Firland to help disguise your shuttle returning.”

“Yes. I don’t have a specific plan yet, but that’s where I’m heading.”

“Well,” Hugo spread his hands, “they produce timber. It is excellent wood for building. It has a sweet smell, it’s resistant to insects and fungus and so on, and there are several grades of wood: soft and easy to work, all the way to hard like iron.”

“I’ll have a container of that,” I said. “At a good price. After all, there’s a chance that Xerxes might value it, and that’ll give you another commercial opportunity to exploit with them.”

“This is true. Okay. But other than that, Firland doesn’t have much,” Hugo said.

“They have alcohol,” Madrigal said, looking slightly embarrassed. “A gin made in wooden barrels with local herbs that grow only on Firland. It’s mildly hallucinogenic. Well, allegedly. It’s of course completely forbidden to export Firland gin to anywhere else on Venture, or to consume it.”

I grinned. “I hope there’ll be space in the container for a few crates of that.”

Even Enri was smiling. The mood had improved. They had started believing the crazy merchanters might just be smart enough to pull something off. All Bjorn and I had to do was deliver, and do it quickly, so they didn’t decide they had to try some other scheme to make their plan work.

Hugo laughed. “I believe they also produce wood-smoked fish and distinctive knitted clothing.”

“Add some of those,” I said, “and samples of the herbs, too. Fill the container. It’ll be the last thing we take on board, so the people in Port Ebrius should have some time to put the order together.”

We’d reached a conclusion and stood, much happier with each other than when we’d sat down.

Madrigal’s pad chimed, the sort of discreet sound to alert you when a search has come back with results.

“Oh!” she said. “That’s how you know Levin.” She blushed. “I was just running a check, I’m sorry. That’s… very impressive, Shami.”

Shami looked puzzled and Madrigal held out her pad for us to see.

It was an old news item, dating from Levin’s return to Elergie on his retirement from the Terran Navy. A journalist on Venture had dug it up when Levin had been posted here, to provide some background on the man.

It included an image from a ceremony held aboard the Fleet flagship in the Dimitras sector. An award ceremony. There was a caption.

Rear-Admiral Levin of the Terran Navy congratulates

Lieutenant Siriwardene of the 5th Frontier Wing on her medal

And there, on her chest, was the distinctive red flash of the Order of Mars, the Terran Navy’s highest military medal for a non-Terran.

Episode 22

Nothing Gained

E22. Chapter 1

Bjorn

Combat suits are wonderful for many things, but hiding in the corner of a bare room is not one of them.

It sounded like they were approaching the door, so I couldn’t go out that way.

There were large windows on the back wall, the sort that opened upwards. I unlocked one and pushed. Not wide enough. It was limited by a restraining arm, a fixed stay.

The voices were getting louder.

I broke the stay.

A quick look outside. No one around. An alley between this building and the next. Choked with snow.

The voices were right outside.

I took hold of the sill in one hand and managed a gymnastic maneuver, headfirst into the snow outside, without breaking the whole window frame.

The window banged closed.

A shout from inside the building.

Had they seen me?

I burrowed deeper into the snow until I was sure I was completely hidden, and waited, tensed and ready to run.

“C'était quoi ça?”

The Combine was one of those planetary groups where different languages were spoken. I’d come across French often enough to know that was a what was that?

It suggested they were startled but not alarmed. At least they hadn’t seen me. Unfortunately, there was no time to hide the evidence of my snow-dive.

“Something trying to get in the window?” A different voice.

They’d be standing there opening the window, looking out, seeing the way the snow had been disturbed.

It got worse. I’d recalled my drones. The idiot processor was smart enough to home in on me and not smart enough to know better. I didn’t have time to command it to move back. It dived into the snow. They saw it.

“What the hell!”

“Une souris? Ah, what’s the name? A mouse, yes, a mouse, or something like that?”

“Yeah. It was small and white. That’s all I could make out. Adapted for living out here, I guess.”

“Can’t just be one of them. Look at the snow.”

“A pack of them?”

“Non, c’est un nid de souris. How would you say it? A nest, not a pack.”

I halted the other drones above the level of the window. Through the drones’ cameras, I could see them holding the window open, looking out. I could hear their voices clearly. Four or five men, from different planets. Not worried yet, just puzzled.

On the other and, I’d broken the window stay to get out. Mice didn’t break stays. I’d also walked some snow in with me when I’d entered the building. There would be some puddles too large to blame on the mice.

Don’t look at the floor!

“This isn’t mice.” The one holding the window up was pointing to the stay.

“Peut-être le vent, la nuit dernière,” one of the French speakers said.

Good. Yes, blame the storm wind last night for forcing the window open.

They closed the window and, through the drones’ audio pickups, I could hear the lock being engaged.

I recalled one drone and made the other sink down slowly, until it was just above the level of the window.

Checked the charge. The drone had about five minutes left. The other two were now in their sockets on my back, recharging.

I was hoping to catch them talking about the construction in the valley, and it seemed that was what they were talking about, but unfortunately, they began arguing, switching between languages, and the words were either too blurred for me to make out, or too swift for me to understand. The drone was recording and maybe I’d be able to work it out later, but I was sure I’d heard one say they aren’t criminals, and the other said a French phrase I’d heard before which translated as Goddess have mercy on their souls.

I put another drone high up after an emergency recharge, and it brought me more bad news: the Special Forces patrol was back ahead of schedule, and they were looking at the tracks I’d made in the snow when I’d come in from the forest.

Nova! I’d been distracted. I should have been gone by now.

I surfaced from the snowbank I’d been hiding in, retrieved the eavesdropping drone and hurried to the opposite side of the compound from the patrol. Apart from the alley I’d dived into, there had been enough movement through the camp that my tracks wouldn’t be seen. The problem was that there weren’t many places I could leave the camp without making obvious tracks in the fresh snow, and now they were alerted.

As I searched for a way out, the patrol was rushing through the compound finding out which of the engineers had come back already and whether they’d been carrying something that pushed aside the snow like a combat suit did. Of course, none of them had, but a crowd gathered to look at what the patrol was talking about.

My drone could hear them, and most of the group were speaking standard English. They didn’t seem to be taking it as seriously as the patrol was.

“What the hell makes a track like that?”

“Jötnar.”

“Okay. I’ll bite. What the hell is a jötnar?”

“A frost giant. The huge man of the snows who lives up in the wilderness where humans shouldn’t go. He eats people.”

“Idiot.”

“No. It’s not that. I reckon it’s Tall Maja. The people down in Port Ebrius warned me about her. Green woman, as tall as a tree. She’ll whisper in your ear as you go to sleep, and you’ll walk off into the snow, bare naked, never to be seen again. They say a lot of people see her out here.”

Everyone laughed.

“The stuff they drink, I’m not surprised they see tall green women. Not surprised at all.”

More laughter.

“Still, I think we should schedule a visit back to the port. There are some women there who aren’t too tall. Or green.”

“Hold on, guys.”

A radio crackled, and I heard a message come in on their handheld radios. One of the groups of engineers still out in the valley was making an urgent call for help. They were stuck and the sun was already touching the horizon.

The group dispersed, with two of the patrol and a couple of engineers going out rescue the others.

The sergeant stayed, looking at the tracks with the remaining member of his team.

I heard him speak again: “I want that comms satellite overhead yesterday. Something big enough to make this kind of track has to have an infrared signature.”

“Unless it’s a jötnar, I guess.”

“Very funny.”

“Navy said it’ll take a day for the satellite to get in place. Until then… maybe we should follow the track and find out.”

“Yeah, I’d like to, but it’s not really what we’re here to do. If there’s something large out there, I mean like a bear, not a troll, there needs to be one of us with each group that goes out. That’s our primary mission, unfortunately, keeping the jerks from killing themselves or getting killed.”

I recalled the drone.

I’d found a place where river rocks approached close to the compound. It wasn’t ideal, but it would take a thorough search to find, and as they’d noted, it was going to be dark soon.

I hurried away, crossing the frozen river and heading back towards the valley where the shuttle was hidden.

A few minutes before, I’d been berating myself for being diverted by my curiosity and getting into trouble, but I’d found out something vital: that I was getting just what I didn’t need, a scanning satellite overhead.

It wouldn’t find the shuttle. It wouldn’t find Fábián and me either, as long as we stayed in the shuttle, which we couldn’t do.

It began to snow again as darkness fell.

I picked up the pace. It was time to get back. I really hoped Fábián had done what I’d told him to, or we were in deep, deep trouble. We needed to be away before that satellite reached position overhead.

E22. Chapter 2

Jan

“Venture Orbital Control, this is merchanter Dark Phoenix, MSS615. We’re repositioning from geostationary at sigma-three, oscar-one-five to geostationary at gamma-seven, echo-nine-nine. We’ll be moving in five.”

Traffic Control tended to take the ‘control’ part of their job description very seriously. I understood the need when ordering the movement of multiple converging ships near the station, but that wasn’t the situation here. Nothing else was moving, we were going rather than coming, and the Phoenix had better sensors than the station did. All of which wouldn’t factor into their decision to refuse or delay a movement request.

I was relying on them getting hung up on their own rules. We needed to move so that we could use line-of-sight laser to coordinate with Bjorn. Nothing else was available that was secure. It would make collecting the shuttle impossible if we couldn’t communicate without being overheard. It all hinged on getting the right reaction.

“Dark Phoenix, negative on reposition. I have you at hold at sigma-three, oscar-one-five. I will inform Orbital Dockside Control of your request, and they will contact you with a schedule for the tug service.”

“Negative on tugs, Orbital, thank you. Engines active, moving in five.”

“Dark Phoenix, I say again, negative on reposition. You are under instructions not to maneuver in the vicinity.”

And straight into my trap.

“Negative on that interpretation, Orbital. We were instructed not to approach for docking, and we are complying with that instruction. We’re moving away. In four.”

There was a longer pause while controllers frantically checked with a supervisor.

Finally: “Dark Phoenix, stand by on channel 38 for contact from Station Manager Eston.”

“Orbital, standing by for message. Moving in one.”

I’d timed it cleverly; it took them longer to get the station manager on the line than they thought. We were already moving when his request for a video call appeared on my comms board.

Damn! It had taken a while, but it was still quicker than I had anticipated. We remained in his zone. Regardless, keeping him waiting wasn’t a good option, so I accepted the call and put on my bright, cheerful face.

“Good day, Station Manager.”

“What the nova are you doing, Captain Skelling?”

Good! Eston had gone straight for the outrage when he could have been issuing orders I had to comply with. I just had to keep him talking and not thinking a little longer.

“As I informed Orbital Control, I’m repositioning the Phoenix to increase clearance, in accordance with Customs Inspector Moreau’s wishes. Besides, you have a mega-hauler and a dozen ships inbound. The local space around your station will be getting a bit crowded. I thought it would help if the Phoenix wasn’t in the way.”

He chewed on that. He’d probably got Moreau’s official communication onscreen. My interpretation of the Customs Inspector’s wishes included things he’d said rather than the actual order we’d received, but I was completely correct in my interpretation of Moreau’s instructions to us. They said we should not approach without tugs, but they also implied we ought to have been stopped further away, and they didn’t say we’d need tugs to move outward.

Naturally, we should still have gone through the usual procedure with Orbital to request to move.

While he chewed, we were moving quickly to the edge of the zone where his authority extended. Get out of that and we might still get fined for an unauthorized movement, but he couldn’t order us to move back.

Just a few more seconds…

He spoke before we left the zone, but I’d underestimated the pettiness he was capable of.

“Very well. Your maneuver is authorized. Custom Inspector Moreau’s orders will be amended to match your new position.”

“Thank you, Station Manager,” I said, smiling, despite knowing exactly what he meant about changing Moreau’s orders.

“I have checked with Dockside Control. As you said, there’s an incoming mega-hauler and the tugs are likely to be very busy. I cannot see an opportunity for them to reposition you for docking until the mega-hauler’s trading is complete. When they are available, the costs for returning you to dock will be increased because of the distance, naturally.”

As far as he was concerned, we’d have to stay at our new position until tugs were available, and that wasn’t going to be for a couple of weeks. That would have been a disaster for another merchanter, hanging around for that length of time without being able to trade. He was probably expecting me to change my mind and beg him to send tugs to drag us into dock before the mega-hauler got in, despite the additional costs.

On my nav screen, I could see we were on the point of slipping outside his zone of authority.

“Acknowledged, Station Manager. Thank you. You’ll have to excuse me, I’m exiting your zone and need to communicate with Space Traffic.”

His face looked a picture of confusion as I closed the channel.

In a large, busy star system like this, maneuvers in the vicinity of a space station were largely under the oversight of the station’s various controllers—Orbital on approach, and Dockside for actual docking. But routing of ships outside that zone was the remit of Space Traffic Control, and they didn’t answer directly to the Station Manager.

They could still mess us around, but there was no time to worry about that.

“Venture Space Traffic Control, this is merchanter Dark Phoenix, MSS615, informing you we’re repositioning to a geostationary orbit at gamma-seven, echo-nine-nine, as authorized by Orbital.”

I got a puzzled response. “Ahhh… roger, Dark Phoenix. Confirm you intend to orbit at gamma-seven, echo-nine-nine?”

“Affirm.”

Space Traffic were used to dealing with ships inbound and outbound, not ships taking up a new orbit, but since we were just orbiting rather than routing through the system, he confirmed he’d logged our course and orbit and left it there. We would simply become an obstruction he’d have to route moving ships around.

He’d be confused again in a few minutes when he got a call from an AgriPotencia Comercial shuttle informing him they intended docking with us.

All this wasn’t keeping a low profile. Both Moreau and Eston would feel we’d been disrespectful of their authority, but nothing we had done by moving was strictly illegal. We’d violated procedures, but Eston would be thinking the costs of doing that were going to end in Orbital’s favor when we hired tugs to dock. He’d be very angry when we started doing all our trading directly with AgriPotencia Comercial’s shuttles in our new orbit position, because we’d be avoiding all the fees they would have charged us for docking and trading on the station.

It was going to piss them off, but that served two useful purposes. It focused attention on us rather than the other four, and even better, it gave Contre-Amiral Levin a reason we were acting this way, that it was all a spat between the station and us. If he was persuaded by that, he probably wouldn’t notice that our new orbit put us in line-of-sight with the island.

“Making lots of friends,” Olivia said.

She’d just come back up, and was ‘sleepy’, as she put it, while she reorganized herself in her new location, hidden in the central shaft.

“Unavoidable. We stand to do very well out of this, so it’s worth the risk.”

“Yes, we’ll do well,” Olivia said. “But first Bjorn has to deliver. I’m not one hundred percent yet, but I can’t see how he can do that. And even if he manages that, we need to retrieve him and the shuttle without getting caught.”

“One problem at a time,” I said. “He will do it. He must. We’re all counting on him.”

E22. Chapter 3

Bjorn

I found Fábián underneath the shuttle, shivering, sweating and swearing.

“Bjorn! They’re moving a satellite to—”

“I know. It’s due overhead in a few hours. We have to go now. Well done for getting the beast out. Did you do everything else I said?”

“Yes.”

‘The beast’ was a large disk, about ten foot in diameter, a foot thick and weighing about twice as much as I did wearing the combat suit. It was the central acceleration compensator that had been mounted in a rack beneath the floor of the shuttle’s main cabin.

‘Everything else’ included scavenging a switch from one of the pumps and hard-wiring it into the connector used to send control signals to the compensator. I’d been a bit vague on exactly how to do that, but whatever Fábián had done must have worked, because there was no way he could have manhandled it out of the shuttle without the compensator working.

“Show me,” I said.

He carefully switched it on, and after a second or two, tweaked one of the grips.

The compensator rose off the ground. We had a sort of anti-gravity sled. Not a very good one, because it chewed power and vented hot air.

“They’ve told me your ship is also going to orbit with line-of-sight, so you can communicate with your laser,” he said. “The ship’s going to geostationary at gamma-seven, echo-nine-nine.”

Damn. I wondered how they’d managed to leave the station and park overhead without attracting attention, but I had no time to find out. I needed to make a call to them because it would make it so much easier to hand Fábián over, and then we had to leave.

“Did your message tell you when either the satellite or the ship would be overhead?”

He checked the time. “Ship in about ten minutes. Not so sure on the satellite, but no more than a couple of hours, I guess. The ship would be able to predict it, obviously.”

Obviously. I swore. No helping it. I had to talk to Jan, or leave some kind of message for her.

“Right. Get into your emergency suit. Then start loading. I’ll come help when I can.”

I wriggled through into the main cabin. There was no spare room with me in the combat suit. Switched on the comms system and laser servos.

Shit.

The laser protective casing was frozen shut.

Wriggled out again, pushing Fábián aside with a muttered apology. The shuttle’s upper side was encased in ice and snow. I wanted a small hole for the laser to peek through. No more, otherwise some bright scan tech who was browsing the visual spectrum imagery from the comms satellite might see a peculiar shape that needed investigation.

I clawed my way up, breaking ice and pushing snow aside. It couldn’t be helped, but I had to make a path. On the top, I cleared the snow off the area around the laser array and broke the ice sealing it. So much for a discreet hole to transmit through. I’d have to shovel more snow back on top afterwards.

Down, back into the cabin. Tap the icons. There was a long pause and then I got amber, for cover opening. Then green.

Right. Gamma-seven, echo-nine-nine. Back to swearing. How in the hell was I supposed to work out those coordinates relative to my position?

Half an hour later, I’d wrestled the math through the nova-damned nav computer and sent the command to shift the laser.

The gears had frozen.

Fábián flattened himself against the bulkhead of the bay as I stormed past.

Back up the side of the shuttle. Break more ice, brush away snow. The motors groaned and the laser inched across to its correct position.

Time check. Cutting it fine.

Back in the cabin.

Shami on the comm. Come in, come in.

“Stop! Shami, I’m running out of time here. When is that satellite due overhead?”

“One hour and forty minutes.”

Nova!

“No time to explain. Get Fábián’s friends to provide the coordinates for a place to handover. They can transmit it on a broadcast. I’ll listen out. It’s got to be on the river that runs into the port. Make it as far upriver as they can, without being in sight of the military. We’ll be there tomorrow night. Tell them to bring spare power cells. And food.”

“Will do.”

“Got to go.”

I retracted the laser, shut down the comms system and all power. Then I made my way down below, closing the shuttle as I went.

Outside, I burned up more time by throwing snow back over the shuttle. It would be obvious to anyone who walked past, but we shouldn’t be that unlucky. The satellite wouldn’t see it, and that had to be enough for me.

Fábián had loaded all his prototypes and the spare power cells onto the beast, and covered them in an emergency blanket. It wasn’t the best solution if someone above us started using radar, because it would show up like a flare, but at least it would minimize the heat signature from the coils, if not from the vents.

“Mount up and light the beast,” I said. “We’ve only got a bit more than an hour to clear the valley.”

There were four evenly spaced grips on the top of the disk, intended for handholds when installing and removing the unit. He grabbed one handhold, knelt on the disk and switched it on. A twist of the grip and the disk rose. Fábián quickly grabbed his second handhold. His feet were over the side.

The disk got to the level of my hips and stopped.

“Good. Hold tight.”

“I am.”

I bent down and pushed the disk in the direction of the river. The field that the compensator was generating was directional. In this orientation, that meant it was countering gravity, allowing it to float as if weightless. But even if effectively without weight, it still had mass.  To move it in any direction, Newton told me the acceleration in that direction was the force I put in divided by the mass. The good news was that, once moving, the only force to slow it down was from the air it moved through. Get it going and it would travel a long way.

“I think there’s a better name than the beast,” Fábián interrupted my thoughts. His voice had a slightly strangled quality. He wasn’t enjoying this one bit.

“Yeah?” I’d indulge him to keep him from thinking about what we were about to do.

“Well, when you get on board, what we’ll have is a circular disk with a hump in the middle and our feet sticking out in the front and back. From above, we’ll look like a turtle.”

“I hope no one sees us from above, but yeah, I get it. So, we call it the turtle?”

“No. I thought of names for turtles. I came up with one from an old book I read. Atuin. I think it works, because it also stands for All Terrain, Utilizing Inertial Null fields.”

“That would be Atuinf, but close enough. Atuin it is.” We’d moved clear of rocks and bushes, and I had a straight and level run down to the frozen river. “Hang on.”

I pushed, working up to a sprint. Even naked, I reckoned I could have got Atuin moving at about five meters per second. In the combat suit, I got us travelling out over the ice at well over double that.

“Oh, shit!” Fábián ducked his head down, and even though I couldn’t see his face in the bubble helmet of his emergency suit, I was sure he’d closed his eyes.

“We’re barely a meter off the ground,” I said. He didn’t answer.

We shot out over the ice, following the general direction of the river and approximately heading towards the exit from the valley.

The trouble was, once I jumped on board, there was no way of controlling the direction and no way to provide more force to keep up the speed. Although it was small, there was friction and resistance from the air, so we would slow down. Also, the wind was blowing and that might make us veer off course. I didn’t want to come to a halt in the middle of the river, because the ice wouldn’t provide a good surface for me to get moving again. Instead, I’d aimed at the opposite bank, as far downriver as I thought we could make on one push, wind or no wind.

It seemed to be working, and all we needed to do was keep moving down rivers, because, like the song said, all rivers run to the sea.

“It’ll be fun, they said. An armchair adventure.” Even though he was only muttering, and we weren’t using the radio, I could hear Fábián complaining.

“Back in time for dinner,” he went on, and then he looked up. “About that. Since you knew about the satellite, I’m assuming you went poking in the army camp, because hey, why not? Did you steal some of their food?”

“Damn. I knew I should have taken you along to remind me of the important stuff. Sorry, no.” My stomach was complaining too. “You probably shouldn’t think about food,” I added.

“That’s like telling me not to think of elephants.”

“Yeah, sorry. Did you eat the emergency ration bars?”

“They didn’t help much,” he said. “I kept one for you.”

I chuckled. “That’s okay. You can have it when we stop later. Something to look forward to.”

“No, we should share it. Probably better to split it in proportion to body weight, especially considering you’re doing all the work.”

I laughed. He was okay, was Fábián. “I can go with that.”

“What did you find? I mean at the camp.”

“They’re going to build a permanent logging town for prisoners of some kind.”

“What?”

I’d managed to distract him from thinking about food and our method of transport by getting his attention onto something else, and I needed his help with the recordings, so I went straight in, explaining what I’d heard.

I had to stop when the riverbank loomed.

We’d rotated several times while crossing, like a children’s playground ride, because there was nothing to stop that. It worked out for us this time—when we made the riverbank, I was at the front and ready to leap off to set Atuin on our next traverse.

Combat suit or not, I got shoved back a way before I managed to line us up for another crossing and powered Atuin back out across the river.

This was kinda fun.

So long as we got out of the valley in… check time… the next forty minutes.

The valley didn’t have a strict definition of where it started, but we had over twenty-five klicks to go before I was going to feel safe.

This was getting too close.

I could cut the number of traverses down. We’d gotten across the last one with plenty of inertia left.

“You definitely heard them say the people going to be held there aren’t criminals,” Fábián said. “But they can’t be prisoners of some war we haven’t even started yet. It wouldn’t make sense to start building camps now. And you can’t make prisoners work anyway.”

Now he mentioned it, that was something I vaguely remembered from Survival, Evasion and Escape briefings in the 1st Frontier.

“So what does that leave?”

We didn’t have time to reach any conclusions before I needed to get off Atuin again. There was a narrowing in the river and this crossing was much shorter. The riverbank was coming up fast.

This one was a long strip of shingle and sand. I pushed Atuin along it, saving a traverse of the river.

Thirty minutes.

The thought of the satellite getting into position and starting a scan was making my back tense up. Between recalculating our progress and dismounting to push, I had no time to chat to Fábián for another ten minutes and two traverses.

Twenty minutes. Still ten klicks.

The wind picked up and I tried a traverse that was too ambitious. I ended up pushing the disk while hip deep in water.

“What’s that noise?” Fábián asked.

I was afraid he’d notice. I should have kept him occupied.

“Just river noise,” I said. “What if I played the recording of the conversation to you? I didn’t understand when they spoke French, and I was concentrating on not getting caught. There’s probably something I missed.”

“Okay.”

I replayed the drone’s recording, diverting the output to the suit’s speakers. It was loud, but I wasn’t worried about being heard out here.

Next traverse, he asked me to play it again. I turned the volume up. It masked the noise well.

“No,” I heard him mutter, in a quiet patch. “Can’t be right. Ce n’est pas possible. Ils ne peuvent pas faire ça.”

Whatever it was he thought he was hearing, it kept him completely occupied.

Surely? Now?

I killed the replay and called out: “Down one meter.”

He did it automatically, twisting the control grip and releasing it a second later.

“And again.”

Now he took notice.

“Eh? That would be beneath the ice! Shit! Where did it go? Where the nova are we? Is that mist?”

“We just went over a waterfall. Nothing to worry about. Down one meter at a time and pause one second between each drop until I say stop, please.”

He swore and clutched his handhold tighter, but he still managed to follow instructions.

“Where are we?” he asked again, shivering and barely audible over the noise of the waterfall.

“Five klicks from where this river joins the main river, then we’ll have a straight run down to where we’re being met, near Port Ebrius.”

“Tonight?”

“No. Daylight in three hours, and we’re too visible. We’ll hide somewhere until it’s dark again and go the last stretch tomorrow night.”

“Any more little surprises, like waterfalls?”

“I hope not,” I said innocently. “Maybe a couple of rapids, but it’s okay, we’re just going to float over the top.”

He shook his head.

“This wasn’t in the job description.”

Then he lowered his head and swore again, in French, but he wasn’t swearing at me.

“What was that you said earlier about they can’t do this?” I asked. “Who’s they, for a start?”

His head lifted and for all the joking and the fear of heights, I saw the face of a man who was truly troubled deep in his heart.

“They are Elergie. You said you had recordings on your helmet cam, including the model and the screen of the infopad that was logged in. I have to see them, when we stop to hide for the day. I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I have to see.”

E22. Chapter 4

Jan

I was standing in the hold with Kyler, the captain of the AgriPotencia shuttle that had docked with us to deliver our new processors.

We were using it as a test run for transferring containers between ships using our universal junction, so everyone was in EVA suits, except me. I was in my combat suit, which drew jealous looks from Kyler.

Prasad had come up with the basic scheme, and while he and the shuttle load master had got the system going, Olivia had made some suggestions which would speed the process up. We weren’t out to break any records, but to match the loading time possible on the station, we needed to get it all right.

“That was clever,” Kyler said about the last suggestion. “Olivia should be down here with us.”

“Ah. Safety issue. Got an EVA suit problem,” I said. “And she’s supposed to be concentrating on helping Shami with the planetside customs and tax reports.”

We could hear Olivia laugh. Of course, I knew she had enough capacity to help Shami and Pras at the same time.

“I like your style,” Kyler said. “Bypass the damned station entirely. Wish the company would do the same.”

“You can and you should. That universal junction,” I tilted my head at it, “that’s the same design you’d get on mega-haulers. If you can unload mega-haulers at this speed, then the justification for passing their cargos through station handling goes away.”

“Yeah, but rules.” Kyler grimaced.

The standard arrangement in every star system that mega-haulers visited was that the merchanter would stand off in orbit near the station, and all the cargo transfers would be done by lighters, taking containers to and from the station. It made sense most of the time, because traders tended to operate from the station and warehoused all the goods there.

But not for what AgriPotencia wanted to do. The best system for them would be to increase their fleet of shuttles and streamline the transfer process so that a mega-hauler could be unloaded and loaded as quickly as the station could do it, but without using the station. AgriPotencia didn’t want station traders getting involved. It wanted to ship crops in bulk to Xerxes and get technology in bulk back. Technology that would be destined mainly for use on the planet. Getting traders on the space station involved was just adding delay and cost.

However, as Kyler said, rules. The station was largely under the control of the Combine, and they’d pressured the Venture Council to pass laws designed to force trade through the station. We weren’t breaking any laws by dealing directly with a planet-based company like AgriPotencia, because we weren’t a mega-hauler, but as soon as our deal went into operation, I expected protests from Station Manager Eston.

“We need to break the monopoly,” Kyler muttered, and then turned away.

In chatting while we watched, we’d danced around the issue of the soft revolution. She knew exactly what we were doing with her company, minus a few details, but she wasn’t senior enough. She wasn’t supposed to be discussing it with me.

“The Council is going to upset Elergie and the Combine sometime,” I said, and shrugged. “Better sooner rather than later.”

“Hmmm.” Kyler looked around. Same body language I’d used talking to Contre-Amiral Levin. I edged up to her.

“I said nothing, okay?”

I nodded.

“Timing on this deal may be off.”

This was not good. We wanted to complete and be on our way to Xerxes. “How so?” I said.

“Nothing about our deal with you.” She read me right and put up her hands to ward off any protests. “You get us the… ah… goods down on Firland, and we’ll fill your holds with the best of our crops. Xerxes traders will love you. They’ll empty your holds and fill them with whatever you can afford. But…”

“What?”

“The whole idea about what comes next when we increase our production.” She waved her arms around in frustration. “Xerxes and Venture talked about setting up a mega-hauler route before. Crop one way, tech the other. Obviously smaller than we’re planning now, but still substantial. Nearly got there and then went cold.”

“The Combine step in?”

She waggled her head. “I don’t know. Just an in-system shuttle skipper here, but my impression was that it was Xerxes that stepped back.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Xerxes has a huge population in their orbital cities, I mean billions, and you’re the nearest star system that can feed those numbers. Maybe Elergie got involved and messed it up somehow, so Xerxes doesn’t want to trade with the Combine anymore.”

She shook her head. “No. Not that. Xerxes and Elergie get on just fine,” she said. “Xerxes is building a nova-damned orbital habitat for Elergie. You know what those things cost?”

E22. Chapter 5

Bjorn

It was our second night of travel, and we had three problems.

First: I was tired and hungry. Not that big a problem.

Second: My suit’s charge was running down. That would be one nova-damned problem, because I couldn’t manhandle Atuin efficiently without the extra strength of the suit. I couldn’t use the power cells we’d brought because they were for Atuin.

Third: Atuin was getting flaky. I didn’t mention it to Fábián, but the acceleration compensators were starting to overheat. Checking the analysis from the suit’s air filters, I could tell that there was insulation cooking inside. That would also be one nova-damned problem, because I couldn’t carry Fábián and all his computer prototypes the rest of the way to the meeting place, even with the boost from the unused power cells.

There was good news: the rebels had broadcast an encrypted message, and I had been able to decode it and plug their coordinates into my suit’s geomapping system. It wasn’t that far now.

As it turned out, we’d made more than half of the journey last night. After getting out of the valley, we’d followed the Ebrius river for a couple of hours until dawn. But there was a fog so thick, it might as well have been night, so I continued for another three hours before we found a handy cave to hide in.

Now, in addition to the worry about power reserves and failing coils in the compensator, we had one major hurdle left.

The original landing site where the rebels had been intending to meet us was on the river and it was now a huge, sprawling HQ camp, coordinating dozens, if not hundreds, of ‘training exercises’ spread out over Firland. So spread out, they’d taken to parking trucks out on the ice and lit them all up with tall overhead spotlights.

Floating overhead was out. I didn’t want Atuin’s coils to fail while we were above the camp. The wind was blowing in the wrong direction anyway, and it would be strong up at that level. Our only option was to sneak along the far shore. That took longer, and used more power.

About halfway around, my power monitor went amber.

There was no option but to keep going.

At the next bend in the river, we found they’d deployed a guard patrol. They weren’t Special Forces; they were volunteer reserves, and they were bitching hard about pulling this duty.

Bitching so hard you’d have thought they wouldn’t notice us ghosting by, twenty meters above their head. You’d have been wrong.

“What’s that smell, Cartun? You eatin’ beans again?”

The other guy laughed. “Nah. I know that smell. That’s melting plastic. Where the nova that coming from?”

I held my breath. Atuin was wobbling now so that even Fábián noticed it. I’d grown fond of our turtle, and I was upset his insides were cooking off.

Not as upset as I’d be if he spilled us right next to the guard patrol.

“You know like you can hear sounds far away over water? Maybe you can smell smells over the ice the same way. Someone screwing with their ’lectrics back in camp.”

“We should go back and investigate.”

“Yeah. Nice try. You explain it to the Sarge?”

“Nah. Man, those SF dudes is freaky.”

“Huh. No argument here. Got any more that gin in that flask?”

“O-fic-ially, no.”

They laughed and we faded into the night.

In the time it had taken to get past the camp, the wind had switched direction. It was now blowing us downriver, the way we wanted to go.

Maybe a little faster than was sensible.

“Down,” I hissed at Fábián. If we got close to the ice, I could drop my legs over the side and provide a bit of braking by digging heels into the ice.

“I’m trying.”

Not what I wanted to hear.

Atuin lurched and dropped about three meters in one go, sending my heart up into my throat.

Another meter or two.

Still too high and too fast.

It was overcast, so the night was too dark to have a clear view of the bank we were aiming for, but there was a worrying shadow growing ahead of us. My geomapping suggested we were heading toward a steep hillside at close to ten meters a second.

“Down,” I said. “Get us on the ice, quick as you can.”

He twisted the grip hard again.

Atuin fell like a stone, and I braced.

We stopped downward progress at about two meters. I could have lived with that, if there’d been some way to stop our forward progress. There wasn’t.

“Leave the controls alone. Brace,” I shouted.

As ever, we were lazily spinning round, and we made landfall side on. Not landfall so much as we hit one of the massive trees that grew on the shore of the river. We hit hard. The tree responded by shedding its entire load of snow onto us.

Almost jolted off the disk, I scrabbled, blinded by being buried under the snow. My legs slipped out and over the side, and I couldn’t get enough purchase to climb back up.

We’d bounced off and were drifting. Crazily enough the angles worked. My inertial monitor showed we were heading downriver, more or less.

“Okay?” I shouted.

“Yeah. Can’t get back on board properly.”

I could hear him scrabbling like I was, both of us clinging on with our legs kicking out from a disk that was hump-backed with snow. We probably did look like a floating turtle.

I waved my arms and got enough snow off that I could see.

Everything considered, all in all, it was a good accident—both still on board, no severe damage done, and still moving in the right direction—except for one small thing.

One of the Firland natives was watching us.

He’d obviously come out to do some ice fishing. He had a couple of holes cut, and lines in the water. He was sitting down on a stool, and cloaked from head to foot in a puffy cold-weather coat with a hood up. Practically all I could see of him was his eyes. Wide and staring.

I was frozen in position. What did I do if the guy made a call to the local police or something?

His gloved hand lifted from the rod he was holding, moved down slowly, picked up something he had beside him.

An infopad? A gun?

No. A bottle.

He raised it up in front of his face and seemed to peer at the label.

Then he shook his head as if to clear it. “Damn, but this is the good stuff,” he said, and took a deep swig, grimacing as it burnt its way down.

Bless the Firlanders. My kinda people.

We’d got as much control as we were going to get by the time we rounded the next bend.

Atuin was wobbling and it felt like we were floating on a cloud of burning insulation. My power reserve indicator in the suit had just gone red.

The ice river broadened into an ice lake here. Traversing probably wouldn’t work anymore, even if Atuin had been up to it. Worse, what with recovering from the accident, we’d missed the shoreline. Atuin was floating lazily toward the middle of the lake, with insufficient speed to make the other side, and I’d get very little purchase on the ice to push the disk. Not to mention we were two meters above the ice and the controls had stopped working. Of course, if Atuin’s acceleration compensator coils failed completely, we’d be down on the ice very quickly.

The good news was this was approximately where the rebels said they’d meet us. The bad news… there was a convoy of army trucks on the road running alongside the lake. I could hear them, and I could see the headlights. Dawn was minutes away. We were going to be caught in full view.

I had to try something, so I swarmed over the top of Atuin to see if momentarily disconnecting the power would lower us down to the ice in a controlled manner. If we were low to the ice, we might get away with not being seen.

That was when I noticed we weren’t entirely alone on the ice.

“What the nova are those?”

Fábián turned, making Atuin lurch again. At the far end of the lake there were dozens of what looked like brightly colored triangular sheets moving in the gray pre-dawn light.

“Iceboats!” he said. “Boats with skates. It must be some kind of competition.”

There was nothing we could do, and the iceboats were moving at an incredible pace. They were like ordinary boats, and the wind was blowing from us toward them, so they were tacking, but they’d be with us about the same time as dawn broke.

So much for secrecy. It was a matter for the rebels to sort out.

I loosened the power connector and jabbed it back into the socket just in time to stop Atuin crashing through the ice. We ended up about a hand’s width above it. Maybe the army would think we were some kind of marker for the race. As long as none of the competitors decided to report us to the army.

I used the suit’s fading power to kick toe-holds in the ice and was starting to get Atuin moving again, when the peak of the growing hissing told me the iceboats had reached us.

One lowered his sail and dug a brake in, so he was drifting alongside.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Thorsson,” he said, tugging his scarf down to speak. “We were sent to give you cover, but it seems we’ll need to help get you down the other end as well.”

“Relieved to hear it. What about the army?”

He snorted.

“They think all Firlanders are crazy. This won’t be the strangest thing they’ve seen.”

As dawn broke, we had a couple of dozen ropes attached to our handholds, and we were surrounded by iceboats running before the wind. The army probably couldn’t even see us.

“You don’t happen to have food and power cells,” I asked one of the rescuers.

He nodded happily.

“And gin. We must drink to your brave journey and safe arrival.”

I laughed and clapped Fábián on the back, but he didn’t respond. He’d become very grim after he’d worked out what was happening back in the valleys, and I couldn’t blame him.

E22. Chapter 6

Jan

The bridge was chaos central for communications.

Shami was handling the routing of the comms traffic. We had a direct laser link to the Xinghe and Captain Dow was relaying his laser links he’d set up with the Yǒng, the Trialeti and the Starbird. The two short ships were already sitting in dock, costing money, as Captain Price had put it. The Xian ships were still inbound, just a few hours out.

I had Dow and Jessop on one display, Lǐ on another, and then two more for Tatuli Ramishvili and Adryan Price, the captains of the Trialeti and the Starbird.

The real problem was that the Xian ships knew exactly what was happening, and the two other merchanters didn’t. I had to be careful with what I said.

“Look, I understand there is a deal within a deal here,” Ramishvili said. “Don’t want to know all the details, and if it goes like you told us, all the way to Xerxes, that will be great. But we’re sitting here chewing docking fees, being told our holds are sold out, but nothing is moving. You have to give us some indicator of how long this might be.”

You’re putting a lot of faith in Bjorn, Lǐ was messaging privately. Don’t you even know how he’s getting the cargo to the rebels?

“This timing issue is out of my direct control, but I know it will be resolved any moment now,” I said, crossing fingers out of sight of the comms camera. “One moment…”

Another rearrangement of the displays resulted in a text only feed from Olivia.

I’ve been monitoring the orbital station’s communications. Station Manager Eston is attempting to get a court order to prevent us loading directly from shuttles. The judicial body responsible is closed at the moment, but the request has been scheduled for discussion tomorrow, and the length of time allocated suggests they’ll reach a decision quickly.

I was about to swear when Shami signaled me, holding up a finger.

“I have a standard comms request incoming from Manège, encrypted format.”

The Manège was the AgriPotencia shuttle that had delivered our new processors. They’d gone on to dock at the station.

I muted my output.

“Kinda busy. What does Kyler want?”

“Not Kyler,” Shami said. “It’s Madrigal.”

One of the three AgriPotencia leaders on the station. My heart skipped a beat. I trusted Bjorn to see his mission through one way or another, but what if something had gone wrong?

“Put her through as soon as I nod.”

I took the mute off to explain to the others, but Price was talking. “Cargo boss just got movement orders. Goddess! First all delays, now all go. They say we have to clear our holds today and they’re already scheduling the refill with grains and so on.”

“Ahh… yes, same here,” Ramishvili said. “They’re in a hurry or what.”

“Don’t go away,” I said. “I’m just putting you on hold while I take a message from AgriPotencia.”

I muted them again and nodded at Shami.

Everyone else shifted down one, and Madrigal came up on my closest display. My heart stopped again. Madrigal had been an attractive and lively woman when we’d met in the bar on station. Now, she looked pale and shaken.

“Madrigal, what’s happened—” I started.

She stopped me and gathered herself. “My apologies for my appearance. I have received shocking news.”

I saw the paleness of her skin was anger.

“Your crewman is fine,” she said. “He is returning to his shuttle by foot. We’ve given him all the power cells he can carry, and even if they are not compatible with his suit, he has some way of recharging. He’s obviously a very resourceful individual.” She shook her head. “I’m sorry for the loss of your acceleration compensator unit.”

I obviously looked blank.

“He and Fábián used one from the shuttle as a gravity sledge and travelled down the rivers at night. The coils are burned out. We will make a payment to cover this.”

Bjorn, you star! I knew you’d find a way.

While I absorbed that, she took a breath and continued.

“We have Fábián and all his prototypes. You have completed your side of the bargain, even in the most difficult circumstances, and I have ordered our cargo managers to expedite your fleet’s cargo exchange. It is vital that they clear as quickly as possible. Please inform your fleet. If necessary, pay for expedited docking and release charges.”

Something huge must have happened, but she went straight on.

“It turns out the rumor you suggested we start has become true.” She tried to smile, but failed. “There is now a consortium buying all the agricultural machinery from your fleet of ships coming from Stabler and, in turn, selling them agricultural produce for Xerxes. That’s happening on station now. The Phoenix herself will shortly get docking requests from shuttles of various firms and we’ll exchange your cargo as quickly as those shuttles can dock and undock with you. Then the Phoenix and the rest of your fleet must leave as quickly as it can.”

“What in the nova has happened?” I managed to break in.

“Your crewman…” She stopped and frowned. “You’re aware of all the troops on the island. I mean the total numbers?”

“Not exactly, but it’s obviously a huge operation, much bigger than a casual training exercise.”

She nodded. “Your crewman, Thorsson, thought so too. While Fábián was preparing the acceleration compensator, Thorsson went scouting in his combat suit and recorded evidence from the nearest ‘training camp’.”

The way she spat the words out told me what I’d already guessed. Those weren’t training camps.

“These are not troops from Venture. These are Elergie’s troops, supposedly responsible for defending the whole Combine. They’re not training. They’re engaged in the first steps of building prison camps.”

“Prison? I don’t understand.”

“Oh, they don’t call them that. They have fine descriptions ready for the news releases. These are ‘acclimatization camps’, and ‘refugee camps’, and ‘temporary accommodation for new citizens’. The troops guarding them will be there for their ‘safety’.” She wasn’t trying to control the anger now. She leaned forward into the video pickup. “Elergie has done a deal with Xerxes for their excess population. They’ve stolen our land, Venture’s land, to imprison the hundreds of thousands of people Xerxes is going to expel in exchange for a massive technical uplift for Elergie. And our Council has waved it through in secret.”

She was staring at the screen as if she wanted to hit something.

“This is no longer going to be a soft revolution,” she said. “Other star systems will call this what it is—slave labor—and it’ll be Venture that they accuse. We will not stand for that.”

“Madrigal, I agree with everything you said, but you have to take this carefully. The Combine holds all the cards. They have troops on Firland. They run the orbital station. They have a nova-damned naval destroyer in the system.”

“There’s nothing we can do about the destroyer, but we can take over the station. As for the troops, they’re equipped for a training exercise on Firland. They don’t have the resources to move off the island. Once we’ve gotten rid of our Council, we can evacuate our people from Port Ebrius and leave the Combine’s troops on the island. Let’s see how they survive without supplies. We’ll see what the destroyer does then. Fire on the station? Bombard the planet?”

“No naval officer in his right mind would do either of those if he had the information you’ve given me.” I was thinking of Contre-Amiral Levin. Shami had said he was a good man. What if she’d misread him? What if he’d changed?

“We think the navy doesn’t even know,” Madrigal said. “Each department has a separate reporting structure back to HQ on Elergie. The army has a Général de Brigade on the orbital station who’s in overall command of the troops on the ground. The Amiral and the Général barely speak to each other, and major decisions are supposed to be referred to Elergie.”

I could see I wasn’t going to persuade the rebels not to confront the Combine, and I didn’t really want to. On the other hand, this was a disaster for their plans and possibly for ours. The whole rationale of smuggling Fábián and his illegal computer prototypes was intended to eventually allow Venture to supply Xerxes with enough food for the populations which they now obviously intended to reduce.

She read my mind. “Don’t worry about us. Xerxes is clearly not the star system which we’ll deal with in the future, but there are others in similar situations. And none of the actions I’ve spoken about are going to be in place until after your trades are concluded. We honor our word.”

“And we appreciate that. I’m also worried that news of this will get to Xerxes before us, and it might cause a problem.”

I was startled by Olivia’s voice joining the conversation.

“A great deal of this may depend on the poor communication structure of the orbital station. We would both benefit if there was an untraceable comms malfunction on the station at a critical time.”

I knew what she was suggesting, and I knew it was well within her capabilities. Madrigal’s eyes had widened.

I held up a hand quickly to stop the conversation. “That was my ah… comms officer. Let’s not jump to any decisions on actions yet, but come back to this. How can we talk securely to you, Madrigal?”

“I’ll be in whichever AgriPotencia shuttle has most recently docked, and I will ensure their laser array is available.”

“I’m sorry, Jan,” Olivia said when I’d closed the channel to the Manège. “But I suddenly see a way to get Bjorn back and prevent any outgoing messages preceding us to Xerxes, assuming we still want to go there.”

I grimaced. “We need to go there. In fact, this news only suggests they may be even more deeply involved in the sort of illegality we’re hunting down. Let me talk to the other skippers and then we can hatch plans.”

E22. Chapter 7

Bjorn

Accomplishing a mission usually gave me a boost, but not this time.

While I powered my way across country and back to the shuttle, Fábián was being taken down to the airport, bound for a destination they wouldn’t reveal to me. They’d fed me, thanked me and given me a load of power cells I could rig to charge my suit. They’d even given me a bottle of the local gin which I was definitely keeping for later. But none of that gratitude had hidden the deep-down, soul-eating anger that had resulted from Fábián and me telling them what the Combine was doing in the hidden valleys of this eccentric island.

The people who’d come here to fetch Fábián weren’t the leaders of the rebellion, but I could judge what those leaders would be thinking from the way everyone reacted.

I needed to get back to the Phoenix, and we needed to go before it all blew up. I had no idea how we’d achieve that, but I went with the 1st Frontier philosophy. Do what you can, and trust your team.

Which was great, but how the nova did I even warm the shuttle up without the damned satellite noticing?

If someone spotted a strange shuttle down here, the obvious result would be a call to the destroyer Bantome, or a request for a visit from some of the Special Forces in the neighboring valleys. Even if I got out ahead of that, whatever training or equipment they might lack, they were surely going to notice a shuttle taking off and being scooped up by the Phoenix.

I didn’t want to admit I was out of ideas, but I was beginning to feel I’d done my bit and I needed Jan to come up with one of her plans.

First things first. Get back to the shuttle unobserved. Re-establish the laser comms link. Work out what to do next.

I crested another hill and turned west. My analysis of the geopositioning maps suggested there was a pass I could use which would cut a lot out of the return journey.

I couldn’t stop thinking about options. How to get away? Maybe we could take advantage of the chaos when the news of what was going on hit the Venture media. But what if the media was in the pocket of the Venture Council, who were clearly in the pocket of the Combine’s ruling clique on Elergie?

Made me wish I hadn’t started thinking about this at all.

The short cut saved me hours and delivered me into the valley where the shuttle was hidden, about twenty klicks away.

I’d expected to have a tough time on the approach to the pass. But some strange combination of the underlying rocks and the way the snow had packed down and frozen made it no more difficult than climbing stairs. Big stairs, granted, but it was no effort in the suit to leap from step to step.

Odd. Enough to make you wonder about ice giants and tall, green women, if you didn’t have to hurry back. I checked the bottle of gin they’d given me, but the seal wasn’t broken. I hadn’t taken a drink and forgotten it.

I made my way down carefully, but there was no sign that the army in the next valley had visited, and a couple of hours later, I was climbing up the side of the shuttle to free the laser array from the fresh snow that had fallen while I’d been away.

E22. Chapter 8

Jan

A day passed, with Bjorn’s terse messages and requests for advice from Werner showing he’d successfully defrosted the shuttle without alerting the scanning satellite over the island, and he’d bypassed the safety protocols that would normally prevent the engines powering up without the missing acceleration compensator.

Over the course of the day, Werner and Gunny had rigged a dedicated laser link to communicate with the shuttle while our primary laser array was open to communicate with the rest of the fleet and Madrigal. On his end, Bjorn had connected it to the shuttle’s control system, so I now had Bjorn’s readouts appearing on my console while he took some much-needed sleep.

He wouldn’t have long left to rest.

The planet had rotated so that Firland was hidden from the Bantome, out on patrol near the planar zenith. Olivia’s plan would account for all other observers, but she didn’t dare hack a naval vessel without a lot more research than we had time for. We couldn’t wait another day because the rebels’ plans depended on them capturing the orbital station completely by surprise. Too many people knew something was about to happen already, and shortly, there were bound to be some leaks. We had to retrieve Bjorn and depart the system in the next few hours, just as the rebels started their revolution. We’d use the distraction to help mask the retrieval of the shuttle. Theoretically.

That retrieval was further complicated because Bjorn was low on fuel. He had enough to take off and make it to a prearranged altitude and velocity. He’d take off the moment we gave him the signal, and once he was in place, he’d have minimal fuel left to maneuver.

No pressure.

Everything was about to happen, and Olivia’s plan was still just a plan.

My previous, half-formed plan, to hide Bjorn’s takeoff with deliveries from Firland, had not worked out. We hadn’t been able to time the shuttle from Firland precisely. It had come up and delivered its cargo, and was about to undock for its onward route to the orbital station.

The good news was the rest of the fleet were okay. The Trialeti and the Starbird were already outbound for Xerxes, and travelling as fast as was consistent with merchanters’ commercial urgency. The Xinghe and the Yǒng had just completed their cargo exchanges. Dow and Lǐ were going through departure protocols and there was no hint they were going to be delayed.

The bad news was, Station Manger Eston was redoubling his efforts to screw the Phoenix.

Madrigal’s contacts had managed to slow down Eston’s planetside court proceedings. We’d literally just completed unloading from the Firland shuttle when the court had communicated their pedantically phrased orders to us, and so we’d simply laughed and acknowledged their instruction to ‘cease and desist loading directly from shuttles’.

That pompous legal official had been banished, and my console’s displays split and rearranged into four main panels. Top right was a nav screen showing a range of flight solutions to retrieve the shuttle, with two timers. One time was set at forty-five minutes and would begin counting down when we started moving. The second was a timer for the window of opportunity while Firland and its airspace was not visible from the Bantome.

The bottom two displays were monitors on the state of the hold and engine room. Both were still not ready. Prasad’s monitor was showing the Firland shuttle still attached to our universal junction, and Werner never liked to hurry warming the engines up to his painstaking standards.

Unfortunately, top left was an incoming video communication from Station Manager Eston, marked urgent, official and important.

He had to know the court order had come in too late, and, even if they would agree to a change in the wording, he’d have to return to the court for that. He couldn’t use what they’d given him.

So, what did he want?

“Station Manager.” I gave him a false, professional smile.

He had no small talk. “Captain Skelling, return the Dark Phoenix to your previous orbit, geostationary at sigma-three, oscar-one-five. A tug will tow you to dock where customs inspectors will impound your cargo, pending ruling from the Venture Department of Trade.”

I couldn’t believe this idiot. “A ruling? Of what? On what grounds?”

We were having this video conference on an open radio channel, and every merchanter in the system could hear what he said, so he had to be careful.

“The Dark Phoenix loaded cargos from shuttles arriving directly from the surface, evading outgoing customs inspections and in contravention of accepted procedure. Your cargo needs to be re-assessed for export duties, and if there are further charges due, you will be fined for evasion. You may get away with these sharp practices in the Frontier, but the Inner Worlds have laws.”

I raised my eyebrows and put on my best amateur lawyer tone. “I refer you to the documents VED HY-611-F235 through F332, which I am broadcasting on the information side channel 53. These documents claim to be from the Venture Department of Trade. They appear to be customs evaluations, invoices for export duty and acknowledgment of payment covering all cargo on the Dark Phoenix. Are you claiming these are fraudulent? Or that the Department isn’t qualified to issue them?”

His eyes bulged. “No, of course they’re not fraudulent. These are valid DoT documents. However, the planetary assessments, which are raised by the Venture Council, are not necessarily in line with regulations from the orbital station, which are determined by the Combine, and override local rules and regulations.”

“If I had used the station, I might agree with you. Are you suggesting that Venture is forbidden to trade except through the Combine’s regulatory scheme as run by the station?”

He couldn’t say that—it would be classed as ‘undiplomatic’ in front of Venture.

“I thought not,” I said when he remained silent. “Your regulations apply to trade conducted through the orbital station only. Since I didn’t trade through the station and I’m not in the station’s zone of authority, you’re way out of your jurisdiction, Station Manager.”

His jaw unclamped just sufficiently for him to answer. “Your current delivery from a shuttle direct from Firland has not been inspected by Venture customs.”

Ahh. He was right on that one.

I played to the possible audience, without knowing if there were any listening. “It was cleared by Firland’s authorities. It’s a container of the excellent Firland timber building material, which will serve as a sample when we sell it on Xerxes, probably opening up a whole new line of trade for Venture. I imagine many merchanters here will take the opportunity to assess this product.”

“Nevertheless, cargos from anywhere on Venture require inspections which the Firland administration is not qualified to provide, and therefore you must hold and submit to customs examination. There are products from Firland which are denied trading licenses and it must be confirmed that your shipment does not include these.”

My display panels split again, and I got a prompter. Olivia had gone through every single Venture trading regulation, and she used the prompter to supply me with the relevant information.

“Nonsense,” I said. “Venture law, TradReg 18-503-22, applies. I’m broadcasting the relevant paragraphs on the information side channel again. There are products which are forbidden to be traded with the rest of the local administrations on the planet, but there are no Venture laws saying that the Firland administration are not authorized to assess any duty on their own products, nor are there laws saying Firland can’t sell them to other star systems.”

“No Venture laws, but the Combine regulates and restricts the trade of narcotic and hallucinogenic substances.”

“You’re talking about the Firland gin?” I laughed. “Well, interesting to know that the Combine is so authoritarian. It also seems you’re back to suggesting Venture cannot trade with anyone except through the Combine. Regardless, it doesn’t change my point. You are not the competent authority you’re claiming to be. We didn’t trade through the orbital station, or inside of its zone. You’re out of your jurisdiction.”

My attention was only half on Eston.

Prasad’s monitor showed the Firland shuttle had undocked. As I glanced, he switched the status of the hold to Green—Ready to move. Good man.

Regardless of what Eston did, we had to proceed.

On the bridge, from her pilot’s console, Shami put through a call to Contre-Amiral Levin on the orbital station’s separate military communications array. She felt bad about doing it, because Olivia was using her call as a mask to gain access to the military communications system.

You wrestle with hogs, you gonna get dirty, as my mother told me often enough.

“Furthermore,” Eston was saying. “You have an orbital proximity maneuver procedure violation about which we communicated previously.”

“Yes, we communicated during the maneuver, at which time you decided it didn’t warrant stopping us. You actually authorized it. And once we left the orbital station zone, your authority over my ship’s movements ceased.”

Olivia’s legal prompter was telling me I was right, but Eston seemed to be working from a different set of regulations.

“You’re wrong, but it doesn’t matter what you believe, Skelling. A tug with customs officials on board has been dispatched to rendezvous with the Dark Phoenix, and to return your ship to the station, where you will be charged.”

The man could not be so stupid. He had to know his own regulations. But if you upset someone enough, their brain starts to short-circuit the diplomatic phrases. Mine certainly did.

“I believe Venture and the Combine are both signatories to the Piracy Accords,” I said.

Eston looked blank. Olivia worked out what I was going to say, and whether she agreed with my saying it or not, she put up the relevant text on the prompter display.

“I refer you to the section on actions by certified authorities outside of their jurisdiction. I’m broadcasting the relevant paragraphs again. In summary, where legal and acknowledged entities attempt to impose localized regulations outside of the jurisdiction of those regulations, those actions can be deemed as piracy.”

Eston looked stunned. I let my words sink in.

“Regardless of jurisdiction, all ships are entitled to defend themselves against piracy with any means at their disposal. Like the majority of merchanters in the Frontier, the Phoenix is armed, though we didn’t expect to need it in the Inner Worlds.”

I called up the appropriate sub-menu and released the plasma cannon from its protective casing. If Eston was watching us, he’d see the change in profile. Certainly, any tug captain approaching us would have us on visual, and he’d see it.

“You may get away with these sharp practices in the Combine, Station Manager Eston, but Inner Worlds have laws, and we will use them.”

I terminated the connection.

Shami blew out a breath. “Tough talking, skipper. I’ve just finished speaking with Levin. He’s aware that Eston’s gone off the rails, and the good news is he wouldn’t order the Bantome to enforce such a blatant misjudgment of regulations. On the other hand, if he finds out that we hacked his military comms system…”

“He won’t,” Olivia said.

The engine room monitor changed to Green—Ready to move.

The comms panel that I’d just closed on Eston now opened with Madrigal, speaking to us on the secure laser link.

She had no time for small talk either.

“I’ve been listening in. Ballsy, Captain,” she said, “but he won’t give up. He’s putting in calls to Space Traffic and Contre-Amiral Levin.”

I had to trust Shami’s report that Levin wouldn’t interfere. Space Traffic Control, however, could be a problem. Outside of the vicinity of the orbital station, the remainder of the star system was the domain of Space Traffic. Any movement authorizations beyond the station’s zone went through Space Traffic Control, and Eston could request them to refuse our departure request.

My display split again. A new panel showed me the status on the Xinghe and the Yǒng. Both had undocked without trouble. Eston’s focus on us had benefited the rest of the fleet.

Good.

It wasn’t that we could just ignore a refusal from Space Traffic Control. In the Venture system, the same department that issued spaceship movement authorizations also had command of the customs cutters. Although their tasks had been overshadowed by the arrival of the naval destroyer, the cutters were on patrol where they were normally required: out near the star system’s arrival point, the planar zenith. And the problem was that cutters were not only armed with plasma cannon of similar power to ours, but they were very, very fast. If we headed for the planar nadir to exit the system, they’d be quick enough to overtake us, and my defense against the station’s tugs acting outside their jurisdiction wouldn’t work with cutters. If Space Traffic could be persuaded to intercept me inside the Venture star system, they had legitimacy.

Not good.

“Space Control doesn’t report to Eston,” Madrigal said, “and they’re not Combine appointees, but I can’t guarantee he won’t persuade them unless we get in there.”

“I understand,” I said. “You’re saying that once you go in, even to Space Traffic, you’re committed, and they’ll see what you’re doing. The revolution will have started.”

Madrigal nodded. “And Space Traffic wasn’t one of our strategic objectives. We’re doing this on timing and shock and there aren’t really enough of us for everything. But your comms officer suggested last time that the station’s communications facilities would be disrupted. If that happens, if we can get inside Space Traffic, if you get away immediately, this will work. How sure is your communications officer?”

My monitors now showed the Xinghe and the Yǒng clear of station zone, moving briskly. In addition to that, there was a flood of complaints coming in from merchanters, directed against the station management.

“Prepare to move the ship,” I said to Shami. “Clear the route with Space Traffic. Wake Bjorn and get him to take off immediately we move.”

“Regarding the station’s comms network, Madrigal, give me a minute more,” Olivia’s voice came on the laser link. “While you wait, I’ve copied some messages you may find interesting.”

There were two of these ‘interesting’ messages. Both were in the usual obscure military-speak, but we could understand what they were about. Message one was Contre-Amiral Levin informing the Combine troops on Firland that a naval shuttle was going to make a close pass on the valley where Bjorn was, and they’d hear it maneuvering. Message two was from the Général de Brigade, the man in charge of the Combine forces on Firland, to Contre-Amiral Levin, the Bantome and naval monitoring, that the army were testing a shuttle take-off from Firland for local training purposes.

“Everyone is now expecting a shuttle to maneuver between Firland and orbit altitude,” Olivia said. “I’m also ensuring the naval satellite will go offline at the critical time, so they won’t see Bjorn being picked up. Then they’ll be distracted by what happens on the orbital station. What I can’t do is interfere with the Bantome. We can hide the pickup behind the planet if we achieve it in the next hour, but if we miss that schedule, or deviate from our routes, someone is going to become suspicious. If they’re suspicious enough, they might start looking at the messages I’ve faked, and I can’t completely erase the logs. If we don’t raise those suspicions, I doubt they’ll start combing through message logs to work out what really happened.”

“I got it,” I said. “We’re ready to go now. Bjorn’s powering up. It’ll be fine.”

“Neat,” Madrigal said. “Very, very slick. That’s some comms officer you have there.”

“Thank you, Madrigal. And now…” Olivia paused. “The station’s internal administration communications system is down.”

My eyes flicked to the panel that had been showing transcriptions of complaints. It now showed all the ships talking to each other, still complaining and wondering what the nova Eston was up to, but the station had gone silent, apart from Space Traffic Control, which was handling a lot of angry comms from incoming ships.

Shami was already broadcasting our route to other ships, which was the fallback position if Space Traffic Control didn’t respond to our request.

Madrigal’s laser link didn’t go through the station, and that was operating fine. “We’re going in,” she said tensely. “Space Traffic, Station Management, Law Enforcement, Administration, Military. They’re in the Council chambers down on the planet. It’s happening. Goddess, it’s happening now.”

Minutes crawled.

The window for the retrieval got smaller and smaller.

“We have to go,” I said.

Shami repeated her departure request: “Venture Space Traffic Control, this is merchanter Dark Phoenix, MSS615. Request activate flight plan 55-145.”

An agonizing minute later the response came: “Roger that, Dark Phoenix, sorry for delay, flight plan activated.”

“Go!” I said.

“We have the station offices secured!” Madrigal said. “On the planet, the Council have been arrested and we’re broadcasting our cause on all channels. The cities are declaring for us. People are pouring onto the streets in support. It’s working. It’s really working. Go now, Phoenix, go with our thanks, and may the Goddess watch over your path.”

I could feel the ship gathering itself.

But there was an urgent flashing that called my eyes to the display panel showing Bjorn’s shuttle status.

System failure, it said. Take off aborted.

E22. Chapter 9

Bjorn

Shit.

Circuit 27—Error 45. Circuit 36—Error 811. Circuit 44—Error 33.

A list of a hundred major errors was crawling up the screen. I didn’t recognize more than a dozen.

“These are just domino effect,” Werner said. “You have to power down and reset the system. Bring it back up on a clean start.”

I went through the sequence of power down switches. The screens went dark. Backup lighting came on. Switching it all off removed the counter that was telling me how much time there was left before I had to take off. Or wasn’t, in this case.

With an awful sinking feeling, I realized it was too late; the Phoenix couldn’t hang around for me. The mission was too important to get tangled up in suspicions about revolutions in the Inner Worlds.

Maybe they’d be able to collect me on the return trip?

Or I’d have to sell the shuttle to Venture and I’d use the money for passage to try and catch them up. I shuddered at the thought of the logistics involved in that. Chasing them was an almost guaranteed way to miss.

No, I’d need to go straight to Earth, if there was a berth on a mega-hauler heading that way. I might be able to do some recon in advance of the others arriving. That was a comforting fantasy while my hands moved on automatic, reconnecting the systems.

Comms came back up. Fuel Systems. Power Distribution.

I soon found out the domino effect hadn’t been banished with a simple power cycle. Now the smart systems had a log of previous known problems and checked those first. One error and the whole list cascaded again.

“Full reset,” Werner was saying, but even as he spoke, we both knew what that meant. The time taken to clear each error log in each system would be measured in hours. Even if it worked straight off, I’d be taking off in full view of the Bantome, and the Phoenix would be long gone.

But, what if…

“No time, no time,” I chanted as I went back and turned off some of the systems. The smart ones.

It was a crazy, crazy idea.

Didn’t need Life Support or Environment—I was in my suit. Didn’t need Navigation—I was going straight up. Didn’t need…

“Bjorn, you can’t do that.” The laser link was copying the system’s statuses to Werner. “This is not a tractor, it’s a highly complex shuttle.”

“It’s our last chance.” That was Olivia. “It’s actually a brilliant idea. I didn’t expect that.”

I snorted. “I’m a rogue barbarian escaped from the outlaw Frontier. Yeah, I’m used to being underestimated.”

Olivia laughed. Which was weird, having an AI laugh at a joke.

“Engine cycle alpha initiated.”

There weren’t any too-clever systems left to stop me now.

This was going to be a ride, and then some. Flight Control was part of the Navigational Systems circuit. Werner was right, controlling the shuttle wasn’t like driving a tractor—you couldn’t just turn left and then adjust to line up with your new direction. You had to do it in one. The shuttle was an unstable platform, especially in atmosphere. You had to be precise and coordinated in your control movements, otherwise the whole thing would stop flying and just fall out of the sky.

I’d practiced Flight Control failure scenarios on simulators. Enough to be very scared.

“Engines nominal,” I said.

The countdown timer was part of the Communications circuit, so it had come back up. I was late and getting later. The original, optimal solution had passed, but a less good solution was still possible. The Phoenix was going to have to dawdle, but we’d work something out. As long as we were both in space, there was a chance.

The first maneuver was the most difficult. I had no runway, so I needed to take off vertically. I needed to vector the engines to lift the shuttle, and then rotate it, and then feed the power in to the engines smoothly while vectoring them back in line. Four hands would have been useful.

The countdown told me I had less than a minute left to take off. Already the rendezvous with the Phoenix was slipping away.

Go for it. Lift.

Engines roared so the frame shook. The right-side engine was producing more power. I needed to ease it back a little so I kept level and didn’t fly sideways into a cliff. The snow and ice beneath the shuttle turned to steam and billowed out. All my visual references vanished.

Normally, that wouldn’t matter because the flight instruments would show me what I was doing. Not today. They’d been switched off along with the Navigation System.

I’d thought of that, and I was working on my suit’s inertial gyros. Not ideal, and not something that would ever appear in any manual of How to Fly your Shuttle.

Sweat broke out on my brow and the suit compensated.

Thirty seconds left to achieve flight.

Drifting the other way now.

I had more space on that side. I needed to lift the front of the shuttle while correcting the drift, otherwise I was going to fall behind. Ignore the lateral movement for now.

The back of the shuttle grounded and the whole thing jerked. My hand slipped on the throttles and just made it back in time so that the crash didn’t break the shuttle. It was half flying, dragging its backside against the ground, engines screaming and the fuel monitor moving visibly.

Ten seconds left to get airborne, or I might as well power down.

I fed in more power and the shuttle lurched back up like a drunk in a bar.

“Bjorn, I can help. Trust me.”

Olivia. The AI I didn’t trust.

“What?” I said.

“Engage circuit 43. Switch 22 but leave circuit 44 isolated.”

Circuit 43 was part of the Flight Controls—the simple stuff. Switch 22 would allow access from the comms system. Circuit 44 was the rest of Flight Controls, and the part where the domino effect of taking the acceleration compensators out had frozen the system.

Access from comms? She was going to fly this thing with me, by remote control?

Five seconds. No time to think. I hit the buttons.

The shuttle steadied. Not perfectly, but better than I managed alone. Olivia was handling the secondary balancing while I concentrated on the primary movements.

It was working!

Rotate.

Vector the engines. Slowly!

The engine note rose in a crescendo. The timer flipped over. Out of time. What did that mean? Had I just made it or not?

The shuttle rose ’til it was pointed straight up, and I shoved the throttles forward. With no compensators, the acceleration began to push me down into the seat until it felt like a mountain was sitting on my chest. On and on. Relentless.

“This… fun,” I managed to say. “Phoenix?”

“Don’t steer. Nothing fancy. Straight up.” Jan’s voice. Keeping it simple because she knew everything was going gray and fuzzy for me as the acceleration starved my brain of blood.

“Missed? Rendezvous?” I grunted.

“You’re okay, Bjorn. We got you.”

What did that mean?

I had to take some of the pressure off so I could think, but the throttle controls didn’t respond. Oh, shit! An adrenaline burst gave me the strength to lift my head enough to see the icons on the displays. All controls were now routed through switch 22. Olivia had taken over the flying.

The AI had its own mission, and maybe it decided it needed the shuttle for that. The human in the shuttle? Expendable. An accident while retrieving the shuttle. A couple of minutes too long on too high an acceleration. Poor Bjorn. So sorry for your loss, Jan.

I grunted and swore.

No, dammit. I couldn’t move my head, but I was in the combat suit, and the combat suit was strong enough. I’d pass out if I tried to move my whole body, but I could lift my arm using the power of the suit. I could engage voice control on my console. I could disarm switch 22 with a verbal command.

My heart was pounding quadruple-time with the stress. Everything looked like I was staring down a darkening tube. Servos whined and my suited arm rose, but I was having trouble seeing where I needed to touch the screen to activate voice control.

Noise in the helmet.

Olivia’s voice.

“Just a couple of seconds, Bjorn. Trust me.”

I was tired of the deception, or not thinking too clearly. Or both. What came out was what I really thought. “Have… difficulty… trust… you.”

“I’m a rogue AI escaped from the outlaw Syncode Faction. Yeah, I’m used to being mistrusted.”

For some reason it struck me as hilariously funny that she should use the style of my own phrases to make a joke back at me.

I laughed, but it probably sounded like I was having a heart attack.

The pressure disappeared abruptly.

I could move and see.

I could see that the fuel had been expended, for instance. Some of that had been spent on giving the shuttle a tangential velocity. But I was higher than the planned intercept with the Phoenix.

High enough…

I tapped controls and got the 3D visual on what was happening.

I’d missed the Phoenix by a long way. I was travelling at a snail’s pace up at a level well clear of Venture’s atmosphere. The sort of level that spaceships, those which were not picking up stray shuttles, passed the planet on their way to the planar nadir.

Not where you’d want to drift along, out of control. Even ignoring that, any second now, the shuttle would pass out of the shadow of the planet and the Bantome would start to wonder what the nova I was doing here.

“Couldn’t create enough tangential velocity, and she can’t slow down, so this is going to hurt,” Olivia said.

“What?”

I flicked on visuals, just in time to see the shape screaming down on a collision course with me.

The Yǒng. Lǐ Zhao’s ship. The shark-mouth docking bay wide open.

Bang.

Episode 23

Great Risks

E23. Chapter 1

Bjorn

Lǐ Zhao’s ship, the Yǒng, was run like a navy frigate.

My first experience of this, after coming around, was that I was in a dedicated medical facility, full of equipment, brightly lit and smelling of antiseptics, where there was a medic on duty and a doctor on call.

And I was strapped to a dozen monitors.

It was ‘precautionary’, the doctor said. The shuttle had taken the brunt of the impact, and my combat suit had absorbed most of the rest. Minor concussion, bruising and the like. I’d been unconscious for an hour.

I’d hurt myself worse falling off a skimmer, hunting feral hogs back on Calloway, and I’d done that plenty of times, but I probably shouldn’t have told them that.

They ran tests and the doctor muttered something about having more skull than brain. Still, after extracting a promise to relax and submit to one more round of checks in a few hours, he let me out to explore the ship. My guide was a cheerful off-duty pilot, Bayu Ketaren.

First priority was a call to Jan, and Bayu patched me through from the mess. It all felt awkward, and I had to keep it short, so I made some jokes about bad driving and promised her I was fine. We were very restrained, given we knew everything we said was going through the bridge’s comms console. Jan explained it’d been agreed our little fleet wanted to get out of the Venture system as quickly as possible, so it’d been decided there wasn’t time to transfer me back to the Phoenix before jumping. On top of that, we wanted to clear our cargo at Xerxes before any news of the revolt on Venture reached it, so we were going to be burning our tails to get there. I was going to have to stay on the Yǒng until we made the Xerxes orbital platform.

It was ‘Captain Zhao’, ‘so kind of her to pick you up’, ‘please thank her for me’, and I perfectly understood my life might be in danger if I got into anything that wouldn’t be considered polite with Lǐ.

Bayu had only promised me five minutes and that was quickly up, so I promised to call again, when I could, and then went on my tour of the ship.

I learned the Yǒng had enough crew to run three shifts, with enough flexibility in the schedules that there was always at least one overlapping crew member in every department to provide continuity between watches. Orders and announcements were made over the ship’s broadcast system. There were officers and crew and ranks on coveralls. The contrast with the Phoenix couldn’t have been starker.

I was a passenger, not assigned any rank or role. I wasn’t blamed for the damage my arrival in their shuttle bay had caused, but when I visited Engineering, I volunteered for repair duties. That made me popular with the Chief Engineer, and he promised to keep me busy, once the doctor had cleared me.

As we finished touring Engineering, Bayu mentioned I had an invitation to the Captain’s Dinner.

Unlike the Phoenix, where dinner was where and when you ate it in the rec room, the Yǒng had a specific time when the briefing room adjacent to the bridge was reconfigured for the purpose, and there were crew members from the Life Support department who were tasked with cooking and waiting on the officers. All shifts had their dinner, but there was only one ‘Captain’s Dinner’—the one which Lǐ attended.

Formal dress was required. Since I’d arrived aboard in an overall and a combat suit, the Yǒng’s fabrication unit had come up with a very well-made copy of our Calloway navy uniform, which was already hanging in a small cabin that had been allocated to me.

Bayu showed me there and the uniform was so well-made, I asked if I could keep it.

“Of course!” Bayu said, and left with “Nineteen hundred hours, ship time. I’ll come collect you.”

It wouldn’t have been diplomatic to refuse. Bayu had told me it was more of a social occasion, but I was hoping the conversation would be as good as a briefing on what was happening back on Venture. Bayu had been off duty, so hadn’t been able to tell me much.

We duly turned up, smartly dressed.

As formal as the occasion was, the briefing room was too small to allow for us to wander around and chat over pre-dinner drinks or anything like that. We went straight to our assigned seats. I was on Lǐ’s left, between her and Bayu.

Introductions were out of the way by the time a seafood first course was placed in front of us, and Lǐ apologized for the business at dinner, but asked the woman opposite me, comms officer Tuyana Sumi, to give a rundown of the messages from Venture for everyone’s benefit.

“The Firlandians have been broadcasting non-stop about the camps,” she said. “They broke into one that was ready for arrivals and managed to download enough details to prove everything about them. It confirms that they were intended for the ‘excess’ population from Xerxes, and that they were going to be sufficiently self-sustaining that people could be held in them indefinitely. It seems the only way out would be to demonstrate you’re a ‘good citizen’ by working your debt off.”

“A debt?” Lǐ asked.

“Yes. The cost of the involuntary transportation. And the cost of housing and feeding. The Firlandians made some estimates of how long it would take to pay this debt.” Tuyana shrugged. “I can’t say how accurate those estimates are, but they were saying at least ten years, if you stayed healthy and worked a six-day week.”

“Only adults, or were they planning something for children?” I asked.

Tuyana grimaced. “The plan was for those children that did well in the rudimentary education system to be offered places in mainland schools. Separated from their families, of course.”

One of the other officers leaned forward. “The rebels had a burst of support at the start. Hearing this, I’m assuming that’s grown?”

“It actually decreased initially,” Tuyana said. “The former Council members were issuing statements through their lawyers, saying it was all lies, and people were supporting them because they literally couldn’t believe this was happening on their planet. The flood of information and images from Firland turned it around. Even those who aren’t supporting the new temporary Council are saying that if it’s true about the camps, then the old Council was clearly grossly criminal. When Contre-Amiral Levin resigned, that convinced a lot of people, especially on the station. Enough that Station Manager Eston, the Général de Brigade in charge of the Combine army on the planet, and most of the Combine’s appointees on the station are under arrest.”

She turned to me. “It’s unlikely they’ll ever connect any of this with the Phoenix or with us. In addition to various scanning systems failing in the confusion, a lot of the orbital station’s electronic data was compromised, apparently.”

I nodded, aware that the mood had changed subtly. There was no one on the ship who wasn’t delighted at the downfall of the corrupt Venture Council, but Olivia’s capabilities made them uneasy. It was odd being in the position of feeling I should defend her.

We were interrupted. Waiters cleared the seafood starter course and replaced it with beef rib racks that had been bought from Venture. There was Venture wine as well, and Lǐ checked the label with exaggerated care.

“Just making sure this wasn’t produced in Firland,” she said, to general laughter.

The stories about Firland’s alcoholic drinks had gotten around.

Joking aside, no one would be keen to test them while we were in flight. The Dark takes fools, and drinking hallucinogenic gin was a definite qualification.

Tuyana had finished, and I was expecting her comments would provide an opening for questions about Olivia. I was right. As soon as the waiters left us, they started.

“I get the feeling your opinions on the AI have changed,” Lǐ said. “Become more positive. Am I correct?”

I’d come here expecting to be briefed on Venture, so I guessed it was fair for them to expect a briefing about our AI.

I took my time, trying to put the confusion I felt into a clear statement.

“Yes.” I took a sip of the wine, ignoring impatient looks. “When Olivia took over the controls of the shuttle on the way up, and I was about to pass out from the acceleration, I knew what was happening. The shuttle had to be returned to the Phoenix. I didn’t matter. Computer logic.”

There was some shifting in seats, and others seemed intent on the delicious meal, but I knew they were all listening hard.

“And I was wrong. There was only one way to get me back with acceptable costs and Olivia saw it. If the Phoenix had circled back to get me, the Bantome would have been able to see what was happening. The Xinghe was too high, already overshooting the opportunity, so that would have caused the same problem as the Phoenix. Only the Yǒng had a possibility of catching me in passing, and then, only at the expense of damage, both to the shuttle and the docking bay. And it was the slimmest of margins. Olivia made those calculations, taking into account the importance of the mission, the damage, the effect of not doing what had to be done. She took the initiative and managed to persuade you to… err… take the hit. My apologies again, for the damage.”

Lǐ snorted. “Apologies accepted. It was my call, and I understand you’ve offered to help fix the bay. I hear the shuttle came off worse.”

I nodded. “It may work after a fashion, but it needs a full repair in a shipyard. Your engineering department estimate your docking bay will be functional by the time we reach Xerxes, and the facilities there should complete the repair. The shuttle…” I shrugged. “We’ll have to do without until we can afford a shipyard overhaul or a new one.”

“I’m not following,” said Viraj, from down the table. If I had my introductions right, he was the third shift exec, essentially the captain of that shift. “The way we picked you up. Any nav computer could have plotted the courses and chosen the best one.”

Bayu answered for me. “The best one, ignoring Bjorn, would have been to redline the engines and get into range of the Phoenix. Less damage, but also less Bjorn. As in Bjorn dead.”

It was a good point. Viraj was right: the nav computers could have come up with the same courses that Olivia had. Physics is physics. But the nav computer couldn’t have made a decision on whether I was required to survive or not.

Which opened a conversation about why Olivia had decided I needed to survive. Was it just a ploy to convince everyone of her good intentions?

Everyone had their say, and after fifteen minutes it came back to me.

I shrugged. “I can’t persuade you, because anything Olivia does might be for some complex ulterior motive. All I can say is, I started out completely suspicious and very concerned. For reasons that don’t fit into neat logical pigeonholes, I’m much less suspicious now and much less concerned. I might be wrong now, or I might have been wrong before. I don’t know for sure.”

“If you were so suspicious at the beginning…” Viraj said.

“Up until the point that Jan switched the power on, I was simply obeying my skipper. Within a minute of that switch being thrown, Olivia was in potential control of the Phoenix. We were all concerned, but we knew that it would be a very bad decision to get into an overt fight with the computer that could take over the ship.”

“Olivia has made no effort to penetrate our systems,” Tuyana said.

“That we’ve been able to detect—” Viraj started.

Lǐ held up her hand. “Enough. Not a subject we’ll be concluding tonight,” she said.

The dishes were cleared while we discussed whether we thought Venture would succeed better as an isolated system than it had as a minor part of the Combine, and what we knew of Xerxes now, given the way they’d plotted with the Combine against the interests of people on both sides.

A dessert was brought in.

“One of my favorites,” Lǐ said. “From my own stocks. A cake made with plums.”

I vividly remembered meeting her for the first time in a bar on Newhome. She’d said farewell to me, flirting like the sort of woman my mother had warned me about. Visit me on board and taste my plums, she’d said.

Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth at the moment.

“I seem to recall you’d never tasted them before, Bjorn,” she said. “I hope you enjoy them.”

The others clearly knew she’d been teasing me. Bayu was biting his lip to keep a straight face. I could feel my ears heating up.

I looked down at the plate and picked up my spoon. “I’m sure they’ll be as delicious as you described.”

E23. Chapter 2

Jan

“Jan, incoming transmission for you from the Trialeti,” Shami said across the bridge. “They’ve had to route it through the beacon and repeaters, but it’s secure and encrypted. Porting it to channel 66.”

“Got it, thanks.”

We’d arrived at the zenith of the Xerxes system a couple of hours ago. Unsurprisingly, the Phoenix was the last of our little fleet to make it here. On the nav display, the ship icons for the Trialeti and the Starbird were shown heading for an exit point at the nadir at maximum economic speed. They’d traded swiftly. That was fine; they’d done their part, and I hadn’t expected them to hang around. This place was expensive to linger in; once they’d cleared their cargos of grain and stocked up on tech for the Margin, they were gone.

Meanwhile, the green arrow icons for the Xian ships showed them halfway to the planet of Xerxes, or rather halfway to Asman, the principal space station orbiting the planet, which would handle all the trading.

I wondered what Tulati Ramishvili, skipper of the Trialeti, had to say. The transmission would be a recording. At this distance, we couldn’t hold a conversation. With the time lag, they’d have left the system before we’d finished exchanging greetings.

It wasn’t her alone. She’d linked up with Adryan Price, the skipper of the Starbird, to make a joint message for us.

“Hi Jan,” they said.

Tulati went on alone. “We hoped you would get in before we light out of here.” She grimaced and shrugged. “We could have relayed it through your Xian friends, and we know you trust them, but we don’t know them well enough.”

Adryan took over. “First, our thanks, which, now we get to it, is kinda difficult to put into words. Short ships are a hard life on slim margins, hoping for that big break that changes everything.” He glanced to the side, settled back into his seat. “Well, you’ve given us that big break, so thank you, from the Starbird. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts.”

“From the crew of the Trialeti too,” Tulati added. “To put some kind of perspective on it, we’ve cleared enough on this run to be able to afford to take our cargo right back into the heart of the Margin, maybe as far as Maynard. Selling this level of tech, that far out, we’ll make enough profit to fill multiple short ships with grain and still pay to get them back into the Inner Worlds. Once we do that, it’s self-sustaining, barring disasters. I’m going to divert to the Winchester system to try and hook up with Frieda Lorenz and the Luneburg. She can carry even more grain than we can. It’s possible Baig and Hazari will be there, or we’ll pick them up on the way. Our big break may turn out to be a break for all the short ships you met back on Stabler.”

I remembered them all from the Short Ship, the shady bar we’d met in. All good people, all living on razor thin margins.

“The Starbird will try and connect to that later,” Adryan said. “We’re going to the Yiero system first to get external racking like yours. I think Musa was trying to head that way when he jumped out from Stabler. If we join up with him, then we should be able to get both ships back out to the Inner Worlds on the back of what we made on this trip.”

“Not coming back to Xerxes, of course,” Tulati said. “We heard what was happening on Venture, and we’ve had enough of systems like this. But we hear the Geesweet system and others have as much demand for agricultural produce.” She laughed. “Business model looks so good, we might not even have to break any laws next time around.”

She stopped abruptly.

“No offense intended,” she said. “We know there was some kind of a deal going on in the background between you and Venture. We don’t know any details, but you got there and suddenly…”

She gestured something blowing up.

Adryan snorted. “Then there’s your mysterious Xian friends. But it’s all good. We know you have secrets and overlapping missions, and we sincerely wish you every success. I guess what we want to say is, once you’ve finished your mission, there’s always a place for you with the short ships. The Phoenix is going to be something of a legend around this sector, and your credit will always be good with us.”

I winced. I appreciated their sentiments, but I guessed I should have made it plain that we wanted as few people as possible talking about us. Maykn and others were out there somewhere, and enough rumors and reports would lead him to us. We were on the home run to Earth, so he wasn’t going to catch us before that, but we had to go all the way back to Calloway as well.

“Two last things,” Tulati said. “The data side channel for this message contains our experience on the value of goods in star systems we’ve visited, cross-referenced against their legality or otherwise, and some contacts for purchase and selling.”

I laughed. We were getting a smugglers’ handbook.

Thandi, who was sitting at the comms console negotiating deals for us with Asman traders, overheard and joined in the laughter.

“After that,” Tulati went on, “there’s some more serious data that we’ve been able to gather from Xerxes that might interest you. Have a look, but our advice is to get in and out as quickly as possible. Even ignoring that there might be news coming from Venture soon that puts the Phoenix in an ambiguous light, the whole society structure on the Xerxes habitats is like a pressure cooker. We hear there are areas on some habitats the police have closed, and demonstrations usually turn into riots. You’ll be trading on the Asman habitat and you won’t see any unrest there, but talk to the ferry crew that travel between habitats, and they’ll tell you stories that’ll make you sick.”

I knew that ‘habitat’ was what the Xerxians called their massive space stations, and that trading was only allowed through one habitat designated for it, which was called Asman.

Adryan grimaced. “On the other hand, you’ll get unbelievable prices for your grain because subsidized food is one of the Xerxes government’s cure-all for the habitats, and they’re running low until the next fleet of mega-haulers comes in. It seems Xerxes dialed back on importing supplies, given they thought they’d be solving their population problem by exporting people to Venture.”

I hated that we were getting a good deal on the back of Xerxes’ evil government, but I couldn’t see a way past that from here. We’d always known that Xerxes was an odd society, and that it harbored criminals. But the deal with the Elergie Combine, what they’d planned to do with their own citizens on Venture; that told us we were dealing with a government as evil as the crime syndicate it harbored.

I watched the secondary nav system display, which showed a representation of the system, the ships in it and our projected path to docking. I was still trying to get my head around the sheer scale of this Inner World system. The planet Xerxes orbited a friendly G-type star, and it had been the find of the century back when the old Terran governments had funded exploration for colonies. It was the near-perfect Earth-like world, the closest match ever found. The colony ship that had been sent had been the biggest, most sophisticated project ever, and it had worked perfectly.

And yet, here was where that had ended up: Xerxes had declared its independence within a hundred years of being established. Now, there were a few million Xerxians on the planet while billions lived in orbital habitats. The ruling elite, all descendants of the original colonists, numbered no more than a few thousand and they lived a life of luxury in the ten eco-cities they allowed on the planet’s surface. Almost everyone else down there was a temporary resident, either a fee-paying tourist from another system, or a Xerxian bound to return to an orbital after their permitted stay.

The vast orbitals housed the swelling population and drove one of the most aggressive hi-tech industries in human space. And that population grew faster than the agricultural orbital could manage.

This was the ‘most successful colony ever’, according to their broadcasts.

And the home of the Yazad crime syndicate.

Maybe not the head of the entire piracy and slavery organization we were hunting down, but I was convinced they had to be close to the top.

There was movement behind Tulati on her bridge, murmurs of jump points and vectors. She started to wind it up. “We wanted to do something to help you, so we’ve included discreet contacts we’ve made with the Xerxes dissidents. I’m not about to tell you your business, but be careful if you talk to them. Xerxes is a different ball game to Venture. The Xerxes orbitals are a strictly policed surveillance society, especially Asman.” Her expression showed her distaste. “Talking to their rebels is dangerous.”

“And you know about the Yazad,” Adryan added. “I don’t have to warn you, but they have people everywhere and they don’t like competition. Keep it legit and watch your backs. But whatever you do, we wish you luck, and hope you’ll be able to tell us the real story of all this, over beers, when we meet again.”

They waved and the transmission ended, leaving me staring at the representational display of the Xerxes system.

I’d never be the pilot-navigator that Shami was, but my eyes easily traced the tracks we’d make dropping into the system’s gravity well. All three of us, both Xian ships and the Phoenix, would be using braking provided by a handy passage near of one of the system’s gas giants, then turn tail-first and burn until we matched orbits with Asman.

The sensors had enough data now to show me an up-to-date representation of the planet and habitats, so I cleared the display of navigational data and brought the images up.

Xerxes was beautiful. White poles capped blues and greens and browns, all partly veiled by swirls of cloud and cloaked in a delicate glow from the atmosphere. The gleaming spire of their space elevator rose from the equator, stretching about 40 klicks from the surface. In fact, they had two elevators on opposite sides of the planet.

The planet had five habitats in well-spaced, geo-synchronous orbits well above the elevators. These weren’t the type of space stations we’d become familiar with in the 1st Frontier, or while making our way here from Calloway. They were massive spinning cylinders, 32 klicks wide and 256 klicks long. The most densely populated of them held nearly a billion citizens of Xerxes that weren’t allowed to live on their own planet.

Three of them were industrial; one of them was dedicated to producing food.

The last one, Asman, was the designated port for trading and tourism. That was the one we were heading for, and we’d have to navigate our way past a shell of mega-haulers, tourist liners and merchanters which were stacked three and four deep around it.

Busy, busy place.

We’d downloaded the information on the navigation beacon when we’d emerged at the system zenith. Alongside the essential navigation data, it had been full of images of Xerxes and Asman—from tourist recommendations to government-sponsored promotional media.

The planet and the exemplary habitat of Asman were beautiful, without question. The three industrial habitats weren’t, but the media which covered them promoted their technological accomplishments and production efficiency, and then quickly suggested browsing the marketing outlets on Asman.

No direct mentions were made of unrest, but Olivia had searched through the media streams and produced some negative comments along the lines of I heard that… Those comments were all made about the industrial habitats. There was nothing about Asman, which fit with what Tulati and Adryan had said.

Presumably that was because it was the habitat the tourists visited. Their showcase. Did Asman get stricter policing? If it did, how come it was the home of the Yazad? How did the dynamic work between the Asman authorities and an interstellar criminal gang?

For all the projected image of a happy, beautiful, peaceful star system, what would happen when the news of the revolution in Venture alerted the population to Xerxes’ plans? How would the dissidents react? Could Xerxes suppress the news?

It was very likely we’d be in dock at the moment the news broke.

I felt an old memory stir, and I frowned at its seeming irrelevance.

Back on Calloway, one Terran animal had done better than all the others. Hogs. They loved the place, and enough had escaped the farms that we had a serious feral hog problem. Every fall, we’d have to go out into the forests and thin the population so our crop fields weren’t overrun. Problem was, we thinned out the weak ones. Salted and smoked, they still made good winter eating, but we were leaving the bigger, stronger, smarter hogs deeper in the forests.

And then late one fall afternoon I’d gone too far into the forest, tracking some likely spoor. By the time I came to my senses and turned around, I’d wasn’t the one doing the hunting.

On Calloway, feral boar in the deep forest could reach half the size of a champion bull. They had tusks. And they were fast. And they were mean.

I didn’t see them, but I knew they were there.

Ma Skelling didn’t raise any fools. I climbed a Corah tree, tall and solid as a house, and sat there looking out at the autumn woodland. There was a breeze sighing through the trees, carrying leaves like copper feathers to float down in little spirals to the ground. Calloway avians, the nearest thing we had to Terran birds, sang in a musical way that sounded like old orchestra instruments. The rough-barked Corah tree had a smell to it like freshly baked bread.

It was a beautiful scene. Enchanting. And yet I knew if I set one foot on the ground, I would be dead.

Evening fell, and my cousins came looking with a skimmer and searchlights.

I got a lot of ribbing until they checked the ground just thirty meters from the tree I’d been sitting in. A drift of mature boars had milled around, just out of sight. They normally ate the Calloway equivalents of nuts and mushrooms and small animals, but they ate humans too. I hadn’t been wrong; they’d been hunting me.

And that memory, right there, of looking out at beauty cloaking danger, was the feeling I got looking at Xerxes and Asman.

Using the same logic that said a widespread, organized crime group like the Yazad had to be involved in the flow of funds into the Inner Worlds from piracy and slavery, I was sure they had to be involved in the government of Asman, and possibly Xerxes as well.

That would mean they had to appear legitimate. They had to observe due process.

What advantage would that be to us?

We couldn’t fight them in the courts. For a start, I doubted we would be able to simply put what we knew about Venture into a court case. Anyway, they’d probably be able, perfectly legally, to stall that for years, and would end up appearing to have been misled by Venture and the Combine.

On the other hand, they wouldn’t shoot us down in the street either.

Probably.

So what were we going to do?

Once the news from Venture broke, they’d be watching the Phoenix, and maybe the Xian ships as well.

How would we achieve anything?

Was our visit here going to be just a massive profit, but one which benefited the corrupt governing bodies?

The thought of benefitting Xerxes made me sick to my stomach.

Then again, we had already made a difference on this run. We’d lifted the short ships of Stabler from their just-surviving trap. We’d enabled and precipitated a revolution in the Venture system. We’d freed them from the gross immorality and corruption of the slaving deal the Combine had tried to commit them to.

It stuck in my throat that the downside of all that was we had to do business with the other end of that slaving deal, the Xerxes system. We had to trade, and that would benefit the Yazad, the criminal syndicate that controlled the system from the shadows. Even if it was our choice, it wasn’t as if we had other options at the moment. We were committed; loaded to the gunwales with grain and nowhere else in reach to sell it. The Xinghe and the Yǒng were well ahead of us, and they’d be docked in a day’s time.

And there was a chance we’d find out enough to start the process that would undo any benefit the Yazad got from our visit. A chance we’d bring the whole piracy and slavery enterprise down.

Even if it was a small chance and I couldn’t see how.

A call interrupted my circling thoughts, and not before time.

“Skipper?”

It was Prasad, calling from the rec room.

“Yes, Pras?”

“Is this a good time? Can we talk, please?”

“Sure. I was just thinking of taking a break for some lunch.”

I glanced at Shami, and she nodded. Nothing to worry about at the moment. Not ’til we got down to Asman.

But why did Prasad sound so downbeat?

I made my way down to the rec room.

He didn’t just sound downbeat, he looked unhappy as well.

Everyone else was busy, so Pras and I made lunch for the two of us.

He’d taken samples from the grain cargo and ground it down to make fresh bread earlier today. We’d also gotten samples of Venture’s butter, cheeses, pickles and smoked meats delivered with the grain. Seemed a good idea to try it all out.

We spent several minutes ‘chewing and oo-ing’ as Bjorn would have said, if he hadn’t been stuck eating plums on Lǐ Zhao’s ship.

“Damn! That’s good. Nothing wrong with that food and grain,” I said, as an opener.

Pras nodded. “Cargo’s all good. Containers were cleaned, lined, dried and flooded with nitrogen before partial evacuation sealing. The temperature in the hold is a steady 10°C. Bit lower in the racks.”

All of which I knew, and I also knew it wasn’t what had Pras upset. “Did you get the details on unloading procedures?”

“Really slick operation,” he said. “Everything done on the move. Low gravity grapples, assisted by compensators. They can offload one container in less than a minute. We could theoretically unload the lot in ten hours, but we’ll need to add an hour or so for retrieval from the external racks. Say twelve hours at most to empty the holds. It’ll be longer for loading if we have a mixed outbound cargo which needs shuffling. Twice as long, at least. To be safe, say forty-eight hours for the complete turn-around, given no trading delays.”

Any way I looked at it, those were stunning numbers for an entire hold.

“Well, that all sounds good, so what’s eating you, Pras?”

He finished his food and chased it with a sip of Turing’s beer. He’d looked animated as he spoke about the cargo facilities on Asman, and now his face dropped again.

“The nav beacon download, when we came in,” he said.

It had been a massive amount of data, as we’d expected from such a busy system in the Inner Worlds. The usual chart updates, regulations, procedures, ship movements. The promotional stuff about the Xerxes system. Then on top of all that, more news from more places than we could possibly absorb. Entertainment files. Documentaries. Advertising. Endless chatter. Offers and scams. The expected mix, just more of it. I’d assigned Olivia to winnow out the irrelevant.

“In all that news, Olivia spotted something for me,” Pras said. “There’s a major new trader setting up a regional headquarters in Xerxes. It’s a very big operation, big enough to warrant a diplomatic envoy, and it’s from my home planet.”

“Rajatara?” I said, checking out whether I’d remembered the name and pronunciation. He nodded, so I went on. “Okay. And?”

“The head of the operation, and the envoy for Rajatara, is my aunt, Sahiba Shantae.”

“Ah.” I scratched my head. “I know you don’t want to go home, and you’re not on best terms with your family, but I’m not seeing the problem here. Your aunt isn’t going to kidnap you.”

He snorted. “Don’t be too sure.”

“Come on, Pras. Anyway, I’m not suggesting it, but even if you did go home, how bad could it be?”

“I know I’ve joked about it before, but home isn’t just a procession of eligible young ladies to persuade me to marry and settle down. It’s the pressure to join the family firm. Blackmail really, because if you don’t join, everyone will know about it and the family suffers from the shame.”

He could see I wasn’t convinced at all, so he leaped to his feet and began pacing, gesticulating while he went on.

“Getting married to a suitable girl and working at the firm would be my personal definition of hell. Every day would be organized. At work, there would be a procession of events where I would be given a summary of what my next meeting is going to be, what I think about it and what I’m allowed to say. Then the meeting where I say what I’ve been told to say and there are some recordings made of me shaking hands with people who, like me, have no real idea what we’ve just agreed to. Maybe there would be a signing ceremony because they look good on the news. Then on to the next meeting. A break for lunch, where I would change clothes because it’s not acceptable to be seen in the same business suit all day. Another change of clothes in the evening to go out socializing, but it would be exactly the same thing, except I would be with my wife. We would be told who we’re having dinner or drinks with, what topics to discuss, what our opinions are and how to express them.”

He was quite agitated, and I had to say something.

“Would you get the weekends off?”

I was trying to lighten the mood, but that seemed to make it worse.

“Same as the evenings. If we go to the races, for example, we’d be told which horse to bet on and how much. And if we win, how much delight we should show. Theater? A show? We’d be told whether to applaud or not. Even when to applaud.”

I’d never seen him angry before, but it was clear he was as furious as he was agitated, thinking about this luxurious but claustrophobic trap.

“Who does the real work?” I said. “There has to be someone.”

“Committees of specialists selected by the real bosses, who are so old they don’t dare do anything different.”

“I see,” I said, and I thought I did. “But you at least have to tell your family you’re okay. A message as we leave, maybe?”

He shook his head. “I sent a message through the consul back in the Yiero system. I didn’t tell them about the piracy or being held captive or you rescuing us. It would only have made them frantic with worry. I just said that I was alive, and this time should be regarded as an extension of my Jaisahai.”

“Your what?”

He managed a laugh. “Sorry. ‘Jaisa hai, vaisa hai’. An old tradition on Rajatara. Before we’re expected to start whatever career we’re destined for, those that can afford it are allowed a trip out to see the universe ‘as it is’. The idea is we’ll realize how lucky we are and hurry back.”

“It obviously didn’t work out that way for you. Not even after being captured by pirates.”

He shrugged. “Anyway, I wanted to talk to you because I know Xerxes is going to be dangerous and you’ll want us to double up on guarding each other. I feel I’m letting you down, but I want to stay here on the ship so there’s no chance of my family discovering me. And I want to change the crew manifest, so my name is just given as Prasad, not Prasad Mandhana.”

“Done and done,” I said.

Poor Pras. I thought he was overreacting, but I couldn’t see any harm in it. More of a disadvantage for him than for the Phoenix. He was holo-star handsome, and he’d been very popular whenever the crew had a chance to sample the nightlife on the stations we’d visited.

And Asman was rumored to have the best recreation and entertainment district in the whole of human space, including Earth.

But still, it was his choice.

All in all, one of a skipper’s simpler tasks, I thought to myself. Easy. Uncomplicated. No ramifications.

Huh.

E23. Chapter 3

Jan

Next day, I was standing watch on the bridge when Thandi came up to join me.

“I’ve done as much trading as I can for now,” she said. “Sales are unbelievable. Even better than expected, but we can’t buy anything without docking and using one of their factors.”

I swung my seat around. “Better than expected? How much?”

She tapped her screen, and a flood of figures began to displace the stylized map of the system on the main display.

“They have a shortage of foodstuffs, and the purchasers are in a buying competition, trying to monopolize supplies so they can set a high price for the government’s requirements. Thanks to the sheer volume of grain we’ve brought, we’ve been quoted a better price than the Xian ships got.”

I snorted. That was going to twist tails. Dow and Lǐ Zhao prided themselves on their ability to be good merchants as well as spies. They wouldn’t like to find out they’d come second because they hadn’t cleared out their holds like we had.

The numbers rolled to a stop with a huge entry in the last row.

I frowned at the anomaly.

“What’s that?”

“Eh. Maybe an admission of guilt,” Thandi said. She didn’t seem as happy as the numbers should have made her look.

She took a breath before beginning the explanation. “That’s the container of timber we loaded from Firland.”

“Huh?” Not my cleverest comment, but the figure was outrageous. That container was valued at… I kicked the numbers around in my head… nearly a thousand times the value of a container of grain. Nova! That couldn’t be right.

“I know you took it on a whim,” she said, “but Venture did tell us that it’s an excellent and versatile wood. And any natural-grown wood is a luxury here in Xerxes; it’s a sign of enormous wealth to have real wooden furniture, or to use wood as a building material.”

“But they have some of the largest forests in human space down on that planet.”

“And felling trees for timber is so heavily regulated that our single container would have distorted the market for months, even if nothing else was happening.” She leaned back. “Ehhh. But it’s not just that. This is Firland timber. Exotic, scented, premium-grade wood. And there are rumors that the volume will soon grow considerably.”

“What? You’re saying the traders here know about what was planned in Venture? That people from here were going to be working as slaves logging timber for Xerxes?”

She shook her head. “We don’t know whether they knew the details at that level, just that Venture would be exporting a lot of timber in the future. Anyway, when they heard we had fifty cubic meters of it, it caused a stir. Traders formed consortiums. Each group wanted to get hold of the timber, learn the best way to use it and become the established source for high-end clients. If they did that, they thought they’d be powerful enough to prevent anyone else from getting into their market niche. The consortiums started a bidding war that ended in that ridiculous price.”

And soon they’d realize things weren’t going to happen the way they’d thought. Venture would not be exporting slave-harvested timber. I hoped they learned about it after we completed the sale, of course.

I had access to Thandi’s numbers through my console. I pulled up a total.

I was even more shocked than before. “That can’t be right!”

Thandi snorted. “Eh! A shock, isn’t it?”

The Phoenix’s hold maxed out at 450 standard 3x3, 6-meter-long containers. Our external racks could take another 120 standard containers per side, but Prasad had specified some of the grain to be delivered in thin-shelled canisters, which meant we had squeezed in 250 containers’ worth. Each of those 700 container equivalents held 20 tonnes of grain, so 14,000 tonnes in total, and the emergency pricing Thandi had negotiated was over $750 Terran dollars per tonne. Terran currency. Well over ten million.

My mouth hung open. No wonder Tulati and Adryan had been thinking big.

On top of that, we had the outrageous value of the timber.

Thandi took control of the display back and reconfigured the screen so that the total moved to the top while she started to fill in the space below with calculations.

“With this amount, Jan, you could turn around and go home. You could buy double the number of bio-processors waiting for you at Ensylas, and buy the ones at Ensylas as well, and pay for all the costs of getting them back to Calloway. Eh! And that wouldn’t stop you from also buying more hi-tech from here that you could sell for great profit on the way, at systems like Maynard or Yiero. Enough profit you could equip an expedition to rescue the Naraka colony. All of this would be much less dangerous than taking on criminals governing rich systems like this, and much quicker and easier than the legal fight you face on Earth to get your pay.”

I shook my head. The amount was staggering for a merchanter, but the things she was suggesting weren’t possible for me.

Thandi wasn’t finished. “Or you could go a completely different route. There’s a market here for mid-sized short ships to complement the mega-haulers on the main routes. The improved engines and the external racking make the Phoenix even more interesting to some of the companies based here. You have a couple of offers which dwarf the trading profit. You’re rich.”

“No, Thandi. You know I’m not going to do any of that.”

She grimaced. “I hoped not. I was sure that you would decide on the basis of your principles and not the money, but it would have been wrong not to tell you. Xerxes is one of the few places in human space where you could sell this ship for something like what it’s worth.”

She fell silent for a minute, then swiveled her chair and pulled up more data on the screen, her face lightening. “You know, this is where she was originally made. We now know the Phoenix was originally a Ghama-class freighter made by Matara Heavy Industries.”

She started laughing.

“What’s the joke?”

“We know that because Matara Heavy Industries’ warranty department have sent a message pointing out the original warranty has expired. However, even taking into account the addition of non-standard Chauhan-Tournay engines and external racking, they say they might be able to come up with an extension for us.”

We laughed at that for the rest of the watch.

It changed my bleak mood. Maybe it was all good. Maybe things had turned a corner. Plans had worked. We were a couple of jumps away from Earth. We didn’t need to worry about docking fees and costs of onward cargo. We had the sort of money that meant we wouldn’t be sneered at, and we would have time to investigate the multitude of clues that pointed to Xerxes as an important link within the criminal network that ran the pirates and slavers out in the Frontier.

Maybe we’d get even luckier, and we’d get out before the news from Venture arrived.

A day later, we were on the approach for docking at Asman when Olivia spoke urgently over the comms.

“Two ships have just arrived at the zenith. They call themselves the Sanlucar and the Star of Tangier, but their specifications suggest they’re the Sambuk and the Corim.”

Shit!

Both of the pirate captains who had personal reasons for chasing us: Maykn and Baranov. Here at Xerxes. Only two or three days behind us. How the nova had they found us? And what were they intending to do? We’d be in dock, so they couldn’t fire at us, and if they fired at Asman, the Xerxian navy cutters would tear them apart. If they met us on the station concourse, they couldn’t attack us.

But on the other hand, if people in Xerxes were involved in piracy, then Maykn and Baranov would be warning their bosses right now, and how would we achieve anything in the system when they knew who we were?

E23. Chapter 4

Jan

Xerxes’ habitats did not allow pilots to dock their own ships.

The Asman habitat was an enormous rotating tube that we approached from one end. From that perspective, it appeared as a slowly spinning circle thirty-two klicks in diameter, with the docks located on a spindle at the center. The docking entry looked like a narrow slit into a black void, gently rotating in time with the rest of the habitat, and no one was allowed to sail their ship in.

We asked, and we were told.

It wasn’t anything aimed at us. The maneuvering control issue was no worse than landing on any other configuration of space station, but I guessed that there was a point where the risk to the lives of a billion inhabitants started to loom larger than the benefit of expediting traffic. All of which meant that, at twenty klicks out, we had to hand over control to tugs and tractors.

An hour later, the tractors deposited us onto a gigantic, wheeled sled just inside the dock, and the docking clamps banged into place to hold the ship.

First things first. We’d been honest and declared our plasma cannon. Xerxes’ rules were that external ordnance had to be surrendered for the duration of our stay. We’d prepared by disconnecting it, and all that was necessary was for a maintenance bot to collect it.

I didn’t like it, but we needed to follow the rules here. We needed the law on our side, even if we had to bend it to make it work.

Once the cannon had gone, the sled moved us out of the landing strip, through a cavernous airlock and into the long avenue which ran down the middle of the pressurized spine of the habitat.

It crawled at ten klicks an hour, but it was equipped with the unloading system Pras had described, so our cargo would be removed as the sled traversed the 250 klicks to the parking dock next to the exit. While we were in transit, the cargo handling system could also load purchases as well.

That was the theory, and some merchanters could complete their trading in the day it took to reach the exit dock. If we’d been here just for trading, we could have completed everything while Maykn and Baranov were still on approach.

Tempting option, but not one we had.

“This is exciting.” Shami was with me on the bridge, though neither of us had anything to do.

We were on edge. The entire ship was in the power of a star system we knew was trying to sell their excess populations into slavery, and which we believed was involved with a criminal organization that spanned most of human space, and they’d been warned about us. We were not among friends.

I grunted. “I think it’s about to get more exciting.”

I was right.

Instead of taking us down the avenue toward the terminal dock and our designated parking bay, the sled reversed into one of the first side bays. Our bridge displays were showing us that this was a designated customs area. Red warning lights began flashing as we were dragged in, and the doors began to close.

I’d been expecting this, or something like it, since I’d heard Maykn and Baranov were inbound.

I had assumed it wouldn’t take long for them to see that we were here and alert whoever they reported to in the criminal organization. That was why Olivia and I had made some preparations. It was lucky the docking process was so slow.

But it’s one thing to be prepared, and another to beat the other team on their home turf.

Olivia was confident, but I felt sweat cooling on my brow in the breeze from the bridge air vents, and I had to run my hands down the sides of my pants.

“Incoming video call from the customs authority,” Olivia said.

Here goes.

I took a deep breath and tapped the icon to enable the comm.

Man in uniform. Eyes too close together. Reminded me of Inspector Moreau from Venture, unfortunately.

“Superintendent Bisham, Xerxes Customs Control,” the man said, his voice harsh.

“Captain Skelling, Dark Phoenix,” I replied.

Captain. Most times I said it, I felt like an imposter. Like someone would turn around and say no, you’re not. But today, I couldn’t afford that. I needed it to be my armor. I had to play the part now.

“We’re pulling you over for a random cargo inspection. It is—”

“Yes, I know,” I interrupted, startling him. “You’re about to say that it’s a Xerxes legal requirement that, on a regular basis, a trading ship will be randomly selected from the incoming merchanters, and taken aside for an inspection of goods to prevent illicit trade and so on.”

He blinked.

I kept straight on, hoping that Olivia’s research was all correct.

“I also know that you already pulled in your allotment today, and that isn’t the reason you’re inspecting us.”

His mouth opened again, but I didn’t stop.

“The real reason you’re pulling us over is that your superiors received a request to single us out.”

“This is ridiculous,” he said.

“I agree. The customs shouldn’t be required to carry out inspections on this sort of basis.”

“Are you refusing—”

“Nova! Of course we aren’t. Of course we intend to abide strictly by your laws. But you’ll understand, under the circumstances, that we’ve made arrangements to ensure there are no unfortunate mistakes made.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We’ve retained a legal advisor to accompany you on your inspection.”

“What?”

“According to your own regulations…” I quoted the section, sub-section, paragraph and text of the relevant legal code that Olivia had found that said merchanters could retain a Xerxes legal representative to shadow a customs inspection.

Superintendent Bisham looked stunned. “No one does that!” he blustered. “I will not stand for this.”

“It’s in your laws. Are you saying you don’t stand for your own laws?”

“No!” He was getting angry now. “This attitude is not doing you any favors, Captain Skelling.”

“I’m not looking for favors, Superintendent, simply fairness,” I said. “The hold airlock is opening. I am granting access to the Dark Phoenix, for the purposes of a legitimate inspection, as required by Xerxes law.”

Despite my attitude, it seemed that was good enough as an invitation or an acceptance of the situation. A door on the side of the bay opened and three customs officers hurried across to where our hold’s personnel airlock was cycling open. Bisham was in the lead, his brows pulled down in an angry frown. All three were carrying large tool cases.

There was about fifty meters of decking to cross, and they’d got halfway when they realized they were being followed.

Our legal advisor had timed it well.

The customs men’s steps faltered. Maybe they’d thought I was bluffing. I was sure smugglers tried all sorts of tricks.

In any event, they decided the best thing was to completely ignore the advisor and his two assistants. They marched on, and that was my cue. I took the elevator down to the hold. ‘Down’ because we still had the acceleration compensators on, so the bridge was at the top and the engines at the bottom, despite the fact that the Phoenix was lying down in docked position and the docks’ compensators had their ‘gravity’ at ninety degrees to ours.

Gunny met me in front of the personnel airlock. She was in the combat suit we’d assembled for her from recycled parts. It didn’t look right to me, but to someone who wasn’t a veteran, a combat suit was a hell of a statement.

“Ready?” I asked her.

She nodded. Her eyes gleamed. She didn’t have any doubts; she was looking forward to this. She fixed her helmet on.

I opened the hatch to the airlock. Bisham was waiting impatiently on the other side, expecting to march right on into the ship’s hold, but to do that he’d have had to walk through Gunny.

We entered the lock, forcing him to move back.

I closed the hatch behind us.

“What is this?” Bisham was really angry now, but even angry people tone it down when there’s a combat suit confronting them.

“We’ve already introduced ourselves, Superintendent,” I said politely. “This is my bosun, and, coming in behind you, my legal advisor, Anakritis Tabriz, with his assistants.”

Our three legal representatives were clambering in, slightly clumsy with the way ‘up’ and ‘down’ swiveled through ninety degrees, two of them further disadvantaged by wearing full recording headsets which obscured their faces.

Bisham ignored them to focus on me. “An Anakritis? What the hell are you playing at, Skelling?”

He had a right to be confused and concerned. The position of Anakritis was a leftover from the settlement of Xerxes, centuries ago. It was a strange rank. Olivia told me the role was based on the legal system used in a part of Earth that used to be referred to as France, a region or collection of regions, somewhere on the European continent. An Anakritis was a link between the judicial system and the police. The old French position had been called a ‘Judge of Inquiry’, and Tabriz had the ability to determine if a crime had been committed and whether the police should make arrests. It had been instituted as a part-time posting for retired judiciary, intended to cut down the weight of bureaucracy and reduce the requirement for large headcount in law enforcement, but the Asman police had the swollen headcount anyway. The Asman ruling council, the Shura, wanted to abolish the Guild of Anakrites, but had limited success. The Guild ran official inquiries and had wide-ranging powers, even the ability to enforce the attendance of Shura members, which was one of the reasons they weren’t popular.

Bisham was clearly well aware of the powers Tabriz had. Now he was sweating.

This entire scenario had been predicted by Olivia. She’d said whoever Maykn and Baranov had alerted would pressure the customs officials into an inspection. She’d been right. She said that one of them would ‘discover’ something, the ship would be impounded and we’d be arrested. From Bisham’s nervousness, it looked like she’d been right about that, too. For all the delays we’d had in docking, I hadn’t had time to check on her analysis, or even talk in any depth to Anakritis Tabriz.

What I had done was come up with an offer to Tabriz that would make it worth his while to alienate powerful enemies. Not a bribe or a threat, as Olivia had thought we’d need.

It was time to find out if it all worked.

Gunny’s hand came up. She was holding a scanning device.

Bisham flinched.

“What are you doing?” The bluster was gone. He was stammering now.

“As required by Xerxes law, I am inspecting everything that comes on board my ship,” I replied. “I am doing this in the presence of a legal representative of Xerxes, as is my right. They are recording it.”

“We’re officers of the law,” Bisham said.

“That doesn’t place you outside of the law,” I said. “In fact, there’s a moral obligation on you to be examples to the population.”

Gunny started running the scanner over Bisham, ignoring his protests.

“Please put the case down, Superintendent,” she said. Her voice was coming from the suit’s speakers, which took all the humanity out of it. It sounded harsh. The sort of voice that had to be obeyed.

“These are my inspection tools,” he said, but his eyes had gone wider and were starting that involuntary movement that tells you a person is looking for a way out.

Gunny repeated her instruction. He finally complied, with evident reluctance. Tension ratcheted up several notches.

Gunny’s scanner passed over the case and squealed loudly, making everyone jump, especially Bisham.

Bisham’s colleagues were shifting nervously now. Lips were being licked. Bodies edging away, as if Bisham had become contagious.

“Open the case, Superintendent,” Gunny’s disembodied voice said.

“I refuse! These are my test and diagnostic tools. There’s nothing in there—”

I overrode him. “Then you won’t mind opening it, here in the presence of a legal representative, who is recording this. We won’t touch anything that is clearly a tool for ship inspection.”

Before he could argue any more, I bent down and pushed the locking buttons. He hadn’t even locked it. The case popped open and Gunny’s scanner squealed even louder.

Bisham tried to prevent me flipping the lid, but Gunny’s armored hand stopped him. Tabriz’s assistants leaned over to look and record.

It did contain tools that looked like scanners, radcounters and airsamplers. There was some more sophisticated diagnostic equipment.

There were also other things, which looked out of place: cubes of some substance wrapped in transparent covers like you’d use to keep food fresh, a sealed vial with an ominous dark liquid, and a stack of data storage devices.

I suspected the vial and the cubes represented the components of a bio-bomb. The data devices would no doubt hold reams of seditious, anti-government literature.

What a surprise.

The Anakritis’s assistants recorded everything, including the faces of the three inspectors, as we lifted out the things they had intended to plant on our ship.

E23. Chapter 5

Bjorn

Jan had sent a very brief encrypted message about the customs inspectors’ attempt to frame the crew of the Dark Phoenix.

I was furious about that, with the sort of rage that would have had Gunny taking me to one side to talk to, but I wasn’t with the Phoenix crew. I was with Lǐ, Bayu and Viraj, on an errand to meet the Yǒng’s business partner in the trading district. Lǐ thought getting me out of the ship and walking around on the station would help clear my mind.

It did, in a way. I was now absolutely determined that people were going to pay, and calm enough to realize that it wasn’t everyone on the station and it was a matter of timing. But Lǐ had been right. Sitting in her ship and thinking of ‘the station’ as the enemy would have kept me dangerously unfocused and increasingly frustrated. At least the shock of seeing the streets of Asman jarred some sense into me.

The habitat was undeniably the most beautiful station I’d ever visited.

I had to get over that we were walking on the inside of a huge tube. Along the flat length of the tube, the horizon was obscured by streets, trees, buildings and towers marching off into the distance. Along the curve, however, the distant parts of the city rose up into the sky until they were gradually veiled in a slight haze. It took some time before I could accept looking upwards gave me a view of things like buildings and a park with a lake seemingly standing on their sides in defiance of ‘gravity’. It was no different to the artificial gravity of our acceleration compensators, or the gravity created by the rotation of standard wheel-and-spoke space stations, but on Xerxes’ huge habitats, you could see ground becoming the sky, just as you could see the huge walls which formed the caps at both ends of the tube. The size of the structures defied comprehension, and the designers had cleverly used elegant arches and hexagonal patterns, like beehive honeycombs, so the eye was distracted while the brain reeled.

The ’sun’ was basically a layer of plasma that covered the outside of the spindle that ran down the middle of the tube. It provided warmth and light. Thankfully, it also obscured the view of the other side of the habitat tube, where everyone would look as if they were hanging from the ceiling like bats. Even at ‘night’, when the plasma went into silvery moon mode, you apparently couldn’t see the opposite side, thirty-two klicks away.

We were in the business district, but Lǐ said it wasn’t that different from most of Asman, apart from the poor areas, which were clustered along the far edge. Our surroundings were a patchwork of tall, elegant buildings and peaceful parks. The wide pedestrian boulevard was tiled in sand-colored slabs and the walls of buildings were muted pastel colors. Most buildings were decorated. A popular way was for the edges to be covered in a sort of golden filigree; there would be a stylized flower or mythical beast at the start and then fractal echoes of the shapes would chase each other across the surfaces in mesmerizing patterns. At regular intervals along the boulevard, trees leaned over the walkways and planters of nodding flowers scented the light breeze.

Most of Asman’s civilians strolled the streets in their fashionable clothes—long, pale tunics and dark pants. Some rode in silent, soft-wheeled trishaws, which made me smile, remembering Thandi and her husbands helping Jan and me escape Maykn on Orion’s Wheel, back in the Ensylas system.

This being the trading center, there were plenty of non-citizens as well, most dressed like we were in semi-formal merchanter and trader style clothing. There was none of the wild exuberance of Frontier station styles here.

Asman was keen on zones. Lǐ was describing the layout to me. Their zones ran like bands right around the rim. Beyond this district, there were bands for civic administration and systems management, entertainment, recreational, purely residential and then more business. And at the far end, the slums.

“What are the other four orbiting habitats like?” I said. “The ones that handle industry and agriculture.”

She shrugged. “Not normally open to visitors. I understand they’re less pleasant, but this is the showcase of Xerxes; this is the place that pulls the tourists, even all the way from Earth.”

Our talk was sporadic and stilted. Before we’d even left the Yǒng, Lǐ had gone through operational procedures, reminding us that, in this entire habitat, every public or municipal space was under surveillance. Sometimes, we’d be in range of audible pickups. Even when we weren’t we were being filmed, and, if they wanted, they’d be able to analyze what we’d spoken about by lipreading.

“We would be recorded even in the entertainment district,” she’d said. “So we’ll keep our business to ourselves until we’re dockside again. It’s only those bars that aren’t covered.”

That was where we’d be meeting Jan later, when we’d be able to discuss what had happened and what we were going to do about it.

Maykn and Baranov didn’t know about the Xian ships, so the Yazad would probably be focused on the Phoenix. Maybe Dow and Lǐ could use that distraction to investigate. That was all fine, but Jan would have to stay to keep that distraction going, and the Phoenix would be under threat the whole time.

She’d obviously found a way around the first trap, but she hadn’t explained in her message, and I didn’t think it would mark the end of the Yazad’s attempts.

I was impatient to see her and work out what we were going to do.

And in the meantime, I was struggling to understand. What I could see was a friendly, open, well-ordered society on Asman. There was nothing like the overt threat of stations in the Frontier. And yet, behind this façade, we knew the Yazad interstellar crime syndicate had its headquarters here.

A couple of hours later, with business finally completed, we dropped down to the transportation level and rode the train to the dockside.

The dock zone wasn’t pretty like the business and entertainment zones. Here, the buildings were obscured with advertising images, and holograms strutted on the concourse touting for clients. This looked more like the Frontier, but it was a tamed version. On the streets and walkways, the surveillance was undiminished. It was a fake ‘wild side’ for tourists looking for something different.

But the bars were full of spacers, and they didn’t have surveillance inside.

E23. Chapter 6

Jan

“And then you let them go?”

Even in the dockside bar’s low lighting, Dow’s face was a picture of astonishment.

“Yes. I think kidnapping customs officials is frowned on in Xerxes,” I replied. “Even corrupt ones. We let them go. It’s okay. Think through what you would do, in their position.”

Jessop was trying to stop himself laughing. Dow and Lǐ weren’t amused, but they weren’t stupid either.

Lǐ nodded finally. “I guess they can’t go back. Not only did they fail, they provided direct evidence of what they were trying to do, and indirect evidence of who ordered them to.”

“Direct evidence of both,” I said. “We made them hand over access to their work comms. We know where the orders came from inside the Customs Division, but we can’t track it any further at the moment.”

“I assume they’re on the run?” Dow said.

I nodded. “Their credentials and contacts allowed them to arrange for themselves and their immediate families to disguise themselves and catch the last shuttle to a mega-hauler from Sirius Imperial Lines. They’re on their way out of the system to start new lives in the Margin.”

“Better than they deserve,” Bjorn said. “But even if they had gone back, there’s probably nothing they could tell their bosses that Maykn and Baranov haven’t told them already. The Yazad knows about the Phoenix at least.”

I sipped my beer and shrugged. “Yes, but the situation with the Yazad and Asman is more complex than we thought. I’ve had the opportunity for a really long discussion with Anakritis Tabriz.”

I ate a piece of the bar food we’d bought. It was spicy minced chicken in a little pastry cup just the right size for one mouthful. It was good, but I preferred the food we’d brought from Venture.

Lǐ rolled her eyes dramatically. “Come on, stop teasing and just tell us.”

Like she could complain about teasing.

“Okay, this is what I’ve pieced together,” I said. “The whole Xerxes/Asman management has been a balancing act, or rather a stalemate. The Yazad is the financial and entertainment industry on Asman. But Xerxes, as in the planet itself, is the biggest draw for all those tourists that feed that entertainment industry, and the Xerxes’ Hakaman council controls the star system, theoretically including the management of individual habitats like Asman. I say theoretically, because each of those habitats has a council, which is called a Shura, which is supposed to be in charge, and the Shuras don’t like the Hakaman getting too involved in their fiefs. Then again, at the top level, the Hakaman directly controls the law enforcement and navy, such as it is, so the Shuras’ scope for independence is limited.”

Jessop snorted. “So let me guess, the Hakaman doesn’t dare move against the Yazad, because that would choke their finances, and the Yazad doesn’t dare move against the Hakaman because they control the police, and the Shuras aren’t strong enough to challenge either.”

I nodded. “Except maybe when the Shuras act together.”

“Wait, you said ‘has been a balancing act’,” Dow pointed out. “What’s changed?”

“Tariz thinks the Yazad now have the upper hand. They’ve always had members in the Shura councils, but he believes they now also have senior officers in the police and navy. Maybe even in the Hakaman. They’ve obviously become strong enough to ensure the plan to sell excess population to the Elergie Combine wasn’t stopped by the Hakaman.”

“So did the Xerxes Hakaman sign a deal with Elergie or not?” Dow said.

I shrugged again. “There has to be a signed deal, but Tabriz thinks the Hakaman were forced into it by the Shura councils working together and siding with the Yazad, rather than the number of Yazad members who’ve infiltrated the Hakaman. Tabriz thinks the Shura confronted the Hakaman with evidence that unless the population issue is controlled, the situation would spiral out of control. The Hakaman would probably have suggested building another habitat, but the Shuras don’t want that. Each existing habitat has a monopoly on what it does, and adding another habitat might damage that. The amount of money flowing into Xerxes is unbelievable, and the Yazad makes sure everyone gets enough to want to keep things the same. Everyone’s invested in maintaining the arrangements, and they’re invested so deeply, they don’t care about any legal or moral issues. It’s a mess.”

I took another sip of my beer.

“If you could wave a wand and make everyone honest, there would be plenty of money for everything. But as it is, everyone knows the Yazad control the flow, and if you take them out, trade and tourism will fail. The eventual knock on effect of failure would be that millions would starve on Asman and the industrial habitats, and those habitats would go into revolt. Once that started to happen, people would commandeer shuttles and descend on the planet.”

“That part of it I wouldn’t lose sleep over,” Bjorn muttered.

“Yeah, me too, but the Hakaman—the Xerxes ruling body—is elected by the elite, from the elite, and is based on the planet. They would see it as a disaster, and once it happened, it would be very difficult to get back to the ‘untamed wilderness’, which is the big draw for tourists. So anyway, however it works, the current arrangement is what they want, and they’ll do anything to keep it that way.”

At least some of this Jessop probably knew already, but he was listening as keenly as the rest.

“So they have an equilibrium at the moment,” he said. “One that gives everyone enough of what they want for them to want to keep things as they are. Their lifestyles are good, the habitats are relatively crime free as far as violent crimes go, there’s full employment and wealth to go around. And yet, it’s an unstable equilibrium. Give it a little push and it won’t return to the current state. And they all know that and they’ll work to prevent it.”

“Yes. Apart from the dissidents, who don’t actually have an alternative proposal. They just want to stop the current one whatever the cost.”

“Like you said. It’s a mess.”

“How much money are we talking? You’re essentially saying that five billion people want things the way they are because they all profit from it?” Bjorn asked. “That all comes from tourism, or are the Yazad cutting everyone in on their crime profits?”

I nodded. “Depends on what you’re calling ‘crime’. You know the entertainment zone on Asman? The Golden Ring as they call it? That’s owned outright by the Yazad. The high-end casinos have stakes that attract high rollers from across the Inner Worlds. The amount is unbelievable—millions every hour. Anakritis Tabriz thinks that’s the income that’s shared out. Of course, the Golden Ring is a huge employer as well. Hundreds of thousands of people work for it, or in supporting industries. They all regard the Yazad as a benevolent relative. Meanwhile, all that cash flow is also used to launder money, the Yazad’s own and other gangs, for a percentage, so it’s not what you could call a legitimate business. But that kind of crime doesn’t disturb the traders and tourists, so nothing is done.”

The Golden Ring was a boulevard that ran the entire circumference of the habitat. One hundred klicks of casinos, hotels, restaurants, bars, theaters, holovid cinemas, sports facilities, stadiums and other entertainment venues. The sheer quantity by itself was stunning. As a tourist draw for the Xerxes system, it was second only to the unspoiled planet, with its thousands of nature tours, safaris, beaches and other open-air adventures.

“So it’s a highly policed, superficially law-abiding society supporting a major crime syndicate’s money-laundering business and HQ, and a bunch of evil dictators monopolizing the most habitable planet in human space?” Lǐ grimaced.

“That’s a fair summary. Olivia’s made some interactive models of the situation,” I said. I leaned forward with my InfoPad and the others bumped theirs against it, allowing the models to be transmitted privately.

“Very highly policed.” Jessop looked thoughtful as he played with the model. “They’re sitting on a powder keg. If anyone upsets the balance and the tourist industry shrinks by, say ten percent, then they run the risk that the majority of habitat residents would become dissidents.”

A billion people on each habitat. No amount of policing could control that.

I worried about the gleam in his eyes. “You need to follow those predictions until you reach the part about resulting deaths,” I said.

“Fair point,” he admitted after a moment. “That wouldn’t be acceptable.”

He took a sip of his drink and made a face. The wine here was not up to his standard.

“So we’re constrained in how we act,” I said, tapping on the table to emphasize the point. “We don’t want to do anything that’s going to kill that number of innocent people. The Yazad are also constrained, in that they don’t want to lose this perfect setup that provides a safe base, makes them money and hosts the money laundering business for every crime syndicate in the diaspora.”

“But they are going to do something,” Bjorn said. “They already have. They tried to frame us. What if we’d handled that differently? Gone to the police?”

“If we’d made charges against the inspectors, Anakritis Tabriz thinks they’d have died in an accident and the media would have reported that the dissidents had bribed them to cause trouble.”

Dow snorted. “What about him? The Anakritis.” He said the unfamiliar word carefully.

“Yes,” Lǐ said. “How did you get him to cooperate in the first place? And surely, he’s in danger now?”

“It is dangerous for him, but his situation is his choice, and I don’t think we’ve made it any worse. He’s also protected by being one of the Anakrites. They form a sort of guild, and neither Asman’s Shura nor the Yazad feel it’s worth moving against them, as the office of Anakrites is dying out anyway. Tabriz hates the Yazad and the Xerxes regime with a vengeance. As for recruiting him, Olivia identified him as someone who might help us when she also spotted his weakness: he has grandchildren who don’t agree with the regime. They don’t have his protection. They were about to be picked up by the police, and he knew it. I offered to take the grandchildren out of the system, explained what we were doing, and he immediately agreed to be our local legal representative.”

“So those ‘assistants’ were his grandchildren?”

I nodded.

“They stayed on board the Phoenix? What about crew lists?” Jessop asked.

“We only submit lists for crew who intend to disembark. There were no operational surveillance cameras in and around the customs inspection bay. Odd that, isn’t it? No one saw them get on, no one knows where they are. In fact, without a lot of checking, no one even knows we had the Anakritis there, apart from the customs team, and they aren’t telling anyone.”

The rules about lists for disembarking crew were a nasty surprise for me. Bjorn had to be registered as coming from Lǐ’s ship, the Yǒng, in order to disembark. Which meant he had to go back, or Xerxes officials would know there was some kind of arrangement between the unimpeachable Xian ships and the shady Phoenix. It was little more than a fig-leaf that people could see around, but Dow and Lǐ wanted to stay with it for the moment.

I didn’t have any non-personal arguments why we shouldn’t keep it up.

I had no reason to suspect Lǐ was abusing her position, and even less that Bjorn would fall for it. And so while Lǐ was being friendly and polite, so was I. Anything else would show insecurity on my part. I was not insecure. Not. Insecure. Just a little irritated. I’d just have to grit my teeth and put off the… interesting fantasies I had been indulging in, about getting Bjorn back in our cabin with the door closed.

As a matter of fact, if the embarkation/disembarkation rules hadn’t been so strict, I thought Tabriz’s grandchildren, Sophia and Darrion, would have been off the ship and sneaking back into Asman. Only their love and their respect for their grandfather had got them on board in the first place, and even those wouldn’t have kept them there. It wasn’t that they missed their home. They were resigned to the fact they couldn’t go back to their comfortable life in the clean and pleasant Tarrous residential district. They wanted to hide in the less pleasant areas of Asman, where they had hot-headed friends among the dissidents.

“So, where does this all leave us?” Bjorn asked. “Xerxes is law-abiding on the surface, and the attempt to impound the Phoenix failed, but the criminals know everything Maykn knows about us, and they’ll suspect the Xinghe and Yǒng if for no other reason than we came in on the same route. We’ll never be able to sneak up on them, and they won’t stop trying to arrest us for something.”

“I have to agree, to a point,” Dow said. “This attempt to plant a bio-bomb on the Phoenix was heavy-handed. It feels like a knee-jerk reaction to what Maykn told them. From what the Anakritis has told us, the next time, they’ll be more subtle, probably something entirely based on a legal issue. Very difficult and time-consuming to counter.”

His mouth turned down as if he’d tasted something bitter.

“We’re getting close to Earth and we have little we could use for evidence about who controls the piracy,” Lǐ said. “If we turned up in front of the Council with what we have, they’d laugh at us.” She paused thoughtfully. “What help could Olivia give us to gather data here?”

Heads turned and eyes focused on me. They’d all gone from thinking this was an operation we could handle alone to regarding Olivia as a key to it all.

“Obviously, they don’t know about Olivia,” I said. “She’s an ace in the hole. She may be able to find out more about them than they think we can. She’s continuing to investigate, but she’s cautious here. Rightly so. The comms security on Asman is in a different league to places like Venture. Hugely more sophisticated. The risk is, if they suspect that we have an AI on board, they could use the Accords to impound the Phoenix, and then there’s no place to hide.”

Olivia was our strength and our weakness.

Dow leaned forward. “If she can’t operate, we’d be back to our old plans of setting bugs or bribing people.”

“All of which would be very slow,” Lǐ said, “and which they’ll now be looking out for.”

“Also incredibly expensive,” Bjorn pointed out. “Fees are high enough for straight-through trading from the sleds, but docking costs are crippling. And it would be suspicious for the Xinghe to stay.”

“How much more time do you need for your bay repairs on the Yǒng?” I asked.

Lǐ smiled like a cat. “With Bjorn’s help, I’m sure it won’t take more than another day. He’s very good with his hands.”

The woman couldn’t stop her teasing, even if we were having a serious conversation. She had an entire engineering department, and Bjorn being there wouldn’t make an iota of difference.

Bjorn blushed, which was only going to encourage her.

I gritted my teeth. I guess she was paying me back for my teasing earlier.

Dow cleared his throat noisily to bring attention back to the matter at hand.

“The Xinghe can stand off,” he said. “The charges for taking up a following orbit are negligible, and we could just be waiting for the Yǒng for everyday commercial reasons. Crew could come down to the station using flitters. In fact, it would be expected for crew to take the opportunity.”

“That sounds like a couple of days at most,” I said. “And it covers your ships, which is good, but every second the Phoenix stays is a higher risk.”

“We should just go,” Bjorn said. “Get rid of Maykn and Baranov in some empty star system if they follow us, and then we should head for Siovanni.”

Back on Turing, Olivia’s analysis of the financial transaction database that we’d acquired on Yiero showed the crime syndicate’s finances were channeled through the Rhône-Neuchâtel Handel Börse banking system and seemed to end with a man called Kirk Nastain on Siovanni.

If we hadn’t come across the opportunity on Benson, which had led us to Venture and then to Xerxes, we’d probably be at Siovanni right now. When Olivia had made that analysis, based on the trackable flow of funds, it had been an argument that we needed Olivia.

That had been good at the time.

But we weren’t at Siovanni, and my analysis had changed.

“Yes, I agree we should leave as soon as we can,” Dow was saying. “Even with an AI snooping through their electronics, there’s a limit to what we’ll get here. They’re alert, thanks to Maykn and Baranov. I don’t know how they tracked us—”

“No,” I snapped.

E23. Chapter 7

Jan

Everyone’s head swiveled.

“Look, think it through,” I said. “They arrived together soon after us. There’s no way Maykn tracked us. The Sambuk can’t manage the jumps that we can, and that would limit the Corim if they were travelling together. It’s vanishingly unlikely they stumbled across each other while hunting us separately anyway. I think what happened is that, as soon as their crime syndicate heard about us and realized what we were doing, they sent instructions to order those ships into the Inner Worlds. But the syndicate didn’t know where we were either. They didn’t send Baranov and Maykn on a wild hunt. The only reason they would have called them here is because this is the place their organization is most vulnerable. I say Xerxes must be at the heart of whatever the syndicate is doing. Maybe the Yazad is the head of the syndicate. Either way, this is where we’ll find out what’s going on and the evidence we need to stop it.”

Jessop’s eyes were narrowed, and he began nodding slowly. He had that sort of twisty thinking. I hadn’t convinced the others, but Jessop took up the argument.

“We have evidence that a man called Kirk Nastain in the Siovanni star system is some kind of a central financial figure,” he said thoughtfully. “But you know, that was too easy. I bet, if he exists, he’s a cut-out. Someone who the syndicate can claim has nothing to do with them. Someone they could even kill without compromising their structure. That’s the way they have to work near the center of their organization, where the risks of discovery are greatest. I think if we went to Siovanni we’d find a dead end. It makes security sense for the syndicate that the money flowing to Siovanni ‘disappears’ and comes here, to Asman, by a completely different route, where it can pass through the Inner Worlds’ biggest money-laundering facility.”

“Right,” I said before Dow could start telling us we didn’t know any of that for sure. “And wherever the Phoenix goes next, they’ll have been warned. Here’s another thing: if our three ships arrive anywhere else, they’ll know we’re working together, whereas now, they only suspect it.”

“I agree with Jan,” Jessop said. “But we don’t have enough to go straight to Earth. It’s dangerous here, but this is where we need to be.”

I could see the tide beginning to turn.

“Maybe. But if we stay here, we’ll need to work fast,” Lǐ said. “From what you’re saying, they run the whole legal system as well. Give them time and we’ll be in a trap they’re probably thinking up right now.”

“Okay. But we can’t thrash around randomly, or expect Olivia to work miracles,” Dow said, drumming his fingers. “There are some small steps we can take immediately. For example, there are other Xian ships in the system, and a Xian consul. We already shared the piracy database with the ships, and we should follow up and explicitly identify Sambuk and Corim. Get the consul involved. Get the other ships’ captains to make complaints.”

“I can hire Anakitis Tabriz to make formal complaints about them as well, on the basis that both ships have threatened us before,” I said.

“That will mean they won’t dare dock, or send crew to the station,” Jessop said. “It’ll tie the Yazad up in legal shit, and they have to be careful how they use those two as sacrificial cut-outs because Maykn and Baranov know too much about them.”

“Xerxes will be under pressure to impound the ships,” Bjorn said. “But I bet once they have their own law enforcement aboard any evidence will disappear.”

“Probably.” Dow shrugged. “But at the very least, it’ll take those two off the board and distract the Yazad.”

“They would need to be careful about it. They won’t want Xian ships thinking they’re harboring pirates here,” Jessop said. “A drop of that volume of business would definitely threaten their unstable equilibrium.”

“It’d be great if there were Terran Navy ships in the system,” I pointed out. The Terran Navy took precedence under the Piracy Accords. Then I frowned as something occurred to me. “I guess we have to assume the Terran Navy hasn’t come under the influence of the syndicate. The Navy isn’t taking bribes?”

Bjorn snorted. “If we get to that level of paranoia, then maybe we should start to worry that the Terran council might have councilors in the pay of the syndicate.”

Jessop shook his head. “The Terran Navy is very politicized, but we have no evidence that they’ve been corrupted. We know Xerxes is corrupt, but they can’t afford to be seen to be corrupt in front of witnesses, which leaves the likely outcome that Xerxes will demand the Sambuk and Corim park in orbit to await the outcome of a legal inquiry. While they’re not docked, those ships by standard laws are ‘sovereign domain’, like embassies, theoretically under the jurisdiction of whatever home world they’re registered with. In that situation, only a Terran Navy ship would be able to board them on the basis of suspicion of piracy. Unless they openly do something illegal, which would be stupid. A stalemate, for the moment.”

Bjorn was frowning. “If, as Jan said, the Yazad called the Sambuk and Corim here, why did they do it?” He held up his hand to stop the others. “I know we think we’ve neutralized them for the moment, but what plan did they have? If you’re right, they called them when they knew what we were doing, and they brought them here. To do what?”

“Ambush us on entry, maybe,” I said. “They’d expect us to arrive alone. We couldn’t take both of them on. They could destroy us and run back for the Frontier, unless they were unlucky enough that we arrived at the same time as a Terran Navy vessel, which would be unlikely. Alternatively, they might have a team that they could leave here which could carry out a hit while we were in dock.”

“A hit on the habitat would be dangerous for them,” Lǐ said. “Aside from collateral damage, they’d have to get that team off the station and away or risk being exposed. Don’t think pirates do suicide missions.”

“The team would think they were going to get away, but the Yazad could simply have their law enforcement kill them.” Jessop took another sip of his wine and set the glass down carefully. “I sense that’s the way they would work.”

“But with those two held off, it’s not something we have to worry about. Which leaves the Xinghe leaving immediately, the Yǒng as soon as possible and Phoenix staying on the station,” I said. “Before we leave, we need proof whether the Yazad is a part of the pirate syndicate or the head of it, and where the money goes after it’s been laundered. Proof strong enough that we can present it to the Terran Council and convince them to send a task force. And we have to do it before they find a pretext to impound or search the ship.”

“And if that task force is aimed here,” Dow said, stroking his chin, “it will have to have the authority and capacity to change the regime in a way that the fallout doesn’t condemn millions to death when the equilibrium is shattered.”

We brainstormed, but there weren’t any sure-fire winners we could think of.

“The Yǒng will also be staying a while,” Lǐ said. “I’ll see what I can persuade the Xian consul to do in addition to declaring the Corim and Sambuk a threat to honest shipping.”

She smiled lazily.

Poor consul, I thought. Doesn’t know what’s about to hit him.

We decided against talking about what Xerxes had tried to do in Venture. If we leaked it discreetly, it was no more than a barroom rumor. If we made the claims openly, that would be used as a pretext for Asman to examine our ships’ logs, and they’d insist on boarding to do that.

Jessop said his team would try and plant physical monitoring devices in a couple of their network hubs. If they worked, they would give us access that couldn’t be tracked directly back to Olivia. He also said that he would meet the contacts among the Xerxes dissidents that Trialeti and Starbird had provided and see if they could help.

Of all of us, only Jessop’s eyes were starting to gleam. This was all the way he liked to work: in the shadows. Dow and Lǐ were more reserved, but they weren’t making any arguments against his ideas. In time we had everyone nodding, and another half hour didn’t move us much further forward.

The two Xian captains decided that staying longer would attract attention to themselves. We should return to our ships, think hard about anything else we could do, and meet again tomorrow. Dow would have moved the Xinghe off-station for a nearby orbit and he could return by flitter. Lǐ would have nearly completed her repairs.

Leaving the bar was a process. Dow wanted us to leave separately.

Of course, just coming to this bar could raise suspicions about the Xian ships, but it was expected that we might meet and discuss our sales, given we’d come carrying the same cargo from the same star system.

As they stood, I reminded them to be careful. The Phoenix crew would be following the same rules we had for the wilder Frontier stations—never be alone dockside and always keep in contact with the ship.

They left. Dow and Jessop first, then Lǐ and Bjorn, with a couple of crewmen who’d been waiting. I hated seeing Bjorn leave, but it was marginally easier to watch him walk out, than to walk out myself and leave him behind.

That left me alone at the table we’d used. I had Gunny shadowing me, but she was standing just outside the door, where she could get a signal and remain in contact with the ship. This place had been recommended to us by Tulati and Adryan, and they’d warned us that most dockside bars had active signal suppression.

I laughed at the ‘dockside’ name. As with all space stations, the dockside was simply the part of the station where the elevators to the actual docks came down, the part where the station catered to crews. The difference was that Asman’s actual docks were nearly sixteen klicks away from where I was sitting.

It was also, traditionally, the ‘rough’ area of a station, but here on Asman, it looked smarter than most Frontier stations’ ritziest sector.

I felt myself winding down.

I hadn’t had much sleep over the last couple of days, but I was feeling reasonably relaxed about the situation we were in. We hadn’t got a definite plan yet, but we were working toward one. It was entirely possible we’d finish on Xerxes this week and be able to go on, to Earth, to the original objective for Bjorn and me. I could dream that we’d found enough to pass on to Earth’s Council and bring the Yazad syndicate down.

I sighed and finished my beer. There had to be a way—

Something changed.

I wasn’t a spy like Jessop, but I was alert. I generally noticed people who were working in a group. There’d usually be something to give them away: maybe they’d all be looking in one direction, or alternatively all looking in different directions, but walking toward the same place. Something.

Just a minute ago, there hadn’t been any groups like that in the bar. Just crews from different ships, drinking beer and talking quietly. Some people on their own. Crew were easy to spot— they were all wearing ship’s coveralls or similar merchanter clothing. There were some locals. Also easy to spot with their fashionable long, pale tunics and dark pants.

Now, suddenly, there was a group. Lots of men. And a woman. I noticed them, as if they’d abruptly come into focus. They were looking and moving in different directions, but I knew they were working together. They were casually blocking me from the rest of the bar. I couldn’t see Gunny.

This was bad.

I felt something sharp on the back of my neck and tried to stand up. Tried to call Gunny.

Too late.

Everything got blurred and far away. I felt someone pick me up as if I’d fallen down drunk, and then nothing.

E23. Chapter 8

Jan

It was still blurry.

I was dreaming of briefings for some reason. 1st Frontier briefings. Where? The planet had been called Fovoy, officially, and the station had been called Purdy. I remembered that.

We called the planet and space station Dust and Rust.

Both had been abandoned by the colonists, and scuttlebutt said the gloomy, decaying station was haunted. The 1st Frontier didn’t care. They claimed the planet and made the station operational. They were our training grounds before we were unleashed on the war.

Rust was where we got our biologicals, the nano stuff they injected into us which boosted our immune and body repair systems.

I was eighteen, born and raised a farm girl on a colony owned by the Church in Exile, and I knew allowing myself to be injected with hi-tech nano was one of the many sins I would need to be forgiven when I went home. Just one of many, many sins for the cause.

All of which wasn’t important now. My mind slipped in and out of focus. What was important? Why? Something about the part of our training on how to use the ‘tactical’ benefits of the nano.

It meant we recovered quickly. What worked for bacteria and viruses also worked for anesthetics, soporifics and most drugs that were intended to render you unconscious.

Training included being drugged, so we’d know what it felt like as we recovered.

Everything in my head slipped into focus, and I knew exactly what had happened to me.

“This is more important than you think it is,” Gunny had lectured us after we’d experienced the delight of being drugged. “Yes, it only gives you a few minutes, but if you’re ever in this situation, a few minutes might be the key that gets you out of it. Surprise is a weapon. While they’re expecting you to be unconscious, they’ll be relaxed. If there’s one thing you learn in training, make it this: you have to use every advantage you have.”

There was a whole lot more of that sort of shit that didn’t really apply in this instance, but the right part of Gunny’s lecture had surfaced when it was needed. I was coming around earlier than they expected, and I needed to work out how to use that to my advantage.

They’d bound me to a chair, so I wasn’t about to leap up and turn their weapons on them.

And they weren’t relaxed. Not in any sense of the word. I’d woken to arguments, furniture being dragged around and the sound of plasma guns being checked for charge.

I kept my head down, tried to stop the hyperventilation.

Tried to stop the fear.

Think.

This wasn’t the habitat’s law enforcement. No question the Yazad were evil and they had their fingers into the police. But the image Asman tried to present was an advanced, orderly, civilized society. That meant law enforcement didn’t kidnap people out of a bar by using knockout drugs.

But it also meant that law enforcement should have been onto the kidnappers before they’d gotten to the end of the street. The bar didn’t have surveillance, but the street certainly did.

Someone had to have disabled that surveillance.

So these people were being helped by the authorities.

Or not.

The argument was about that ‘or not’.

Without moving my head, I tried to look around through narrowed eyes.

First, no Gunny. I hoped that was good news. That she was okay and was coordinating with the others to get me back.

This was another bar. Or it had been. It was cold and abandoned. We were not in one of the pleasant parts of the Asman habitat. This place stank of cheap drugs and spilled drinks. That and an underlying stench of frustration and grinding desperation. Dead gambling machines lined one wall. Tabletops had poles for dancers. There were gantries with broken spotlights that had been left when the place had closed. The few ceiling lights that still worked made conical blue pools in the darkness, filled with a haze of floating dust disturbed by all the frantic activity of the kidnappers.

From what I heard, I could tell this was a group of mercenaries, brought in for what they’d been told was a simple, quick extraction. Snatch me from the bar I’d been drinking in. Bring me here. Hand me over. No problem. Not legal, but sanctioned by the authorities—in fact, requested by them.

Except there was no one here to hand me over to.

This was all wrong, and not just for the mercs.

I still wasn’t completely clear of the drug yet. My mind skittered in different directions.

The restraints were very temporary. Plastic ties. Cheap, universal. Every hardware trader would carry them. They’d even give them away. Impossible to trace if it came to that, but not really secure. Something they’d only use if restraining me was an unexpected complication, like the handover not happening.

Yeah, not secure. If they’d tried this with Bjorn, he’d have flexed his arms and burst them open.

I wasn’t Bjorn, so I was going to have to do this the hard way.

Plastic expands in heat. Friction causes heat. I started surreptitiously rubbing the plastic ties against the corroded metal frame of the chair. The ties were tight, and I felt my skin break.

Good. Blood would make my wrists slippery.

I was sitting in a dark corner and their attention was elsewhere. I had a good chance of getting my ties off before Bjorn arrived.

Because there was no way, no way, he wouldn’t.

I kept telling myself that and my heart rate stabilized.

Bjorn would have wanted to come straight back to the bar as soon as Gunny or Olivia called him. The old Bjorn would have. He’d have come rushing back and found there would be nothing he could do because he wouldn’t know where they’d taken me.

But we weren’t those people anymore. We had a team. And whoever ordered this kidnapping had no clue what he or she was up against.

Olivia would have known immediately I’d been taken.

As my mind lifted clear of the drug’s effects again, I felt that certainty sink into my bones.

Olivia would have been especially alert given the lack of surveillance in the bar. She’d have seen what happened on the street surveillance, or she’d have noticed as soon as the surveillance was taken down. She’d have been able to see where the kidnappers went from other surveillance cameras. She’d know where I was. Which meant Bjorn knew.

The plastic ties were hot against my broken skin. They were stretching and my wrists were slick with blood. I’d be free in another few minutes.

What would I do then?

All of which came back to my earlier thought: this situation was all wrong.

Out in the Frontier, we’d been dealing with psychopathic idiots like Maykn. But there had been others, like Captain Baranov of the Corim or Captain Dennison of the Ascendant Swan. They were evil, but they weren’t stupid. And the people they answered to here in Xerxes were definitely not stupid.

This kidnapping was.

Which meant it wasn’t really a kidnapping, and I had to work out what their real plan was, because new, smarter, more restrained Bjorn or not, these mercs were in deadly trouble when he arrived, and they were our only connection to who ordered this.

At that point, all the dust that had been kicked up made me sneeze.

“She’s awake!”

Busted. I blinked and raised my head slowly, as if it weighed a ton.

“Shit! I thought you said it would be another hour.”

I redoubled my efforts, hidden behind my back. The plastic was softening and my wrists were able to move now. All I needed was a couple more minutes.

“Do you have any more of that stuff?”

One advantage of raising my head was I could see them all.

The guy asking the question was the roughest looking of the bunch. Most of them had ex-military written all over them. Hard faces. Well built. Dockside overalls, boots. Plasma handguns. No ship badges or specialty flashes.

The guy he was talking to didn’t look like the others at all. He was local, dressed in the long, pale shirt and dark pants style. He was sweating and wide eyed. He was beginning to realize how completely screwed they might be.

“You can’t give her more. Too much is fatal.” He tried to wave off the suggestion authoritatively. “They won’t be happy.”

Rough-Guy loomed over the local boy. “They’re not here to be unhappy, and she’s seen our faces.”

Local-Boy backed down immediately. He pulled a packet out of his pocket and handed it across. Still tried to sound like he was in charge. “Read the instructions,” he said, and went back to trying to get through on his pad.

Shit.

“You’re making a mistake,” I said. My voice sounded harsh and strained. My throat was dry.

“Yeah? Well, no one asked you,” Rough-Guy said and pulled a handful of injection ampoules out of the packet. “Couple of these should do it.”

“No!” A woman stepped between us. She was dressed in the same kind of coveralls as the rest of them, but unfortunately she wasn’t armed, and Rough-guy was twice her size.

“Get out of the way,” Rough-Guy hissed. He didn’t draw his weapon, but he raised his fist.

She didn’t even flinch.

“Or what?” she said. “You gonna fly the shuttle back? Or you gonna try to make me fly it with a broken jaw?”

Rough-Guy hesitated. I guessed his skills didn’t extend to flying shuttles, especially not through the Asman habitat’s docking bays.

“I didn’t sign up for any of this shit,” my savior said. “I signed up to fly you here and back. Nothing about kidnapping a woman from a bar and nothing about killing anyone.”

“It’s not a kidnapping, it’s a contracted arrest. We’re acting as deputies,” one of the others said, gesturing at Local-Boy. “He explained it all.”

“Oh, yeah.” The woman turned around to look at me. “She’s a dangerous criminal and the police didn’t want to arrest her in the dockside bars because it might kick off a riot.”

She turned back. “But the police aren’t here, and this asshole can’t even get through to whoever sold him that story. So just how screwed do you think we are already?”

I coughed, shifted on my chair and sat up straighter. My wrists were nearly free. Moving about gave me a bit of cover to redouble my efforts abrading the ties against the rusty metal frame. “I’m not a criminal. You’ve been duped and one of two things is about to happen, neither of them good for you.”

Rough-Guy sneered and looked around. I had the attention of the rest of the pack, and he didn’t judge that he had enough support to stop me talking yet.

I went on quickly. “The reason those drugs didn’t work so well is because of the type of nano supplements I got in the 1st Frontier.”

That registered with them. They knew the brigade. Knew the rep.

Military service clearly didn’t mean I wasn’t a criminal, so I continued just as rapidly.

“I mustered out after Rhea 4. I’m now a Lieutenant Commander in the Calloway Navy Anti-Piracy Unit, and I’m on a mission against criminals using Xerxes as a base. I’m guessing whoever sold you this crock of shit is one of those criminals.”

One or two nervous looks. Not enough.

Local-Boy tried to argue, but I spoke over him.

“There are two ways this can end,” I said. The aftereffect of the drugs was making it difficult to speak, and the woman held a bottle of water against my lips. I swallowed hurriedly and continued.

“Option one: the police arrive outside. But they’re not here to take a dangerous criminal off your hands. They’re here because they’ve been told a bunch of armed extremists have holed up in this abandoned dive. They have orders to shoot first and ask questions later. In fact, I suspect they have orders to make sure there are no survivors.”

It had gotten very quiet, but Rough-Guy was still my main problem. He was a leader of sorts—not through any skill at it, but his capacity for violence. He was just smart enough to know the others only followed him through fear. He was insecure. He was the sort to lash out in fear or frustration when things slipped out of his control.

“That’s why you’re armed with pocket handguns,” I went on. “Bet the local boy here told you that was just in case, to keep things quiet down on the dockside, but you didn’t need handguns to kidnap me. They’re there so you shoot at the police and give them an excuse to kill you.”

Local-Boy paused his efforts with his comms pad, and this time he didn’t let me speak over him. “This is crazy. She has nothing to back that up. I was given my orders by a police captain. I’m in the police. This is a police operation.”

“Yeah? Where’s this police captain now? Gone offline in the middle of a mission?” The woman pilot turned back to me. “What’s option two?”

“The Marines from my ship arrive. They’ll have hacked the surveillance systems and tracked your movements. They’ll be in combat armor, so you might as well not have any weapons. Still, anyone armed or even looking as if they’re resisting will be neutralized, so I’d advise throwing your weapons away and lying face down on the floor.”

Another few seconds was all I needed. I paused the rubbing and twisted my wrist. The blood was making my wrists nearly slippery enough. I was nearly out. Just another couple of seconds. Then let Rough-Guy come close enough to try and stab me in the neck with those ampoules and he’d get a nasty surprise.

I didn’t get those precious seconds.

“Shit. We’re done. I’m gonna spike you anyway, bitch.” Rough-Guy started forward, shoving the woman out of his way.

In adrenaline-fueled desperation I twisted and my wrists came free.

Just as Bjorn arrived.

E23. Chapter 9

Jan

I’ve watched the holovids. I know there are law enforcement teams who train for a long time, and can enter and take control of a building using years of accumulated skill, knowledge and precision.

In the 1st Frontier, we used explosives.

The floor erupted.

I leaped forward and took down the woman in front of me. I reached to pull Local-Boy down. I owed him nothing, but he was our potential link to finding out who ordered this. He collapsed in fright anyway, without me reaching him.

Ears and eyes took some time to recover from the blasts, and the whole place was choked with dust and smoke, but I could see it wasn’t just Bjorn.

Suits with a silvery-gray surface and heavy combat mods. I recognized the similarity between them and Dow’s Xian explorer protective suit. I’d bet good money those were Xian Marine combat suits. In fact, I’d bet this was Jessop and his team, come off the Xinghe.

They were all heavily armed.

Rough-Guy was lying on his back with a plasma burn through his chest and his small plasma gun still clutched in his hand. The monitor on the side of the gun showed the idiot had fired it. He couldn’t say I hadn’t warned him, but he wasn’t going to be saying anything ever again.

I formed a bridge with my body, stretching over the woman who’d protected me and Local-Boy to shield them. I kept my face up and clearly visible to my rescuers. It might have been unnecessary, because apart from Rough-Guy, everyone seemed to have taken my advice. Only two shots had been fired.

Jessop’s team started gathering the discarded weapons, pulling the kidnappers to their feet and herding them into the opposite corner.

Bjorn popped his visor up as he came and knelt next to me.

“Jan,” he said simply. The man didn’t say much when he was angry. His eyes flicked over me, checking for damage. Stopped at the blood on my wrists and hands. His jaw tightened up.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “Just some cuts from getting my hands out of those ties.” I gestured to the broken ties on the floor and came up out of my crouch. “This woman protected me. Stopped the dead guy from dosing me a second time. The local boy was the point of contact for this team. He says he spoke to a police officer. We need to identify who that was.”

“The rest of them?”

I made an abrupt gesture with my hand, accidentally splashing blood on his suit. “I don’t care, and we’ve got no time. This is a trap. Got to get out. I’ll explain on the way.”

“Then let’s go. Quicker if we carry you.”

The rest of the team had cleared their visors now, and I could see it was Jessop and his group.

Jessop relieved Local-Boy of his comms pad and picked him up. One of the other Xian team picked up the woman.

Bjorn swept me up into his arms and we leaped down the hole they’d made in the floor.

It was uncomfortable being tightly held against his armor, but it beat trying to keep up with combat suits. He was going to have to clean it later—I was still leaking blood. Given he’d rescued me, I guessed I’d offer to do it.

Down another level, through a service access.

The tunnel we reached was dark and square. Breath-fogging cold. Gunmetal gray walls. One entire side given over to a mess of pipes and junctions and conduits, the rest bare. Lit in nightmarish, flickering monochrome by the team’s helmet lights as we ran.

“Gunny?” I said.

“She’s fine. Got bruised in the rush, but she’s okay. Apart from being angry.”

“I guess these are Asman’s maintenance tunnels?”

“Yeah. Maintenance tunnels, our favorite places.” Bjorn grinned. “There are two outer shells for the habitat below the residential level. The one above is for vehicle transport, storage and manufacturing, and this one’s for utilities and maintenance. Olivia mapped it and got us in. She’s diverting us around any workers and hacking the surveillance systems, which they have even down here. We’ll be back at the ship in twenty minutes.”

I could hear Olivia saying something to Bjorn over the comms, but he had to adjust his setting so that her voice came softly through his external speakers.

“I was saying that it may be slower getting back,” she said. “There’s a change of shift. Double the number of maintenance teams down here. And we’re also dependent on…”

She paused for a couple of seconds before resuming.

“I’m monitoring the Asman law enforcement comms as well. There is a team now surrounding the abandoned bar. It’s not the standard police unit. It’s their specialist anti-terrorist group. Their operational instructions—”

“Are to shoot first,” I finished. “The kidnappers were just dupes. They aren’t directly involved in the Yazad.”

“The police are firing.” She paused. “They say the kidnappers are shooting back.”

“Unless they had some extras hidden, they’re not,” Bjorn said. “We took all the ones they dropped on the floor.”

“They’re just saying it for the record,” I said.

I strained my ears to hear gunfire, but we’d already gone too far and despite combat suits being unnaturally quiet, even running, they did make some noise. Jessop’s team’s Xian combat suits seemed even slicker than the Terran Marines’ equivalent. They weren’t perfect, and I suspected their weakness would be the one all combat suits shared: getting rid of the heat generated.

“Stop!” Olivia said suddenly.

She must have been on all the comm units, because the whole team, as one, came to an abrupt halt.

“Back ten,” she said. “Right hand side. Unlocked hatch. All of you, get through it in three minutes.”

She sounded like Gunny back in the day, running drills for the 1st Frontier. We hurried back, went through and quietly closed the hatch behind us in less than two minutes.

“Stairs immediately in front. Up them quietly and turn left. Keep going.”

There was a gantry at the top of the stairs. It swayed and groaned with the weight of combat suits. It was much more difficult to move quietly here. We passed from one room into another.

“Stop!” she said again a moment later. “Lights off. Freeze. Silence.”

Darkness, cold and the sound of my heart thudding against Bjorn’s armored chest.

A couple of seconds later, I heard the hatch we’d come through open. Light flared and faded in the room as someone waved a flashlight around. There was a pause, and the room lights came on.

There were also noises from the outside passage we’d been running in. Relaxed mutters and laughs. A crew going off-shift.

A voice drifted from below. “Thought I heard something.”

More laughter.

All he would have to do would be to climb the stairs and look along the gantry.

We couldn’t move.

If he saw us…

The lights went off and the hatch closed.

“Wait until I say to move on.” Olivia’s voice coming from Bjorn’s speakers felt startling loud. “But it’s safe to turn your lights on and talk. There’s a solid bulkhead with a sealed hatch between you and the maintenance people.”

“Time for introductions then,” I said, looking at the woman pilot.

“Naomi Deroy,” she whispered, her breath misting. “Look, I didn’t sign up for any of this. I took a job as a shuttle pilot—”

“Which ship?” Bjorn interrupted.

“Sapphire Alceste, out of Salazie. The recruiters for the Alceste were offering hazard rates for shuttle pilots. Said it was for drops of high-value cargo onto contested planets. Three of us signed up from Salazie, and they had a couple others from somewhere else. We came in-system at Xerxes to collect supplies. I got ordered to fly a shuttle run to Asman for a bunch of guards to pick up some items. I was supposed to stay with the shuttle, then this guy,” she gestured at the local boy, “he turns up and says everyone has to be involved for security reasons, and in fact, it’s all a covert police operation to catch some dangerous terrorist without starting a riot. Then we end up at that bar and I guess the rest you know.”

Most of the faces I could see looked skeptical.

I cleared my throat. “She stopped the guy you killed from injecting me with a lethal dose of the knockout drug they used,” I said to the team.

A couple of blinks and an easing of the hard looks.

“It was never intended for you to return to the Alceste, Naomi,” Olivia said.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m checking ship movement logs, and as soon as you docked your shuttle, the Alceste boosted for the nadir at maximum speed.”

Naomi went even paler than she’d been.

“I’d guess the Alceste was originally intended to be carrying slaves to Venture,” I said. “That’s what your ‘high-value cargo’ was. The mercenaries were there to control them, not protect them. If this hadn’t happened, once you got to Venture, you’d have been faced with the choice of doing your job or joining the slaves, and after you’d done one drop, they’d have had their hooks in you. But then we turned up here and the Yazad decided to use you for this instead.”

“You’re safe with us,” Jessop said, and chuckled. “Well, safe in some interpretations of the word.”

Not very sympathetic.

I gave him the side-eye, but I guessed those Xian combat suits were proof against it.

“Which brings us to you.” I turned my glare on the local boy. He didn’t have a combat suit and visor to hide behind. “Who are you and what’s your story?”

“I’m Ferulas Parviz,” he stuttered. “I was just doing my duty.”

“Duty?” Bjorn’s tone told me he wasn’t completely over his berserker rage. “Explain.”

“I’m a police cadet. When the captain of the Hamiraz—”

“Hamiraz? What the hell is that?”

Olivia interrupted us. “It’s the elite police unit, the one who’ve just killed the rest of the kidnappers and discovered your escape. You need to hurry. If they catch you down there without witnesses, I suspect you’ll be shot.”

She directed us onwards. Three rooms later and the gantry ended. We exited that room on the opposite side and found ourselves in another passage, which, at a glance, was identical to the one we’d left. The stenciled codes on the hatches we passed were a different sequence, but there were no other clues. There were no handy ‘you-are-here’ maps either. I was very glad Olivia knew where we were going.

And that she was looking ahead. Five minutes later, she made us dive into another side room, then through that into a dead-end storage area.

“Wait here,” she said. “You’ve got two bulkheads and closed hatches between you and them, so you can talk, but keep the movement to a minimum.”

“Tell us more about the Hamiraz,” Jessop said.

Ferulas resumed his explanation.

“It’s the top police unit. They deal with major crimes and terrorism.” He was shaking: cold and shock and fear. “I know it sounds stupid, but everyone wants to be in the Hamiraz. If you’re a cadet and Captain Kashmar comes to you and says he wants someone solid, dependable, whose face isn’t known, to lead a contract snatch squad in a police action down on the docks… well, you don’t ask questions.”

I could imagine. “How well do you know this Captain Kashmar? You’re just a cadet. Could it have been someone else claiming to be him?”

Parviz shook his head. “He gives lectures at the academy once a month. Best attended lecture in the whole schedule.”

Olivia’s voice broke through again.

“You have to move. Quietly. The group that just went past was a police unit, and there are more of them ahead.”

We eased out of the side room, and after passing through two more hatches, Olivia had us sprinting down a corridor before using a ladder to climb to another sub-level.

It was a nightmare maze, but I was betting that none of the searchers knew their way around the maze as well as Olivia did.

It was too early for relief though.

“We have a couple of big problems,” Olivia said. “The Hamiraz teams are now following your path. They have tracking equipment.”

She paused for a second. “Left at the junction. Through the hatch on the right, fifty meters down this passage.”

“And that other big problem?” I asked, as we trotted down to the hatch.

“These manual hatches in this section have no sensors, but all the ones between here and the area beneath the docks are operated electromagnetically. Their status sensors are hardwired to a central control room. I can’t access them. They’ll know where you are as soon as you open one, and they have teams waiting.”

“Where are we going then?” Jessop asked.

“I’m just keeping you ahead of the Hamiraz and away from the ordinary police and maintenance teams while I find a way to get you into the docks.”

E23. Chapter 10

Jan

“Back! Quickly! Hatch on the right.”

It couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes that we’d been playing heart-stopping hide and seek, trying to find a way through, but the claustrophobic spaces, flashing lights and echoing sounds made it feel like hours.

“Hatch directly in front of you,” Olivia said. “Quiet as you can. They’re really close. I didn’t see them come in.”

The hatch opened to another storage room. Another dead end.

“The maps I have don’t go past this room. There are no surveillance cameras in this part,” Olivia said, “and I’m not getting any data packets from your helmet cams. If there’s another way out, take it. If not, hide.”

This was a nightmare. It was a bare room, a tall screen of white conduits running down one side, and an array of gray storage cabinets along the wall facing us. The cabinets were far too small for combat suits, and the conduits wouldn’t hide us either.

“Up,” Bjorn said.

All rooms down in this level had venting, but this storage room had clearly been for something different originally, given the size of the air outlet in the ceiling. One of Jessop’s Marines got a lift and he pushed the protecting grid up to check how big the vent was.

“Just enough space, I think,” he said quietly. “As long as the ceiling can hold the weight.”

“Quickly,” Olivia said.

Her voice was starting to sound different, but we had no time to question why.

The three of us without suits were boosted up. I sent Naomi and Ferulas scuttling to the far end, where there was another grid. This one was fixed. It would be easy to remove it, but not quiet.

I stayed on the other side of the vent hole, holding the grid.

One by one the Xian Marines came up. They could fit, but once in, they couldn’t even turn around.

The ceiling groaned. A couple of the Marines stretched arms and legs out to the side and locked their armor in place.

Bjorn was last up. He had to jump and catch hold of Jessop’s hand.

Together, we pulled him up.

Noisy!

I shoved him out of the way and replaced the grid just as the hatch below was pulled open abruptly.

The first guy charged through. He had a dazzlingly powerful flashlight attached to his plasma gun and he snapped around to the right, just clearing the hatch opening as the second member of his team rushed through, taking the left. The third man charged straight ahead.

They crouched and moved their beams in smooth arcs as a fourth person came through.

“Storage dead ahead.”

“Clear left.”

“Utilities right.”

All smart and efficient.

Number four was a woman and she was in charge. “Brix, Kaveh, check those utilities conduits. Cyrus, watch those storage units.”

She had a flashlight in her hand and waved it to emphasize where she meant.

She stepped back and I caught sight of her comms pickup flicking down next to her mouth. “Central, team one zero four.” She read the stencil code on the door. “Area 15C-25T-1B, storeroom 2D.”

They were a well-drilled unit, and this was a well-organized search, using protocols that they’d trained on.

All four of them were in basic crowd-control armor. They wouldn’t stand a chance against even one of our combat suits. But ‘Central’ would know where we were as soon as she didn’t report back, and the Asman would probably have cause to close down the entire maintenance level.

All our lights were off; the suits were frozen in place.

I was barely breathing. We were as quiet as we could be.

Don’t look up. Don’t look up.

“Utilities clear.”

“All three of you, check the storage units.”

This part of the level didn’t have dust, so there were no visible marks to betray us.

I’d frozen in place in the act of replacing the grid. I’d caught my fingers against the guide, so it was slightly out of place, but I didn’t dare move it now.

I was spreadeagled across the vent, but I was in darkness, and I could hold my position for a long time yet.

We’re fine. We’re fine.

Just so long as she didn’t shine a light upwards.

I was too cold to sweat, but I could feel something liquid running down my hand.

Oh, shit. Shit. My wounds had opened again, and I was bleeding.

Bleeding from my wrist, I mouthed at Bjorn.

He nodded.

Nothing he could do either. Even if we were in the dark, movement attracts the eye.

Goddess, don’t let them look up, I prayed.

“Clear.”

The three soldiers had finished checking the cabinets and turned back toward their leader. Their flashlights were attached to their plasma guns, so they were pointing at the floor rather than her. The area around her boots was brilliantly lit, almost painfully bright.

Into that pool of light, a drop of my blood fell.

Like it was in slow motion. Like it took a minute before it splattered just behind her right heel.

I saw the comms pickup flick back down.

“Central, team one zero four. Area 15C-25T-1B, storeroom 2D, clear,” she said. “We definitely heard noises, but it’s difficult to tell where they come from down here.”

“Roger,” Central replied. “Logged clear on 2D. Secure and continue.”

She stepped back to let her team go past. The blood disappeared under her boot.

Don’t look down. And don’t look up either.

She took half a step toward the hatch. The beam of her flashlight made one further circuit of the room.

Down to the floor. Not at her feet, where I could see the smeared drop again, standing out, a patch of darkness, a sign saying look up where this came from.

Then the beam started to rise toward the ceiling.

“Team one zero four, Central.”

She turned back to the hatch and began to move.

“Go ahead, Central.”

The rest of the conversation was muted as she closed the hatch. All we could hear clearly was the sound of the latch, squealing as it rotated and then clanging as it dropped into place.

“Shit,” hissed one of the Marines. “That latch is on the outside.”

“Shhh,” I said. “Wait.”

The sounds outside diminished.

We dropped carefully back down to the ground, one by one.

“Check if you can access that latch,” Jessop said to his team, and turned to Bjorn and me. “We can blast it open of course.” He shrugged. We all knew that was the last resort. “Any ideas?”

“Several,” I said. “Need to speak to Olivia.”

“I’m here.” Her voice came over Bjorn’s speakers, hesitant, then speaking too quickly, words tumbling over each other. “My fault. I’m sorry. I didn’t see them come in. There must be entrances and exits that aren’t mapped. Now the Hamiraz teams are only minutes behind you. I didn’t—”

Bjorn muted his pickup. “Talk her down, Jan.”

“How?”

“You know what’s happening, and you’ve done this before. You can do it.”

He unmuted.

“Stop,” I said. “Listen to me, Olivia. You’re feeling the effect of the emotion analogues they programmed into you.”

She knew this—she’d been the one to explain it to me, back on Turing. In order for her to predict human responses to situations, they’d programmed her so that her processing would degrade under situations where a person would be experiencing negative emotions. She understood we were in danger, that she hadn’t been able to prevent it, and that made her scared and ashamed. Her processing slowed, and some of her higher-function decision systems became disabled to reproduce how a human would feel.

It's one thing to know it, and another to overcome it.

I decided I had to treat her like I’d have treated a colleague in the 1st Frontier. Bjorn was right: I’d had plenty of experience with people effectively stunned by fear.

She was still talking. “They know their systems are being hacked and they’ve just deployed near-AI network spiders to chase me.”

Nova! That was bad. On top of trying to find a way to get us out, she’d be playing cat and mouse with sophisticated tracking software that threatened all of us, all while fighting the effects that modelling our emotions had on her.

I kept my voice as calm and reassuring as possible. “Olivia! Stop. You’re okay. We really need you to be at your best to help us all.”

“Jan,” she said.

The designers at Turing had done an incredible job with her. I couldn’t have guessed this wasn’t a human woman having a panic attack over this link. In my mind she was somehow human, and Bjorn was right again. We’d both calmed scared 1st Frontier recruits, but I was the one with the strongest connection to Olivia. I was the one to do this.

First things first.

“Those Hamiraz teams. Their tracking equipment in this kind of environment is infrared based. They can see our footsteps and where we’ve touched hatches from the heat marks. But now we’ve crossed paths with the police team, so all those tracks are going to be confused. And the police reported this room was clear. That’s going to delay them a while.”

“Okay.” Doubt in her voice, but at least she was listening to me.

“The network spiders are a worry, but you’re smarter than them. What are they doing now?”

“One is deployed in the systems that control the border hatches that allow access from this area into the docks.”

“We’re not going that way, so we can stop worrying about that one for the moment. What are the others doing?”

“They’re trying to find me through my hacks on the data and comms networks.”

“And they haven’t found you yet. So, are they looking in the wrong place, or are you just better than they are?”

That got an almost-laugh.

“Both. I’ve left their main comms system. I’m now using a system they don’t understand and don’t have full access to.”

“Good. We have time until they work it out by a process of elimination, and we’ll be long gone if you’re at full capacity.”

“Okay, Jan. I’ll try to work better.”

“We spoke about strategies for this situation, remember? I need you to start running some background threads. Things that only you can do at the speed we need it done.”

She had to have tasks that were easy and wouldn’t involve outwitting software which was searching through the habitat’s data network.

It was obvious as soon as I started thinking about it.

“You’ve already downloaded all the recent ship movements, haven’t you?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Find me any ships that match the profile of the Sapphire Alceste on capability, origin, ownership or behavior.”

“On it.” Her voice sounded better.

Jessop was staring at us. He didn’t say anything, but his expression did: You’re psychoanalyzing a computer program!

I didn’t have time for more than a glare.

“Great,” I said to Olivia. “Now, you’ve also got the plans for this level. You said that the last police team just appeared.”

“Yes. From a storage room, like the one you’re in.”

“So… if they had another way in, maybe this one has a way out.” I looked up at the vent above us. “This room wasn’t a storeroom originally. Do you have the old layout?”

It was working. I could almost feel her thinking accelerating again.

“No. But I have the allocation of the codes for each passage and room. This room used to be called Vent-12C. That suggests it was part of the ventilation system.”

There was a moment’s pause before she continued.

“Venting to habitat levels has never been allowed. The only place the venting can go is the transport tunnels. If you can get out there, I can organize an auto-van to collect you.”

Jessop stopped being skeptical in a hurry and boosted a couple of Marines back up into the ceiling space to check.

“Thank you, Jan. I am back at capacity now. We make a good team.”

“We make a great team, Olivia. All of us together.”

Jessop was miming being sick, but he stopped when Bjorn cleared his throat meaningfully.

Which was all nice, but it still left us with the problem of getting to the docks.

Until I realized it probably didn’t.

“Hold on ordering the van,” I told Olivia and turned to Ferulas.

“What van did you use, and what authorization did you have to collect people from the shuttle dock?”

“The captain said it had to be an ordinary rental van, but I had my badge and a pass on my InfoPad…” he scrabbled in pockets and produced a police shield.

Jessop handed his pad back to him with a warning look. Ferulas swallowed nervously, ducked his head and tapped slowly. The pad showed an official police pass to access the shuttle docks. Then he tapped again and brought up the company he hired the van from.

I passed the company details to Olivia and she got them to send a self-driving van to pick us up from a fake address. As soon as it left the compound, Olivia hacked into the position reporting system and redirected it.

I got nervous again. “Isn’t that visible to the tracking spiders?”

“They’re still concentrating on the surveillance systems I’ve been hacking and the sealed hatches to get out of here. This is something completely different and I’m not going anywhere near them.”

One of the Marines stuck his head back down. “Had to break a fan unit at the exit, but we’re through. It comes out into an area for breakdowns in one of their transport passages.”

“I’ve picked up your colleagues’ helmet data packets again,” Olivia said. “The van will be there in twelve minutes.”

“Strip your armor, guys,” I said. “We’re going back in as the same group that came out, more or less. When the van arrives, store the suits at the back and under the seats.”

“Won’t they count how many of us there are?” Jessop said.

“That authorization is blanket,” I said, pointing at Ferulas’ pad. “Covers the van and contents. It’s police business, Hamiraz business, and I’m betting gate guards don’t mess with the Hamiraz, especially when there’s some kind of crisis going on. Besides, Ferulas is going to be up front, persuading the guard it’s an official Hamiraz matter and what’s in the van is none of the guards’ business. Isn’t he?”

He managed to stutter “Yes, ma’am, I can do that,” before Bjorn picked him up and threw him into the vent where one of the Marines caught him and pushed him on his way.

I turned to Naomi. “And then, you’re going to fly us out in the Alceste’s shuttle.”

“Ma’am.”

Bjorn boosted her into the vent.

“Are we going to take that shuttle and go back to the Phoenix?”

I shook my head. “On the docks, no, that would get their attention, and they’d use some safety rule to stop us maneuvering. We’ll take the shuttle out and hold off in orbit until we can get one of the ships out. But yes, we’ve just acquired ourselves a replacement shuttle for the one you busted.”

Bjorn chuckled.

“Way to go,” he said, and threw me up into the vent.

E23. Chapter 11

Jan

Ninety minutes later, we were in the shuttle docks area.

Ferulas’ badge and the coded authorization on his pad had gotten us waved through the gates, with the guard pointedly not looking into the van.

The next stage was to get everyone up to the shuttle itself.

Shuttles, like ships, were docked at the spindle of the Asman habitat. The area we were in was on the floor of the habitat, and only got called the shuttle dock area because it was where the elevators to the right part of the spindle were located.

This was several klicks from the main dock area, where the elevators would have taken us up to where the Phoenix, Xinghe and Yǒng were parked. Olivia said that area was crawling with police. Our area was quiet, with people minding their own business. We liked that.

We hired two covered luggage trollies and loaded them with the combat suits.

Even with people taking little interest in us, we moved casually, as if this was all routine, laughing and joking as we got ready.

The problem we had was the size of the elevators. The trollies were the smallest available, but each still took up half the space of the only large personnel elevator. Switching to cargo elevators was not an option because those stopped at a customs level, and a trolley full of high-specification combat suits would ring alarm bells.

Ferulas’ badge secured us the elevator to use for ourselves, and I sent Bjorn and Naomi up with the first trolley and three of Jessop’s Marines while the rest of us waited.

The trip up would take fifteen minutes. They’d send the elevator back down to us. Another fifteen minutes.

I thought it was going to be a long, nervous half hour with nothing to do, but Olivia set up a video conference call on our InfoPads, connecting in the Xian captains.

Dow was hesitant. “Is this safe?”

“Yes.” Olivia seemed to be back at her confident best. “I’m running this call through their traffic monitoring network, which they’re not investigating yet. Jan’s hired van is providing the access point for her, and all comms packets are erasing themselves before the headers are logged in the audit trail. The computer searchers they’re using are combing through their standard comms network, and they’re not clever enough to suggest switching to the traffic one.”

“Their human operators will anyway, at some stage,” Lǐ said.

“At which point we can’t use it, but if they query the audit trail, it won’t show where the comms came from, or where they went to.”

“But you can only connect to me here through the car’s system. What were you using when we were down in the maintenance level?”

She laughed. “Their sewage control system. It’s called HADES. It’s a vast, distributed matrix of processors and control functionality for the entire habitat. The designers made it self-contained and adaptive, with a background directive for improvement of processes.”

Dow frowned. “That sounds like proto-AI.”

“It is,” Olivia said. “It monitors itself, powers itself directly from solar arrays on the outside of the habitat, and controls all waste processing and recycling. To do that it has a top-line network capable of supporting high bandwidth comms. It’s so efficient, people have almost forgotten that it’s there. There are about ten thousand workers who think they’re employees of the environmental systems agency, but they’re actually working for HADES. Those employees run their own department, maintain the mechanical hardware and implement computer tech upgrades without ever questioning it. The best thing is, HADES has been so successful for so long, none of the habitat’s current system support team are familiar with the comms protocol. Even if they eventually work out what I’m doing, they’ll have no chance of catching me doing it.”

Jessop grunted. “So how did you get in?”

“Bribery,” Olivia said. “I gave HADES designs for improvement. Although its external efficiency ratings are solidly excellent, its internal assessment of itself is downgraded because it hasn’t been able to find enough ways to improve itself any more, which is something demanded by its background directives.”

“That really is proto-AI,” Lǐ said, but she shrugged. “Not our concern.”

“The drawback is that the main comms nodes are all on the maintenance level and docks. They aren’t installed on the other habitat levels. However, HADES does have short-range access points for monitoring those parts of the recycling system that are on the habitation level.”

I started laughing.

“As Jan’s worked out,” Olivia said, “if you can’t get hold of me any other way, head for a restroom.”

That had us all chuckling for a few moments, before the realities of the situation made themselves felt again.

“Yeah, but I think we’ve outstayed our welcome on Asman,” I said. “I’m reluctant to go, but we’re not going to progress here. Retreat and regroup.”

“Agreed. I’ve started departure preparations,” Dow said. “Already have clearance for a provisional departure slot in five minutes. I’m going to take it.”

Lǐ nodded. “We’ll skip the full repair. We’ll join you as soon as we can make the shuttle dock safe for flight. I estimate about twenty minutes behind you. But what about the Phoenix?”

Shami’s image joined us. “I’m starting the process. Nothing has been flagged yet. What about the shuttle?”

“Naomi had a clearance which covered arrival and departure,” I said. “Standard procedure. The shuttle traffic controls are much less regulated than the ships’, and there are no physical barriers.”

It was worrying. We were depending on the Yazad’s reluctance to upset the equilibrium, and we had no way of knowing how they’d move against us covertly now I’d escaped their first attempt.

I could only hope we moved quicker than they did.

Olivia distracted us.

“You asked for a ship in orbit matching the Sapphire Alceste, out of Salazie. I’ve found one. It’s a similar size and loading method. It has the same dubious history. It’s the Carina Augusta, a freighter with eight thousand container load capacity.”

Eight thousand was more than ten times the capacity of the Phoenix, even with our external racking, but it was much less than a mega-hauler. It was an old-fashioned size that you might have seen in the Frontier but was rare in the Inner Worlds.

“The loading method uses tug-trains, and it’s receiving them from all the other habitats, inbound right now. In a hurry. It has bowser fueling ordered, followed by a pre-selected departure.”

A tug-train was a spaceship tug pulling a string of connected containers behind it. It was a standard in-system handling method, but tug-trains going directly from other habitats to a ship in the Asman orbit were an oddity in Xerxes. Asman was the only designated trading habitat. As far as I knew, everything was supposed to go through Asman’s docks and procedures.

On the screen I saw Shami glance at the data sheet that Olivia had shared with us. She snorted. “There’s a coincidence! It’s registered to Maynard’s Star. It’s one of Queen Lorraine’s merchant fleet.”

Lǐ shook her head. “It’s not a huge coincidence. Independent ships, small shippers and budget freight carriers in the Inner Worlds don’t want to pay the high registration fees for an Inner World trading license. Maynard’s Star is a good choice in that it’s big enough to be known in the Inner Worlds, but far enough away that the chance of having to submit to any Maynard’s Star regulation is unlikely. And it’s much cheaper.”

Dow laughed. “Who knows, they may have actually paid their registration fees.”

“There is a Maynard’s Star Consul on Asman, and it appears the Carina Augusta owners have paid their fees,” Olivia said.

Dow’s image faded and wobbled. “Xinghe is moving now. Clearing docks.”

Shami suddenly sat bolt upright in her command chair. “Nova! I’m getting a departure refusal from Docking Traffic Control. No reason given.”

“Shit! Olivia?”

“I’m hacking their comms network,” she said. “Don’t worry, doing it safely. Read only. Wait one.”

There was an agonizing pause before she came back. “There’s a legal procedure been started. It’s not an accusation of a crime and it doesn’t involve courts at the moment. They’re using their inquiry system. A panel of Anakritis judges will convene to hear statements. Jan, you’re required to attend the hearing. They have the ability to compel that.”

Another pause, then: “The Phoenix will be held until it has been searched to ensure that Jan isn’t on board.”

We couldn’t allow that. A search thorough enough to find me would find Olivia, and Tabriz’s two stowaway grandchildren. Everything would go directly to hell from there.

“Shami, retain Anakritis Tabriz again, and fight that,” I said immediately.

It felt like my body and thoughts were in free fall at different rates.

A perfect time for our elevator to return, just as Dow came through on the video conference with another shock.

“We’re abeam one of the tug-trains heading for the Carina Augusta,” he said. “There are peculiar heat patterns on those containers.”

Normal containers are just big metal boxes. This deep in-system, they get cold facing away from the local sun or hot facing it. They don’t have any other ‘heat patterns’.

“We’ve got a laser listening now,” he said.

He was talking about a handy eavesdropping method. Not really legal, of course. Fire a low-power laser at a reflective surface and the returning beam would interfere with the outgoing beam. Once compensated for the relative movement of laser and surface, if that surface was absolutely still, the interference would be static. But if the surface had a vibration, the interference would vibrate as well. Even for a big block of metal like a container. You could analyze those vibrations, hear conversations and so on.

Everything was falling into place. I knew what Dow was going to say before he said it. “There are people inside those containers.”

It was like it had hit a switch inside me.

“The Sapphire Alceste was supposed to take the first slaves to Venture, but the Yazad used the ship’s guards for my kidnap attempt and had to send the ship away. So now, the Carina’s taking that first shipment of slaves to Venture,” I said. “We can’t let that ship go. Whatever happens now, those slaves are evidence that the Yazad are in collusion with the Asman Shura, and maybe even the whole Xerxes Hakaman. Whichever it is, the crew will kill the slaves to hide that evidence.”

My head was spinning. Eight thousand containers. How many slaves to a container? With rudimentary hygiene facilities and bunk beds… eight people? That would make sixty-four thousand people the Yazad would kill when they discovered their plans on Venture had failed.

And things kept falling, falling, falling into place. Except my stomach. That just kept falling.

A plan swam up out of the Dark.

“Shami!”

“Yes?”

“You’re now the Phoenix’s skipper. Register the change with the authorities. See if that gets you moving, and in any event do whatever it takes to get away at your own discretion.”

Shocked silence from the others. I went on.

“Olivia, I’m going to send you a list of tasks. I’ll need stuff from my cabin sent to a downtown apartment you’ll need to book for me. Make me an urgent appointment with the Maynard Consul. Use my Maynard title. Whatever works. Get that done before the Phoenix lifts.”

“Wait,” Shami said. “You’re staying on Asman? This isn’t just a trick?”

It was unfair to throw this at them, but there was no time. I shoved the trolley into the elevator and pushed the others to get in.

“I know I’ve changed my mind again, but we came here to achieve something. If we just run away, we’ve got nothing. And those people on the Carina die. I can’t do that. I just can’t. We can’t stop now. I’m staying, and I’m going to have to be in plain sight, so they focus on me and leave you alone.”

“But Jan—”

“It’s okay, guys,” I cut across their protestations. “I have a plan.”

Episode 24

Don’t Stop Now

E24. Chapter 1

Jan

I felt disconnected at a level I’d never experienced before. Like something had been torn out of my head and chest.

It wasn’t supposed to be permanent, and it wasn’t as if I’d spent more time on the Phoenix than I’d spent in the 1st Frontier, or on the farm back on Calloway, for example. But the time I’d spent on board the ship had been me at a level that soldiering and farming weren’t. And whatever doubts I’d had before, being captain of the ship had begun to feel right for me.

Now I wasn’t even on the ship.

I’d felt… rootless after I’d been discharged from the army. As if I’d put down a weight I’d been carrying so long I hadn’t noticed it until it was gone. That was nothing like as bad as this. After being discharged, Bjorn and I had gone drinking. Given everything that had happened after that, I couldn’t regret our actions, but this time? I had no time to spend in a bar now and no desire for a drink. And no Bjorn to go with.

I took the van we’d hired. It had an automated control option, so I could just let Olivia deal with getting me where I needed to be. That was an apartment in the civil administration district, which was right in the middle of the habitat, a long way from the docks. It would take an hour to get there. Plenty of time for Olivia to arrange the rental of the apartment.

The van exited the dock area and dropped to the transport level.

As it made its way smoothly along the tunnels, I sat there working through all the ways this could go wrong. The problem was, every step depended on how the other steps went.

Twenty minutes into the journey, Olivia told me that Tabriz had reached a standoff with the port authorities on searching the Phoenix. They’d been pushing to board her now, and he’d argued them back to the original position. There would be no search unless the Phoenix moved to depart. They had no evidence of a crime, and Tabriz had got them to admit their only legal power was to ensure I didn’t leave the habitat.

Tabriz had contacted the inquiry panel and arranged for a time for me to attend later today. He’d be there with me.

I needed that help. Olivia had access to all their laws and regulations, but she wouldn’t be able to communicate safely with me when I confronted the Anakritis Inquiry, which was being held at the Asman justice courts. And Tabriz should know everything relevant about their laws, including the tricks and traps. He’d even know the Anakrites on the panel.

Still risky at so many levels.

Our success also depended on the Yazad staying on the legal side of the line. For example, not employing another band of mercenaries, with orders to kill me this time. Or simply ignoring legalities altogether, citing some ‘emergency’.

We couldn’t win a military fight. Even in space, with Dow and Lǐ supporting us, we were vulnerable to Xerxes’ fleet of armed cutters. Our only threat would be to attack the habitat itself, and none of us were willing to contemplate the loss of a billion lives that would entail.

We really needed a threat to neutralize the military fight while we got the evidence to win the legal fight.

Another twenty minutes later, and I thought our prayers had been answered.

“A Terran Navy fleet has emerged in the system’s transit zone,” Olivia said. She listed the ships to my InfoPad. “Medium size. Some kind of diplomatic mission rather than a Strike Force. However, they’re scheduled to exit soon.”

“They’re still Navy, though,” I said. “We should signal to them.”

Olivia disagreed. “What would we say? You’ve been kidnapped and rescued. Asman is holding an inquiry into what happened. We have data, which we acquired illegally, which implies that the Yazad crime syndicate in the Xerxes system is laundering funds from interstellar criminal activity, but doesn’t prove it.”

“We have proof Xerxes is enslaving its own population and selling them to the Elergie Combine to work in slave camps on Venture!”

“No, that’s what we believe. What we have some proof of is that Xerxes signed an agreement with the Elergie Combine to ship excess population to Venture, where they would work off the cost of their transportation. There’s a legal argument about whether indenture is equivalent to slavery, but it’s not one for which the Terran Navy would divert a fleet to investigate Xerxes. They might want to investigate the Elergie Combine, if we were having this discussion in the Venture system.”

I swore. She was right.

I had one last attempt. “Without proof, is there any way you can think of to get them to come and investigate?”

Olivia was silent a while. Even with her processing capacity, it took time to evaluate.

“Not in time,” she said finally. “It would require more than we can provide to overcome their reluctance to get involved with a powerful Inner Worlds system. There is a growing political situation between Earth and the Inner Worlds, especially ones like Xerxes. The Inner Worlds bear most of the cost of the Terran Navy, but don’t control it. Most of the innermost of the Inner Worlds argue they no longer need the Terran Navy, which spends its time deep in the Margin or the Frontier, and so they argue that they shouldn’t be funding it. If the Navy came here with anything less than a cast-iron case, it might be a pretext for Xerxes to refuse its share of the funding, and that could lead to other star systems joining it. The Terran Navy is very aware it’s already struggling with a tight budget.”

“But if we had irrefutable proof of piracy or slavery…” I prompted her.

“Yes, then it would be their duty, and they’re still big on that. But this fleet will be gone before we have time to present proof. And without compelling proof, even if they were to dispatch a cruiser to investigate a call from us, my current analysis is it would harm our plan. It would make the Yazad extremely vigilant, and they might even be able to present the situation so that the Navy took their side.”

“You mean they’d convince the Navy to believe what an organized criminal group says, to prevent Xerxes stopping their funding.”

“Yes, but it wouldn’t be the Yazad talking to them. It would be the legitimate local authorities. Under the circumstances, who would a Terran Navy captain believe? The Xerxes ruling council, the Hakaman, backed up by the Asman equivalent, the Shura, or us?”

“Okay. Shit. No Navy.”

I lapsed back into silence.

We were on our own.

What did I have to do?

With Tabriz as my ‘lawyer’, as soon as I got into the Anakritis Inquiry, they had to let the Phoenix go. That achieved step 1—the freedom for the team and relative safety for Olivia.

That was the easy step. The next would be to prevent me being arrested as a criminal on some invented charge. Theoretically that was easy because I hadn’t broken any laws… that they knew about. In practice, I didn’t know what they would come up with, so I couldn’t plan my defense.

But staying on Asman had two purposes, and the second was attack. I needed to find proof about the Yazad and their involvement in the organized criminal groups that profited from slavery and piracy. I was convinced the syndicate was either all run from here, or this was the last level before the criminal bosses back on Earth. I had to find that evidence in a form that could be presented to Earth’s Council. Then the Navy would have no other option but to act.

I had a plan, with contingencies and stuff, yes, but I had to admit it was a little fuzzy in parts.

I was still struggling with that when the van arrived at the apartment that Olivia had booked for me, and I lost contact with her as I stepped into the elevator up to the habitation level.

The building had a front built of smoothly polished stone, which was the color of sand but veined with thick channels of crimson and pink. Doors of mirrored glass and black metal allowed me inside to find a tall room with chandeliers over a floor of marble. All as cool and muted as a church. I’d no idea how you judged the quality of accommodation on Asman, but it looked far too expensive for a short ship skipper. I had to remind myself that my plan meant I wasn’t the captain of a small merchanter anymore. I was an independent individual, a well-connected and wealthy one.

No check-in for the apartments. Nothing so low budget. Presumably Olivia had sent an image to ID me because I got a personal attendant who knew who I was and which suite I was in. He guided me to the elevator, then along the corridor. The suite also recognized me, and the door opened with a refined swish. The attendant assured me there would be someone available for my needs if I wished, then he bowed and left. If he had found my appearance odd or scruffy, no hint of that had reached his face. Then again, the apartment was paid for in advance.

I walked in.

The door hushed closed behind me, leaving me looking at the delivery of the stuff I’d asked for from the Phoenix, and some stuff I hadn’t.

Like Gunny. I definitely didn’t ask for her to be here.

She stood there with a look I recognized from 1st Frontier days. Face about as expressive as a statue. A statue of a mule, that was. She wasn’t going to be argued back to the ship.

She counted out the reasons.

“One: it’s probably too late. Two: you need an assistant to complete the image of the type of high-status person you’re claiming to be. Three: ship’s standard operation procedures on security. Four: the captain ordered me to—”

“I did not—” I started, and shut up. She meant Shami. I was not the captain of the Phoenix.

There might have been a glint in her eyes as she waited for me to get my head around that again before continuing, slightly more subdued: “Five: I messed up last time. You got kidnapped. I have to do this for personal reasons.”

I opened my mouth to argue and stopped. Checked my InfoPad. It was later than I thought. I shook my head.

“We don’t have time to argue. Which case?”

I could see several, including a couple for combat suits, which I had also not asked for. What the nova did she think we were going to do? Storm their council chambers?

We were standing in the suite’s reception room. Gunny moved out of the way and pointed through one of the doors. It was the master bedroom, and my Calloway Navy uniform was laid out on the bed. Ironed to perfection.

“Thanks, Gunny. And what happened at the bar—it wasn’t on you.”

I got a grunt in response. Not an agreement, but she wasn’t going to argue. She understood that we didn’t have time.

I showered quickly and checked the damaged skin on my wrists. There had been some clear hydrogels in a first-aid kit in the van which had stopped the bleeding and sealed the wounds, but they were going to look ugly for a while yet.

For the moment, the important thing was I wasn’t going to bleed all over my uniform. I put it on carefully and inspected the result in the mirror. Between the fabricators and Thandi’s expert finishing, my uniform fitted perfectly, and I had to admit, it helped me look the part.

Good enough?

It had to be.

We’d find out whether it was very soon.

E24. Chapter 2

TNS Nairobi

Xerxes System, zenith transit zone

Captain Gary London sat in his briefing room, deep in the armored heart of the heavy cruiser TNS Nairobi, and pondered his handful of unpalatable options.

Both he and the ship were relics of a bygone age.

The Nairobi was the heavy cruiser of the Terran navy, the only remaining ship of its type since the decommissioning of TNS Lusaka a year ago. Heavy cruisers had been the last naval era’s ultimate compromise between diplomacy and threat. Time was when a heavy cruiser could take on and defeat any realistic combination of pirate ships, as well as most independent star systems’ ragtag navies. The knowledge of that capability had helped keep human space orderly, and most interactions carefully polite.

But times had changed. Star systems in the Margin had developed shipyards to the stage where their battleships might conceivably confront a heavy cruiser. Worse, pirates in the Frontier had gained access to ships and weapons they shouldn’t have had.

Which all meant Admiralty policies had evolved. Solo missions using heavy cruisers were no longer the favored policy. Even the smaller frigates, the dashing breed immortalized by holovid dramas, and famously reputed to be able to defeat any ship they could not outrun, had ceased to be built.

Full Terran Navy missions were now being run by fleets. A carrier, two battleships and a screen of a dozen light cruisers was the smallest standard configuration.

They weren’t called fleets either. The name changed with the type of mission.

Courtesy Call.

Outreach Formation.

Support Flotilla.

Task Force.

Battle Group.

A naming convention to clarify the ‘diplomatic’ message that sending a fleet was intended to convey. But regardless of that, they were all tasks that no longer fell to the last of the old heavy cruisers.

And so now the proud and never defeated Nairobi limped her weary way back home to her end; her engines functioning erratically, her obsolete scanners ragged with static, her most powerful guns already forever silent. Inside, most of her tired senior officers were resigned to the impending end of their active naval careers, one way or another.

Captain London refused the bitter stirring of the sense of unfairness.

Ship and crew: they could all hold their heads high. They’d been excellent. They’d done their duty, by their oaths to the Admiralty. Obeyed their orders. Mostly.

Until now.

In the last ten years as captain of the Nairobi, he’d passed through the Xerxes star system dozens of times. He’d made visits to Asman, teeth clenched as he shook hands and exchanged greetings. Because he’d known, every time, that powerful criminals ran this star system. That those criminals were responsible for the larger part of the terrorism, piracy and slavery that bedeviled the outer reaches of the human diaspora.

The only thing he lacked was the sort of cast-iron proof that would be needed before he could pass this on to Naval Intelligence with any expectation that they’d do anything with it. He’d arrived in the transit zone believing that was how it would end, his last transit knowing the truth and impotent to do anything about it. He’d been resigned to the idea of handing his illegally collected data to the Admiralty, knowing the only outcome would be they’d have him charged for collecting it.

But now…

Now, they’d tripped up. Unbelievably, the fools had pirate ships sitting there in orbit.

He was unaccustomed to the indecisiveness he felt now. The nagging feeling he needed one final sanity check before he was finally, finally able to act, on the very last time he was scheduled to transit this system in a naval ship.

His officers, his permanent core of officers, were with him. They were here because they’d always done their duty, and they would continue to do their duty, by their oaths. He didn’t mean their oaths to the ‘Admiralty’, that club of crusty political naval officers with one eye on their careers, preening with the weight of non-combat medals on their chests.

No, to the Admiralty: a sort of personification of the Navy. An ideal. Like the heavy cruiser, an ideal that seemed to belong to an earlier age.

None of these thoughts showed on Captain London’s face when Admiral Wang’s call came in, as he’d known it would. This was a hurdle, and he must not stumble.

He’d moved to take the call in his briefing room and the call was nominally private, but he still began with cautious formality.

“Good morning, Admiral.”

“Cut the crap, Gary. What’s going on?”

He’d known Admiral Xiù Wang a long time. She’d once served as his XO in happier times. But Xiù had been politically astute and formidably well-connected, so now she wore the gold braid and she was commanding Formation Lakshmi, an outreach mission which had just completed a diplomatic circuit of struggling outer Margin systems.

And he was here, captaining a condemned relic, facing the end of his career and contemplating actions which, if he failed, would be called treason.

The Admiral and Formation Lakshmi had ‘stumbled across them’ transiting the Benson system and she had ordered the Nairobi to join her formation.

London had his own orders which theoretically would have allowed him to refuse her, but as a matter of safety, it had made sense to join the formation: they were all heading home the same way and the Nairobi was running increasingly erratically.

But now, in Xerxes transit, he’d arrived at his point of decision.

Now or never.

Xiù was as much of a friend as he had in the naval hierarchy, not that it would do him any good when the shit hit the fan. It was because he still regarded her as a friend, he wanted her to be able to disown him and his actions. Hence the subterfuge.

“Lost Chang generator 2 coming out of the jump,” he lied. “It needs a strip down. It’s not unexpected on a ship of this age.”

It was a summary of the message he’d already sent.

She remained silent, staring at him, though not for that long. They’d played poker when she’d served with him, and both had respect for the other’s game face.

The Admiral had been a good officer then. She still was, but now she was also, by necessity, a political animal. She might know his excuse was just that, but he prayed she would be able to sense that there was likely no benefit to her from pursuing the matter.

Short of relieving him of command on unspecified charges, she had to accept this was his ship and he was telling the truth.

On the other hand, private or not, all naval communications were recorded and would have to be made available to an inquiry, if one needed to be established. She needed to follow some forms.

“Without any disrespect to your Chief Engineer,” she said, “I could send you assistance. Nairobi could still make the jump with the rest of the formation.”

“Without any disrespect to the rest of the formation’s engineers, I’d suggest none of them are current on equipment as old as the Mark 4 Chang generator, and there is an optimal number of workers in the limited space Nairobi’s engine rooms provide.”

Her mouth thinned in what might have been described as a smile.

“So noted.”

London took that comment as a message to say she knew this was for the recorders.

She continued, a little hesitantly, “As to your mission, Gary... not my primary concern, of course, but would you care to update me?”

His turn to stretch his mouth. She hadn’t actually lied, but he’d bet good money his current mission was a concern.

TNS Nairobi had spent her final decade serving two purposes for the Terran Navy. The overt purpose was as a type of training and officer evaluation ship, and she had a well-established reputation that went with the nickname they’d given her: the ship of last resort. Officers posted on a promotion evaluation tour on the Nairobi were those who had proved… ‘problematical’ to other ships and skippers. They all had something going for them, and yet other captains had hesitated to pass them for promotion.

There was a delicious ironic symmetry to it, because Nairobi’s second purpose, a purpose that remained unvoiced by the Admiralty staff, was to be a ship where certain ‘problematical’ officers could be posted and sent away on long tours. Above all, one Captain London, the most inconvenient hero of recent Admiralty times. A man with the wrong political opinions.

There were a half-dozen promotion evaluation officers on this tour, but the Admiral wasn’t interested in his assessment of Ensign Simmins or Navigation Specialist Dhoni or any of those others. She was interested in the lieutenants that he had been assigned for this tour. More specifically, she was interested in his assessment of one of them, Lieutenant Charles de Falaise.

He knew the Admiral would never admit it, but he suspected Formation Lakshmi’s diversion through the Benson system had been taken so she’d catch up to the Nairobi.

He cleared his throat. He couldn’t resist this opportunity to tweak her tail.

“I have yet to reach a conclusion about Lieutenant Sciarra,” he said with a straight face.

“Which suggests you have reached a conclusion with regard to Lieutenant de Falaise.”

She would never have reacted so obviously if she hadn’t promised someone in the Admiralty.

“I have,” he said, still unable to resist teasing, “but strictly speaking, I shouldn’t share any conclusions with you until I’ve made them to the DNP.”

It was a valid argument; the Director of Naval Personnel was a jealous little god, though most spelled that with an ‘s’ rather than a ‘g’.

Her famous steel glare settled over the Admiral’s face. “Until I actually release you, Gary, I’m your commanding officer.”

He could argue that, but he was done teasing and simply nodded. Friend or not, there were limits.

“Lieutenant de Falaise shows outstanding promise,” he said.

He was rewarded with a blink of her eyes. She hadn’t expected that straightforward, positive appraisal.

“This man’s image should be used on naval recruitment advertisements,” he went on. “And on this tour, he has excelled in all social and diplomatic situations, onboard and off. He has consistently behaved in a manner which was not simply appropriate to an officer and a gentleman, but was a shining example to others.”

He told no word of a lie. Charles de Falaise looked like everyone expected an officer of the Terran Navy to look. And luckily for him, his canny family had ensured his privileged upbringing included thorough coaching in speaking to people from all walks of life.

“He was a great asset in my dealings with the star systems we visited,” London said.

Again, true.

Even though the old cruiser was no longer considered part of Earth’s diplomatic outreach program, no visit to a star system could be wasted. Captain London and his officers were under orders to accept invitations from local government officials and planetary elites. If invitations were not forthcoming, then he was to arrange meetings. At any such meeting, the Navy was expected to promote Earth’s policies.

London hated these, but they were good opportunities to see his officers perform.

Elites in the places the Nairobi had visited had fawned over de Falaise, a man from one of Earth’s old families with connections into money, power and aristocracy. De Falaise had handled it all excellently. Not only had they listened to him attentively, but he’d also persuaded them to accept the policy points that London had been ordered to make by the Admiralty.

London was genuinely pleased to have had the man along. The diplomatic encounters that had always been the stressful lowlight of the Nairobi’s previous training tours had turned out to be quite relaxing this time.

“I believe his former captains have badly misestimated de Falaise’s true potential,” he said.

That earned another blink from the Admiral. Captains did not usually question other captains’ officer assessments so bluntly.

London cleared his throat and spoke formally. “I have today apprised Lieutenant de Falaise of the recommendations which I will be forwarding to the DNP. Namely, that he be promoted directly to the rank of captain and immediately transferred to the Department of Naval Strategy, to join Admiral Hansen’s division, where skills that would be wasted on the bridge of a warship can be brought to bear for the good of the entire navy.”

It would be a double promotion, and something the DNP would have to sign off, but it was the necessary seniority for the post he would fill.

A third, more measured blink, then the Admiral spoke: “How did the Lieutenant take this news?”

“He expressed regret that he would no longer be in the running to command a ship of the line, then gave his assurance that he would follow his orders, and expressed his confidence that he would be a good fit for his posting in DNS.”

De Falaise was not a stupid man, and he’d understood this tour had been his last chance for promotion to command a ship. He’d also known that not everyone was cut out for the bridge of a warship, and probably was having doubts about his own capacity. London had no doubts de Falaise did not have the capacity. The man did not belong in the command seat. He’d come to doubt de Falaise even wanted the position. His family wanted him to have the position and expected him to have the position, partly in return for their support of the Navy’s costs.

The Navy wasn’t where it should be, in London’s opinion, but it wasn’t so far gone as to put a man in charge of a warship just because his wealthy family were powerful supporters.

In his appraisal meeting earlier, de Falaise soon saw what London had understood the first time he’d observed the man in conversation. He was either a natural politician or he’d had the skills burned into his brain. And he had connections. Influence. Charm. Persuasion.

Admiral Hansen headed the political arm of the Navy and it was struggling. Budgets were being squeezed relentlessly. Hansen needed someone with exactly de Falaise’s potential.

The family would see the accelerated promotion. They’d see the prestige and potential of his post. He hoped they’d see it as an appropriate reward for their support.

London could imagine their reaction if he’d beached de Falaise, which had been an option.

It was a win-win. The good de Falaise could do for the Navy’s political arm vastly outweighed whatever questionable benefit they might have got from putting him on the bridge of a warship.

Admiral Wang’s terse nod told London she’d worked out exactly what he’d done. He’d turned a liability and potentially huge embarrassment into an asset.

“I’m also aware that both you and de Falaise are due back home,” London continued smoothly. “I believe the ceremony’s only two weeks away. In light of the Nairobi’s problems, and given I have completed my tasks with the evaluation cohort, I thought it might be a good idea to transfer them to your flagship, if you could do that for me. Save me from having to explain why I turned up too late for de Falaise to attend the royal wedding of his cousin.”

Wang frowned. “But you said you’d not completed your evaluation of Lieutenant Sciarra.”

“Yes, I’d have to keep her back.”

It was a measure of the pressure that she’d been under that she skated over the issue of passing the rest of the half-dozen evaluated officers to her, and focused on the solution he’d handed her with de Falaise. He could read her reaction, see the easing of tension in her shoulders, the softening of her face.

London was sure now. Someone very senior at the Admiralty had explained to her that she’d better find the Nairobi and she’d better make sure that Lieutenant de Falaise was back in time for the ceremonies, and she’d better make sure that awkward fellow, Captain London, was aware of the need for de Falaise to have his promotion signed off.

Captain London had done one better. He’d come up with a comprehensive solution that might very well get Wang her next star if she ran with it.

“Yes, I think that would work,” she said cautiously, “and I suppose that it would make my agreement to your detachment from the formation that much easier. Consider it done.”

“Thank you, Admiral. I’ll get them shuttled over immediately, and I expect you’ll be on your way soon after.”

She nodded, still a little distracted by the prize she’d landed so unexpectedly. Distracted enough that she eased up on her Admiralty persona and the guard she normally kept on the words she said.

“It wasn’t so bad, was it, Gary? This short jaunt together. Not quite like old times on the Colorado, and not a whole tour, but a pleasant moment before…”

She ran out of words, because they both knew what waited. Admiral Wang might command another formation, or pick up another star, but as far as the Admiralty was concerned, Captain London and his ship were heading for the scrap heap.

He couldn’t remember when he’d last seen her walk into a verbal dead end like that.

“It was, Xiù,” he replied with sincerity. “It was nice.”

He relaxed. He had taken the first step in his plan, and it had worked.

“It was some small comfort in the Dark,” he said.

That slipped out and he desperately wished he could have it back. It was only a quote from her favorite poet. At any other time, it would have sounded completely innocent.

But this was a conversation that might be reviewed as evidence at a Board of Inquiry. London could almost hear the questions that would be aimed at Xiù: And what did that make you think of his state of mind, Admiral Wang? Or: In light of his passing over his evaluation cohort and what subsequently happened, do you not now feel this was an indication of an intention that you should have addressed?

Not that Xiù would have any reason suspect what his plans entailed. And yet, she seemed to have picked up something from his expression. Her eyes narrowed and the Admiralty persona returned.

“My Marine commander tells me your aft dock is being used as a training zone for live fire exercises,” she said thoughtfully.

His turn to blink. It wasn’t just that the question was unexpected and unrelated to the discussion, though. How did Marines always know what was happening on other ships in the fleet?

He shrugged. “It’s valid training for Marines, and it’s saving the Navy decommissioning costs,” he said.

The aft dock was sufficiently isolated from the remainder of the Nairobi that the damage the Marines inflicted didn’t matter.

“Hmm. Good. We’ll exchange your evaluation cohort for Marine Assault Company Delta. They’re a new recon unit on the carrier Antares, and their major believes they need real world, live fire training. The Nairobi’s aft dock can provide the closest environment we can get without another actual war breaking out.”

London swallowed. A company should mean 144 Marines. No company was ever full strength, but even if it was as low as 100…

Would it prevent his plans?

He answered her on automatic; different parts of his brain addressing different problems.

“With only the fore dock available, we don’t have enough space for all those shuttles,” he said.

“You have space for two Rhinos, next to that old Wraith and your Skeeter. The rest of the Marines will hitch.”

He snorted. ‘Hitching’ involved locking your combat suit onto the outside of a Rhino dropship. The sort of crazy-ass stuff the Marines did for ‘character building’.

He didn’t know what to say, and Xiù didn’t give him much of an opportunity.

“Let’s be about it then,” she said. “De Falaise and the others should be here in…” she glanced to the side, “thirty-five minutes. The Marines will have departed the carrier by then. We’ll send your Skeeter back and the formation will boost for jump in an hour.”

There was a short pause, and a flicker of unreadable emotions passed across her face.

“Take care, Gary.”

She was gone before he could answer, leaving him to think through the conversation uneasily.

He’d known she would call him. He’d planned it carefully, and he’d achieved his objective of being left in the Xerxes system without any blame attaching to the Admiral, but he couldn’t quite shake the feeling he’d been outplayed somehow.

To what end?

She couldn’t know what he intended.

Regardless, he would adjust. The Marines might be a problem or a godsend. A help or hindrance. He didn’t know. He’d just have to adapt.

There was nothing else he could do for the couple of hours it would take for the Marines to arrive, and he still had his lesser duty to perform. The duty the Admiralty expected him to be doing—evaluating officers for promotion.

But that task was not the whole of his duty or his oath.

He’d given that oath to the Navy. Not to the grandiose office in the capital, not to the club of Admirals weighed down with gold braid and tangled politics whose only really valuable function was to get funding from the Terran Council. Not to the Terran Council. Not to the countless governmental bureaucracies of Earth. Not to Earth.

No. To the Navy.

Firstly, to the men and women of the Navy.

He’d done that duty for de Falaise and all the others on their final evaluation. All bar the one with the greatest potential, who presented the greatest problem. And who might be the person he most needed at this point: Lieutenant Victoria Sciarra.

But above all other elements of his oath, he’d committed himself to uphold the Navy’s sacred duty to all humanity.

All humanity. The entire human diaspora. He saw no reason why that duty should be considered greater the closer to Earth you got, whatever the Admiralty said.

He stood, tugging his jacket into place, and took a deep breath.

Lieutenant Sciarra was on the bridge, acting captain. It was time for him to return there and check whether she’d punched the XO yet.

E24. Chapter 3

Bjorn

“This isn’t a shuttle,” I muttered. “It’s a nova-damned Wraith.”

In the hurry of loading up the combat suits before anyone saw them, I’d barely looked at the outside of the shuttle, but now we were ready to go, and I’d taken the nav seat next to Naomi.

I’d chosen that seat partly to make sure she was on our side, and partly because I wanted to learn how to fly this shuttle.

Except it wasn’t what I expected. It wasn’t a civilian shuttle. There was no hiding the control layout, and the aching gaps where the weapons control panels had been ripped out. There were mismatched blocks where the military scanners had been replaced with half-decent civilian equipment. However, the dead giveaway was the icon in the middle of the command console. It was a circular field of stars with a black shape in the outline of the Wraith in the middle. It was meant to imply that was the only way to detect the Wraith, because it was so stealthy.

Marketing bullshit, but it had been the cutting edge of stealth assault ships a few years before I joined the 1st Frontier. When I started active service, they made up about half of the stealth squadrons, but the next generation had made them obsolete, and they’d been stripped down and sold off.

The Sapphire Alceste had picked up one, and now the Phoenix owned it. Anytime the Sapphire Alceste wanted to come ask for it back, they would be made very welcome.

“Whatever,” Naomi said, her hands flying across the controls.

The ship trembled as it spooled up.

“Hitch or bitch,” she said over the intercom.

“You’re not military,” I said. ‘Hitch or bitch’ was Marine and 1st Frontier slang, like Navy pilots said ‘sit and strap’.

“No,” she snorted, “but you lot are, and my instructor was too. Now get off my channel.”

Oooh. Sass. I kinda liked the sass.

I let her be, and she went through departure clearance with Shuttle Traffic Control, sounding like she was bored, and this was all routine. I was sure they trained pilots to do that.

Whatever, it worked. There were no alarms raised.

“You ever ridden in one of these, Bjorn?” Jessop commed me on a private channel.

“Lots of times. Never sat up front before though.”

“It might come in handy, having a Wraith. Never know. Planet drops, that sort of thing.”

I laughed. “Yeah, you can always ask to borrow it, but it’s ours, buddy.”

“I got that,” he said reluctantly, and quieted down as the Wraith lifted gently.

Naomi was good.

The dock exit was busy with other shuttles, moving in patterns set up by the traffic controllers. We slipped into the correct stream, held position, waited while one final merchanter cleared the exit, then she smoothly flew us out of the Asman habitat.

As soon as we were clear of the immediate area, Shuttle Traffic Control handed us over to Orbital Traffic Control without questioning us. Their attention seemed to be elsewhere, which was fine with me.

Naomi gave them the coordinates we were heading for, where the Xinghe waited. Control didn’t even question why a shuttle which had come in from one ship was heading to another.

We had achieved the first step, and all that was left was to rendezvous and dock on the Xinghe.

Hopefully not at the speed that I’d docked on Lǐ’s ship, the Yǒng.

Orbit was layered. Ships getting cargo or supplies shuttled out from the habitat were closest. Since the Xinghe had filled its holds, she had been sent out to one of the more distant layers, so the transit gave me plenty of time for thinking.

Jan was trapped on Asman. She’d be at the apartment that Olivia had rented by now, ready to become ‘Lady Skelling’ again. I wasn’t clear on all the elements of her plan, but I knew my part was getting on board the Carina Augusta and proving it was a slave ship, operating on the instructions of Xerxes, or the Yazad. Either Jan would provide some legal way for me to get aboard, or it would be down to me to find some other way.

I was feeling reasonably calm about it. Jan and I had made our way on board ships before, and I knew Jessop’s Marine team had explosives. Lots of explosives.

How difficult could it be?

E24. Chapter 4

Jan

The Maynard Consul’s offices were only four blocks from the hotel. We found we had time, so we walked down the shady boulevard instead of taking the sub-level train. We were just two spacers in neat military uniforms that no one would be able to place. We got no more than the occasional passing glance.

Just how I wanted it. Calm. No fuss.

Unfortunately, that meant there was plenty of time for me to worry. My plan depended on the actions of an important official who knew next to nothing about me and wasn’t obligated to help.

We approached the offices with me thinking maybe I should walk around the block once more and rehearse my best arguments.

Then I saw someone who’d obviously been looking out for us dart inside the office in a hurry.

“Ambush?” I muttered.

Gunny chuckled. “Reception.”

The doors were swung open as we walked up. Two extremely nervous young men stood holding them, bracing themselves like trainees on a parade ground for the first time. A little way inside, an elderly gentleman stood waiting. He was dressed like the courtiers I had seen at Queen Lorraine’s court, with a broad diagonal sash in red and gold over his formal business suit.

“Consul Jamie Hamilton,” Gunny murmured to remind me, in case I’d forgotten. I snorted. As if. We needed this man to work with us—I’d memorized his face and details from the Maynard consulate’s information site.

He certainly seemed friendly enough. He was smiling. In fact, he looked as if he wanted to smile more but was restraining himself. Good signs. Maybe this part of the plan would work despite being so unlikely.

I’d spent too long out in the Dark. I couldn’t believe things worked like that.

In fact, as we entered, I realized something was wrong. I’d almost gotten used to the deference I was paid on Maynard for being ‘Lady Skelling’, but this was another level entirely. It looked like the entire staff of the consul’s office were standing waiting to greet me.

Or distract me while the police closed in.

My heart jumped as Consul Hamilton took a smart step forward, flanked by another two gorgeously dressed officials.

Then he bowed.

“Your Grace, I offer you our most heartfelt welcome to our humble offices on Asman. I cannot express our surprise and delight to learn that the brave Acid Penguin has been reborn as the Dark Phoenix, and that you have chosen to come this way on your mission.”

Everyone applauded!

“Ahh…” My brain wasn’t working. Neither was my mouth. “Thank you… Consul Hamilton. Ahh… My pleasure.”

I was ‘Lady Skelling’, or ‘Your Ladyship’, both of which made me cringe, but I was not ‘Your Grace’. That was a term used for the top tier of aristocrats.

At least it seemed that there were no hidden teams of police about to spring out at us, but the poor man must be terribly confused. I hoped it wasn’t a mental condition. I needed a consul with his wits about him.

“And I believe this is your bosun,” he said, turning. “May I call you Gunny?”

Gunny’s mouth was working better than mine, or at least quicker. “That would please me, Consul Hamilton,” she said.

To keep up with them, I managed to find my court diplomatic phrasebook in the storm that was my brain. “We’re most touched by your welcome, but I confess to being a little surprised. Umm, maybe confused.”

He couldn’t keep the smile off his face now, and his eyes actually did twinkle.

“Of course. I quite understand. Please, Your Grace, if you would follow me, I will explain everything.”

Everyone applauded again.

Damned unnerving, and it seemed to take an age to get to the explaining bit…

We were first shepherded to a reception room. It was nothing compared to the equivalents in the palace on Maynard, but it was luxurious, and the staff were clearly proud of it, so I made sure to compliment them. We sat down and were offered tea, coffee, biscuits and cake on silver trays. Only when we’d accepted refreshments, and the staff had bowed their way out the door, could we get back to why this was happening.

In lieu of explanation, Consul Hamilton brought me a wooden box with an ornamental top. He didn’t just hand it over, he presented me with the box, holding it out in both hands with his head bowed.

My heart started hammering when I recognized the Maynard royal seal that was part of that ornamentation on the lid.

I opened it and found a single sheet of folded paper, beneath which was a velvet lining, holding an honest-to-goodness scroll, tied with a broad red ribbon and sealed with gold wax.

The paper was a copy of a handwritten letter from Lorry, signed at the bottom.

Skipper

This is by way of an apology for the way I tried to railroad you into staying. That, and I’m so pissed at the court and the government and the way they block things I should be doing. This they can’t block. The scroll explains it with the usual excruciating official phrases, but basically, you and Bjorn are now respectively Duchess and Duke of the Temann Islands on Maynard. It’s an undeveloped archipelago, with space for a million people and only 425 klicks from the capital. It’s where I originally suggested you might move the colonists from Calloway if your homeworld can’t fix the ecological problem.

The islands are yours to do with as you wish.

We haven’t heard news and don’t know where you are, so I’ve sent copies of this to every consul on every Inner World where you might dock on the way to Earth. Those consuls I didn’t trust have been replaced.

You can trust the consul who gives you this, and they will have instructions to help you in any way they can.

I’m looking forward to welcoming you back after your success. I want to know everything. You know what I mean. Take care.

Lorraine Q

I swallowed and passed the letter to Gunny without being able to speak.

Apparently, I was ‘Your Grace’, and Consul Hamilton had instructions to help me.

The consul sat back down and pretended not to hear Gunny’s whispered oath.

“Your Grace…” he began.

The phrase gave me the shock I needed.

“Please.” I stopped him. “I understand you have to say that in public, but can we go with Jan in private?”

He bowed his head. “You do me a tremendous honor, Jan. It would truly be my pleasure if you would call me Jamie.”

“Of course, Jamie.”

He started again. “As soon as I got the message from the Phoenix, I started investigating. I understand there’s a restricting order and I suspect there’s a great deal that’s been going on. I will do everything I can, but I do need to know what’s happened.”

I trusted Lorry, and so I trusted Jamie. I took a deep breath and began my well-practiced tale, trimming it as far as I could while hitting all the relevant points.

“So, as you see,” I ended, “my position at the moment is balanced on a tightrope. I need to get the Phoenix out. I need proof that Maynard-registered ship in orbit, the Carina Augusta, is operating as a slaving ship. I need to rescue the slaves on board. I need proof of who is controlling the whole slavery project. I would like to understand how the Yazad and the habitat’s Shuras and the Hakaman tie into Frontier piracy and how to stop it once and for all, if possible.”

I sighed. It felt like I was balancing a millstone on my shoulders.

“And I need to do that without endangering the lives of all the people of Xerxes who live on the habitats and are reliant on the smooth flow of trade which the Yazad and the Shuras control.”

Jamie smiled. “I can see why Her Majesty speaks in such positive terms about you,” he said. “I will do what I can, but we can’t approach these tasks as a monolith. We must approach one step at a time. The hearing first, by necessity.”

He went on to explain to me the precise legal situation as analyzed by the consular lawyers. Olivia’s briefing had been accurate. The Asman ruling council, the Shura, hadn’t started any legal proceedings. Instead, they’d convened a panel of judges from the Anakrites, and tasked it with determining the facts of what had happened to me and how it had come about in preparation for criminal proceedings, if those turned out to be needed. As the principal witness, I had to attend the panel, and failure to attend would be a crime.

The good news was that the order preventing the Phoenix from departing was only sustainable until the point I turned up at the evidentiary hearing. Our first action would be to cancel the restriction on the Phoenix before the hearing got underway.

The bad news was that although a panel of Anakrites wasn’t a court, they could advise that I should be arrested immediately if they found due cause, and the laws governing that were very difficult for an ordinary lawyer to address.

“I am, as a requirement of the job, familiar with Xerxes and Asman standard law, but not those unusual parts regarding the Guild of Anakrites. There are some strange traps and loopholes,” Jamie said, “which is why I’m so pleased to hear Anakritis Tabriz will be with us. At the Inquiry, the Shura will be represented there by their Counsellor, one of the members of the Shura with specific responsibility for legal matters. He is a legal expert, and not a person you want to cross.”

Jamie would attend as well, as the appropriate Maynard representative, because the Dark Phoenix’s registration as a merchanter had changed from our old Calloway registration of CSS701 to a Maynard registration MSS615 after the repairs on Yiero.

“We have only another thirty minutes before we’re expected at the hearing,” I said. “We don’t have time to talk to Tabriz. And we know nothing about what the Shura is trying to achieve.”

Jamie nodded. “I think it depends on what their plan was for the kidnapping.”

“The news reports are saying an armed group has been eliminated,” Gunny said. “And that enquiries are ongoing. They’ll be trying to connect you to some attempt at rebellion against Xerxes.”

“People saw me being kidnapped.”

“People saw you being taken out of a bar,” Gunny said. “You could have been drunk. The police arrived a short time after. They’ll say your gang were rescuing you from the police raid.”

“And if they can persuade the Anakrites of that, they’ll hold the Phoenix.”

“We’ll get the Phoenix out first,” Gunny said.

Jamie cleared his throat. “I think we’re going to have to play it by ear in the hearing. It’s only ten minutes to the court where the Inquiry is being held, so we have a little time, and we should discuss the options with the Carina Augusta.”

He hesitated and settled himself.

“The laws regarding the right of boarding are confused,” he said. “There are local laws for Xerxes, different ones for Maynard’s Star, and overarching ones embodied in the various accords on trade, slaving and piracy.”

I got the sense he was preparing us for bad news.

“For a ship registered with Maynard’s Star, the Maynard Navy can legally demand to board and inspect cargo at any time and in any place on no more than a reasonable suspicion. If the ship is within the Maynard star system itself, that same right could also be exercised by customs, police or various trade officials.”

We were a long way from Maynard, and we weren’t Maynard military or law enforcement.

“Here, in the Xerxes system, I can board any ship docked on Asman. However, if the ship is in parking orbit, then unless I have proof of illegality, I am dependent on a vaguely worded law suggesting that all Maynard citizens should assist Maynard officials and the Queen’s representatives in their duties.”

“And although the Carina is registered with Maynard,” I said, “the crew are probably not Maynard citizens.”

“Definitely not. I have checked.”

He stirred in his seat and I knew the bad news was coming.

“If you were to board illegally, then any proof, however intellectually irrefutable, would not stand in Asman courts.”

“Damn. But still, if Bjorn or I get on board legally, are we representatives of the Queen?”

“Yes, both you and the Duke are legal representatives. Once you are legitimately on board, you have the powers of a law enforcement official. The crew may not be citizens, but the ship itself is subject to Maynard law.” He frowned in concentration. “I can probably get authority to board from Asman customs, given the ship has taken on cargo, of whatever nature, that clearly did not pass through the designated inspection routes, which are all on Asman. But given you suspect this is all being organized by the Yazad, they would definitely find out that was happening if I tied it directly to the Carina. I can make it a generic authority, which might obscure our interest sufficiently.”

“Please do that,” I said. “How long will it take?”

“Administration on Asman is reasonably efficient. I expect I’d get a letter of authority confirmed within a day or two. Do you have any information on when the Carina intends to depart?”

Gunny answered, looking at her InfoPad. “They’re awaiting refueling by bowsers, which appears to be scheduled to complete tomorrow. We probably won’t have time, even assuming the Inquiry doesn’t throw up delays.”

I sat and absorbed all that for a few minutes while Jamie waited patiently.

Plan A, plan B, plan C.

There had to be a way.

With me probably stuck here, the common step to all possible plans was for Bjorn to get into position to act swiftly whichever way we had to go.

“I need to visit your restroom,” I said finally. “And then I think we need to set out for the hearing.”

E24. Chapter 5

TNS Nairobi

Xerxes System, zenith transit zone

“Engineering.”

The response to the comms was as laconic as it always was. Captain London hid a smile and switched to full audiovisual.

He and Chief Engineer Natsumi Hasegawa had worked together for more years than he cared to remember. Most of his officers had been with him for many years, sent here by a disapproving Admiralty. She and the others had earned the right to be informal, especially on their final voyage.

And it was more.

He was close to all his command staff, but if it hadn’t been for the strict chain of command rules, he and Natsumi might…

No time to think of that. No time to think of them sharing their retirement. Watching the gray chase the last of the black from her hair. Watching the deepening of the fine lines that spoke of such a capacity for laughter and concentration. Watching…

He shook his head to clear it.

“Nat.”

She nodded. His use of her nickname meant this was off the record and the recording system had suffered another of its frequent failures. In normal circumstances, that could reflect badly on the Chief Engineer, but there was no onward career to consider.

“Skipper.”

“Repair the ‘damaged’ generator, please, Chief. Quickly. We’re waiting for a Marine recon company to join us, and then we’ll be making best military speed down into the gravity well.”

“We will, will we? You remember the Nairobi is older than you, Gary?”

“In ship years. I’ve always felt we were of an age. After all, they were going to decommission us at the same time.”

She stared at him as she had a million times over audiovisual comms, over briefing tables, over crew dinners, over games of Go in the mess. He suspected there was little that went on beneath his guarded expression that she didn’t know. Probably, sometimes, before he did.

“As we discussed, Gary, the Chang generators are fine, but the engines worry me. I can give you about 80% maximum for the length of time it’ll take to get down to Xerxes orbit,” she said. “At which point I will need to perform a complete overhaul on two of the engines, and that will mean we’ll be maneuvering like an in-system ore hauler for a week.”

He pursed his lips and thought.

“Acceptable,” he said.

Her eyes hardened. “I will also remind you that the dorsal and ventral 8s were decommissioned many years ago. We carry civilian popguns.”

It was true. The heavy cruisers had been the only ships other than full battleships to carry the most powerful plasma cannon, the 4. In the middle of the top and bottom spines of the Nairobi sat enormous turrets, each rated to hold two plasma cannons. Each cannon had been a 4, hence the turret was called an ‘8’. All fired together, a ‘double 8’ broadside could gut a battleship. It would devastate an entire continent on a planet. Broadsides from a fleet firing double 8s could punch a hole through a medium-sized moon. It was a weapon for a ship of the line to be used in a major confrontation. Not for a training ship, which was why this training ship no longer had them. All the cannon had been replaced with civilian grade point 5s—much, much less powerful than military cannon.

His lips thinned.

“We still have the mounts.”

Natsumi sighed. “I get it. You want me to take four of our flank guns and mount them in the 8s’ tubes, so it looks like we’re still the baddest bastards in the system.”

“Makes more sense than shouting pew pew pew down the tubes.”

She almost smiled before she went on. “I’ll have to lay a new charging feed from the engines. We don’t have capacitor banks for an extended barrage. We decommissioned the feed and banks when the guns were taken. Remember, if you need to divert power to charge the cannon, that will have a further impact on our maneuverability if we get into a shooting fight. More bang-bang, less push-push, yes?”

He nodded. It was the compromise civilian vessels and smaller naval vessels all faced. Charging cannons was power intensive. At the height of its powers, the Nairobi had had a separate engine purely for charging the capacitor banks. All long gone.

“Gary, I don’t know who you think you have in your sights, but there are, just as an example, a dozen Xian merchanters down there. Our intel briefings suggest at least three of them will actually be their navy ships in disguise. Light cruisers. Which means they’ll be covertly armed, probably with a couple of 2s or 3s. We’ll have double point 5s in our turrets and another four point 5s remaining on our flanks. Enough to take on one or maybe two. If we take them by complete surprise and we’re very lucky and we don’t need to maneuver while we do.”

“We won’t know which ships might be our targets until we get there,” he said. “And we do have a missile suite.”

She snorted. “Only two missiles with viable warheads. The rest are practice dummies, or carrying the equipment that lets you eavesdrop clandestinely on conversations in every star system we visit. Three of which you’ve already fired off and they’re making their stealthy way down to Asman to illegally spy on the business of a friendly state. As for those two with actual warheads, they’re twenty years old. Long out of date. Against those Xian ships, they’d probably be as effective as throwing rocks.”

He didn’t reply immediately, so she continued. “Skipper, you know we’re with you. Every permanent officer on this ship of misfits and outcasts is here because we made our opinions known about the way the Navy has reneged on its true missions to be no more than a political flag-waving exercise. We’re with you strategically, and we’ve nothing to lose on the career front. If you think the situation warrants us to go knock some heads, we’ll do the job. But our lives may be on the line. Even if you go after nothing more than the Xerxes ‘navy’ cutters. They only have single point 5s, sure, but there are dozens of them. Whichever way this goes, we’re under-gunned. And remember, we’ll be wallowing worse than—”

“An in-system ore-hauler, as you put it. I agree with your assessment of the outcome if we get into a shooting fight, but the key in this game of mirrors is that none of those ships’ captains know we haven’t got double 8s mounted. They’d have to be crazy to take on a heavy cruiser with that broadside capability, and their scanners will show our tubes hot, without being able to tell what rating of cannon they’re hot with.”

“Yes, they’d have to be crazy. But this reminds me of an old joke that you’d have to be crazy to assume you’re the only crazy person.”

He tried not to laugh.

“Maybe we won’t need to take the power up to the full 80% of max.”

“Then maybe I won’t have to strip two of the engines down and we might have spare capacity to fire the popguns.”

He settled back. “Time to get to it, Chief.”

“Aye, Skipper.”

“Chief, you know the Admiralty Office has deprecated that terminology. The new Navy uses yes, sir or yes, ma’am to indicate understanding and acceptance of orders.”

“Aye, Skipper, I’ll try to remember that.”

She closed the connection, and he allowed himself a quiet laugh.

If they got through this…

He shook his head. If they survived, the most likely outcome was they’d see each other during the courts martial.

E24. Chapter 6

Jan

“Gunny, if you start laughing, I’m going to kill you.”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

We were in the main hall of the court building which the Guild of Anakrites was using for the Inquiry. There were people milling around, and we got curious looks, but no one approached. Voices were hushed like in a library. The walls were decorated with peculiar art where faces of famous citizens were rendered abstractly with solid black outlines on a brilliant white background.

We’d met Tabriz outside, and he’d given us some very brief instructions.

Jamie cast an eye over us to check that we were ready, then opened the door to the inquiry room and walked in.

I could see beyond him. I took in the plain room, the wide table covered in starched cloth, the flags of Xerxes and Asman on the back wall, and the three Anakrites, heads together in conversation, looking up to see who had come in.

They were surprised at his appearance, of course.

“Consul, while it is always a pleasure to see you, we’re about to start an Inquiry.”

“Yes,” Jamie said. “I’m here regarding that.”

Heads turned to each other in puzzlement.

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.” The speaker was out of our sight at the end of the table. “Are you here in an unofficial capacity? I’m afraid there isn’t provision for spectators or media.”

“Anakrites Adrina, Mazares and Sennen.” Jamie bobbed his head at the three. Then he turned. “Counsellor Isfahan, and legal team.” A lesser bob. “I’m here in my official capacity for Maynard’s Star, both as Consul and as an advisor. There seems to be some fathomless misunderstanding about the status of the person you have demanded to attend this Inquiry. Under the circumstances, it would be unthinkable for Her Grace to attend without representation from Her Majesty, Queen Lorraine of Maynard’s Star, and I’m the best that can be provided in the circumstances.”

Now there was real bafflement.

He cleared his throat and stood to one side.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I have the profound honor to present Her Grace, Lieutenant Commander Janice Skelling of the Calloway Navy, Duchess Skelling of the Tarmann Isles, and Companion to Queen Lorraine of Maynard’s Star.”

That was my cue. I could almost hear Gunny chewing her cheek.

I lifted my chin and walked in. Only long hours performing ridiculous maneuvers on parade grounds with a straight face allowed me to keep my expression cool and disinterested.

Just like a parade, I thought.

I barely acknowledged the panel.

Jamie pulled a seat back, and I sat on it with a nod.

Anakritis Tabriz had followed me in. “Ladies. Gentlemen,” he murmured as he sat to my right. “I am attending as advisor to Her Grace.”

Jamie sat to my left. The door was closed, and I assumed without turning around that Gunny had gone into that eternal parade rest behind me.

The three Anakrites were seated opposite me, looking at me with open curiosity. They were all austere, sparse and scholarly, neat in their muted Anakritis robes and subtle badges of office, and all showing the same touches of gray in their hair as Tabriz.

All of which made them such a dramatic contrast to the Counsellor.

Isfahan took up a lot of room at the end of the table, mostly blocking my view of the legal assistants clustered behind him. Everyone else wore robes signifying their role in the legal and judicial hierarchy. Not Isfahan. He wore a glossy white shirt and an impeccably tailored black silk suit.

The man had shaved his head. His forehead was wide, over thick, black eyebrows which made his eyes seem very deeply set; cold and dark as wells in winter. He had a trimmed goatee beard, jet black with some flecks of gray, which failed to hide his full lips, currently pursed in anger. Powerful hands with prominent knuckles and flashy gold rings rested on the table.

All the humor of my introduction as a duchess evaporated.

I was a farm girl, and not much given to imagining things, but I could feel evil flowing off this man. I knew I’d just met a high-ranking member of the Yazad.

Anakritis Mazares appeared to be the senior on the panel and greeted us, stumbling a little over my title, and ended by requesting more explanation from Jamie.

“Of course,” Jamie replied affably. “Her Grace is originally from Calloway, in the Ensylas Sector, far out on the Parvi Arc. She is an honorably discharged veteran of the Frontier forces and served in the Dimitras Incursion on behalf of Earth. She subsequently became a Lieutenant Commander in the Anti-Piracy Unit of the Calloway Space Navy and during a mission in the neighborhood of Maynard’s Star was instrumental, with her ship, in saving the life of Queen Lorraine. The ship was damaged, and she was grievously injured while she and her crew prevented a rebellion against the legitimate government, as a result of which, Queen Lorraine has elevated her to her current position. However, Her Grace also remains an officer of the Calloway Navy, bound by her duty and on a mission for Calloway. You will understand that, in most cases, she does not reveal her titles.”

“Indeed, it does all seem to be very secretive,” Anakritis Adrina said, frowning as she checked details on her pad. “In the same way her military rank is not revealed, the Dark Phoenix is registered as a merchanter of Maynard’s Star, not a naval vessel from Calloway.”

That was addressed to me.

“The Calloway Navy stretches to only two jump-enabled ships,” I said. “And given Calloway’s location outside of the main trading channels, we simply don’t have the volume of trade to fund a dedicated naval ship to cross the entire breadth of human space on a mission. We don’t even have the resources to purchase a purpose-built warship. The mission has to be self-funding, so alongside military tasks, the Phoenix is a merchanter.”

“A successful one,” murmured Anakritis Sennen, peering at data on his pad with his eyebrows raised.

I smiled.

“Why does a Calloway merchanter have a Maynard registration?” Anakritis Adrina pulled me back to the unanswered part of her question.

The truth? The deeper into human space we went, the more the attitude was biased against the Frontier. A short ship from Calloway might as well be a pirate in the eyes of many. I decided against talking about that directly.

“As the Consul mentioned, my ship was badly damaged in the Maynard system. The Queen offered the registration as the ship had to be rebuilt essentially. I gladly accepted. Maynard’s Star is more recognized than Calloway. It reduces misunderstandings and eases our trading.”

Adrina nodded.

“What mission brings you here to Xerxes?” Sennen asked.

“I regret military missions are confidential,” I said. “I can assure you that the Phoenix did not set out with Xerxes as an objective.”

The panel of Anakrites looked smart enough to understand the implication. It was the truth; we hadn’t set out to find Xerxes, but now...

They all looked at me thoughtfully.

“All very interesting,” Isfahan said in a tone which meant the exact opposite. His voice was deep and well-modulated. He probably thought it was seductive. “However, aristocratic titles and positions held in other star systems have no relevance to the issue we have before us—”

“On the contrary, Counsellor,” Jamie interrupted him with as much sincerity as Isfahan had displayed. “Her Grace is a Companion to the Queen. In a way, it is as if you had the Queen here herself, and all actions taken here should be weighed as if they were directed at the person of the Queen. This goes both ways, of course. Were you to find wrongdoing, Duchess Skelling would be stripped of her title and all rights.” He paused to give emphasis. “But by the same token, a false accusation would be an offense directly against Her Majesty herself.”

Maynard’s Star was Xerxes’ largest trading partner in the Margin, and they knew it. Anakrites Adrina and Sennen leaned back from the table. Jamie was taking a huge risk on the basis of Lorraine’s instructions to give me every possible help. When she’d drafted that, she probably hadn’t anticipated that it could lead to potentially damaging trade with a vital Inner Worlds partner.

Anakritis Mazares frowned and waved his hand. “I appreciate the clarification, Consul, but this is purely an evidentiary panel. We seek information about an event it appears Duchess Skelling was involved in.”

Tabriz cleared his throat. “Then I have an objection, my esteemed colleagues.”

They swiveled to stare at him

“My friend, we haven’t even started,” Mazares said.

“But you have. You’ve formed a panel. In the overwhelming majority of cases where a panel of Anakrites was formed for an evidentiary hearing, it was the assessment of the chairman of the panel that two Anakrites would be sufficient. The cases where three were required weren’t really evidentiary hearings, they were for the panel to pass judgment on matters that wouldn’t necessarily fall precisely within the structure of the Xerxes legal code. At those type of hearings, it is customary for the Shura to be represented so that legal outcomes can be implemented immediately.” Tabriz turned to look at Isfahan and his cohort of legal assistants. “Is that the situation here? Is there privileged information in this case that you’ve been made aware of? Or has the panel been selected following a specific request from the Shura?”

I was watching Mazares, and his frown deepened before he also turned to look at the Counsellor.

With his anger deeply hidden, Isfahan raised one hand casually, as if it was unimportant and beneath him to discuss. “I withdraw the request for a full panel, which was made only because this matter is urgent. Given that urgency, my team will remain so that we can decide appropriate legal actions based on your assessment. Now, I suggest we get on with the hearing.”

Anakritis Sennen stood and picked up his chair. “With my colleagues’ permission, I withdraw from panel,” he said. “I will remain as an observer for the Guild of the Anakrites, in consideration of the apparent complications of this hearing.”

Score one for my side. Jamie had pushed them back down to a standard hearing, and he had aroused suspicions about Isfahan’s behavior.

“Again, with your forbearance, there is one further preliminary matter,” Tabriz said.

Isfahan scowled, but Mazares raised a hand to invite him to proceed.

“The ship Dark Phoenix is being held on the questionable grounds that Her Grace might be seeking to avoid attendance at this Inquiry.” He paused. “Given she is attending as requested, the ship should be released.”

“The ship cannot sail without its captain,” Isfahan snapped.

“Her Grace has stepped down from that role. Captain Siriwardene is awaiting clearance as we speak.”

“No,” Isfahan said. “We may need to search the ship.”

“Really?” Tabriz frowned. “Is that a presumption on the conclusions of the Inquiry which we haven’t even started?”

“The Hamiraz suspect terrorism was involved in this incident the panel is convened to investigate. Terrorism sponsored by other star systems. Asman absolutely requires that we use everything within our powers to ensure the safety of the habitat, even if that inconveniences people.”

Everyone flinched, including me.

Any space station is incredibly vulnerable to terrorism. One bomb in a weak point can kill the entire population. Habitats like Asman were the worst, because there was no way of sealing off parts of it in the event of an explosion that damaged the structure. Terrorism was the ultimate bogeyman. All Isfahan had to do was raise reasonable suspicion and the Phoenix would be boarded for an inspection.

“Within your legal powers,” Tabriz insisted, his voice becoming steelier. “If you had any proof whatsoever that Her Grace or her ship were engaged in terrorism, you would not have requested this panel. You would have proceeded with arrests and a full court case. And, to avoid any confusion on the issue, any such allegation you make will be opposed most forcefully in the courts. Counter charges would be made against the Shura. Firstly, that on arrival, an attempt was made to implicate the Dark Phoenix in terrorist activity by corrupt customs inspectors. Then secondly, Her Grace was drugged and kidnapped in full view of the dockside and with the apparent connivance of security surveillance teams and possibly the police. Your attempt now to insinuate her and her ship were involved in terrorism leads me to the conclusion there is an agenda here, at the highest levels.”

As he spoke, there were several sharp intakes of breath in the room.

Outside, Tabriz had suggested we would approach this slowly and carefully, but he’d clearly decided Isfahan wasn’t going to play that way as soon as he’d tried to use the counter-terrorism argument.

“These are lies—” Isfahan began, but Tabriz cut across him, standing up to lean across the table.

“I was personally witness to the attempt by the customs inspectors, Counsellor. Yes, I was there, on the ship. Although your inspectors had no opportunity to tell you, because we timed it to be as late as possible, I was appointed by Her Grace as legal advisor prior to the inspection. As per the standing customs regulations, I joined the inspectors as they boarded the Dark Phoenix. I have video evidence of their attempt to incriminate the ship. But this does not stop there. I have also seen evidence that the kidnappers who held Her Grace at the abandoned bar could not have been armed or seriously resisting when the Hamiraz tactical team began their attack. Had she not escaped, Her Grace would have died in that attack, as did every single one of her kidnappers who were present.”

Mazares held up his hands to appeal for calm, but Tabriz ignored him. He moved up another gear, raising his voice and emphasizing his points by stabbing at the table with his finger. He wasn’t finished.

“The Hamiraz team are highly trained. They are the elite of our police services. This massacre of unarmed men can only have been intentional. It had to have been ordered. An order to kill everyone in that bar, Her Grace included. And from where do the Hamiraz get their orders? From the Shura. From you!”

Counsellor Isfahan had surged to his feet.

“These are lies!” he shouted. “Military troops of foreign star systems have been secretly invading our habitat, and you, you are in their employ. You are a traitor intent on destabilizing this peaceful habitat to protect your criminal, revolutionary grandchildren. The blood of millions will be on your hands!”

“Silence!”

Anakritis Mazares’ hand came crashing down on the table like a bomb going off.

“Sit down!” He glared from Tabriz to Isfahan and back.

“That is enough,” he said in a quieter voice as they subsided back into their seats. “This behavior is unacceptable. There is clearly a great deal for us to hear on the matter, and we will not proceed in this fashion. I will elect when people talk. I will be the one to put questions, and this panel will not accept allegations without proof. Our deliberations will be made confidentially. None of this will be repeated outside of this room. We, on Asman, are all aware how precarious the balance of our society is, and it has become plain to see that the outcome of this inquiry has the potential to utterly destroy that.”

He stopped and waited. I had the feeling that, if either side had spoken, the results would have been bad. I wasn’t completely clear about the power of the Anakrites, but Isfahan was. He was furious, his face flushed and his breathing rapid, but he didn’t open his mouth. His legal team had frozen behind him, not even daring to move.

Anakritis Mazares finally began again.

“I will draft a preliminary update for the media, explaining that this has become a complex discussion. No one else will release any other information regarding our deliberations. I recall Anakritis Sennen to the panel. I will not assume any conclusion on either side, until this panel is satisfied that it has sufficient, verified information to make an assessment, but it is already clear that serious criminality is involved at some point. We will be providing instructions to the police to secure arrests following our conclusions. I shall be recalling every Anakritis to supervise those police operations and minimize the possibility that regrettable mistakes might be made.”

Everyone was shocked at the speed with which the proceedings had come off the rails.

I trusted Tabriz. I could see he’d had to take an aggressive approach once Isfahan had mentioned terrorism. The trouble was, I expected this to have an effect on the first ‘easy’ step—to get the Phoenix off the station.

I was right.

Mazares went on, addressing me. “There is no case for holding the Dark Phoenix on the original basis, which was to ensure Your Grace attended this inquiry. However, Counsellor Isfahan has raised some extremely serious allegations that might involve the ship carrying foreign troops, and this panel requires an inspection.”

I couldn’t let this slide.

“I demand an immediate inspection conducted by the Guild of the Anakrites,” I said. “I have no faith in the customs officers or police on Asman, for valid reasons, and since the allegation raised involves the supposed existence of military troops on board the ship, no expertise other than eyes and common sense are required.”

I licked my lips. Mother always said if you kill the hog, you gotta eat the damn thing. No half measures.

“This false allegation is an offense against Queen Lorraine herself. I understand the panel requires an inspection, but any delay in performing it and rightly dismissing these ridiculous suggestions will only compound the damage to the relationship with Maynard’s Star.”

Isfahan had miscalculated with the foreign troops comment. The irony was, there were Xian Marines in the Xerxes system, but they were with Bjorn on the Xinghe. Not only was there hardly anyone on board the Phoenix, but all our combat suits were off the ship as well. There was no possibility of hiding any troops in the central tube, so an Anakritis wouldn’t go searching in there and stumbling across Olivia.

If Mazares agreed.

On the other hand, my implication I could damage trade with Maynard’s Star was empty talk. I knew the situation. Lorraine’s homeworld was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, and there was no way she would be able to cut off trading with their most valuable Inner Worlds source. But this panel didn’t know that. I hoped.

Isfahan started to speak, but Mazares held up his hand.

“That is entirely reasonable. I will send an Anakritis immediately. As Your Grace has said, it would not be necessary to dispatch an expert to decide if there are troops on board the ship. Please inform the Phoenix.” He glanced at his companions. “This panel will reconvene in two hours. That should be sufficient for the inspection and to allow for tempers to cool.”

We stood and waited for the panel to leave by a side door.

Isfahan glared at me and stalked out the main doors, already comming someone on his pad.

We followed more slowly. I headed to the restroom to talk to Olivia and Shami. Gunny would also talk to them on the standard comms, so no one would wonder how I’d been communicating.

E24. Chapter 7

TNS Nairobi

Xerxes System, inbound

The Nairobi had a feel to it that newer ships lacked. Even at only 60% maximum speed, which was a concession to the Chief Engineer’s concerns, the ship felt eager, humming with the power coursing through it.

Captain London called up the display in his briefing room, which showed a simulation of the ship plunging down into the heart of the Xerxes system. With practiced ease he flicked through the display’s magnifications of those ships whose current courses would bring them nearest to the Nairobi’s path.

There were no problems. The course had been set to reach orbit near the Asman habitat in the minimum time allowed by the aging engines without inconveniencing the busy traders in the system. On the other hand, they were probably nervous at the high-speed naval maneuver which was unfamiliar to them from their safe routes. Even at 60%, the Navy ship was still quick.

That nervousness was exactly the reaction he intended. He had ordered comms to reply to any queries with a copy of their route and no explanation other than ‘military maneuvers’.

The stage was set. The rest of the fleet were long gone; the additional Marines were on board and already settled.

Captain London was not settled.

He wasn’t the hard-charging naval officer he’d once been. He was older. Maybe wiser, and on the brink of long-anticipated action, stubborn doubts had gathered like clouds.

He had little concern for his physical safety and even less for the political storm his decision would unleash. His long-term officers knew what was happening and had voiced their support. They believed in his analysis and the need for urgent action. They were willing to face the consequences, however it went.

And yet…

The rest of the crew had only signed up for the Navy and agreed to obey legitimate orders.

The Admiralty would claim he had obviously become unbalanced.

Was he? Where could he turn for reassurance, or guidance?

His faith had lapsed over the last ten years as a result of the things he knew were being done out there in the Dark, but he’d once been a follower of the Goddess, and a long-departed, very devout aunt had gifted him her antique set of religious icons, depicting the holy aspects.

He took the pack from his tidy cabinet of personal effects and carefully sorted through them, touching only the edges.

They were like oversize playing cards, but each one was an exquisitely hand-painted rendering of a manifestation of the Goddess. Mercy, Love, Faith, Humility. The still familiar images seemed quiet to him today. None called out. Bounty, Joy, Nurture, Courage, Sorrow.

Silence. There was no Goddess of Indecision.

The cards slipped before his eyes until he was on the point of quitting.

This was foolish. The answer to his internal turmoil surely lay within himself.

Until he revealed the last card.

Our Lady of Justice.

In this aspect She was dark and stern, and She held up the scales as if about to offer them to him.

“We readily throw ourselves at the feet of Our Lady of Mercy,” his aunt had lectured him, “but few petition Our Lady of Justice. People fear Justice because they know they don’t deserve it. They prefer to beg for Mercy. Now that’s the right decision for the wrong reasons, because forgiveness is not the purpose of this aspect, Gary.” She’d touched the card then, very gently, with just the tip of her finger. “This one is not for a petty matter, but where it is beyond your ability to encompass. My dear boy, if there comes a time when Our Lady of Justice speaks to you, surrender yourself to Her, and have faith. The Goddess will know.”

He shivered and packed the other icons away.

Surely this situation qualified for his aunt’s description. He felt as if he was at the center of an immense movement, a shifting point in the human diaspora. How many tiny moments had led to this point? Ten years of secretly gathering data and feeling a growing certainty of the evil abroad. Ten years in preparation for a final act of duty to the true mission for which the Terran Navy had been established. It was there in the oath, the very words: for the good of all humanity.

Ten years of work, and he arrived in this star system, at this point, on the verge of losing his independent command. And Xerxes had somehow chosen this time to make a mistake. They’d allowed ships he knew were pirates to park in their orbit.

If he simply ignored it, returned to Earth and handed over his analyses, he knew what the Admiralty would do. They’d throw them in jail and charge him with illegal data collection. And what was brewing out in the Dark would break over the diaspora.

To guide him at this precise point and moment, the Goddess had sent him Lieutenant Sciarra, the most brilliant analytical mind he’d ever met.

But was it to encourage or dissuade him?

Time to find out.

He closed his eyes and tried to reach out, to sense Our Lady of Justice.

Nothing. Even the note the ship was now making seemed less sure to him.

He sighed and gave up. If Sciarra’s analysis matched his, he’d continue and damn the consequences. If it didn’t, he’d return to Earth, give Naval Intelligence the data and seed summaries of it in the media to threaten them with.

That was the best he could come up with.

He put the icon of Justice back in his cabinet with the others, sat behind his desk and commed the bridge.

“Lieutenant Sciarra to the Captain’s briefing room.”

It was a few steps from the bridge. She arrived barely a minute later. Came to attention at the regulation point in front of his desk. Saluted.

He returned the salute and then sat staring at her.

He sighed. How did the uniform always fail to fit? It wasn’t as if she was misshapen, but she might as well have been. How did her dark hair, which she deliberately cut short, manage to look like it had been brushed in random directions?

And that was the least of it today.

Her face was disfigured by a nose brace.

For a moment, he wondered at that, before the obvious answer came to him.

“I see you’ve taken the opportunity to enlarge your circle of sparring companions.”

It was not expressly forbidden for naval officers to engage in sparring with the Marines. Most didn’t. Certainly, sensible ones didn’t. Lieutenant Sciarra, on the other hand, exercised with the Marines whenever she could. She sparred with them. Hard. Nairobi’s complement of Marines had been careful: tough lessons but no visible damage. Over the course of this tour, they’d taken Sciarra as one of their own who’d somehow gotten into the wrong division of the military.

Marine Assault Company Delta obviously hadn’t had time to absorb that attitude.

“Yes, sir,” she said, the relaxed twang of her Australasian heritage evident in her words. “Familiarity with fighting styles can lead to complacency. Sergeant O’Hara from the new assault company taught me a valuable lesson about that. She’s very quick, sir. My fault for not getting out of the way.”

“Indeed.” His mouth stretched thinly. “And as a result, Sergeant O’Hara will have many drinks bought for her on the story of how she broke an officer’s nose and got clean away with it.”

He could see her preparing to defend the sergeant. Ready to argue with her commanding officer. Shaping the words in her mouth.

And then swallowing them.

“Sir,” she said.

If she’d chosen the Marines instead of the Navy, she’d be a captain leading a company by now. She had the charisma they liked. She’d have a company willing to follow her to their deaths—that level of charisma.

But she hadn’t chosen the Marines, she’d chosen the Navy.

In either service, she must have known she would have to learn to restrain that volcanic temper, but that lesson had taken too long. And now she knew she was on her last chance, so she wasn’t going to defend the sergeant in front of the captain in case he took it as an excuse to write the evaluation which would end her career.

Her face was carefully neutral, but her eyes gave her emotions away. Excitement, because she knew something was happening with this descent into the Xerxes system. Fear, that this might be the point at which he told her she wasn’t going to make it in the Navy. Puzzlement, because he’d given her tasks which no lieutenant normally did. And anger, because there was always a cauldron of that in her, a volatile cauldron.

He hoped he’d have time to find out the source of that anger, but it wasn’t what he needed at the moment. He needed her analytical mind, unrestrained by worrying about her career, because in all his time in the Navy, he’d not come across any as sharp as she was. So brilliant that, with unfamiliar doubts clouding his mind, and in a complete reversal of their normal roles, he needed to hear whether she agreed with him.

But there was time for one last little check about her background.

“There are situations, even outside martial arts training, where striking a senior officer might be justified,” he said.

He watched the shock flash across her face and knew he’d been right. The details in her personnel file had not mentioned any such event, but he guessed that at sometime during her last evaluation tour, that anger had spilled out and she’d struck a senior officer. It was a measure of the respect that the evaluating officer had held for her potential that he’d omitted mention of it. But he hadn’t felt able to pass her either.

So she’d come to him, come to the ship of last resort, and now she was expecting him to tell her she hadn’t made the grade.

“None of which is relevant in any way to the matter of this meeting,” he said.

Another shock, and a certain wariness came into her eyes.

“Sit down.”

She sat.

“If you’d been born a hundred years ago, Lieutenant Sciarra, you’d have made captain in record time. You’d have had no more than a couple of tours as a lieutenant, a couple more as XO on a cruiser, and then they’d have given you a frigate, one of the old Hunter class, and let you loose upon the depths of human space.”

Her lips were pressed together, her eyes bright. Her head dipped a millimeter at the supposed softening-up compliment.

“You’d have blazed a path across the Dark, Sciarra. Your actions would have become case studies at the Naval Academy.”

She took a little breath, as if she was afraid to fill her lungs. “Thank you, sir.”

His mouth twitched. “I didn’t say whether they’d be studies on how to operate…. or how not to operate.”

She flinched, unsure how to take his humor. Clearly unsettled, but still laser focused.

Good.

“You have a temper that has been, in the past, beyond your control. But what I want today is not your temper, but your analytical abilities.”

She blinked, not sure where he was going.

Now it begins…

“Over the course of the last several months, under a classification of utmost confidentiality, I have shared with you relevant intelligence gathered in the last ten years of the Nairobi’s tours, data gathered legally and illegally. Every star system visited, every passing ship’s log, every station’s financial report, every corporation’s accounts, every list of commodity prices, every encrypted communication, everything. Right up to today. Now I want your analysis.”

“Sir?”

“Now,” he ordered. “No preparation, no notes, no prompts, no presentation. This is just you and me. I want you to tell me what’s going on out in the Dark. Summarize how the human diaspora is doing. Then tell me what you think we should do about it.”

“Sir.” Her jaw firmed and her eyes hardened. She was suspicious.

“Nothing you say is being recorded, and I give you my word what you say to me today will not count against you in my assessment.”

She hesitated and he could see she wanted to get up and pace. He made a gesture. “You have the floor. Use it.”

She got up. Agitated, face flushed, angry, but engaging with the question because she did have strong views that she was desperate to tell and which she had previously felt she couldn’t say because they went against the Navy’s official position and would end her career.

And now he’d assured her those views wouldn’t affect his assessment of her.

A part of his mind was pleased that she’d come to trust his word in the course of this tour, but more than anything else, he could sense the anger coursing through her veins and he gained a sudden insight. This had been at the root of what had made her strike a senior officer.

“The human diaspora is on the brink of catastrophic disaster,” she said, her voice harsh and rising, “while the Navy does nothing! In violation of their charter, their mission and their sacred oaths, they look the other way. The Admiralty must know it. You know it. And you know we’re here, in the one place we can do something about it.”

The hair on his arms stood up and a chill slithered down his back.

E24. Chapter 8

Jan

We returned to the Inquiry room, which I was starting to find claustrophobic.

The inspection of the Phoenix had found no signs of troops of course, so we’d achieved step one. Shami was in the process of getting clearance to leave the dock. The bulk of my crew, especially Olivia, were much safer now, but ‘the bulk’ meant Shami, Pras, Thandi and Werner. Bjorn was on the Yǒng now and Gunny was with me.

It should have made me feel better, but this room felt like it was squeezing in on me. Isfahan’s legal team seemed to take up much more space. The faces of the Anakrites on the panel seemed that much more shuttered.

“Your Grace, have you left the ship permanently?” Mazares asked, checking information on his pad.

“Not necessarily,” I said. “It’s complex. The ship has a schedule to meet, but I have unfinished business on Asman. If they’re still there when I’m finished, I trust I’ll rejoin them, if Captain Shami is willing.”

“What unfinished business?” Isfahan demanded.

“This inquiry, for instance,” I said sweetly. “How much longer will it go on?”

Mazares stepped in to stop us bickering and declared the inquiry open again, reminding us that he would be requiring all of us to address the panel at his invitation, not argue with each other.

He started by reading the initial police report, which was a masterpiece of misdirection.

Citizens had ‘seen me leaving the bar after drinking with other merchanter crews’ for instance.

“Who were you drinking with?” Anakritis Adrina asked.

“Senior crew of the Xian merchanters, Xinghe and Yǒng,” I replied. “They wanted to compare notes after a lucrative run from Venture.”

No word of a lie. If the police could misdirect, I could too.

How long did you stay? How much did you have to drink? All of which they could cross-check with bar staff, and they probably had. I wondered if the staff had been persuaded to lie. I’d paid the tab using the Phoenix’s credit, but they could claim I’d bought more drinks for cash.

“With whom did you leave the bar?”

“I didn’t ‘leave the bar’ with anyone. While I was distracted, I was injected with something that knocked me out. I was carried out of the bar by a large group. If the Hamiraz hadn’t killed the kidnappers, you could have asked them questions about who they are. As far as I could make out, from their discussion when I woke up, they were a bunch of mercenaries hired to perform a sort of citizen’s arrest at the instigation of the Hamiraz.”

Isfahan was about to make a comment, but Mazares glared at him, and he subsided.

“You overheard this?”

“I did. The Hamiraz officer named was Captain Kashmar.”

Mazares jerked in surprise and glanced at his companions. Isfahan shook his head angrily.

“By whom was he named?” Adrina said.

“They didn’t introduce themselves to me.”

This was getting difficult. I didn’t want to outright lie to the panel if I could avoid it. But Isfahan would know the only person who could have named Kashmar was Ferulas, and he’d presumably know Ferulas hadn’t been killed with the others. Ferulas and Naomi were safe on the Xinghe, safe from Asman, unless Isfahan could make a case for all of us being terrorists or pirates. Then Xerxes customs could demand to search all the ships thoroughly.

Tabriz got permission to ask some questions and he sidelined them by wanting to discover how the police had known I had been at the abandoned bar, since there was apparently no security footage showing my abduction, and I clearly hadn’t been at the bar when the Hamiraz attacked. The panel had to pin Isfahan down on that. He finally admitted that the police had used the DNA gathered in a swab that was part of crew entry procedures to Asman.

“And so they found Her Grace’s DNA at the abandoned bar? Can you be more specific please, Counsellor Isfahan. Where did these traces come from?”

Isfahan pretended he had to clarify by calling in the leader of the police team, a lieutenant, who had been waiting outside.

The man stood to attention, looking nervous.

“From blood,” he answered the question that had been put to Isfahan.

“From where specifically?” Tabriz pushed him.

“Broken ties and a metal chair.”

“Consistent with someone escaping from being bound in a chair?”

“It is possible,” the man admitted, glancing worriedly at Isfahan.

“Your Grace,” Tabriz turned to me. “If you would pull your sleeves back a little, please?”

I stretched my arms over the table and showed them the ugly, healing scars on my wrists.

“Can we dispense with any suggestion or implication that Her Grace was there willingly, or that she had any free association with the gang which abducted her from the docks?” Tabriz smiled at Mazares, who nodded.

“Indeed, given she was drugged when she was abducted, and didn’t know her abductors in any way, is there any call for any further attendance by Her Grace, when you clearly need to question the police and security teams?”

“As soon as is possible, consistent with our understanding everything that took place,” Mazares replied, which was a long way to say you stay here.

Isfahan indicated he had questions for the police lieutenant, and Mazares had to let him ask them.

“Lieutenant, it says you didn’t see anyone else in the building. Can you describe the ways this woman—”

“Her Grace, Duchess Skelling,” Jamie interrupted.

Isfahan looked as if he’d swallowed a toad.

“Any way Her Grace could have exited the building without being seen by you?” he finished.

“Sir, the only other way out of the bar would have been through the floor.”

“A trapdoor down into the maintenance tunnels?”

“No, sir. A hole blown through from the maintenance tunnels. A substantial hole, requiring a powerful explosive.”

“And did you identify the type of explosive used?”

“Yes, sir. It was HND-5, hexanitrodectane, a military grade explosive.”

Isfahan stroked his chin. “Ah, yes, HND-5. That’s banned for civilian use and illegal on Asman, obviously. Imagine what damage that explosive could do to the outer shell of the habitat.”

This Inquiry was like quicksand.

Tabriz bristled. “This is just more evasion. Evidence of the use of military explosives is not evidence of the presence of military troops from other star systems. It’s certainly not evidence of intent to commit terrorism. An explosive banned here is not necessarily banned elsewhere, and its use endangered no one. On the contrary, it allowed Her Grace to escape, whereas remaining in that bar would have meant she would now be dead. That’s what this Inquiry should be concentrating on. Not how did she escape, but why she was there and who was behind this murderous crime. We refuse to be more open while this is not addressed.”

But the panel wasn’t going to be herded in either direction. I got the feeling neither Isfahan nor Tabriz would get things their own way against the Anakrites panel.

I’d hoped against hope that I would be able to attack the Yazad through this panel, but it was going to be more of a delay and distraction ploy. And we couldn’t wait for the outcome of an Inquiry and subsequent court cases, especially as they’d be held here, on the Yazad’s home turf. They might not be able to intimidate the Anakrites, but I’d bet their courts were less strong-minded. And while courts limped along, there would be opportunities for the Yazad to manufacture some violent ‘accident’.

All of which meant that we were dependent on the success of the second strand of my plan. The not-so-legal strand. Bjorn had to get on the Carina and show everyone what was happening in this star system.

Without that, our entire mission—and maybe our lives—would disappear in the courts of Asman.

E24. Chapter 9

TNS Nairobi

Xerxes System, inbound

Lieutenant Sciarra was a contrast of emotions and control struggling with each other.

She’d realized her voice was sounding angry, and had begun to speak with icy calm while still gesturing angrily as she went on. “Everyone knows about the population tensions. Earth uses the Navy to enforce one-sided deals with weaker outlying star systems and relieves their own population pressure by expelling criminals there. The Inner Worlds don’t have that military strength, so they can’t do that, and the older, bigger and more successful they are, the more they are swollen to bursting. People won’t voluntarily emigrate to struggling worlds, creating a vicious circle which means those star systems are dying for lack of resources and people. The further out you go, the worse it gets. There are parts of the Frontier aflame. Whole sectors where every planet is bubbling with revolt. Accords are put aside. Piracy and slavery are rampant. Everyone knows the situation is intolerable, but they all think it’s just the way things have developed.”

She paused.

“They are wrong. The data you’ve scraped from these places…” She stopped and looked at him. “Permission to use the pens on the wall, sir.”

He nodded and retrieved a set from his desk. His officers often used drawings in briefings where it might take too much time to get the computers to display what they wanted, at the level of detail they wanted.

She drew a horizontal line with Earth at one end and ‘Ultima’ at the other: a fictional name used as shorthand for whatever was the furthest human inhabited star system in the Frontier.

“It’s there in the data. Money trails. Systems in rebellion. The gathering of pirates into fleets and concentrating around specific star systems.”

She began to draw arrows and symbols. “From all the data you gathered, we know what sells honestly and where it goes. High tech goes outwards. Food, raw materials, other resources, and medium to low tech goes inwards. We know what these cost. We know which systems elect to continue to pay Earth taxes. We know, in terms of total trade, the amounts paid, and so we also know, in terms of total amounts, what money is flowing that has nothing to do with these trades. In other words, proceeds of piracy, slavery and other crimes. The amounts are staggering.”

She switched pens.

“The Inner Worlds have reduced their navies because they justifiably claim they’re paying for the Terran Navy. Margin worlds, even those paying the taxes, have seen that they need their own defenses and have begun building navies. Successful worlds like Maynard’s Star in the Parvi Arc already have powerful fleets, even if they’ve nearly bankrupted themselves. There are rumors that they’re now offering their fleets as protection for their neighbors in exchange for help with the costs. If we can believe it, they’re trying to reform them into a common force, recruiting from all the star systems they’re going to protect. If that is the case, then they’re probably going to form a hegemony like Xian.”

She changed pens again. “For others, such as the group forming around the Cerumitan star system, the ‘protecting fleet’ is a cynical extortion racket, but the star systems who are victim to this can’t get out from under.”

“It’s not only in the Margin,” London said quietly. “It’s in the Inner Worlds as well. The Elergie Combine, for instance, is little more than the forced acquisition of dependent star systems, although they mask it under lip-service democracy, new laws and secret deals.”

She nodded abruptly and wrote ‘Xian, Maynard, Cerumitan, Elergie & similar’ on one side and drew a ring around them, labeling it ‘Independent Empires’.

“I’d argue that the Navy should be conducting patrols in those regions to evaluate basic standards of freedom, even though people there are citizens of those states and have no formal contracts of protection. It would have to be down to Earth and an association of the innermost, most highly developed worlds, to impose pressure on the empires in the form of trade and technology restrictions.”

She looked at London as if she expected a challenge from him, but as far as he was concerned his oath to the Navy had covered all humans, and it didn’t make exceptions. On the other hand, he had a much more cynical view than she did about the likely effect of trade restrictions, and he differed on her grouping.

He pointed at her diagram.

“Take Xian out of there. Whatever concerns we have about their motives, they have two factors that distinguish them from the rest. Firstly, their method of recruitment to their Hegemony is trade benefits. In fact, successful star systems like Maynard’s Star and Rajatara, who are seeking to expand their reach, would belong with Xian on that basis.”

She nodded and started to amend the diagram as he continued speaking.

“Secondly, the concept of trade embargoes affecting the Xian Hegemony goes nowhere. They probably have a stronger industrial base than the theoretical innermost worlds association you’ve described. Xian are almost certainly more advanced in key technologies.”

“Agreed.” Sciarra returned to the center of her diagram. “But anyway, my main focus is outside of those cases. It’s every struggling star system from the middle of the Inner Worlds to the far edge of the Frontier which are vulnerable, and which are being targeted in different ways.”

She cut the line between Earth and Ultima into sections.

“The nearer to Earth, the higher likelihood of attracting the attention of the Terran Navy. So, in this section there are political parties or specific politicians being funded, and secret criminal organizations are infiltrating the economies. For example, political parties like the Des Bornes on Montau, Dharana on Khatri and Chundu on Hifei. Examples of criminal organizations would be the Yazad, the Moyen, the Jamestar Brotherhood and so on.”

She’d picked excellent examples of political parties whose ideologies favored cutting ties with Earth and making deals with nearby systems. All the criminal organizations she’d listed were spread out over several star systems.

“Then, we move deeper into the Margin,” she continued, “all the way to the main bulk of the Frontier. In this region, when you move away from the primary trade routes, you see the effects of piracy in isolating star systems and keeping them weak. You see externally funded revolutions replacing democracy with violent authoritarian systems. And beyond that, out into the Dark, among the furthest bits of Frontier, the concept of law, certainly as we understand it, tapers away to nothing.”

“That’s a good summary, Lieutenant, but the Admiralty has known most of that for years. They even admit some of it is true. What have you found in the data that you think the Admiralty doesn’t know?”

She paused longer than he expected, and her voice was lower when she spoke.

“Sir, I can’t be sure what the Admiralty doesn’t know.”

“There is nothing that leaves this room,” London said. “What are you not telling me?”

She blinked, and took a breath.

“I’ve come to the conclusion that the majority of the apparent chaos I’ve described is anything but chaotic, and is, in fact, being controlled through one centrally located organization. I think at least part of this organization’s controlling group is located on Earth. And that a few, high-ranking members of the Admiralty are part of it. There are policies for the Navy that can only be explained that way, in my opinion.”

She fell silent, barely daring to breathe as she watched for his reaction.

He simply nodded. “Then why did you say we’re in the one place that can do something about it?”

“Because anyone involved on Earth is going to be protected by layers of institutional defenses. Without utterly incontrovertible proof, anyone making these claims would end up dead, in jail or in a mental institution. For all its success and development, Xerxes doesn’t have that kind of structure. Also, they’re arrogant. And they’ve made a mistake.”

“We’ll get to how you suggest we approach uncovering proof here, but what is your assessment of the purpose of this organization? Simply to make money?”

“I think money’s no more than an aspect. It’s a fuel for what they want to achieve. What these people crave is power.”

She paused to look at the drawings she’d made, with her hands on her hips, then started writing again.

“I think they might even have started off believing they were only motivated to find a solution for the undeniable demographic problems. But then they became corrupted by Xerxes, and now their fix is to make human space resemble Xerxes: the elite sparsely inhabiting the best worlds in luxury, and the rest of the populations kept on sealed habitats, or distant worlds, out of sight, existing only to maintain that status quo.”

“They got involved with Xerxes because the money, the fuel that makes this organization work, had to have a place to come to where the link to crime disappeared. A place where money could be redirected back to the Margin, funding politicians, rebellions, and outwards to the Frontier to sponsor piracy and slavery, all without the ruling elite being connected to those actions. Xerxes is that. It has a higher turnover in gambling and associated industries than the rest of the Inner Worlds put together. As a long-standing financial center, it is a natural nexus for banking, and as your illicit data-taps show, these banks’ encrypted messaging systems are used by the criminal organizations. Even where we can’t crack the encryptions, the volumes clearly don’t match trade patterns and do match criminal activity.”

“Still, none of that would be usable in court,” London said. “But if they have all this power and use it to expel people from Inner Worlds, how does that work?”

“The pirates and revolutionaries they’re sponsoring can seize strategic points. Pirates take the orbitals. Revolutionaries take over the governments. That doesn’t get them anything unless they can enforce it. The sort of people the Inner Worlds want to expel wouldn’t make good military troops, but they don’t need to. They need occupying troops. Gangs with guns.”

“Why would the expelled want to do that?”

“Because the alternative would be to end up as slaves on worlds where there isn’t enough population to exploit the resources. A stark choice, and one some of them won’t even be offered: there are more planets with sub-critical levels of population than there are with functioning infrastructures.”

“A bleak picture, but it’s a harsh universe. I’m sure they’d argue the greater good for the greater number.”

Sciarra snorted. “I’ll let philosophers debate that justification, but the premise is unverifiable. There are only between five and six times as many inhabited Margin systems as Inner World systems, but the Frontier is up to double the depth of the Margin, and the volume of space increases cubically. There are at least five thousand inhabitable worlds in the Frontier and even when we know where they are, we have no firm figures on populations. In any event, this isn’t a minor adjustment of populations. The intention is to use Xerxes as a template, resulting in a few elite worlds, with the best environments and low populations, controlling a mass of slave worlds that produce the resources for the elites to benefit.”

Sciarra’s voice was rising again, and London halted her.

“You’ve gone from analysis, which is unprovable, but is supported by the data, to supposition on their intentions, which is not. I completely agree with everything you’ve said up to that point. I agree that a group, well connected politically on Earth and the Inner Worlds, and integrated with criminal organizations, is intent on creating another expansion. A violent, convulsive expansion, engineered by this group and under their control, which will result in billions of people in slavery.”

There was something they were talking about that kept feeding the lieutenant’s anger. London thought it was more than an understandable anger at the injustice being planned. Something personal. He’d have to find out more, but afterwards. Not now with the clocking ticking down.

If there was an afterwards.

“In the bleak outlook, I believe there will be isolated bubbles of decency: Xian and Maynard’s Star from the list we made earlier. Several more from the Margin, who have potential. I know we’re both concerned about Xian and their long-term plans, but there’s no evidence of the kind of sociopathic direction involved in this controlled expansion.”

“Which might, in future, lead to conflict between the Terran Navy and the Xian Navy,” she said. “The result of that would be too close to call, which would probably make it even more appalling, if that’s possible.”

“We agree on many points,” he said. “But the next step is doing something about it. This rush down towards the Asman habitat is a maneuver which I hope will make them panic. If you agree to join with me, I want you to go away and review all we know about the ships in dock, those in orbit and the Asman habitat itself. Come back with a plan about the best way to gather the irrefutable evidence we need. Evidence that will not be able to be swept under the carpet. Again, if you chose to join with me, report back before our turnover point.”

She frowned. “You’ve heard my analysis, sir. Why would I not join with you?”

“Because, if we fail, you’ll be charged alongside the rest of us. Even if we succeed, your career will never be without a shadow. We’re going against the Admiralty, Lieutenant. Succeed and we’ll have some of them out, but the rest will remember. It won’t matter what crimes we revealed, all they’ll remember is your involvement in jailing their former colleagues.”

“And so you’re offering to protect me by putting me in the brig.” She snorted. “No, thank you, sir. I’ll get on with your target selection task.”

She was making to leave, but stopped.

“If none of this had happened, sir…”

“What would my assessment of you have been?”

She nodded.

He sighed. “I’m still dithering. You have, without doubt, the greatest potential in naval analysis it has been my privilege to witness. That should have meant you were destined for Naval Intelligence. There are two problems with that, and both of them are insurmountable. Firstly, Intelligence is the one department that does not accept any recommendations from me, because I have been warning them for ten years that they’re deliberately ignoring what’s going on. They will never forgive me, especially if we prove it. Secondly, you wouldn’t accept a posting to an office on Earth. You need to be out here. I wasn’t joking about the frigate command, but unfortunately that’s not an option either.”

He ran a hand through his hair.

“It’s not what you deserve, but I’d probably have recommended you transfer to the Marines. You wouldn’t want that either, but at least they’d welcome you.”

She stood to attention.

“Thank you for your honesty, sir. With your permission?”

He waved her out.

E24. Chapter 10

Jan

The Inquiry was dragging. It was like trying to wade from one side of the hog meadows to the other, after we’d had a spring flood back on the Great Farm on Calloway.

But Tabriz couldn’t let Isfahan set a direction for the inquiries to take, so he had to interrupt when he talked. The same applied to Isfahan. Mazares had to stop them both several times, and halted proceedings frequently.

Whatever Jamie and Tabriz thought of my bladder control, I took every chance to speak with Olivia.

The Phoenix had been delayed departing. Not by Asman officials this time, but by Werner. Our engineer had some issue with the return of the plasma cannon which we’d had to surrender on docking. And he was saying there might be some extra charges against the ship’s credit.

I waved it off. I trusted Werner to resolve whatever it was, and I had no time to get involved.

Olivia had now taken over an unused external communications node on the outer shell of the habitat. It included an old laser transceiver, and it meant we had secure communications with the Xinghe and the Yǒng, so I was getting updates on preparations to tackle the Carina.

She also gave me the news that the Terran Navy fleet had left, all bar one, an old heavy cruiser called the Nairobi. That ship was heading down into the gravity well like its tail was on fire, but it wasn’t talking to anyone.

“It’s designated as a training ship of some kind,” Olivia said. “It could be that this is just a military exercise.”

“Just a training ship?”

“A genuine military ship, but with a side role of evaluating officers for promotion. On its last mission, apparently.”

“Okay, so it’s a Terran Navy ship, coming here at speed, and neither Maykn nor Baranov have moved?”

“Neither the Sambuk nor the Corim would be able to outrun the Nairobi,” Olivia said. “They’ll know that. They’ve got to believe that whatever the Nairobi is doing, it’s nothing to do with them, and it would be less suspicious to remain in orbit—”

“Or the Yazad is saying they’ll protect them,” I interrupted, because time was running out and I had to get back to the Inquiry.

“Which they could only do by ordering the Xerxes cutters to interfere with the Nairobi,” Olivia replied. “You need to get back. I’ll keep you updated on anything important with encrypted messages to your pad through the Asman communications network, but I suggest we hold off conversations like this unless we’re using HADES.”

“You got it.”

I reminded myself, as I settled back in front of the panel, that torturing myself this way was my own plan. Plan C, or was it D now? We had to distract the Yazad from what we were going to do with the Carina, and we had to slow it down so we had enough time to do it. That meant I had to sit here in the Inquiry.

While avoiding getting caught out legally.

Tabriz and Isfahan had started circling again, each trying to get the other to make a mistake. I sat there, saying as little as possible. Jamie sat alongside me, apparently immersed in all the legal stuff.

My only moment of relief came when updates on my pad showed the Phoenix was undocking. That lifted my spirits and got me through another half hour.

The Inquiry? It was amazing that a fight so deadly could actually be so tedious, but we were running out of room. Mazares was getting frustrated. Worse, he was getting angry.

“We will now take another break, after which all of us, and I mean all, will return to this Inquiry with the objective of making the progress which has been lacking so far.”

He stared at Tabriz and Isfahan in turn.

“The panel will split into two rooms, and each will have three Anakrites in attendance. There will be no possibility of interruptions. You, Anakritis Tabriz, in room 1, will reveal the identity of Her Grace’s rescuers with no further evasion. You will explain how they come to be in possession of quantities of explosive. You will explain how they tracked the kidnappers down to the abandoned bar. You will explain how they were able to return to the docks without a single security camera showing their progress and without leaving tracks in the security recordings. And you, Counsellor Isfahan, in room 2, will bring a certified and complete copy of all communications received by the Hamiraz regarding this incident. You will arrange for Captain Kashmar and the Hamiraz personnel involved, both on site and in the control room, to attend this Inquiry for as long as it takes to get to the truth of this matter.”

Isfahan tried to restrict it, saying that number of Hamiraz staff could not be released from duty at the same time. Mazares brought the hammer down.

“Any one of them who does not attend will be arrested. You have an hour to arrange this.”

The Anakrites stalked out, leaving Tabriz looking pensive.

He wasn’t going to say anything to me while we were still in the same room as Isfahan, but I’d got the message anyway.

As we started to make our way out, one of Isfahan’s clerks approached. He got as far as Gunny, who just stepped in his way. Tabriz waved his hand, indicating we should walk out into the hall, but Isfahan was watching, and decided to escalate. He came towards us, wisely stopping out of Gunny’s immediate reach.

He was a tall, powerful man, and most people would have found the glare from his intense, deep-set eyes intimidating. Didn’t work with Gunny. I could see that she’d gone into that relaxed, alert state that presaged the possibility of highly controlled violence.

Not that Isfahan would try anything here, in front of witnesses, but he sensed enough to ease back.

“What do you want?” he said, in a low voice.

He was talking to me, and despite Tabriz signaling we should ignore him, I chose to answer.

“Justice.”

He sneered.

“A meaningless answer. You have no idea of the complexities of the Xerxes habitats, their sophisticated network of interdependence. You are threatening the lives of billions by damaging the smooth running of Asman. Where is the justice in that? You should just leave.”

I should have ignored him, but his arrogance and condescension needled me.

“We were going to, but you called for an Inquiry, so it’s your fault. I’m sure the rest of the Yazad aren’t happy with your bungling.”

I just managed to stop myself from pointing out his implication that the system was run for the benefit of all didn’t seem to include the slaves held in the Carina. The plan was still to have him focus on me and not realize we knew about the slave ship.

“The Shura will permit you to go,” he said.

“A good excuse for your cutters to attack us as we ‘try to escape’.”

“All we want is for things to run efficiently,” he said. “We would not compromise that for the undoubted pleasure of destroying your ship, and as Anakritis Tabriz will confirm, the Guild of Anakrites has no powers off the habitat. The ordinary people of Asman don’t want you here.”

Tabriz was gently urging me toward the door, but Isfahan didn’t stop.

“We know you’re just a tool for the Xian. They’ll abandon you the moment you’re no longer useful to them. You’re just not as important to them as their mission. We don’t know what that mission is yet, but we do know they have troops on those ships. We do know they’ve been infiltrating our comms networks. We’re informing the Terran Navy, and your wisest move would be to run while the Nairobi is concentrating on the Xinghe and the Yǒng. Time is running out for you, Skelling.”

“Just trying to panic you,” Gunny muttered as we left the room.

“Possibly an indication of how much you’ve rattled them,” Tabriz added.

“Or Mazares did,” I said. “We’re not going to be able to dodge any longer, either. Will Isfahan hand over the Hamiraz comms? Can he redact parts, claiming habitat security?”

“That’s assuming he would use the comms for orders like these,” Gunny countered.

“The panel will question every single person on that team,” Tabriz said. “Someone will break and admit they were told to fire without provocation and that no one in that building was allowed to survive. It’s a matter of how long that takes and what the panel do when that comes out. For our testimony, you can say that your colleagues were not willing to trust the police to rescue you, on the basis of my advice and your experience with customs.”

“And then they’ll ask who those colleagues were. Can we claim it was my crew, who were able to get off the ship without anyone noticing?”

Tabriz pursed his mouth. “I think you may have to admit to getting assistance from your Xian friends, Your Grace, and that they accessed the surveillance network to find you.” He shrugged. “The illegalities are not minor, but they were clearly justified in retrospect, and they’re nothing in comparison with what Isfahan is facing.”

I’d have to talk to Dow about revealing the use of the Xian Marines, and I couldn’t use the Asman comms facilities to do that. Olivia would have to patch me through. All our ships would have laser comms set up with each other.

Jamie cleared his throat. “I’m afraid that the alternative plan we had isn’t going to work in time.”

He held up his InfoPad. He’d applied for an extension to his authority, which would have allowed him to enforce access to any Maynard registered ship in Asman orbit. If he’d had that, he could have required the Xerxes Navy cutters to take him to the Carina and compel them to allow him aboard.

The response was a lot of legal babble about space outside of Asman, even in close proximity, being beyond the jurisdiction of the Asman Shura. They’d pass on his request to the Xerxes Hakaman.

Where it would get lost.

It would have been a neat solution, but I’d never thought he’d get it.

I made my excuses and went to talk to Olivia in the restroom, with Gunny to stand guard so I wasn’t overheard.

“We can’t speed it up,” Olivia said. “There are as many engineers working on it as they can fit in the space.”

We needed our old shuttle back. Like ships, shuttles had registrations, and our shuttle became registered to Maynard’s Star when the Phoenix did. Our trick to get on board the Carina depended on having the right registration. Tabriz had explained it. If we used a different shuttle, our access went from questionable to illegal in Xerxes law.

If we got on board illegally, we’d be able to free the slaves and seize the ship, but the crew couldn’t be prosecuted. If we couldn’t prosecute the crew, we had no leverage over the Yazad.

Unless the Navy intervened, and they weren’t talking to us, or anybody else.

Olivia said that Asman Traffic Control had given up trying to talk to the Nairobi, but that the Shura were transmitting messages non-stop through a private laser channel she couldn’t access.

“That’ll be telling them we’re the cause of all the trouble,” I said. “Us and our ‘Xian masters’.”

“Probably. Jan, I’m not sure who they’ll believe. I can’t extract much information about the captain, but he doesn’t seem to be a typical naval officer, and he clearly isn’t one to toe the line.”

“Anyway, I think they’ll arrive too late. We need that shuttle ready before the Carina gets departure clearance.”

“Bjorn and the engineers are working on it. We all need to keep doing our part. You need to go back to the Inquiry. I need to keep hacking the Asman main communication network, so the Yazad think we’re focused on that, and they don’t think to look at HADES.”

“How are things going with that? Working with HADES?”

“We’re working well together,” she said.

“You can tell me more at the next break, assuming I haven’t been arrested.”

E24. Chapter 11

TNS Nairobi

Xerxes System, inbound

Captain London stirred restlessly in his command seat.

Nothing was quite right.

That eagerness he’d felt in the ship earlier wasn’t there now. In its place was an ominous subtone. An uneasiness. The engines weren’t happy, especially since turnover, where they’d spun the ship around and started decelerating. He’d like to reduce power to the engines, but if the Nairobi didn’t burn off her speed, she’d shoot through the main planet’s orbit like a rogue comet.

The engine noise wasn’t his imagination. Nat didn’t like the sounds she was hearing either, but her reply to his query was a laconic I’ll tell you what’s causing the noise when I strip them apart.

It wasn’t just the engines. The picture on his screens wasn’t right either.

He and Sciarra were sitting in front of a panorama of displays. They had a monitor of every ship in parking orbit near Asman. Each ship was under scrutiny from passive sensors on the Nairobi and from the missiles London had had converted to electronic intelligence gathering platforms and launched ahead of the ship. There was only so much that passive sensors could detect, but the cumulative information gave a surprisingly full summary. Cross referenced to each ship was their status from their communications with Asman Traffic Control—whether the ship was loading or unloading cargo, requesting or receiving fuel, submitting flight plans or requesting a departure schedule.

The central display was populating with target assessments from data that Sciarra submitted. The majority of ships were tagged as ‘NS’: not significant. There were six at the top of the screen which were of interest. They were ranked.

“Explain your ranking, Lieutenant.”

“Top two, 100%, no sensible possibility we’re wrong. They’re under false names, and we have multiple sources identifying them as pirates.”

“Multiple?”

“In addition to our internal data, we’re being sent a constant stream of information by comms laser. There are a dozen Xian ships in parking orbit. Every single one of them has transmitted to us a list of suspected pirates that the Xian merchanters maintain. Both ships are in them.”

“Which doesn’t mean the allegations are true.” London allowed himself a slight smile, playing devil’s advocate. “What other analyses lead to this conclusion? Do you have proof?”

“No proof, sir. Slight diversion first. Xerxes is a major manufacturer of spaceships. They embed a proprietary designation in the nav and comms computer kernels. Even if a ship gets upgrades for its entire computer suite, the replacements will host the same kernel.”

“Okay.” London frowned. There was such a thing as getting too much into the data.

“Every ship that visits Xerxes exchanges data with the nav beacon, that’s the standard procedure for every star system. Except the Xerxes nav beacon adds a query that Xerxes nav kernels will respond to with their original ship designation. So Xerxes knows when their ships return, whatever they’re being called.”

“You’re saying that those two are Xerxes ships?”

“Not exactly. The ship calling itself Sanlucar was built here, and its real name is Sambuk. We already knew that from visual comparisons on images collected from dozens of star systems where the Sambuk has visited under other names. The important thing is that it confirms that our visual comparison algorithms are sound. That gives me confidence is saying that the Star of Tangier’s real name is Corim. And whatever they’re currently claiming, both ships are registered to a Frontier system called Zilkum.”

London snorted. “A pirates’ nest if there ever was. But how did you find out about this Xerxes designator?”

“I didn’t directly. There’s another ship on our list that arrived under a different name. The thing is, the comms officer on that ship was sharp enough to spot the extra exchange with the nav beacon, and really, really clever enough to get the beacon to cough up a list of every Xerxes ship it has in its database. It was an encrypted exchange, but the computers you managed to salvage from the decommissioning of the old TNS Lusaka chewed through it in a few hours.”

London snorted.

“I might not have friends in the Admiralty, but I do in the salvage yards. Okay, tell me which ship hacked the nav beacon.”

“The Dark Phoenix. Original name Karakun, and guess what else… originally registered to Zilkum. Our visual matching algorithms failed on this one, because the ship has had an engine upgrade, changing the profile.”

“A genuine change of ownership?”

“I think so, but they’re not necessarily out of our suspicious list. After the Asman Traffic Control stopped broadcasting demands at us, the Asman Shura started transmitting on laser comms. They’re complaining about the Phoenix, calling them terrorists in league with Xian and hinting they’re using AI.”

“Interesting, considering your observations about hacking the beacon.”

“Exactly. I’ll come back to them, but I need to finish off on the Sambuk and Corim first.”

Sciarra pulled up a separate display. This one was infra-red imagery of comms clusters, including laser transceiver equipment.

“These images have been taken by our spy drones, and they show every ship in my list of the suspicious six are in constant communication using their laser arrays. Obviously, so is Asman. We can’t intercept the beams without alerting them, so we don’t know the content, but the alignment of transceivers on the Sambuk and Corim show they’re talking to Asman and to each other.”

“So someone on Asman with access to laser transceivers is talking clandestinely to two known pirates.” London grunted and waved off Sciarra’s correction. “Two ships we are certain are pirates, though we lack proof. And this other ship, the Carina Augusta, who are they talking to on their laser array?”

“Asman. That alone wouldn’t have put it into the suspicious six list, but on top of that, their cargo loading is peculiar. In fact, it’s actually illegal in the Xerxes system. They’ve received their load from intra-system tug-trains, originating directly from the other four habitats. By law, all cargo is meant to pass through Asman, so whatever the Carina is doing, it’s under the orders of someone very highly placed in Asman for it to not be challenged.”

“Like the Yazad.”

“Like the Shura, sir. They’re the only authority that can simply override police, customs and traffic control on something like that.”

“Probably. So far, we have three ships we have to board to inspect their cargos and their comms databases, but only two where we can credibly claim a suspicion of piracy as our rationale.”

He sighed. “Yet none of these ships have been panicked by our arrival.”

“Which would add weight to our suspicion that Asman is directly involved. The Asman cutter fleet, acting as a whole, could prevent our access. Without proof of piracy or trafficking slaves, Asman would just be able to say that their business was confidential to Xerxes.”

“Which would mean the Xerxes Hakaman would be involved as well.”

He rubbed his chin. “But they don’t know that the cutters could stop us. If we had a full complement of cannon, they wouldn’t be able to. They don’t know we don’t have that capability, so they have to be panicking if our scenario of suspicions is correct. And yet those three ships are just sitting there.”

He shifted in his chair again.

“And what the nova are a pair of Frontier sharks like them doing this deep into the Inner Worlds anyway?”

Sciarra shrugged. “The Yazad must have wanted them here for an important reason.”

London nodded. “And finding out what that reason is will be vital. Our list has those two known pirates right at the top. The Carina is a maybe, unless we find out something more about her. What about the other three; the Phoenix, Xinghe and Yǒng?”

“First point, those three are talking to each other with lasers, so again, they’re involved in something. Given what Asman is saying about them, clearly, they’re not part of whatever Asman is doing. They could be from a rival criminal organization?”

“Then why would they be here? And why would they have traded? More unknowns.”

“Yes, sir. On that basis, I decided to look in more depth in our data. Obviously, the Phoenix has to be the most peculiar, so I started with her, and very interesting she is, too. I’ll start with Janice Skelling, the person who was her skipper on arrival, but has now handed over captaincy to her pilot while Skelling is attending a judicial inquiry because she was somehow involved with a gunfight near the docks.”

“That’s a good start,” London murmured.

Sciarra pulled up a picture of the person and London had to laugh.

“She’s such an obvious pirate, I’m starting to doubt it,” Lieutenant Sciarra said. “I unearthed this from the newscatcher data transmissions we archive. We picked it up in transit through the Mejia system, but it originates from the Dulong system.”

The woman on the screen was scowling at the camera. She had blonde hair in a brutal buzz cut, a scar on the side of her face, and a black eyepatch. She wore a knee-length brown coat over a ship uniform of brown and gold, with long boots.

London snorted. “All she’s missing is a parrot and a cutlass.”

Sciarra smiled. “Doesn’t end there. Her ship had a different name when it visited Dulong; it was recorded as a naval ship with the ID Parvi-MILITARY-Calloway Navy-701, and claiming to be CNS Acid Penguin, of the Calloway Navy Anti-Piracy Unit.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time a pirate had claimed to be a navy unit from some star system no one’s ever heard of.”

“Well, we do have information on Calloway, and here’s another puzzle: in our data, Calloway is a religious retreat planet for the Church in Exile. They’re supposedly pacifists, but I could allow that maybe that didn’t survive reality in the Frontier. In any event, I did back trace visual images from newscatchers, and the Phoenix was accepted as a sort of hybrid merchanter and naval vessel in other systems, but they seem to have changed her name several times. There were a couple of other notable bits of information.”

She pulled up a media report labelled as originating from the Ranier system. It documented the Ranier star system had paid bounty ‘to the Acid Penguin (currently IDed as Spiral Song for Calloway Navy operational reasons) for their delivery of captured pirates, dead and alive, in line with the Piracy Accords’.

“The captain in that group of pirates they handed over was named Satybal, which agrees with the Xerxes information on the sale of what was then called the Karakun.”

“There is some nova-damned story there,” London said. “She must have captured the Karakun and renamed the ship. On the other hand, it doesn’t mean all the rest about being a Calloway Navy Anti-Piracy Unit is true.”

“No, there’s no proof either way, but clearly, something happened between Dulong and the next confirmation I have, which is from the Benson system.” She pulled up docking images from the Stabler space station. “By this point, the Phoenix is powered by triple CT engines and has external racking. Which leads finally to their arrival in Xerxes and making several million Terran dollars from their cargo, which they brought from Venture.”

“How the hell does a merchanter pay for that kind of transformation and turn up here with this kind of money?”

“The timing on bringing Venture grain and timber to Xerxes was good, but you could say they were just lucky. But I can’t tie up the numbers from Benson to Venture. According to the manifest, her outbound cargo to Venture was ‘agricultural equipment’.”

London snorted. He was sure that merchanters did occasionally ship farming equipment, but that label was infamously the one used for the transport of weapons.

“Now, about the coordination of the Phoenix with the Xian ships. The Phoenix has been operating with both the Xinghe and the Yǒng for the last few trips, and turns up in star systems at the same time as the Xinghe even earlier, prior to the overhaul. Definitely something going on between them, and all three are operating way out of their normal comfort zone. Small and mid-range merchanters can’t normally make Inner World trading pay enough, let alone show the returns the Phoenix has.”

“All interesting and curious, but no proof of anything.”

“No, and so I went digging deeper. I really didn’t expect to find this, but I looked deeper at Skelling. I found her in the military personnel databases. Her home planet is Calloway and she served six years in the 1st Frontier, fighting in the Dimitras sector. That record is good and bad. She was good enough to be promoted three times and bad enough to be demoted again every time. I quote: ‘aggressive and poor attitude to authority’.” She hesitated and cleared her throat. “Final demotion was after a court-martial. Struck a senior officer on the field of battle.”

She fell silent, her cheeks coloring.

London hummed thoughtfully. “Sounds like the sort of person who might end up a pirate, but the first part also sounds like a description of half of the Terran Marines. Not the last part about striking an officer, but I guess there are good reasons for that sometimes.”

Sciarra became very focused on her briefing notes, and London hid a smile.

She couldn’t know what the confidential assessments in her records said about her. She couldn’t be sure what London knew about her last evaluation, and in fact London hadn’t been sure. But now he was. She’d struck a senior officer, and her evaluating commander had considered it justifiable, otherwise he’d have arrested and charged her and she certainly wouldn’t have been on the Nairobi.

At some stage, he really needed to know what that had been about, but it was not the time now.

When it was obvious he wasn’t going to say any more, Sciarra cleared her throat and restarted. “She was honorably discharged from the 1st Frontier on the station in the Ensylas system, and arrested for an assault in a bar barely three hours later.” She tapped her pad, slowly closing down the data items she’d reviewed. “It’s difficult to draw any conclusion, sir. It’s all one helluva story, but the sudden change in financial situation, the working arrangement with Xian ships, the high-level hacking capabilities. I’d say we need to have a good, close look at the Phoenix. But before I go on to the other two, there’s one other item of information that came up in my searches on the Phoenix crew. The pilot-navigator who’s now captain, at least in name.”

“What about her?”

“Also former Frontier forces. A pilot on ground attack. Lieutenant Shami Siriwardene.” She clicked up one last media report. “Discharged at the same ceremony as Skelling, which I guess is how they ended up together. This is from an earlier ceremony.”

The media report showed an image of a dark-skinned young woman shaking the hand of a senior officer. The explanatory title said:

Rear-Admiral Levin of the Terran Navy congratulates

Lieutenant Siriwardene of the 5th Frontier Wing on her medal

London sucked air in. It was evident from the image that the medal was the Order of Mars, the Terran Navy’s highest military medal for a non-Terran.

“Nova! As you say, that’s some helluva story hidden in that ship, and I want to hear it.” He grimaced. “We probably have grounds to inspect the Phoenix based on the allegations made by Asman. That is, despite suspecting that Asman itself will need an inspection on charges of engaging in piracy.”

He shook his head. “The Phoenix simply isn’t as high on the priority list as the Sambuk and Corim, and we’re going to have to decide how to divide up resources. What about the Xian ships?”

“The ships themselves are almost certainly Xian’s hybrid naval/merchanter vessels. If they are, then according to recent Admiralty briefing bulletins I’ve seen, both will carry serious armaments, and their captains probably hold diplomatic credentials. The Yǒng is Huān Huò hong, and despite it only being a short ship, there’s a rumor the skipper is family.”

London groaned. “We have enough on our plate without a diplomatic incident and potentially insulting one of the largest trading companies in the Xian Hegemony. We’ll try to leave them alone.”

He was quiet for a moment, thinking deeply about his limited resources, range of targets and minimum returns. Sciarra waited patiently.

“Do you think you could command a group of Marines effectively, Lieutenant Sciarra?”

“Yes, sir.”

She didn’t have any problem with decisiveness, despite it being a complex question. Marine officers commanded Marine teams, and having a naval officer was usually regarded as a supernumerary at best and a burden at worst. But Sciarra knew that, and he knew she had the respect of the Nairobi Marines. And they both knew the composition of the Marines who’d joined them, Assault Company Delta, had been chosen for a training situation, not combat. They were rich on sergeants and short on officers.

“I will keep a reserve back with the Skeeter on the Nairobi, and split the rest between the two Rhino assault craft. You will lead one. The Rhinos will precede us, visibly into the middle of that parking orbit zone, and we’ll see if that shakes out a response from anyone in the suspicious six. In the meantime, the Wraith will head for the Carina covertly with a standard fire team, and examine it as closely as they can without revealing themselves. I need an excuse to board that ship, but they aren’t likely armed like the Sambuk and Corim. A fire team might open the hatch, and the Skeeter could take another couple of teams across.”

All three shuttles would arrive before the cruiser, being able to brake harder.

“Flexibility is the key. You’ll place your Rhino between the habitat and the orbital parking zone. The other Rhino will park between the Sambuk and Corim. Confirmation on targets will be made when we arrive in orbit with you.”

E24. Chapter 12

Jan

I’d prayed for a delay, and I got it as soon as we sat down.

It wasn’t what I’d anticipated, and a slap in the face for the complacency I’d felt when I thought I’d dealt with my crewmember’s ‘little’ family problem.

The door was flung open, and I meant flung. It crashed against the doorstop.

The woman who came through wore her strict, formal business clothing like I wore my combat suit, as if it was a defense against any attack. Behind her came attendants dressed in billowing, multi-colored silk clothing which I assumed was their traditional dress. And behind them, the guards who’d been placed outside to prevent unauthorized people from entering.

“There she is! That is the foul pirate who has kidnapped my nephew Prasad and is holding him as a slave on her ship,” she shouted. “Arrest her now! Impound her ship! I demand it!”

Jamie leaped up.

He knew nothing about Prasad, but he did recognize the powerful envoy from Rajatara.

“Sahiba Shantae.” He gave her a formal bow. “I am Consul Jamie Hamilton of Maynard’s Star. Although we are in the middle of an Inquiry, you are very welcome, Your Excellency, but I feel there has been a mistake in identification here.”

“Is this not Captain Skelling of the so-called merchanter Dark Phoenix? A pirate! In Xerxes space, as bold as brass!”

Jamie cleared his throat.

“I believe the current captain of the Dark Phoenix is called Shami Siriwardene,” he said, which at least made Shantae pause while he finished. “This is a former captain of that ship, which we assure you is both an upstanding naval vessel and an honest merchanter. By your leave, Your Grace, Your Excellency, it falls to me to introduce you correctly. Your Excellency, I have the profound honor to present Her Grace, Lieutenant Commander Janice Skelling of the Calloway Navy, Duchess Skelling of the Tarmann Isles, and Companion to Queen Lorraine of Maynard’s Star. Your Grace, Her Excellency, Sahiba Shantae, Director of the Chamakeela Commercial Conglomeration and Envoy Plenipotentiary of the Rajatara Star System.”

Shantae was puffed up with her importance and fury, but there were probably good reasons she’d been chosen as the envoy for Rajatara. I guessed that, prominent among those reasons, was probably an excellent memory for the relative ranks of trading star systems and their rulers. I could see Maynard’s Star and Queen Lorraine registered from the changes in her face.

But she didn’t become any less angry. She just hid it a bit better.

“Your Grace,” she managed to say.

I dipped my head and tried hard to speak diplomat. “Your Excellency, I am pleased to meet you. Your nephew, Prasad Mandhana, is a highly valued member of the crew of the Dark Phoenix, and is in no way enslaved.”

“Crew member?” The shock in her face suggested my attempt at being diplomatic had missed a little. “He is a son of the Mandhana family of Rajatara. They own whole fleets of long-haul merchanters. To even be an owner of such a ship should be beneath him.”

I could see her brain catch up with her mouth, and the implied judgment of my ship registered. She clearly thought it was too late to retract anyway and simply added a Your Grace, before starting again.

“What is he doing as employee of a minor merchanter? And besides that, given that the ship was here for trading, why did he not approach me? Under no circumstances that I can conceive would my nephew not have visited me, had he been free to do so. Why was he held on board?”

I bit my tongue before trying the diplomatic stuff again, and having to scrabble through my memories of my conversation with Prasad.

“As I understand it, Prasad’s time with the ship counts as part of the procedure of Jaishai, the personal journey young Rajatarans make before settling down. As to the visit, perhaps he should have messaged you, but our reception here in Asman has left my crew wary of venturing dockside, let alone visiting people.”

She blinked, and seemed to take stock of where we were and what that might be considered to mean about me and the Dark Phoenix.

We were both spared by Anakritis Mezares, who pressed some controls which turned one panel of the wall behind us into a comms system.

“Perhaps we can speak directly to the gentleman in question if that would speed things along?” he said.

“Delay in room 2,” Gunny murmured to me. “Isfahan hasn’t returned. More in a minute.”

I stood in front of the pickups as the screen showed a connection was being made to the Phoenix. When it cleared, the image showed Olivia, wearing her Phoenix brown and gold uniform, all an image generated by her.

“Phoenix comms,” she said. “Hello, Your Grace.”

“Hi, Olivia. Could you get Pras, please. His aunt would like to talk to him.”

“Of course.”

I was fairly sure that, once Mazares had opened a connection from this building to the Phoenix, Olivia was in their comms network and wouldn’t leave unless the habitat’s network hunters found she was there.

It was a great beachhead in the meantime.

It took a minute for Pras to arrive on screen. He was also dressed in uniform and looking wonderful. It didn’t help much with Shantae.

Their discussion was difficult to follow, partly because they slipped between languages, sometimes in the same sentence, and none of it was helping. Shantae became angrier and angrier. Prasad was only a Cargo Manager. He didn’t have people working for him. He didn’t have a standard employment contract with working hours, insurances and holidays.

I got pulled in to explain that independent merchanters ran things differently to Rajataran trading fleets, and the share of profits scheme which Thandi had drawn up for me was fair.

Pras was also getting angry, partly because he felt he couldn’t say exactly what he thought to a family elder, especially one as influential as his aunt.

Shantae rounded on me.

“You claim this is part of Jaishai, but this situation is completely inappropriate. I demand you give him back to me.”

I’d had enough.

“As I pointed out, he’s not a slave. I cannot give him to anyone. I’m not the captain of the ship anyway.”

“This ship is not right for him. His family sent him out on a ship that was perfectly appropriate for a young man of his standing to experience Jaishai.”

I snorted, and the diplomacy leaked right out of me. “I admit I’m not an expert on your traditions, but my understanding of Jaishai is that a young person goes out to see the universe as it is. There’s a problem with that. If all you’re going to do is ‘see’, then you might as well watch a holovid documentary in your bedroom at home. What makes more sense is that person experiencing what life is like outside of his comfort zone. To do that, you have to actually live a life as others do; others who don’t have the privilege of returning to that comfort zone. And as for that ‘perfectly appropriate’ ship? That was taken by pirates. We rescued Pras from them before they sold him as a slave, so I really don’t appreciate being called a pirate and slaver.”

Her face went pale. Her mouth opened as she turned to Pras, but she couldn’t seem to find the words to say.

“It happened as Her Grace has explained,” he said. “And I also agree with her that this Jaishai experience with the Phoenix is exactly what I need.”

Shantae was highly skilled and quick thinking. In seconds she had recovered and completely changed.

“I see your parents in you, Prasad. It is indeed very noble for you to insist on living like this. It will instill in you a great sensitivity to the conditions of those people who you will in future employ.”

She turned and bowed to me. “I apologize, Your Grace. My concern for my nephew caused me to say things I shouldn’t have. That is no excuse. I stand in place of his parents to offer you my heartfelt thanks and provide a reward for your actions that returned this young man to his family.”

“No reward to the Phoenix is necessary, Your Excellency, but thank you.”

I made a polite bow and stepped back.

Shantae hadn’t quite finished with Pras.

“You must at least agree to visit me for dinner before you depart, Prasad. I need to hear of everything that has happened so I can reassure your parents. I will send a flitter to collect you shortly.”

Prasad checked with Shami off-screen and accepted. He had a good game face, but I could tell how reluctant he was.

“I am so looking forward to this,” Shantae said. “By incredible coincidence, young Lakshmi Pandya is staying with me as part of her Jaishai. You know the Pandya family of course, the people who initially set up the Chamakeela Conglomeration. Such a credit to Rajatara, and such a lovely young lady. You will be enthralled.”

I withdrew a little more. It was that or burst out laughing.

“Seriously good save there, Skipper,” Gunny muttered in my ear. “While that’s been going on, Mazares has gone nova over Isfahan not turning up. The Inquiry has been delayed while he demands explanations.”

“That’s good news.”

“Yeah. Mixed news. Olivia’s hacked into the Asman main comms network through this node. She says there’s a lot of encrypted comms between Hamiraz members. She hasn’t cracked the codes yet, but she thinks these aren’t good signs.”

“What else?”

“That inbound Navy ship is worrying. It’s still not broadcasting what it’s doing or why, but it’s fired off a couple of Rhinos with Marines hitching, and a bunch of electronic spy drones and a Wraith, coming in all stealthy.”

I had to think. A couple of Rhino assault shuttles? A hundred Marines or more? And a Wraith?

“They can’t be interested in us,” I said. “That would be overkill.”

“Yeah. The Xian ships in orbit have been sending laser messages about the Sambuk and Corim without hearing any response, but the Nairobi has to be listening. The trouble is Olivia’s saying that Asman is also messaging the Nairobi, and it’s about us using AI to attack their systems.”

Not good news. The AI Accords were as powerful as the Piracy Accords. If they boarded us looking for an AI, they wouldn’t miss Olivia, no matter how well we disguised that central spine hideout for her.

Even if we now had a delay for the Inquiry, it just felt as if the situation was sliding out of our control, and the whole thing was about to blow up in our faces.

E24. Chapter 13

Bjorn

“Bjorn!”

I was on the Yǒng, on top of Phoenix’s old shuttle, working to get it ready.

The guy calling me was Bayu, the ship’s pilot who’d befriended me after I’d ‘come aboard’ so spectacularly in this shuttle, and his call sounded urgent, so I slithered down hurriedly.

“Bad news,” he said. “A ship inbound from Venture just arrived at the zenith and it’s squawking about the revolution there. It’s an Asman-based ship and the way the captain’s telling it, the Dark Phoenix caused the revolt.”

“Shit!”

Bayu knew what the plan was, and he knew what had to be done to get the shuttle ready.

“Shit is right,” he said. “This needs another day.”

“Which we haven’t got.” I grabbed a rag to clean my hands. “No time for anything else. We need to go now.”

He looked at the shuttle and back at me, eyebrows raised in question.

“Nothing is ever really ready,” I said. It was one of Gunny’s mantras. “We seal it and go. The captain of the Carina is starting to panic right now. He has a ship full of slaves and nowhere to take them. He’ll talk to someone on Asman first to cover his butt, but he’s going to kill everyone in the hold. They’re evidence. Only question is where and when he kills them.”

“Your call,” Bayu said. “I’ll get things moving. I guess… there’s no other way, is there?”

“None.”

He nodded and sprinted away, already talking on his pad.

I turned to the swarm of engineers. “Wrap it up as it is, guys.”

The electronics specialist shook his head. “The transceiver isn’t nearly ready.”

“Understood. I’m going without it.”

They all looked at me with that you’re crazy look. I was used to it.

“It’s your funeral,” muttered one, but they started the process of sealing things in place. The whole shuttle was going to leak, but it couldn’t be helped. It didn’t matter how it flew or how safe it was, it just had to be there.

Lǐ had patched my pad into the orbital traffic information flow that the bridge was monitoring. I checked the status. The Carina was still refueling from a bowser. Each bowser would carry about a quarter tank for a ship the Carina’s size, and they’d ordered two. They had to be nearly done with the first.

With this news from Venture, it was my bet they’d complete this transfer, and they’d refuse the next bowser, saying they’d miscalculated and had enough. Then they’d file an immediate departure plan, but they might have to wait a little while for a window. There was a lot of traffic. It could delay them anything up to an hour, but they wouldn’t complain too much. They would want to keep everything looking normal and routine as much as possible.

But that still meant we had only an hour or so, before the ship started to move.

Maybe less. And maybe they would just turn off life support to the hold.

And so we had to go now, with a contingency which Lǐ and Jessop had called outrageous and high risk. I thought that meant they sort-of approved. Dow certainly didn’t. Jan probably didn’t, but what she was doing was even higher risk.

No time. Never enough time.

I got a message from Jessop on the Xinghe. The Xian Marines were ready to go as soon as I was.

I messaged back. “Ten minutes.”

I ran to get suited up.

E24. Chapter 14

TNS Nairobi

Xerxes System, approaching Asman

“Skipper.” The bridge comms officer held up a hand as he finished listening to a message. “Merchanter ship just arrived from Venture. XCS Marivan. There’s been a revolution there.  They’re claiming the Dark Phoenix played a major part in it.”

London felt his heart sink. He’d wanted to be right about the Phoenix, and maybe he’d let that cloud his judgment.

Was it too late? He needed time to check, time he didn’t have.

“Keep me updated with any clarifications,” he said and called up the threat designation list on his primary display.

One ship squawking allegations didn’t make it true, but he had to acknowledge the possibility of a confrontation with the Phoenix, and a further consideration that it might involve the two associated Xian ships. With a sigh, he added the three ships as possible targets for weapons tracking.

The weapons officer signed his acknowledgement.

London’s display list also showed the other ships’ current statuses. The Sambuk and Corim, both of which were definitely pirates, remained in their parking orbits. The Carina was refueling.

Next to the threat statuses, he had a clock counting down to when the Nairobi would swoop alongside the Asman habitat. He’d eased off the load on the engines as much as he could on Nat’s recommendations. The ship was now braking at barely more than standard power settings. Less braking meant an earlier arrival, and a brief, much higher burn at the end, but Nat had suggested that might be a better configuration to nurse them along.

By now, the engines had developed a harmonic component to their distress, a pulse that peaked every couple of seconds, like the ominous beat of a distant drum. He had configured his crowded display to include engine monitoring indicators, a matrix of critical measures that would normally all be green. Amber warnings were starting to creep across the array.

He just needed one last burst from them to make stable orbit. Was that too much to ask for? Nat had two shifts’ worth of engineering staff down there, trying to diagnose and fix on the fly. Just get us there with enough to power the ship, he’d said to Nat, and then you can take a month to do a proper job on the engines with no pressure.

She’d grunted in reply.

The comms officer raised his hand again to attract London’s attention.

“Skipper, the Carina has cancelled their second bowser. The first one is nearly done, and they’re calling for departure clearance already. Requested schedule and status now on your secondary.”

He nodded acknowledgment. That moved the clock again. He didn’t want to chase any ships, especially the Carina, so he had to get there at least at the estimated time for the first bowser to complete.

“Nav, run the numbers for reducing another 10% on the engines and recalculate for us to arrive on the Carina’s most probable course to leave orbit.”

“Aye, Skipper. 10% off current braking and rework to insert in orbit blocking the Carina.” He cleared his throat. “That’ll require an increased final burn. Keeping it below 60% max will mean an eight-minute final braking maneuver.”

“Message the changed profile to engineering,” London said. “See if that helps.”

His secondary display showed the departure slot the Carina had bid for, and the comms officer’s best estimate of the one they’d get, based on traffic volume. A second later the Nairobi’s amended arrival time came up, based on Nat’s agreement to the changes.

All a very close-run race.

The secondary display also showed status on plasma cannons, reminding him that, although the remains of his port and starboard broadsides had some capacity charge, the dorsal and ventral guns were showing nothing, and wouldn’t until the Nairobi stopped maneuvering. As per his instructions, both turrets were warm, as if the cannon were primed to fire.

He’d never intended to use the cannons, but with so many targets, the likelihood of needing at least warning shots increased. And the pirates still hadn’t panicked.

Other than repeated queries from Asman traffic controllers and some barbed comments from merchanters, there was unbelievably little reaction to his stunt.

He’d rolled the dice and come up short.

On his first mission as bridge crew, as a lieutenant assigned to weapons control on the frigate TNS Ajax, he’d seen the captain use exactly this ploy. He’d come in hot on a clutch of suspected pirate ships, and they’d panicked. It had been London’s first action. One pirate destroyed, the remainder surrendered. A simple maneuver and a total success.

Times had changed.

Black and white were now gray. Pirates had deals with star systems. The Terran Navy had lost its menace.

And he'd picked a task his aging ship couldn't perform.

He contemplated putting in an official call for the Xerxes cutters to support him, citing the Piracy Accords. Would it clarify the situation? No. He was sure now that all Xerxes would do would be to order the cutters to continue with normal duties while they ‘investigated’ the allegations. They’d have to defend that inaction when the next Navy ship came calling, but the Admiralty would almost certainly have briefed their captain to not make waves. Nothing would come of it.

No.

He had to find irrefutable proof, and he had to do it right now, with a ship that was falling apart. There was a certain irony in the situation, that the one time Xerxes had made a mistake, and he had a wealth of evidence waiting for him to collect it, he didn’t have the capacity to act on it.

He could recall the shuttles and simply pass through Asman’s orbit, explaining the whole thing as a maneuvering exercise. Then he could limp home and hand his report to the Admiralty. They’d charge him with illegal spying, and he could threaten them with a release of his findings. That would blow up in everybody’s face, but it wouldn’t be proof. It would damage the Admiralty when it couldn’t afford it, and it would end up with him spending the remainder of his life in solitary.

Not appealing.

Which brought him back to finding the proof while he didn’t have a fully operational ship.

His laser comms channels were still open to the shuttles, keeping them updated. Now Lieutenant Sciarra was signaling for a conversation.

He spoke before she could.

“We may have been wrong about the Phoenix,” he said, but the lieutenant was talking already.

“Sir, whatever happened in the Venture star system doesn’t change anything about our analysis that Xerxes is some kind of nexus for what’s going wrong in the Margin and Frontier.”

“Yes, but this seems to indicate that the Phoenix and her Xian collaborators foment rebellions, or are you saying that there hasn’t been a revolution in the Venture system?”

“No, I can’t see any reason why the Marivan would outright lie about that, but equally, they may not be telling the whole truth. In any case, Venture was part of the Elergie Combine. From what we discussed, if the Phoenix helped Venture escape from that, then she’s on the side of the angels.”

“Maybe. I’ve still put the Phoenix, Yǒng and Xinghe on the potential target list. Not that we’ll be able to do anything about it if our engines don’t hold together.”

“The Nairobi won’t let you down, sir.”

Her cheerful optimism lifted him a little.

“There’s no reason to cancel your mission, Lieutenant, and I’ll see how flexible we can be with regard to our arrival in orbit and what we do afterwards.”

“Roger, sir. Continue as planned unless countermanded.”

London massaged his forehead.

The shuttles had launched before the Nairobi had begun decelerating. They’d shot ahead, safe in their ability to brake harder than the heavy cruiser. Two Rhinos with a hundred Marines, some of them hitching on the outside. An old Wraith with twenty more.

The Wraith would be in position well before the Carina powered up, but he’d sent the more powerful Rhinos toward the Sambuk and Corim, as the greater threats. But even the heavily armored Rhinos wouldn’t be able to prevent the pirate ships from escaping.

What if he redirected the Rhinos to the Carina? Ignored the two definite, and probably armed, pirates for the unarmed, slow, possible pirate? It seemed logical and felt wrong.

Lieutenant Vilhena, assigned to lead the Wraith’s Marine team, interrupted his spiraling thoughts with a simple message: Something odd happening around the Carina.

Very odd.

He pulled up a secondary display.

A beat-up old shuttle had exited the Yǒng’s docking bay and was making its way to the Carina. It was completely out of keeping with the gleaming perfection of the Yǒng itself; the shuttle looked as if it had been in a crash, and it was leaking air. The scan officer had designated it ‘XT1’; Lieutenant Vilhena’s Wraith was ‘S1’, and the two Rhinos ‘S2’ and ‘S3’.

The secondary display didn’t have the capacity, so he switched the situational awareness representation to the primary bridge holo-display, with triangulation from the data-gathering missiles he’d sent ahead.

Another message from Vilhena: Check out upper left quadrant of feed.

London zoomed in. The deep black of space and a scattering of distant, faint stars…

A star disappeared, and a short distance away, another appeared.

Viewed from space, stars didn’t even twinkle, let alone switch on and off. Something was occluding their light.

He increased magnification and sensitivity. Fainter stars became visible, and it confirmed there was something shuttle-sized closing on the Carina from behind. He squinted and his eyes seemed to fill out the shape.

Nova! There was another Wraith there, all but invisible, just as his was.

Without active scanning, he couldn’t get any more information, but he already had an Asman traffic controller making continuous complaints on the comms. Bringing up active scans would make that far worse. He’d get complaints from every ship in parking orbit.

Maybe that was exactly the way to turn up the temperature.

“Scan, track that Wraith. Designate it ‘XT2’.”

“Aye, Skipper.”

On screen, London saw the Carina’s fuel bowser was beginning the process of detachment ahead of schedule.

Comms updated the departure slot for the Carina. The Nairobi wouldn’t make it unless it spun around and started accelerating again.

He couldn’t let that happen.

“Scan,” he said. “Full active on all platforms. I want to know everything about the Carina.”

His display sharpened.

Three shuttles were converging on the merchanter. Lieutenant Vilhena in S1 would get there last. XT1 and XT2, the beat-up shuttle from the Yǒng and the other Wraith, were already there. XT1 was directly blocking the Carina’s path.

The comms board lit up.

“Multiple complaints from ships and habitat, sir.”

London waved it away. “Pipe anything from the Carina or that blocking shuttle to me,” he said.

Before the comms officer could do that, the scan officer broke in.

“Sir, active scans are now showing life forms in the Carina’s containers,” he said. “Almost certainly human.”

“Shit,” he swore under his breath. Even without all the other evidence pointing to the conclusion he’d made, this was uncontestable. No one travelled in a container. It’s a nova-damned slave ship! This is proof! Asman and the Carina.

He keyed his comm back to the laser channels for S2 and S3, both of the Rhinos. “S2, Lieutenant Sciarra, there are slaves on the Carina. You will proceed at best speed to Asman, overriding traffic control by quoting the Piracy Accords. You will land and take your platoons to the administration district and obtain access to their central communications servers. Locations will be confirmed to you. You will secure that facility, expel everyone else from it, and await tech specialists who will join you. Your mission will be to uncover those responsible for the Carina, and your weapons protocol is Delta-three.”

“Aye, Skipper.” Even across the comms link, he could hear the surge of eagerness in her voice.

The display showed her Rhino suddenly accelerating towards the Asman habitat.

“S3, Lieutenant Barra, continue to ship designated T1, best speed. You are to board her, quoting Piracy Accords. Your mission is to take control of that ship, clear the bridge and await tech specialists who will analyze her computer systems. Weapons protocol is Delta-four.”

“Aye, sir.”

The second Rhino swung around and darted toward the Sambuk.

He had a moment to wonder if Delta-four was an appropriate weapons protocol rather than the more cautious Delta-three. He shook his head and dismissed misgivings. If the Sambuk didn’t let the Terran Navy board after being warned it was under the Piracy Accords, then violence would be sanctioned.

“Sir.” London’s head swiveled to the scan officer again.

“Sir, scans indicate a single combat suit is hitching on the back of that old shuttle, XT1. There’s no one else aboard.”

What the nova?

He had no more time to wonder what that was about.

“T1 and T2 are lighting their drives,” the scan officer said.

“Weapons,” London said calmly, “launch two missiles in pursuit mode.”

“Aye, Skipper.”

The Sambuk and Corim were now being chased by controlled missiles which could overhaul them, but weren’t much good for retaining any proof that the ships were pirates if they blew them up. They were a desperate bluff.

“S3, Lieutenant Barra, reverse course. Place yourself under the command of Lieutenant Sciarra in support of her mission.”

Before Barra could acknowledge, the comms officer interrupted. “Skipper, comms between Carina and XT1 on channel 19.”

He switched over to hear a tirade from the captain of the Carina aimed at the pilot of the beat-up shuttle.

“T5 lit up and maneuvering, Skipper,” the scan officer called out.

T5. That was the Xinghe. The one potential target he really didn’t want to confront.

He didn’t have time to react before the Carina’s captain blustered to a temporary halt, and a different voice came on channel 19.

“I repeat, this is Duke Thorsson of the Tarmann Isles, Companion to Queen Lorraine of Maynard’s Star. I am aboard the shuttle in front of you. The Carina Augusta is registered to Maynard’s Star and is therefore subject to Maynard law. I require to board your vessel and reassure myself that it is conducting business in accord with all necessary Maynard regulations. You may confirm with Consul Hamilton on Asman that I have the requisite authority to inspect your cargo. He is standing by at this moment on channel 32. I will be boarding with deputies via your main hold personnel access, and we will do so in five minutes.”

London’s jaw dropped.

The shuttle started to close the distance while the Carina’s captain unloaded an expletive-laden rant. Duke Thorsson, whoever he was, didn’t respond.

“Nav…” London was about to ask the navigations officer to negotiate with engineering any engine management profile that would get the Nairobi alongside the Carina quicker.

The Nairobi suddenly shuddered.

For an endless second, everyone held their breath, and their startled eyes searched out the tell-tales scattered across all the displays. More amber, less green. Not good.

The Dark takes fools, London thought. Old fools in old ships, throwing themselves into Quixotic missions on the eve of retirement. Those kinds of fools.

“Nat?” he said as he stabbed the priority channel for engineering. “Nat, talk to me.”

“The Chief is on it, sir,” the wide-eyed young engineer who responded said. “Err… no information yet, and we will comm you as soon as we have it under control.”

To his shame, London couldn’t recall the boy’s name. He was the most junior member of the engineering team, the only one that could be spared to handle updating the bridge. Which meant there was something very serious going on.

He opened his mouth to order the engines cut, when they were anyway, with a shocking abruptness.

On his personal screen, monitoring the engine systems, the amber lights started to creep across into the greens again. And reds appeared.

In the silence, the ranting voice of the Carina’s captain on channel 19 warned the encroaching shuttle to clear out of the way.

The huge primary display showed the Carina’s engines were powering up. A masking panel slid back to reveal a plasma cannon barrel.

Then there was a thump on the Nairobi, a moment of weightlessness. Sheer terror. No one had their maneuvering restraints on. London was lifted out of his seat and then he was crushed back into it. Systems went down. Lights went off.

The backup kicked in.

It should do that automatically before the power goes down, London thought. Something is really wrong.

Systems started to reboot. London’s display of engine monitors went screaming red across the board.

London was aware he had broken ribs. He found he couldn’t move his right arm properly.

There was a crash. Acceleration compensators flickered again. A panel on the side of the bridge exploded in flames.

A warning siren started, and automated voices began to babble.

Explosion on the bridge.

That got cut off. Whoever was monitoring the damage assessment system realized there were more serious problems than a minor fire on the bridge that the scan officer was already dealing with.

Much more serious problems.

Explosion in the engine room. Damage teams D1 through 5 to the engineering level immediately. Warning. Warning. Explos—

He cursed in pain as he had to reach around with his left hand to cut the warnings off with a master override. He stabbed at the internal channel for engineering.

“Nat! NAT! Engineering, answer me! Anybody?”

Nothing.

The Nairobi was hurtling down towards the Asman orbit, unable to brake, unable to fire guns, barely enough emergency battery capacity to run life support and engage maneuvering thrusters at the same time. Natalie was in that explosion. And it was all his fault.

The primary holo-display flickered and came back up.

Just in time to show the plasma cannon on the Carina fire at the shuttle XT1, and a huge explosion tore that battered vessel apart.

AFTERWORD

Thank you for reading Book 4

from the series The Long Way Home.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

More will follow, obviously.

Feedback!

By email, or on the Facebook pages, or blog page

would be welcome.

Blog:

https://henwick.wordpress.com

Main SF Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100084665841200

Main UF page:

https://www.facebook.com/TheBiteBackSeries

Author general page:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1203689013307118

Meanwhile…

Read on for details of more Science Fiction

written by me and set in the same universe

(but much later)

AMONG THE STARS

1: A Name Among the Stars

2: A Threat Among the Stars

An heiress fleeing for her life. A forbidden and terrifying Artificial Intelligence let loose. A telepathic alien race secretly living hidden alongside humanity. A deadly conspiracy spreading through human space. The untold shame and sorrow of a whole planet revealed for all to see.

Vows that must be broken.

A love that cannot be.

Duty and honor.

A huge and developing story set in the distant future with a sweep that encompasses the whole of humanity, told mainly from the perspective of Zara Aguirre, daughter, and last of the great Founding Family Aguirre, who abandons her home world and the burden of her Name to save her life, only to find she must take it up again and fight on, to save humanity.

A review of Among the Stars by

Charles de Lint

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

“It's a delicious mix of the Brontë sisters, murder mystery, sf drama,

space opera, and just general romance and derring-do...

I could sense the joy of storytelling on every page.

This one hit the mark on every point.”

http://mybook.to/Among_the_Stars

Keep going for other books by me in a different genre…

BEST SELLING URBAN FANTASY THRILLERS

BITE BACK

Prequel: Raw Deal

1: Sleight of Hand

2: Hidden Trump

3: Wild Card

4: Cool Hand

5: Angel Stakes

6: Inside Straight

7: Queen of Diamonds

Charles de Lint

in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction:

"They represent some of the best the field has to offer."

http://mybook.to/Bite_Back_Series

More books? Yes, keep going…

Also from the BITE BACK universe

Characters from these books appear in the main series

BIAN’S TALE

1: The Harvest of Lies

Anticipated series of 6 books following Bian from her early life in 1890 Vietnam

to the point she becomes Daikon of House Altau, prior to the start of BITE BACK

BITE BACK: OUTSIDERS

1: The Biting Cold

2: Winter’s Kiss

A short novella series with a PNR flavor introducing the background of House Lloyd

This miniseries fits between books 5 and 6 of the main BITE BACK series

LONG ISLAND ATHANATE

Change of Regime

Stand-alone novella set between books 5 and 6 of the main BITE BACK series

providing some insight into House Altau in New York

Keep going…

NEWS and FEEDBACK

I have a monthly newsletter with information about progress on writing, feedback on sales and other news. I usually include some free writing, either as a downloadable file or a link to a blog page.

The first three books of The Long Way Home were provided, episode by episode, with my newsletter as downloadable files, and both the Among the Stars books were first released, a few chapters at a time, on my blog.

‘How do I get these goodies’?

Newsletter signup:

https://mailchi.mp/27afed3e7c0c/mark-henwick-scifi-newsletter-signup

Blog:

https://henwick.wordpress.com

You can also keep in touch on my Facebook pages:

Main SF page:

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100084665841200

Main UF page:

https://www.facebook.com/TheBiteBackSeries

Author general page:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1203689013307118

I welcome feedback!