Captain James Heron: First into the Fray: Prequel to Harry Heron: Into the Unknown of the Harry Heron Series

by Patrick G Cox

  Commodore Enescu’s new employer was a front for Interstellar Protection Services (IPS), one of several companies engaged in building a fleet of ships to rival that of the World Treaty Organisation Fleet. Her flagship was one of the newest they possessed. Officially registered with the Earth registry as a protection vessel, she was actually a heavily armed cruiser equal to a Fleet vessel of the same class. Commodore Enescu’s squadron included six more of these vessels and ten converted freightliners carrying a full division of infantry as a garrison, a wing of aerial support fighters and strike craft, and ground transports.

  “Everything is prepared for your landing, Commodore.” The speaker was a heavily built man in the uniform of an IPS Security Operative. “The elections went as we intended, and Governor Kodiak is now re-installed. The Colonial Assembly has a majority of our people on it, so there should be little in the way of resistance.”

  Leandra frowned. “Resistance? I hope not. My orders were to deliver a standing force to protect the populace. Why would they resist?”

  “Oh, you know how touchy these colonists are about their rights. You should have been here for the election campaign.” The man laughed. “I suppose they’re too proud to admit they need our help. I don’t anticipate any major problems, though we might face pushback when we have to expropriate the sites we’ve identified as the locations for our bases.”

  “Right, I see what you mean. As I understand it, the Board wants to establish a base for our operations and an administrative HQ for the Interplanetary Consortium and the Johnstone Research facilities.” She smiled. “Sounds like you’re going to be tied up with some heavy construction for a while!”

  “Already started. Once we have a suitable hole in the ground, installing the prefab modules is easy. Once we have the troops landed, I’ll show you round one of the facilities if you like.”

  “I’d appreciate that. I need to stretch my legs on terra firma again.”

  “But that’s the location of my meat-fungi culture plant!” Marcus Grover glared at the man seated in front of his desk. “I can’t just move it. It takes months to set up cultures like that.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Mr Grover, but that entire ridge is expropriated. Johnstone Research has been given the go-ahead to build a major research centre there, so your culturing plant will have to move.” The man’s smile was emotionless and insincere. “You’ll receive some compensation, of course, but that is for the Governor and his advisors to determine.”

  “But … I mean, why here? And why there?” Marcus felt as if the ground had been cut from beneath him. First the massive increase in his shipping costs meant he was only just covering all the expenses, and now this. It didn’t help to know that he was not alone in being hit like this. “Surely a research facility could be anywhere! There’s a whole damned planet to choose from. Why here? Why on New Caledonia? And why that spot right there with the whole island to choose from?”

  “Come, come, Mr Grover, you and I don’t have to know all the answers. If it helps, all I know is that the spot was chosen because some of the research to be done there needs the special conditions that you exploit so successfully.”

  “But this will put me out of business! How am I supposed to maintain production when you walk in here and tell me I only have days to move culture tanks that will take months to replace! And that’s just my tanks! What about all the other equipment I have there? I have orders for the next four months! None of the cultures up there at the moment are due to reach maturity inside of a week. Moving them now will destroy everything!”

  The man shrugged. More drama from the locals. He was so bored of it, but he had a job to do. “I’m sure you can find a way, Mr Grover. You could always apply to the Governor, of course, but Johnstone’s want to start their excavation in four days’ time. It’s a large and complex facility, and it will provide employment and a market for you once it is operational. Think of it as an opportunity, Mr Grover. I’m sure your customers will understand.”

  Marcus barely noticed as the man stood and departed his office without another word. His mind was in a whirl. He had a plant to move and a business to save. A taste of bile rose in his throat. He’d heard these new corporate operators were doing this sort of thing elsewhere. One incident in particular had made the news. Grover’s expression was grim as he recalled the mining cooperative that destroyed its own mines in protest then retreated into the interior to regroup and plan their revenge. Eighty-seven years his family had been here, eighty-five of them on New Caledonia. They’d built everything they owned, and made a decent living out of it. Then came the Interplanetary Consortium. First their people gained control of the banks, then other industries, and finally the shipping and transport.

  And now this. Now it was personal.

  He sat for a few minutes and worked out how he was going to move his culture vats without spoiling or poisoning the contents. At night, that had to be the time. Where to? Fred Esterhuisen had a dome he wasn’t using. It wouldn’t be ideal, but he didn’t have much choice. Four days. It was going to be close, but they could get the job done if his friends pitched in to help.

  “Welcome to Pangaea City.” The man was overweight and rather florid of complexion, and seemed to always have a few beads of sweat on his forehead. “I’m Governor Kodiak, and these are my advisers.”

  “Glad to meet you, Governor.” Leandra extended her hand and cringed inwardly as she anticipated the rather damp handshake. “Beautiful planet. Are you descended from the original settlers?”

  “No, no, Commodore! I don’t have that honor. I arrived to look after the mining operations for Consolidated Minerals, and, well, sort of got sucked into the political side. But where are my manners? Allow me to introduce my friends.” His all too familiar hand at her back, he steered Leandra toward a very smartly dressed woman. “Ms Ceasescu, my legal adviser, and hopefully soon my Justice Secretary. Colonel Downs, Head of Police, and Mr Brigden, my adviser on Corporate and Community relations.”

  Shaking hands with each in turn, Leandra Enescu got the feeling these advisers were the real government of Pangaea, but kept the thought to herself. She was being very well paid to protect their interests. What happened on the planet was not really her concern unless it came under the heading of defending it from an attack.

  “I’ve a small reception laid on for you, Commodore, so you can meet the Assembly Members and some of the corporate managers.”

  The interior of the dome stood in stark contrast to the planet outside. Here a variety of adapted Earth plants provided greenery and a park-like feel among the groups of internal structures, some evidently offices, others residential.

  “Our Assembly Chamber is over there, and the Members’ Office is to your right.” Governor Kodiak kept up a running commentary as they walked toward the Governor’s Hall. Other pedestrians passed without comment or greeting, a factor Leandra put down to the heavily armed escort swaggering along on either side of the group. She’d learned a lot in the last few months about the organisation she worked for, and some of it made her uneasy, but in the main she agreed with the Consortium’s political agenda.

  The reception had an air of unreality about it. Everyone seemed delighted to welcome her ships and the ground forces.

  They seem almost too pleased, she mused, but kept her expression neutral.

  “It’s such a relief you people are here!” a Councillor told her, pumping her hand so enthusiastically that she wanted to wrench it away. “The colonists are so resistant to change, even when we can demonstrate to them how much more efficient our proposals are.”

  Leandra noted a tiny bit of food stuck in his teeth, and cringed. The man had evidently made good use of the buffet bar.

  Leandra’s smile implied scepticism, but only to an astute observer. “Hopefully there won’t be any need for our troops to engage in enforcement activity. If it reaches that stage, it seldom wins hearts and minds, you know.”

  “Of course, of course, but there a
re some hotheads here. One or two have been very busy inflaming opinion since the Governor reassigned some of the mineral and mining rights—some were simply not being efficiently exploited by the holders, and others were under capitalised—but you can’t reason with these people!”

  “I see.” Leandra wondered what the dispossessed claimants had been doing with their claims. Still, not her problem in the end. “Well, we’ll do our best.” She paused, catching a signal from across the room. “You’ll have to excuse me, Councillor. I see the General wants a word.”

  “Our forces are installed on Pangaea, Chairman.” Consortium Admiral Wu tapped his tablet. “General de Witte has distributed the troops across the three finished bases and has the other two well advanced.”

  “What about the Command and Administration centre for the Board?”

  “He reports the chosen location is an island called New Caledonia. The main excavations are completed now, and the installation will commence as soon as the prefab construction materials are delivered to the location. He estimates two months to install it, four with the installation of the Johnstone Research Lab facilities above it. The landscaping and terraforming to hide the entire facility and install the anti-scanning screens will take it to around six months, which will also cover the installation of all the necessary equipment.”

  “Good, good. Everything seems to be well on track.” The Chairman steepled his fingers. “The island is secure? What of the colonists?”

  “We considered moving them, but that would draw attention to the fact the island has significance to us. We decided it would be better to install our own people alongside them to keep them from potentially betraying what we have there. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, and all that. The island is primarily an agricultural outpost, most of it now owned by Interplanetary Agri-Corp, with a few smaller independent producers. They are reluctant to lose this fight. A displaced population would arouse suspicions, and we don’t want that. Leaving them in place prevents that.”

  “As long as it doesn’t threaten our research centre.” The Chairman paused. “On the other hand, it provides cover, so that works in our favour. How do they move the produce?”

  “By sea. Originally they used cargo vessels of a displacement type—simple hull, large capacity, but slow—but these proved to be unwieldy when a fast getaway was needed to escape the very large and aggressive sea creatures known as the pleurodon. Now they use fast sea-skimming vessels.”

  “So the people on this island are dependent on sea transport? Do they travel much off the island?”

  “Not a great deal, sir. It is a rather small community, and they don’t see much need to visit anywhere else.”

  “Good, good. All the better. Easier to control. I shall leave it to General de Witte to decide how to ensure these colonists don’t reveal the location of our installation there.”

  “Good to see you, Leandra. How’s the new ship behaving?”

  “First class, sir.” Leandra Enescu took the chair offered. “The Ventnor is easily better than the Fleet units of the type.”

  “Good to hear. We’ve had to revise our build programme, but we should have our first starship in six months. She’s a modified Vanguard, bigger hangar and launch bays, more capacity for landing craft and so on. One thing we won’t have is a weapon that we know Fleet have been working on, but we haven’t been able to get details. No matter.” He grinned. “We do have another little advantage. It’s a gizmo that makes the ships invisible to scanners and nearly so to any visual detection.”

  “I heard about that. Fleet have been developing it for years. Who convinced them it doesn’t work?”

  Bob Gratz tapped his nose. “You’d be surprised who we have embedded in Fleet Technical Development. Plus, of course, owning WeapTech meant our people had control of the data.”

  Leandra Enescu chuckled. “I wondered about a lot of our colleagues. Do you think this can work? It’s a pretty radical idea—government by commercial industrial Boards directing policy behind the scenes?”

  Bob Gratz shrugged his shoulders. “If it takes power away from paper shufflers and filing clerks and gives it to the technocrats, I reckon it can’t be worse than what we have now with politicians who know very little and understand even less about what they are supposedly doing.”

  “True, but there are some aspects of what our employers are doing and want to achieve that bother me.”

  “Nothing’s perfect, Leandra. Look at it this way: if it helps bring in some of the changes the Earth population and the colonists need, I’m for it, and if our employers fail, at least we tried.”

  Her recent visit to Pangaea in mind, Leandra nodded. “Hopefully it won’t come to outright war. I gather the Chairman believes they can manipulate the politicians into letting the Board pull the strings and run things through them.”

  “I hope they’re right, but I think there will be some resistance.” He shrugged again. “Nobody willingly gives up position and power.”

  Chapter 6

  Interference and Espionage

  Mr Brown surveyed the assembled team leaders and deputies, pleased to see they all appeared relaxed and alert. His day had been useful. He’d met the people in his ‘opposition’ files, and thought he now had a better idea of the threat they and their activities might pose.

  “Everyone here?” He confirmed the answer with a sweeping glance at the faces present. He made a point of knowing all his officers and as many of the warrant officers as possible. Some of the more junior operatives might have been surprised to know that he had read each man and woman’s file before assigning an operation and approving an appointment.

  “Good, then let’s begin. We have two objectives: to ensure that our ships are built and delivered, and the contractors don’t sabotage the project or delay it by diverting components and equipment necessary for the construction and fitting out.” He paused to study their faces. “The opposition are building a fleet, and we’ve good reason to suspect that they are diverting equipment and components from ours to their own builds.”

  “Have we proof of that, sir?” The question came from a woman halfway down the table.

  “Yes, circumstantially. We now have people in place to find the concrete evidence of it. That’s not your main concern, but if you do find anything, I want it passed on immediately. Make no mistake, they have some good operatives. We’re not up against amateurs here. They have as professional a team as you are, and they have an advantage: they’re recruiting a lot of officers and rates from the Fleet, people who know our systems and who probably know some of us.”

  “Who are ‘they’, sir?”

  Mr Brown spread his hands on the tabletop. “The organisation is called the Consortium. We believe they are the money behind the public group known as the IPC and others, but we still need proof. They also have links to some groups on our terror watchlists. Suffice it to say that ‘they’ are a sort of background organisation that directs or controls a whole raft of corporations, which in turn control others that control others—you get the picture.” His gaze swept the table. “Among the interests they control are DockCorp, WeapTech and SecuriCorp, as well as Colonial Protection Group, which runs Colonial Defence Services, and Interplanetary Development Corp.”

  One of the older men let out a low whistle. “Bloody hell, boss. They must have control of just about every security provider on Earth and in the colonies! How did that happen?”

  “A lot of people either took their eye off the ball, or they’re complicit.” Steepling his fingers, he added, “Did I mention they control most of the media as well? They do, hence the constant stream of disinformation about how bad the Fleet is.” He paused. “Now you know what we’re up against. Nick has your individual team tasks. They’ll overlap in some areas, but warn your people to liaise where they need to. No slip-ups, people. We can’t afford to drop the ball on this at any point. One more thing before Nick takes over.” He paused. “This ship will be armed with a new
super weapon we’ve been developing in secret. M Branch are going to be assembling the new weapon on Vanguard in the next few months. Officially it is on the schematics as a high penetration scanner, though anything scanned with it will wind up as a dispersing cloud of atoms. The opposition will be making concerted efforts to get their hands on this weapon, of that we can be sure.”

  Commander Mary Allison was not amused. She and her small team were trying to get one of the ship’s primary propulsion units to give the rated output. Over two full days each test they’d run had failed to achieve more than seventy percent of the rated power. Now she was poring over the specifications and the component manufacturer’s handbooks. Her team were busy inside the unit, tracing and identifying each and every component and checking it against the specification.

  “It has to be down to something underperforming,” she told her second in command. “According to the specification, everything in there should be rated for a hundred and twenty percent of requirement to allow a margin, but we can only manage to get seventy percent.”

  One of the TechRates emerged from the housing he was inspecting. “Ma’am, I’ve got sixty-three components in here not in accordance with the spec or the drawings. The spec says this one.” He held up a power unit he’d uncoupled. “Should be sixty terawatt, and it is supposed to be a BR-Five-Five-Eight-Six-Six-W, but this is a BR-Five-Five-Five-Eight-Four-F, and there’s a whole slew more like this.”

  “What the hell?” Commander Allison exclaimed. “Have you marked these on the drawing or the spec?”

  “Yes, Commander.” The TechRate nodded. “Got them all here.”

  “Anyone else finding this sort of thing?” she demanded of the rest of the team.