Assegai

by S J MacDonald

  He was, however, anticipating difficulties of another kind at Karadon. It was supposedly a secret that they were coming here, and Dix had said that he’d lay diversionary trail, but Alex knew only too well how tenacious his pursuers were. The media, activist groups, even members of the public who’d got so fired up over Quarus that they followed him around in a frenzy of fandom. All, he felt sure, would be awaiting him at Karadon, the station itself packed out with journalists and hundreds of ships spinning in orbit, like a web waiting to catch him.

  As it turned out, he was to be surprised on both counts. As they approached Karadon it quickly became apparent that there was, in fact, no great horde of ships in orbit there.

  Alex hadn’t seen it that quiet in years – not since his own operations here had put an end to the station being used as a hub for intersystem drug shipments. Every time he’d called here since had been an Event, with the media sending hundreds of journos here to cover the story and every activist group which could muster the funds sending at least a couple of representatives to wave placards in front of the cameras.

  But here, today, there was none of that. The only ships in orbit around the biggest station in deep space were the liners scheduled to be there right then, forty or so freighters and perhaps twice that number of yachts. Many of them were in the short-stay orbits indicating that they were only calling in for freight, supplies and a few hours aboard the station. A perfectly normal day at Karadon, therefore.

  Min held out her hand palm upward towards her executive officer, without looking at him, and when the exec slapped her hand lightly in the traditional ‘pay you’ gesture, grinned. It wasn’t a financial bet, of course – the Fleet would not tolerate that on a regular ship – but a purely nominal virtual ‘dollar’ which would never actually be paid. The exec, evidently, had been of the same opinion as Alex, that the media would figure out where they were going and be waiting for them in force. But there was nothing – only the one little camera-fitted craft which all the channels maintaining teams on the station shared the funding and use of.

  The Assegai, requesting parking orbit, was assigned to a place out in the eighth circle, along with the solitary Fleet ship and the Customs and Excise vessel currently stationed here.

  The ship – the corvette Herring – was a sister ship of the Minnow, the silverfish-class corvette which had been Alex’s own first command. It had evidently been recently upgraded, with the new design of comms arrays, heavier guns and more powerful thrusters – innovations which Alex himself had pioneered on the Minnow. That, after all, had been part of his remit when he was given the command, to look for ways in which that class of ship’s performance could be improved during its remaining years of service. It would be another five years before the next generation of silverfish corvettes began building.

  The Herring was on a prestige assignment, here. ISiS Corps, under the new management of Davie North, had set aside centuries of conflict with the League government and allowed the Fleet not only to board the station for the first time in living memory but even to base a ship here. The role of the ship, officially, was to support the station in keeping Karadon drug free. Unofficially, it was also understood that the ship would be tapping into the resource of spacer goss to pick up any intelligence as to how those crates of drugs were being shipped around now that Karadon was not available.

  The first attempt at doing that had been embarrassingly awful. The Admiralty had sent the Minnow, evidently in the hope that its association with the Fourth would inspire confidence. And they had put it under the command of another young go-getter, the officer who’d graduated top cadet the year before Alex and was himself tagged – being pushed through the ranks on an accelerated promotion scheme – and flagged, expected to rise into flag rank and end his career high in the Admiralty.

  After he’d offended the station management, alienated the spacer community and mishandled the media, Harry Alington had been withdrawn from that assignment and sent to serve with the Fourth, a humiliation which had come close, Alex knew, to breaking him. But he’d pushed through, learned, grown, and found talents even he’d never realised. He was currently riding high on a recent promotion to Captain, himself, after the huge success of an assignment on Telathor.

  Since the disaster of his efforts at Karadon, though, the posting had become both sensitive and so important that only the best of their skippers got the posting. The Herring and the Customs and Excise ships fired salutes as the destroyer came into orbit. The Assegai returned salute, exchanged orbit data with the station’s flight control, and waited.

  Nothing happened. No frenzy of ships and shuttles hurtling at them, no barrage of calls. For a whole minute, it was as if nobody on the station had even noticed their arrival.

  Then Quill Quilleran called. He called Alex directly, using the call-code which took him past security and admin filters to get straight through to his wristcom.

  ‘Hey, Alex!’ he greeted him with a grin and a wave. ‘Good to see you!’ He didn’t pause, but went on, ‘A little surprising to see you, but good!’

  ‘Likewise,’ Alex grinned back. His old friend had put on a little more weight, he noticed, filling out that expensive business suit, but he was looking good on it. He was a very different figure now from the skinny cadet Alex had met when they’d shared quarters at the Chartsey Academy. Quill’s career in the Fleet had been brief, transferring into a far more comfortable life as an officer with the White Star liner company. And since Davie had hired him as director of Karadon, he’d become every inch the beautifully groomed corporate executive. ‘All very quiet here!’ Alex observed.

  ‘It wasn’t, last week,’ Quill said, with feeling. ‘The circus was in town! But they were convinced you weren’t coming, so they all cleared off again.’ He looked at Alex with a combination of admiration and some reproof. ‘I only found out this morning, myself, that you were coming,’ he said.

  ‘Ah.’ Alex realised that Quill himself had been misinformed so that he, in turn, would convince the media that they were waiting here in vain. Which, indeed, he had. The media had systems which could analyse micro-signals far more accurately than Alex could with the naked eye, and they were experts in detecting deception. So when Quill had stood in the full glare of cameras and declared on his word of honour that the Assegai was not coming to Karadon, the media had seen that he was speaking the truth. And when the Assegai had not turned up within three days of when the media had expected them, they had abandoned the station en masse. And where the media went, of course, activists and public chased after them.

  ‘I thought you were going to Flancer,’ Quill told him, and with another hint of reproach, ‘I’ve written to you there.’

  Alex laughed. So that was where the media pack had gone, either heading back to their homeworlds or racing to Flancer in the hope that they’d arrive in time to get in on the story. There were, indeed, a couple of hundred people at Karadon enjoying an extra week on the station and generous compensation for having given up their tickets to journalists wanting to travel on the Red Line ship to Flancer which had left five days before.

  ‘Anyway, you’re here!’ Quill’s smile broadened, with a hint of wicked glee. ‘So – reception at 2000?’

  ‘Oh, noooo!’ Alex implored, with a heartfelt, ‘Do you have to?’

  ‘You know I do,’ said Quill, with a prim note. ‘More than my job’s worth not to.’

  Alex could only laugh. ISiS Corps had given him the freedom of all their stations at a time when Fleet personnel were still not allowed to set foot on them, and even now they insisted on a high degree of ceremony whenever he visited. The Admiralty was in full agreement with them, too, telling Alex that it was important both to demonstrate and to promote the good relationship established now between ISiS Corps and the Fleet. So there would, inevitably, be a reception in his honour, the very least that Quill could get away with under his own orders from ISiS Corps HQ.

  ‘I know,’ Alex sighed. ‘But if you could try
to ensure that nobody throws a drink in my face this time, it would be appreciated.’

  That was a teasing jibe, since nobody had been more mortified by that incident than Quill.

  ‘I will stand by you,’ Quill assured him, with an air of noble sacrifice, ‘and be ready to throw myself in the way if anyone mobilises champagne in your direction.’

  ‘My hero,’ said Alex, and they both laughed. ‘And supper afterwards?’ He invited. ‘My place?’

  ‘Delighted,’ Quill said, and was. He would have been thrilled even by the opportunity to see aboard the Assegai – still very much a spacer at heart, and always would be – but it would be great to catch up with Alex, too, with all the things they could only talk about in private. ‘And we are,’ he promised, ‘braced for Silvie.’

  Alex gave a little snurge at that. Silvie had been to Karadon just once, nearly two years ago now. She’d made Davie take her there while Davie was bringing her out to meet the Fourth. She had, Quill had told Alex in a subsequent letter, had much the same impact on the place as his own operations there, which had turned the station, almost literally, upside down. Having forced its evacuation, and during the course of live-fire boarding operations, the Fourth had reversed gravity throughout the station and pumped it up to high gee. As a means of disorienting and disabling the drugs gang who found themselves crawling about on the ceilings, it had worked very well. Unfortunately it had also flung every loose object on the station up onto the ceilings, too, and since it turned out that the majority of shops on the massive duty-free shopping plaza had a rather relaxed attitude to grav-safe shelving and the like, the resultant mess had had to be seen to be believed.

  Silvie might not have left the station physically trashed, but there’d been all kinds of other chaos, including reducing the station’s star chef to a state of incandescent hysteria.

  ‘Even Marto?’ There was a note of concern in Alex’s voice, for all its light heartedness. And that concern, it had to be said, was as much for himself as it was for Silvie.

  Marto had latched himself onto Alex during the Karadon operations – he had been deeply, deeply affected by the revelation that Cadet Officer von Strada had found a teenage girl dead of a drugs overdose in the Subter levels of Chartsey. As moved as he was appalled, he had got behind the Fourth’s anti-drugs operations here with the fervour of a crusader, declaring Alex to be a hero, his hero.

  He had cooked for him, as he had put it, wonders and delights. And he had embraced him, too, publicly, with rapid kisses which Alex, at the time, had considered about as embarrassing as it could get. He had underestimated Marto, though. Even months later and light years away, the chef had managed to embarrass him mightily. It had turned out that the anonymous gift of shares in a vintage yacht which Alex had thought was some kind of attempt to subvert his integrity had actually come from Marto, in a poorly thought out but well intentioned attempt to please him.

  ‘Oh, Marto!’ Quill said, with a guffaw, his eyes alight with laughter. ‘You should have seen him, when it came on the news that Silvie is the quarian ambassador!’

  None of the people at Karadon had known that. Even Quill himself had only been told that she was a VIP under Davie’s escort.

  ‘Shrieking?’ Alex asked.

  ‘Fainting,’ Quill said. ‘I mean, for real, not just for the benefit of cameras. Then there was shrieking – a lot of shrieking, for a very long time!’ He laughed again. ‘And he will be shrieking right now, for sure. You really will have to let me take you to the Temple, this time.’

  He’d been trying to get Alex to have dinner at Marto’s restaurant since his first visit here, but Alex had always managed to evade it. And he had every intention of doing so now.

  ‘Oh – we won’t be here that long,’ he said. ‘It’s just a touch-and-go.’

  Actually, they were scheduled to be here for two days, picking up Skipper Eldovan, taking on supplies and giving the Assegai’s crew a five hour pass to stretch their legs off the ship. They would also, of course, be picking up their orders telling them where they were to go next, naturally a matter of intense speculation on the destroyer.

  ‘Really?’ Quill was surprised, and even as he spoke, Alex could see why. He was in his own quarters, using a comm screen on his desk, with all the usual side and sub-screens he was used to working with. A message had just flashed up from his adjutant, coded so important that it would appear even when he was on a private call.

  Skipper Eldovan not aboard the station; expected aboard Rose Voyager from ISiS Kavenko, booked on Cartasay Empress to Chartsey.

  The dates of both liners arriving and departing were given, quite unnecessarily since Alex knew liner schedules in just the same way as any city dweller knew the routes and times of their own transit system. Liners were the only constant in the spacer world, the only ships which ran to rigid routes and timetables. When they changed, that was news in the spacer community. So Alex knew that the Rose Voyager was one of the elderly ships pulled out of retirement to cater for the massive upsurge in demand for tickets to Telathor. Actually, the demand was for tickets to Carrearranis, but they were in extremely short supply, only one liner allowed in port at a time and at that under tight restrictions.

  Most people, therefore, would get no further than Telathor, a world which had previously been unmarketable as a tourist destination. It wasn’t merely the remoteness or the discomfort of the rough space ships had to traverse to get there, or even the humid climate with a bioshock index so high that tourists were pretty much assured of vomiting or passing out in their first hour or so on the planet. The thing which really put people off were the insects. Even spacers, contemplating a world in which swarms of billions of biting midges were the norm and in which sparrow-sized wasps would be buzzing about them, did not regard Telathor as a desirable destination.

  Now, though, it was different. Tourists – a certain breed of tourists, anyway – were willing to gulp down bioshock meds and spray themselves with insect repellent for the glamour of having been to Telathor. Wealthy socialites were keen for dinner-party bragging rights, while hordes of back-packers came in search of Adventure.

  The liner companies were doing their utmost to accommodate them. Ships like the Rose Voyager ran as far as ISiS Kavenko, the nearest transit station to Telathor. Other ships then ran ferry services between the station and Telathor itself, with a small number of liners operating between Telathor and Oreol, the mid-way base which had become an adventure destination in its own right, and only the authorised liner between Oreol and Carrearranis itself.

  Making a journey from Carrearranis to Chartsey by liner, therefore, would involve changing ship at Oreol, Telathor, ISiS Kavenko and Karadon itself – a long, slow, four months of travelling altogether.

  Eldovan, however, was travelling fast. She had been expected to go as far as Telathor on any of the official ships shuttling back and forth, since space conditions meant that even couriers couldn’t travel that route any faster than a liner was allowed to. At Telathor, though, a courier had been put at her disposal to bring her out to Karadon, where she would be picked up by a Fleet ship passing through en-route to Chartsey.

  That schedule had evidently been discarded. If she’d followed it, Eldovan would have arrived at Karadon eight days ago, receiving orders there that she was to await pickup.

  Instead, evidently, she was aboard the Rose Voyager, which was not due to dock at Karadon until the end of the following week.

  Alex was astounded, and for many reasons. Fleet personnel in general would do almost anything to avoid travelling on liners, preferring to hitch rides on freighters or even endure the hideous discomfort of travel on a courier. Even in normal circumstances, travel on a liner was awful, travelling with the kind of passengers spacers called Human Cargo. If they found out you were Fleet, too, they would make your life a misery with their endless questions and their all too vocal uninformed opinions. He couldn’t imagine, really, that an officer like Eldovan would travel aboard a liner b
y choice. And she was on her way, too, to a highly prestigious and important assignment, already on her way to work with the Samartians long before the Assegai and training group had been arranged. She would, for sure, want to get to Chartsey by the fastest means possible. Alex would have expected, indeed, that she would have asked for a berth on a courier from Karadon to Chartsey, too, shaving a day or two off the run.

  But there it was, confirmed by records provided by both Red Line and White Star, that she was booked aboard the Rose Voyager as far as Karadon, with a ticket – first class Gallery Suite, Alex noted – aboard the Cartasay Empress.

  That was as luxurious as it got. The Cartasay Empress was one of the newest ships in the White Star line, operating the prestige route between the capital and the ISiS flag station. Gallery suites were the most expensive, too, with private verandas onto a promenade overlooking the first class leisure deck. Alex himself would rather have bunked down in a corner of the hold than endure the kind of company those quarters would inflict, and he found it hard to believe that Eldovan would have accepted it, either.

  ‘Eldovan isn’t due till the end of next week,’ Quill told him, as Alex was absorbing that information from his adjutant’s message. ‘And I gather you’re supposed to pick her up?’

  Alex nodded. He didn’t tell Quill that they had Samartian officers aboard, nor would he. Quill had nine ack alpha clearance, of course, and was perfectly used to handling high-sensitivity visits. But even knowledge of the League’s relationship with Samart was tightly controlled by need-to-know, and the presence of their delegates in League space was so locked down that it wasn’t even a rumour on spacer goss.

  ‘I was expecting her here,’ he agreed, but left it at that. Others would be just as surprised as he was and Min, for sure, would already have people finding out what was going on. ‘But I am not,’ he said, with that decision making itself, ‘going to hang around here for a fortnight, Quill. Fifty hours, and ffffft!’ he gestured to indicate that the Assegai would be departing at high speed, and Quill chuckled.