Solfleet: Beyond the Call

by Glenn Smith

  She pulled a small card from her blouse pocket and read, “You have the absolute right to remain silent. You do not have to answer my questions or say anything. If you choose to waive that right, anything you say can and will be used as evidence in an administrative hearing, a criminal court-martial, or both. You have the right to consult with an attorney before questioning and to have an attorney present with you during questioning. This can be a military attorney assigned to you, at no expense to you, or a civilian attorney that you arrange for at your own expense, or both. If you choose to waive any or all of your legal rights, then later wish to invoke those rights, you may do so at any time.” She looked up at him. “Crewman Omar Al-Sharif, do you understand your legal rights as I have explained them to you?”

  “Yes I do.”

  “Regarding your right to remain silent and not answer questions, do you choose to waive or invoke that right at this time?”

  “What do you mean by waive or invoke it?” he asked.

  “To waive it means to give it up,” she explained. “Waiving the right to remain silent and not answer questions or say anything means you’re willing to talk to me and answer whatever questions I might ask you. Invoking that right means you want to remain silent and not talk to me or answer my questions.”

  “Oh. I’ll answer your questions I guess,” he said, shrugging his shoulders again.

  “Regarding your right to consult with an attorney before questioning, do you choose to waive or invoke that right at this time?”

  Al-Sharif harrumphed and looked away. “A lot of good they’ve ever done for me,” he mumbled. Then he looked back at her again and said, “I don’t want an attorney.”

  Anxious to help himself. Good. She could use that, too. This interview promised to be a very fruitful one. “All right. Regarding your right to have an attorney present with you during questioning, do you choose to waive or invoke that right at this time?”

  “I just said I don’t want an attorney,” he answered impatiently. “Can we just get on with this, please?”

  Very anxious to help himself. “Fair enough.” She slipped her card back into her pocket and then picked up the handcomp, turned it off, and returned it to its storage place. Then, with the formalities out of the way, she leaned in a little closer and got right to the point. “Not too long ago someone deposited a very large sum of money into your payroll account. Then, two nights ago, after a second large sum was deposited, you went to Little Green Manny’s and passed a data-chip containing detailed personnel information to someone in no way affiliated with the fleet. So tell me, Omar. What exactly are you involved in?”

  He drew a breath to answer, but suddenly hesitated as a puzzled expression appeared on his face. Then he looked her in the eye and asked, “Wait a second. What am I involved in? You mean... You don’t actually know if I’ve done anything illegal or not?”

  Jennifer backed off, just a little. “Oh, I know you’ve done something illegal,” she assured him. “For starters, that data-chip you passed off is government property. By taking it from your workplace and giving it away, you’ve stolen it. And by giving away the information that was on it to the person you did, you’ve unlawfully disclosed official information to someone who’s not authorized to have it. What I want you to tell me is who put you up to it and why they want the information in the first place.”

  “That’s all you’ve got, Agent Barrett?” he asked, growing cockier by the second. “Theft of a chip barely worth five feds and giving away a list of names that anyone who knows how to talk to the computer could’ve gotten for themselves?”

  “Selling, not giving,” she reminded him, maintaining an air of calm despite the fact that he was obviously on the verge of closing his mouth for good. After all, she held all the aces in this hand. “And for a very large sum of money. You’ve profited well as a result of what you’ve done, Omar, and you stood to profit a lot more. That makes things a lot worse for you. Especially in the eyes of any military judge qualified to preside over a general court-martial. And to answer your question,” She leaned slightly toward him again, “no, that’s not all I’ve got. I’ve also got the guy you passed the chip to and everything he’s told us. Another agent’s interrogating him as we speak, and he started singing like a canary over an hour ago.”

  “I don’t believe you, Agent,” Al-Sharif declared. “As a matter of fact, I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about or anything else to say to you.”

  Jennifer sat back in her chair again, gazed into his suddenly defiant eyes for a moment, then told him, “We have a bet, that other agent and I. He believes your contact will keep talking until he tells us everything we want to know before you do. That way he helps himself out and lets you take the hard fall for him. I, on the other hand, think you’re too smart to let him do that to you.”

  Al-Sharif actually grinned. He clearly believed that he had the upper hand. “I was right, Agent Barrett,” he said. “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

  “We have the chip he took from your pocket, Omar,” she reminded him.

  “What chip?” he asked defiantly. “I don’t know anything about any chip. Some guy stuck his hand in my coat, so I told him to get lost and that was the end of it. If you found some kind of chip on him that he wasn’t supposed to have, that’s his problem. He didn’t get it from me.”

  “Your D-N-A is all over it, Omar.”

  “Must have been planted there. Like I said, he stuck his hand in my pocket.”

  “That wouldn’t...”

  “You know,” he said a bit louder, talking over her, “now that I think about it, I remember I felt something else at the same time. Like a scratch or a pull on the back of my neck. He must have scraped my skin or plucked a hair or something. I bet that’s how he got my D-N-A.”

  Jennifer snickered and shook her head. “You’re not a very good liar, Omar.”

  “I’m not lying, Agent Barrett. It’s no secret I’ve made enemies on this station. Someone’s trying to set me up.”

  “You think you have an answer for everything, don’t you.”

  He shrugged his shoulders again, but with a very different attitude behind the gesture. “You said you wanted answers.”

  “True enough.” She stood up and stepped away from the table, purposefully turning her back on him. She let him sweat for a few moments—she didn’t believe for one second that the frightened, teary-eyed kid who’d been sitting there when she walked in was suddenly feeling as confident and self-assured as he was pretending to feel—then told him, “Your contact tried to murder my partner after he left Manny’s. Did you know that?” He didn’t say anything. “What do you think the penalty is for being an accomplice to the attempted murder of a Solfleet C-I-D special agent? Especially when that attempt is made while committing an act of espionage and treason?” She let him ponder that one for a few moments, then very methodically turned to face him again, approached the table, leaned in close, and looked him dead in the eye. “What do you think the penalty will be if she ultimately dies?”

  He tried to hold his ground and maintain eye contact with her, but faltered quickly and dropped his gaze to the tabletop... and swallowed audibly. “Can’t be any worse than the penalty for espionage and treason,” he replied, his force a little weak and raspy.

  Jennifer straightened, gazed down at him for another moment, and then returned to her seat. “Sure you don’t want to be the first one to tell us everything we want to know?”

  She spent the next hour talking to him—listening to him sing, to be more accurate—then concluded the interrogation when it became clear that she’d gotten all she was going to get out of him. Afterwards, she got him a glass of water—a flimsy foam cup actually, so that he couldn’t break it and use a shard to cut his own throat—then walked out front and asked the receptionist to call Security Control and have them send a patrol to take the prisoner to the brig.

  “Jennifer,” Boucher called to her as the recept
ionist made that call. “The C-O wants an update on your case.”

  “Be right there, sir,” she replied. She nodded her thanks to the receptionist and then went to Commander Ansara’s office. His door was open, so she knocked twice as a courtesy and then leaned in and asked, “You want an update, sir?”

  “Agent Barrett,” he acknowledged as he looked up from a handcomp he’d been reading. “Yes I do. Come in. Have a seat.”

  Jennifer complied, then waited for him to set the handcomp aside and prompt her to start. When he didn’t, she began on her own. “Crewman Al-Sharif waived his rights and confessed, but I didn’t get much more than that out of him. He told me his first payoff was for a complete set of deck plans to this shipyard and a detailed rundown of the ships docked here. His second was for the chip with the list we recovered, but we already knew that.”

  “Did he tell you who’s he working for?” Ansara asked.

  “He claims he doesn’t know, sir. I went at him pretty hard, but he didn’t budge an inch on that. Maybe another agent should give it a try and...”

  “That won’t be necessary,” he interrupted, raising a hand to silence her. “Not for the time being anyway. Who knows? Maybe Al-Sharif really doesn’t know who he’s working for. Did he say whether or not he knows why they wanted the information?”

  “Again, he claims he doesn’t know. Says he just did it for the money. The only other info I got out of him was that at some future date they were going to ask him to provide the most up to date traffic schedules possible and a list of all the ships in long-term dry-dock here.”

  Ansara considered it all. “The facility’s deck plans, personnel records, traffic schedules, berthed ships. Sounds like I’d better give the S-I-A a call.”

  She knew it! She knew they should have notified Intelligence! She wanted to tell him that she’d tried to get Boucher to do that earlier, but Ansara and her supervisor both would likely see that as disloyal on her part, so she wisely kept her mouth shut. Instead she asked, “Would you like me to call them, sir?”

  “No,” he answered, shaking his head. “S-O-P requires that I contact Admiral Straczynski myself, directly. That’ll be all for now, Agent Barrett. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, sir.” She stood up and turned to leave.

  “Oh and, Jennifer?” he called after her.

  She stopped and faced him again. “Sir?”

  “I assume you visited Ashley this morning. How is she?”

  “Still pretty weak, sir,” she told him. “She woke up for a couple minutes, but was still pretty groggy. I think they have her doped up on painkillers.”

  “Probably,” he agreed. “But she woke up. That has to be a good sign.”

  “Next time I go see her, I’ll tell her you asked about her.”

  “Thanks, but I’m going to see her myself in a little while.”

  A commanding officer who really cared about his people. It was a nice change. Jennifer nodded to him. “Sir,” she acknowledged, and then she left his office.

  Chapter 16

  Rear-Admiral Josephine M. Straczynski, Chief of the Solfleet Intelligence Agency, sat in one of her six matching teal upholstered chairs over in her office’s informal conference area with her shoes off and her feet propped up on the low, oval falsewood table, reading through the file that Mars C.I.D. District Chief Commander Ansara had forwarded to her earlier in the day for what had to be at least her fifth time. She believed in being thorough and in committing as much information as possible to memory, so she’d probably read it at least a few more times before she finally set it aside. She had also discovered a long time ago that she could think more clearly sitting there in one of those comfortably cushioned chairs than she could sitting behind her desk. She didn’t know why that was the case, since the chair behind her desk felt every bit as comfortable as the set of six did, but it was what it was and she tended to sit behind her desk as little as possible.

  As she read the end of Special Agent Jennifer Barrett’s recently updated progress report again, she found herself in complete agreement with Commander Ansara’s assessment—not too bad, considering he wasn’t a trained investigator himself. There definitely was a real possibility of espionage, though God only knew what Al-Sharif’s mysterious benefactors were up to. Their needs were, to say the least, most unusual. That worried her.

  She switched off her handcomp and set it down on the seat of the chair next to her, then slipped off her reading glasses and sat there for a moment with her eyes closed, gently pinching the bridge of her nose. She was tired, but not just from reading the same file over and over. No, her fatigue ran much deeper than that. After struggling and worrying and overworking her way through so many years of war, she had hoped the current ceasefire might afford her a chance to relax the agency’s posture, at least a little bit, but the reality was that the exact opposite had occurred. Now her agents not only had to keep their eyes on what the Veshtonn might be up to, they also had to try to watch the Earth’s own citizens to make sure no one tried to take advantage of the situation and inadvertently reignited hostilities. Her workload had actually increased.

  She thought briefly about reading the file again, but then decided that she needed to rest her eyes for a while. Reading handcomp screens had been growing more and more difficult lately and she was beginning to grow concerned that her eyesight might be getting worse. Perhaps she should start printing everything out and working off hardcopies instead.

  She set her glasses down on the table and then stood up and walked over to her desk and tapped the intercom. “Ariel, are you there?”

  “Yes, I am,” her secretary’s voice answered from the ceiling speaker.

  “Would you raise Commander Ansara from the Mars Shipyards C-I-D on the secure line please?”

  “Right away.”

  “And when I’m done with him, connect me to the local F-B-I office, please.”

  “Will do, Admiral.”

  “Thank you, Ariel.”

  Ariel was a lovely girl in Straczynski’s opinion, though the poor girl did seem to have a problem when it came to her romantic relationships. She was young, vibrant, friendly, and full of energy. And she was pretty, with china-doll pale skin, natural ginger hair, and always glistening jade-green eyes. Actually, she reminded the admiral of a younger version of herself, except that in her opinion Ariel was a lot prettier than she had ever been. Come to think about it, she was growing into a prettier woman than her mother had ever been as well, and her mother had been quite pretty. Yup. Sooner or later she’d find the right man for that young lady.

  By the time Straczynski walked around her desk and sat down, her secretary had reached Ansara and put him on standby, as evidenced by the small flashing green light in her monitor’s upper right corner. “I have C-I-D Commander Ansara standing by, Gramma,” her lovely image reported. “I mean... Admiral.”

  “Thank you, sweetheart,” Straczynski replied, smiling in spite of herself. While it was certainly more professional for her granddaughter to call her ‘Admiral’ or ‘ma’am’ while they were at work, she never let the occasional slip bother her. Besides, she kind of liked being called ‘Gramma’ now and then amidst all the ‘Admirals’ and ‘ma’ams’ that people threw her way every day. It reminded her that she actually had a life outside the office.

  Ansara’s image replaced Ariel’s on her screen. “I take it you finished reviewing the file, Admiral?” he asked without preamble.

  “First of all, Ron,” she began, ignoring his question for the moment, “from one agency chief to another, please call me Michelle. I don’t stand on formalities.”

  “I’m the commanding officer of a district office, Admiral, not an agency,” Ansara pointed out. Then he canted his head slightly to one side, much like her little Scottish terrier tended to do when it found something odd or curiously interesting, and added, “Besides, I thought your first name was Josephine.”

  “It is, but I never liked that name very much,” she told hi
m, still grinning over his head tilt. “I’ve used my middle name informally all my life.”

  “Then Michelle it is,” he acquiesced.

  “Thank you. And yes, I’ve finished reviewing the file.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think you’re right, Ron. I think we should look into this further.”

  “I thought you might.”

  “The information they’ve been trying to collect is basically benign on the surface and that worries me. I mean, if they were after tech manuals or the schematics of a new generation jump engine, or the launch codes to an advanced strategic weapons system or something like that, then I’d understand. But this? Deck plans to your facility and the names of everyone who lives and works there? Traffic patterns and the names of the ships in dry-dock there? It doesn’t make any sense, which tells me this thing probably goes a lot deeper than we suspect at this point.”

  “Maybe someone’s trying to get some idea of how badly they might hurt us if they attack the place?” Ansara suggested.

  “I don’t think so, Ron,” Straczynski opined, shaking her head with doubt. “I’m not ready to rule that out completely yet, but I really think there’s a lot more to it than that. I mean, if that were the case they wouldn’t need so many details. The yards’ overall population figures would be every bit as useful as having all the names. Same goes for the ships. Having an overall count by class would be just as good as having all the names and registration numbers. And the traffic patterns? I should think ‘busiest time’ would be good enough if all they wanted was to know what the best time to hit the place would be.”

  “And if attack and destruction is their goal, then why on Earth would they need the deck plans?” Ansara added along that same line of thought.

  “Exactly,” Straczynski affirmed.