A seventh officer stood in the gravity zone in the same body armor. The man had removed his helmet and holstered his weapon, but his eyes were suspicious as he studied David and his companions.
“Captain Rice?”
“That would be me,” he confirmed.
“You have prisoners for us to take into custody?” he snapped.
“Ivan.” David gestured for his Security Chief to hand over the mercs. There didn’t seem to be any fight left in the men, and they both followed directions out into the loading bay, where cops took hold of them and guided their manacled forms through the zero gravity.
Four of the cops remained behind Lieutenant Soun, their weapons still leveled.
“How else may I assist you, Lieutenant?” David said carefully.
“I also have a list of members of your security detail that will need to be detained until we’ve completed our investigation, and we will need to lock down the affected area,” Soun barked. “No one can be allowed on or off your ship or the chunk of station the incident took place on until we’ve fully reviewed the situation.”
…that was not what David had been expecting.
“I believe the right of my security team to use lethal force in defense of my ship is firmly established,” he told the cop flatly. “I will not be surrendering any of my people to your custody.
“You will have to establish access to our cargo with Cobalt Interstellar,” he continued. “You have no grounds to lock down my ship at all.”
Soun smiled thinly.
“This is not optional, Captain,” he said calmly. “You will either accede to my requirements or I will arrest you right here and now. By your own admission, six people died on your ship.”
“In a firefight they started,” David pointed out. “The right of a starship crew to defend themselves and their cargo is well established.”
“Then I am certain that your crew and ship will be free to go quickly enough,” Soun told them. “But my orders are clear—”
“And unconstitutional, Lieutenant,” a new voice interjected. David looked up to see who had interrupted, but the speaker was a stranger to him.
The man was broad-shouldered with neatly trimmed gray hair, clad in a plain black robe of some kind and a dangerously calm smile as he strode along the gravity runes.
“I beg your pardon?” Soun demanded.
“I am Aubert Caron, Barrister at Law for the Desdemona System, expert in Protectorate and interstellar law,” the newcomer reeled off brightly. “I must admit, an attempt by DesSec to further delay the arrival of Cobalt’s parts is suspicious, given the fines to be collected by the system government in the case of late activation.
“Regardless, however, I was retained by Ms. Lauren to make certain there were no…complications with regards to Captain Rice’s crew,” he continued. “So, I repeat my original comment: the demands you have laid on Captain Rice are unconstitutional, a violation of his rights to self-defense, free movement, and security against illegal search.
“My client will be pleased to allow for DesSec investigators to sweep the smelter core—once it has been off-loaded from Captain Rice’s ship and we have begun the assembly process.”
“You can’t just waltz in here and override my orders,” Soun snapped.
Caron smiled and held out his hand.
“Then where, Lieutenant Soun, is your warrant for search and seizure?” he asked calmly. “For such extraordinary assertions of authority as you have made, you must surely then have a court order to back you up?”
The lawyer’s hand didn’t tremble. He held it out, palm up, in the magical gravity field for ten seconds. Fifteen. Thirty.
Then, without a word, Lieutenant Soun turned on his heel and barged past Caron.
The robed lawyer shook his head once the DesSec troopers were out of the docking bay.
“Captain Rice, I hope I arrived in time?” he asked.
“Well, none of my people are in irons and I haven’t had to shoot my way out of the system yet, so I’d say yes,” David agreed, looking after Lieutenant Soun. “What the hell was that?”
“Another piece of the puzzle,” Caron said calmly. “I’ve made some quiet arrangements. Lieutenant Soun will not be keeping custody of those mercenaries.”
“You think he’s involved in the attack?”
Caron shook his head again.
“Captain, I am starting to fear that my government arranged the attack,” he admitted. “The penalties Cobalt will have to pay if the refinery doesn’t come online on schedule are…substantial.
“They would provide quite a slush fund for the Desdemonan government.” Caron sighed. “One hates to think ill of the government of one’s system, but that is quite the temptation. Your prisoners will end up in the hands of officers I trust to see their duty done, regardless of orders from on high.
“With that said, however, I suspect that Lieutenant Soun and his allies will have only limited difficulties acquiring a warrant to temporarily intern your ship. I have advised Ms. Lauren to arrange for the fastest possible unloading, but you are in danger of becoming a pawn in this game so long as you remain in the Desdemona System.”
David considered his ship’s status as a Martian covert ops vessel. An attempt by the Desdemona government to intern Red Falcon would draw far more attention to their little game that they probably wanted, but no one would work that out until after the fact.
And it would be too obvious.
“Megafreighters don’t really…move without cargo,” he pointed out. “I’ll have to see what I can find.”
“Look quickly, sir Captain,” Caron told him. “We’ll off-load as quickly as possible and I’ve already set into motion several legal measures to protect you, but we’re talking about a potential conspiracy inside the system government.
“There is only so much protecting one law firm can do, even with Cobalt’s resources behind us.”
“I understand,” David replied. “Thank you, Mr. Caron.”
It seemed that he was going to have to be less subtle than hoped in making his connection here.
10
“Greetings, Captain. Call me Ishmael.”
David Rice stood in the entrance to the cheap trinket shop in Puck Station’s bazaar and studied the man standing behind the counter. He was one of the many humans in this day and age that couldn’t be traced back to a single ethnic group on Earth, with skin a mixed tan color and startling blue eyes.
“Greetings, Mr. Ishmael,” David replied. “I’m told to look for Caleb Abel here.”
“Ah, Abel,” the stall proprietor agreed. “Come in, come in, Captain. Close the door.”
“How do you know I’m a Captain?” David asked. He wore a plain business suit today, much the same as a good half of the people wandering the bazaar behind him. He listened to the strange little man, though, stepping inside the stall and closing the door behind him and Soprano.
“You can see it in a man’s eyes if you know how to look,” Ishmael told him. “His eyes and how he stands. Plus, well, I pay attention to who docks at this station, Captain Rice.”
“I see,” David allowed. He shared a meaningful glance with his Mage, who shrugged.
She clearly thought she could get them out of whatever trouble this man could create. Having seen Maria Soprano in action, David agreed with her assessment.
“And Mr. Abel?” he asked after a few moments’ silence.
“Abel is dead,” Ishmael said flatly. “Suicide, they say.”
“‘They’, Mr. Ishmael?”
“DesSec coroner, in this case,” the stall-keeper said quietly. “Don’t blame them; the evidence all added up that way. Unless you had context.”
“That’s…unfortunate,” David told him. “Though it leaves me wondering why I’m here.”
“Caleb Abel had many names. Under all of them, was an idiot,” Ishmael responded. “Smart man, brilliant man in many ways. But an idiot. He tried to play too many sides against the middle.
For your purposes, Captain Rice, suffice it that it was not Legatus that killed him, and the cargo he was supposed to put you in touch with remains idle, waiting for a ship to haul it.”
David studied Ishmael carefully.
“And how do you know all this, Mr. Ishmael?”
“I was Abel’s handler for MISS,” the little man replied. “Other things, too. Personal, professional, romantic.” Ishmael shrugged casually, but his eyes turned to ice as he spoke. “I’m still culling down my list of who may have killed my lover, Captain Rice, but believe me: you should be happy you’re not on it.”
David shivered.
“I won’t argue that,” he said. “My cargo?”
“Seventeen point five million tons of raw ore, destined for the smelters at Legatus,” Ishmael told him. “Transshipping to a vessel flagged under Integrity Galactic Transport at Junkertown—the primary orbital around Junkrat in Snap.”
“Seems odd,” David noted. “Why not ship directly to Legatus?”
“Two reasons. One, IGT is one of the companies licensed to transport directly to Legatus. They have a regular line between Snap and Legatus, but they never come to Desdemona. Minor MidWorld, not big enough for them.
“Two, the shipment is actually seventeen hundred and sixty ten-thousand-ton containers,” he continued. “IGT knows what happens to the extra ten; you won’t need to worry about it.”
David held up a hand.
“I don’t do no-questions-asked shipments anymore,” he pointed out.
“So far as the official client is concerned, you do. Understand?” Ishmael asked. “But yeah, I know.”
“So, what game are we playing?” Soprano asked. “If the client thinks we’re not asking questions…”
“You don’t ask the client, Mage Soprano. You ask me, and I tell you, and the client never knows you know.”
“So, what are we hauling?” she asked before David could.
“Gems,” Ishmael said flatly. “The authorities here were accidentally tipped off that someone was trying to smuggle an illegal gems shipment out; that’s what kept the cargo held up until there was no one here to haul it. You’re the first ship since with the capacity to carry Mr. Wu’s cargo.”
He shook his head.
“Mr. Wu thinks he’s smuggling gems for monetary value,” he continued. “Ninety percent of the gems you’re hauling are just that: jewelry and industrial uses. Buried inside them, however, are ten thousand tons of crystals of sufficient grade for combat-rated laser optics.
“Mr. Wu is a smuggler of long standing here, and Legatus is using him as a proxy. We don’t know where those optics are going, and from what little brief I got, tracking them isn’t your problem.”
Ishmael shrugged. “Presumably, someone is tracking them. I’ll make sure that Mr. Wu is aware of your presence and cargo capacity before the end of the day.”
“We’re in a hurry ourselves,” David admitted. “Reaching out directly here was a secondary option if the main plan failed, but we didn’t have time.”
“I didn’t know the main plan,” Ishmael told him. “So, it’s a good thing you went straight for the backup. Wu will be in touch. If anything else comes up, let me know.
“In the meantime, however, people are going to wonder why you were in my shop. Buy a whelkie?”
Ishmael gestured at an array of hand-carved wooden statues beside David.
“Believe me,” he added with a wicked grin, “they’re expensive enough that people will believe we spent this long arguing over the price!”
“How long until we hear from Wu?” Soprano asked as they made their way back through the bazaar, the Mage’s gaze flickering around, watching for threats.
“Hopefully not long,” David replied. “From what Ishmael said, he’ll be desperate to move this cargo before DesSec keeps poking at it—but we still need to finish off-loading Cobalt’s gear.”
He looked around. The bazaar was in the rotating portion of the station, kept at three-quarters of a gravity, and seemed to glow with an amazing mix of colors and smells. David had seen a thousand bazaars like it, though, and he had a feel for the patterns now.
And he didn’t like the one he was seeing.
“Cops coming from the left,” he murmured to Soprano. “They’re probably not looking for us, but I think grabbing a bite at that restaurant over there is a good plan.”
His Mage followed his lead as they slipped into an “open-air” patio. He tucked them against a wall as the server brought them menus, keeping an eye on the crowd.
They’d barely begun to peruse the tablets before he spotted the burgundy uniforms and clamshell armor, identical to the troopers who’d met them at the docking tube. A different officer led them, though, and he relaxed for a moment.
Only a moment. The cops were looking for somebody. It wasn’t a regular patrol—people were moving away from them too deliberately, too quickly, for it to be a normal thing.
“They won’t see us,” Soprano murmured to him. “I’m blocking their view. Just in case.”
Having a Mage along was useful far more often than he expected. They watched in silence as the armed cops swept by, relying on Soprano’s magic to be safe.
Then the waitress reappeared to take their order.
“Is it normal to have entire squads of armored cops wandering through the bazaar?” David asked. “Seems…strange.”
The woman shook her head.
“It is strange,” she agreed. “Not the first time lately, though. Normally, there’s only about thirty, forty DesSec guys on station, but they tripled their strength a month or so ago.
“Nobody’s talking about why,” she concluded. “Bad for business, though, when they’re being that obvious. What can I get you?”
One decent, if not spectacular, meal later, they returned to the ship. Something in the tone of the station had clearly made it into Skavar as well. Normally, most of Red Falcon’s counter-boarding defenses were kept under wraps.
Today, four armed security troopers in the same style of clamshell body armor the DesSec cops were wearing stood around the entrance. Where the guards would normally be carrying stunguns, today they carried battle carbines with under-barrel stunguns.
Still nonlethal if they chose to be, but the carbines themselves were a pointed threat—and the tripod-mounted penetrator rifle they were alternating sitting next to was a reminder all on its own.
“Any trouble?” David asked.
“None so far,” the team leader replied. “Some of the burgundy cops wandered by to take a look, but I think they got the message the Chief was after.”
“It’s not a subtle message,” Red Falcon’s Captain noted.
“You’d be surprised. The fire team behind us is in exosuits.”
David chuckled.
“I wish I could say Ivan was being paranoid,” he said. “But…this is making me twitchy.”
“You and us both, Skipper,” the Marine replied. “Coming aboard?”
“Yeah.”
The guards waved them through, keeping a careful eye past them.
“Hmm.”
“Corporal?”
“Just noticed that there’s a young lady over there who I’ve seen before,” the Marine said quietly. “A few times. I think she’s circling around to keep an eye on us. Where there’s one spy…”
“There’s more.”
“Yep. We’ll keep an eye out, but I think you need to assume everyone leaving and boarding this ship is being tracked.”
LaMonte was waiting on the bridge when David and Soprano returned, rising from the captain’s seat as they came in.
“Everything’s under control, Skipper,” she told them. “Cobalt’s people started linking about twenty minutes ago.” She gestured to the screen. “First of the big segments is coming off as we speak.”
On the main screen, David could see the idling engines of at least a dozen dockyard tugs attached to the main smelter core, the component that had been their biggest hea
dache all along.
LaMonte leaned back to the chair, tapping a control.
“Tug Lead, this is Red Falcon. We’ve released all clamps and connections. Segment One is yours.”
“Confirming release; we have control of Segment One,” the tug captain replied. “Initiating synchronized burn in fifteen seconds.”
The engines on the dozen tugs lit up brighter and brighter, slowly pushing the massive station component away from the megafreighter. The farther they got, the brighter the engines grew, until the tugs were accelerating the smelter at one gravity.
“One down, six to go,” David muttered. “Plus two hundred damn containers.”
He shook his head.
“Was Skavar keeping you in the loop on our doorway situation?”
“Yes,” LaMonte confirmed. “I reached out to the local MISS office with one of our covert drop codes. They may not know why, but they’re poking into the kerfuffle around Soun trying to arrest us.”
“That’s risky,” David observed. It was already done, so there was a limit to the degree he could undermine his XO, but…
“Calling them in to help watch Falcon was my first inclination, but that would definitely be risky,” LaMonte told him. “And if I told them what was going on, that would be risky,” she agreed. “I had them come at it the other way—I pointed them at the Cobalt fees and the risk that the government was trying to basically extort the company.”
She smiled.
“I may have left our MISS friends with the impression that Mr. Caron had the drop code,” she admitted. “Give them something to look at when they get curious. So far as I can tell, Caron is aboveboard, so that’s safe enough.”
David chuckled.
“Fair enough,” he allowed.
Their covert drop codes were one-time command sequences that basically told the local Security Service station that the attached “suggestions” were to be regarded as orders at the highest level. In theory, they were dumped through the system network and untraceable.
In practice, MISS analysts were obsessively curious and were almost certain to find out who had used the code. They wouldn’t tell anyone, they were almost as reliably discreet as they were reliably curious, but each person who knew what David’s ship actually was was an increased security threat.
Mage-Provocateur (Starship's Mage: Red Falcon Book 2) Page 7
