The Rylerran Gateway

by Mark Ian Kendrick

  The chime on his comm next to the bed stirred him from his reverie. He reached over and looked at the display. He didn’t recognize the name or the number and almost decided not to bother answering it. Something told him to bother.

  He sat up and pressed the on icon. “Lieutenant Commander James-Po,” he said quietly.

  “Darreth?”

  Darreth didn’t recognize the voice. “Who is this?”

  Darreth heard a muffled voice say something to the caller then the caller answering in equally muffled tones.

  “Who is this?” Darreth asked again, becoming frustrated. If he didn’t get an answer this time, he would simply press the ‘end’ button.

  “Name’s Traig. I’m a friend of Naylon’s. I’ve got some information you want. But you have to meet me.”

  Instantly, Darreth was wide awake. “You know where Naylon is? What about my brother?”

  “I don’t know any of that.”

  “Then why are you bothering me?” he demanded.

  “I need to meet with you about the smear campaign.”

  “What smear campaign?”

  “The one directed against your father, you and the rest of the Council. Can you meet me?”

  What? “Where.”

  “There’s a building named The Triangle on…”

  “I know that building.”

  “There are two back doors. One has a blue light above it. I’ll be in there.”

  “How do I know this isn’t a trick?” he growled suspiciously.

  “You don’t. But I can tell you this. If you don’t get the info I have you’re going to be in worse trouble than you already are.”

  Darreth smoothed back his hair. This is crazy, he thought. “When?”

  “An hour. We know you’re at your parent’s place. That’s why we chose a building close by.”

  “You have the code to a door in The Triangle?”

  “Of course I do. It’s the back door to my father’s office,” Traig told him flatly.

  Darreth entered the proper code on the entry pad next to the back door forty minutes later. The door silently slid open. Expecting a dark interior, he was surprised to find the entryway well lit instead. This was the back end of an office all right. To the left was a bathroom. To the right was a glass door revealing some computer equipment. The rest of the hallway wasn’t lit. He saw a man who appeared to be somewhat younger than him at the far end. Traig beckoned Darreth into a room off the corridor.

  Darreth may have been grounded but he still had his stunner. It was holstered but he had deliberately left the safety off in case he needed to pull it out quickly. He started down the hallway. As he approached Traig, he noted right away that the man didn’t look threatening in any way. Darreth instantly relaxed, then yawned. After all, it was one o’clock in the morning.

  “In here,” Traig told him as he entered the room.

  Darreth entered a large conference room behind Traig. Inside, two other people were already seated around a circular table that could easily seat eight. They were Alista Kosovil and Traig’s girlfriend Grevi.

  Traig extended his hand. “I’m Traig Maverol.” He pointed. Alista. And Grevi.” They both introduced themselves.

  Grevi started doing the talking right away. “We’re sorry this sounds so mysterious and all, but we have some very important information. Believe me, we’re all sleepy, but we felt it was far more important than waiting to tell you in the morning.”

  “Tell me what,” Darreth asked a bit impatiently.

  “Your life is in danger.”

  “Is that all?”

  “You don’t care about that?” Grevi asked, quite surprised at his reaction.

  “My life is in danger every time I go into space. How is this day any different?”

  Traig shook his head and immediately upped the ante. “It’s because of the plan to secede.”

  Darreth felt as if the heat were rising in the room. How could they possibly know about that? It was supposed to be a Council secret, and at that, only a few people on the Council were even discussing it. He had barely heard about it from his own father.

  “What do you know about any plan to secede?” Darreth demanded.

  “Look, we have a lot of information you need. Will you listen?” Grevi pleaded.

  Darreth’s body language told them everything. He was prepared to listen.

  “Look, we know about the plan to secede. We also know that Director Alarr knows, too despite the Council thinking it’s a secret. She’s communicating with someone on Rylerra and telling them about scheduled shipouts to the starlanes.”

  “She is involved!” Darreth exclaimed.

  “So, you do know about this,” Traig said. “We figured you had to be privy to something as important as seceding from the Consort.”

  “Yes. I do know about it. And I’ve had my suspicions for quite some time about her involvement in something nefarious. Who’s she communicating with?” Darreth asked.

  “We don’t know. The message headers are scrambled.”

  “What message headers?”

  “We, uh, intercepted some of her vidcomms.”

  “What kind of organization are you?”

  Traig answered for them. “We’re just a discussion group. Naylon was one of the members. He contributed his thoughts just like the rest of us. One of our guys, uh, tapped into one of the Director’s comm archives. We sorted through some of them and uncovered what looks like a well-concealed plan to thwart everything the Council wants to do. What’s more is that some of the vidcomms went to Rylerra. I personally think she’s got a lover there or is in communication with a spy or something. We just don’t know exactly because she couches even those comms with damn odd phrasing. Your shuttle was shot down after she sent one of her comms to Rylerra. She had something to do with it, we’re sure of it.”

  Darreth was duly impressed. “You figured all that out from a few comms?”

  “Caddo’s pretty good at mysteries. He’s got a naturally suspicious nature. Long ago we learned not to underestimate him.”

  “Caddo?”

  “He’s the guy in our group who dug all this up.”

  “I want to meet him.”

  “He’s asleep. He needs it,” Traig told him. “He’s not so good when he gets woken up before he’s had his eight hours.”

  Grevi nodded at that assessment.

  “About my life being in… danger. What else do you know?” Darreth asked.

  “Just that. Look, we’ve all been friends with Naylon for a lot longer than you’ve been seeing each other. We want him back like you do. But you have to understand we could be in serious trouble if you let anyone know how you found out what Caddo did.”

  “No doubt. Spying is punishable by some seriously upheld laws. Did Naylon know anything about this?”

  “Caddo dug this up after Naylon disappeared.”

  Alista interrupted Traig. “Naylon and I have worked together for quite a while now,” she told Darreth. “He was terribly excited about going to Rylerra. He’s pretty good at what he does and had pressed quite hard to get the funding to go off-world. To tell you the truth he was thrilled you were going to be the pilot, too. He’s got a thing for you, by the way. He’s even used the ‘L’ word.”

  “Huh?” He told someone else?

  “His exact words were, ‘I think I love Darreth’.”

  Darreth leaned back ever so slightly. His eyes started to smart. This wasn’t supposed to happen. He wasn’t supposed to get all emotional about this. His sole purpose for being here was to discover what they knew and put the rest of the pieces together. But this added an extra emotional dimension and impact to the situation that he wasn’t expecting. He swallowed in an attempt to clear the ball rising in his throat.

  Grevi spoke up now. “Look, I might as well tell you that as soon as we heard Naylon had gone missing we immediately suspected you.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because you knew Naylon was invol
ved with us. Not a single one of us is exactly sympathetic to Consort interests. Your job is to make sure those interests are maintained. See the link?”

  “No, I don’t. I’ve known about this discussion group for months. He and I talked about it.”

  The group glanced at each other briefly.

  “Maybe you don’t realize my brother is one of the missing people. I had nothing – nothing – to do with their disappearance,” Darreth added angrily.

  Grevi waved her hands. “Don’t agit. We know that. Boy, do we. There’s lots more.”

  Good, at least I’m not on their suspect list anymore, he thought. “Go on.”

  “Alarr knows that the Council has discussed pulling out of the Consort. She’s using her usual underhanded ways to put a stop to it. It wasn’t a pirate ship that blasted you. It was someone operating under her authority.”

  “How can you be sure about that?”

  “Didn’t you scan the ship?” Traig asked.

  Darreth issued a slightly audible sigh. Boy, do they have a lot to learn. “Of course I did. It’s standard procedure. The scan only determined what type of ship it was and that they weren’t using a transponder code.”

  “And no positive ID on them being pirates, right?” Alista added.

  “Right.”

  “That’s because they weren’t pirates. She was using someone else to get rid of you as a bargaining chip to keep your father from agreeing with the others on the Council.”

  Uh, oh. Just as I suspected! “I’m being used to get to my father?”

  All heads nodded.

  “You think my death will influence what the Council wants?”

  Traig answered. “We don’t think anything like that. Alarr does. Look, she successfully had several trumped up charges leveled against you, had you grounded, and that alone has prevented the Council from discussing independence any more. She’s getting her way. Even though you didn’t die. You have more weight than you give yourself credit for. You’re the Chief Council’s son. That’s the only bargaining chip she needs.”

  “You said there’s more,” he said.

  Grevi sighed. “A lot more.”

  “Such as?”

  “We’ve discovered she’s involved with the ‘real’ pirates.”

  “I thought there weren’t any pirates,” Darreth replied, confused.

  “The real pirates that you go after. Not the pilot of the ship that shot you down. Apparently, she has some sort of deal worked out with someone named Anoon Tilshar. Ever heard of him?”

  “No, should I?”

  “We did a search on that name. He was killed in an accident on Agica Prime five years ago.”

  “If that’s so he seems to have made a remarkable recovery.”

  “He never died. He went undercover. He’s either a leader or working for one of their leaders.”

  “If that’s even remotely true I have to bring it to my superior’s attention,” Darreth told them.

  Traig was immediate with his response. “You can’t.”

  Darreth snorted. “I can’t, huh. And, why would that be?”

  “I told you he wouldn’t understand,” Traig told Grevi.

  “Traig,” Grevi warned.

  Alista intervened. “You can’t because you don’t know who to trust.”

  It was as if the room suddenly reached its flashpoint. In fact, Darreth started sweating now. Where had he heard that before? From himself. It was all beginning to make sense, too. For too long he hadn’t wanted to be wrong about his work. He kept having to tell himself he was performing a duty that was greater than himself. Now he wasn’t certain who he was really working for. His interest, training and full-time employment was routing out pirates, which was supposed to be for the greater good of Andakar. But it was beginning to become quite clear that someone in his division, obviously someone high up, might be working for Inandra and not have Andakar’s best interests at heart after all. Who could it be? Someone directly above him? Or was it much further out of sight? It was impossible to tell who he could trust. Just as Grevi said, he realized. Was it possible someone might actually be paid to look the other way while he was out risking his life to keep pharmas out of the wrong hands? As far as he could tell he was doing legitimate work, but clearly someone else was seriously trying to keep him or others from discovering the truth about the pirates.

  Grevi spoke next. “We need proof of your true loyalty.”

  “You want to be a little more clear than that?” Darreth shot back.

  “Specifically we need to know if your loyalty is to Andakar or not.”

  Darreth stood up. His chair slid back and bumped the wall behind him, startling the three people. “My loyalty to Andakar has never been questioned until this very minute. You better have a good explanation for even asking me that.”

  There was a moment of silence in the little room.

  Traig’s voice broke that silence. “We think the so-called pirates are on our side.”

  Darreth slowly sat back down.

  Traig let the silence drag out a moment longer before he decided to explain himself. “We’ve sifted through enough of the information garnered from her comms to determine that the Planetary Director’s office has been involved in a massive cover up. Years ago, before the Space Navy was beefed up to become a full-fledged military division, there were huge debates on Earth about how much to fund you guys. As you know, a corporation whose purpose is to make money isn’t necessarily interested in planetary security.”

  “You’re dead wrong. Planetary security is achieved by guarding profits. It’s not hard to understand.”

  “I figured you might not connect the dots,” Traig said acidly.

  “Traig. Stop it,” Grevi said sternly. She stared at him until he looked down at the table.

  “What Traig was going to say,” she said, “is we suspect the pirates are trying to fund a breakaway from the Consort, too. They’re just going about it all wrong. They’re stealing pharmas and reselling them for profit to finance their own narrow interests.”

  “There is no way that can be true. I would have heard about it,” Darreth countered.

  “But you haven’t,” Traig retorted. “Which means that the propaganda machine is working.”

  From what Darreth had heard so far, they had to be accurate on that point, too.

  Traig continued. “Caddo figured it all out. The pirates are operating on an unknown world by stealing pharmas from us then reselling them to the highest bidder on the black market. That much everyone knows. But what he figured out was that those credits are being used to purchase ships and pay off officials to maintain their secrecy. What those officials don’t realize though is that they’re being duped. The pirates are attempting to withdraw completely from the Consort or have already done so.”

  Darreth was already shaking his head. “How could there be ‘some unknown world’?”

  Grevi decided to fill him in. “The Consort has developed only 14 worlds. That leaves about 18,400 planets…”

  Traig interjected the exact number. “18,435 surveyed planets.”

  Darreth knew the exact number, too. It was part of his pilot training. Stellar cartography was imperative to use the nav system aboard the vessels he piloted, although there was no way anyone had ever been to or named all 18,435 of them.

  “…and umpteen moons,” Grevi continued, “they simply have never bothered to Inhab due to atmosphere, gravity, orbital period, radiation issues…”

  “Yes, yes,” Darreth interjected this time. He was well aware of the number of undeveloped planets due to their less than perfect conditions and lack of material resources to exploit.

  “Let me finish,” Grevi responded. “So, it’s a simple fact that the pirates could easily be on one of those other planets, far outside the normal travel and shipping lanes the Consort has established.”

  Darreth had been in many meetings about this issue already. There were a little over four thousand possible planets and m
oons large enough to inhab humans, and reasonably close to star lanes, where the pirates could be making a stand. There were so many potential locations and they were scattered so randomly it would take decades to find them at the rate the Space Navy had been proceeding, even by using remote probes.

  “They couldn’t possible make enough money to break away,” Darreth told them.

  “And they don’t know that Andakar is attempting to do exactly what they’re doing, but at a much slower pace,” Grevi said.

  “So they’re making themselves into criminals in the meantime. That doesn’t make it right. They have no right to steal our assets,” Darreth said.

  “No, it doesn’t make it right. So, be aware that one of the paid off officials is Inandra,” Alista added very quickly.

  “Why would Alarr give them the time of day?” Darreth asked.

  “Caddo suspects she’s buying time to discover where their hideout is. She’ll eventually find it. That way she can be the ‘hero’. Everyone will rally around her and make her something she’s not. As a result, someone’s bound to offer her even more power than she has right now and that could seal the fate of our entire planet.”

  Darreth took that assessment in, considering it for a moment. “I’ve never heard anyone say or even elude to these pirates being organized. If anything, they appear to be semi-organized, at best. I’m not privy to any of the information extracted from those we’ve captured, and none have talked in my presence. It would make sense that she’s been hobbling our division’s attempt to find out where their base is so she can do it herself.”

  “Hobbling or paying off,” Traig told him.

  “So, you’re speculating that she has some very highly placed people working for her and against us,” Darreth mused.

  “We’re sure of it. Unfortunately, no names have turned up yet,” Grevi offered. “We didn’t sort through every comm.”

  “What about those Council vidcomms.”

  “She’s had an extraordinary amount of access to their private conversations. Caddo found two between provincial managers that were significant. That’s how he discovered the aim to leave the Consort. The third was between a provincial manager and your father. Your father was very good at couching his phrasing in such a way to not implicate himself in any direct way regarding withdrawal. But Caddo figured it all out. She wants to stop all talk about independence before it gets too far.”