It hadn't been uncommon in the Empire for someone to be incorrectly reported missing, or dead. Jasmine had reviewed quite a few cases while on punishment duty; they’d all had a soldier or spacer reported dead, then the man had been discovered alive ... after all of his property had been divided up and his friends and family gone on to make new relationships of their own. Legally, it was always a mess – and it was demoralising as hell to the person who had returned home.
There was a brief flurry of conversion, then a tap on the wall. Jasmine stood up, stepped out of the room she’d rented and opened the door into Trevor’s room. She'd seen it earlier, when they’d been checking for bugs and other unpleasant surprises, but the only unpleasant surprise had been discovering what kind of apartment a mourning man considered acceptable. Jasmine had seen pirate ships that were in better condition – and that was saying something.
Trevor looked up in surprise as she entered, then made sure that both he and his wife were decently covered. Jasmine wondered idly what she looked like to him; without her uniform or powered armour, she looked more like a fitness fanatic than anything else. But a more detailed examination would reveal the truth. Corinthian had been too settled to play host to many retired Marines, or Imperial Army Special Forces, but a brief check had revealed that they were all missing, presumed disappeared. Jasmine wasn't surprised. Even a regular soldier from the Imperial Army would know enough to give the occupation forces headaches before he was finally rounded up and killed.
“Good evening,” she said, shortly. She felt a flicker of anger as she saw the mark on Danielle’s cheek, then pushed it aside. “We need to talk.”
Trevor couldn't be introduced to any of the other cells, not when he was simply too valuable to be risked easily. Instead, she ran through a series of basic communications protocols with him, including a number of code phases that could be used to pass on messages. The datanet was heavily monitored, but like most automated systems it could only work with what it saw; it wouldn't realise that a message talking about used aircars was actually plotting sabotage. Jasmine assumed that a certain percentage of traffic was reviewed by humans, but there was so much traffic that she doubted it would find anything useful unless they had prior grounds for suspecting someone.
Perhaps we should mark a few people down for suspicion, she thought, grimly. Give them false trails to follow.
“There are others who are ... unhappy,” Trevor said, finally. “I could contact them for you.”
“Not on the orbital platforms,” Jasmine said, quickly. “They’re just too easy to monitor. Pass us names and we will check them out first, before you risk approaching them. One single informer and your cell will be blown open.”
“Don’t risk yourself,” Danielle added, quickly. “I won’t lose you again.”
Trevor scowled at his wife, unsurprisingly. It would be a long time, Jasmine suspected, before he ever fully forgave her for faking her death – and convincing him that he’d lost both his wife and daughters to a fire. It would hang over their marriage until they either recovered or it ripped them apart.
“No, don’t risk yourself right now,” Jasmine agreed. “We need to gather intelligence before we can proceed onwards. Your job is to help us do that.”
She smiled inwardly as Trevor nodded. Between him and Wolf’s files, they should be able to find others who could be subverted – or convinced to join a revolutionary cell. Once they had enough people, they could launch their coup ... if Admiral Singh left them enough time. That was the real problem; if they had years, Jasmine knew they could pull the coup off perfectly. But they didn't have years.
“I understand,” Trevor said.
“Every weekend, you will come back here, where you will be contacted,” Jasmine said, flatly. “We are currently creating a false identity for your wife. Once that's ready, you can move in with her and everyone will congratulate you on finding a new partner. Instead, when you come home, you will report to her ...”
“My house was bugged,” Trevor said. “What happens if they bug my new house?”
Jasmine frowned. Danielle’s house hadn't been wired completely for sound; she had a private suspicion that the security forces had lost interest in Danielle after she’d done nothing of interest for several months. But Danielle’s paranoia had kept her fearful ... she didn't want to say anything to discourage it, not when it might save their lives in future. A little paranoia could be very useful at times.
“We will ensure that there is a place where you can talk freely,” Jasmine assured him. She stood up. “I’m afraid I have to leave now. Danielle can stay for a while, if she wants.”
She smiled as Danielle clutched her husband’s arm, refusing to leave. There was love there, no matter how badly it had been damaged. And they were taking advantage of it ...
Feeling dirty, Jasmine left the two lovers in the room and walked out of the flophouse, back towards the van.
Chapter Twenty-Six
This may seem absurd – after all, the motives are good. But you may also wish to remember the parable of the cooked frog. When dropped into boiling water, the frog jumped out and fled – scalded, but alive; when dropped into a slowly heating pot, the frog stayed put until it was too late. And the cook had boiled frog for dinner. It is rare for freedoms to be lost overnight. Instead, they are traded away, piece by piece, until it is too late.
-Professor Leo Caesius, Authority, Power and the Post-Imperial Era
“Be careful how you insert the pallets,” Mandy ordered, as the station’s crew loaded the cargo into Lightfoot’s hold. “They all have to be secured perfectly.”
She smiled inwardly at the glances they tossed her, no doubt thinking that she was yet another starship commander nervous about having her deck scratched. It wasn't an uncommon reaction, even on Avalon, where there were genuine penalties for accidentally damaging an independent freighter or breaking the cargo before it could be shipped to its destination. On the other hand, the station crew seemed well trained. Mandy had heard horror stories from spacers who had visited some of the Empire’s worlds and they’d often included station crews bribed to ruin the reputation of independent traders.
It had been simple enough, as Tam had predicted, to win a contract. Indeed, there was no shortage of contracts for freighter crews – and this one was easy money. If she’d been a real freighter commander, with no ulterior motive, she would have jumped at the chance to run an in-system mission, particularly when the pay was so good. The Corinthian System was so heavily patrolled that it was unlikely that any pirates would dare stick their noses into the system, let alone risk intercepting a freighter.
She checked the pallets as they were installed, confirming – as any normal spacer would do – that they were both secured to the deck and the security tags were intact. The cargo was generally verified by the loading agents, who then sealed the pallets to ensure that no one could break into the boxes without making it obvious. Some smugglers had ways of circumventing the system, but Mandy had a suspicion that such smugglers rarely operated anywhere near Admiral Singh. Her system seemed designed to catch smugglers who tried to be clever. Still, it was well to check. It was easier to complain before she’d shipped the cargo, even if it was only going as far as the nearest planet.
“Well done,” she said, once the last pallet was firmly secured. “Excellent work.”
The station crew headed back to the station, allowing her to run a secondary check of her own. If they’d taken advantage of the opportunity to insert a bug into the ship ... she probed carefully, but found nothing. But that might just mean that the bug was shut down, waiting for the activation command before it went online – and became detectable. Mil-spec gear would probably have found even an inactive bug, yet using such gear would have been far too revealing. At the very least, hard questions might have been asked.
She checked that the hold was sealed, then walked back to the bridge. Her crew had taken the opportunity to sample the station's pleasures and come back to report
that they were minimal – and overpriced. Plenty of cheap alcohol, a handful of VR booths, a large brothel and little else. Mandy suspected that the real shore leave experience on Corinthian was on the moon, or maybe down on the planet itself. But she’d checked the prices and rolled her eyes when she discovered that going down to the surface would push their line of credit too far. The system discouraged visitors without ever quite making it explicit.
The bridge crew, she was gratified to see, looked refreshed after their brief exposure to shore leave on the station. Mandy smiled, sat down in her command chair and began to flick through the rules and regulations for departing planetary orbit. On Avalon, it was merely a matter of picking a departure trajectory, informing System Command and then leaving on schedule. Here, they were assigned a departure route and fined if they deviated from it by even a tiny fraction. Such precautions might have made sense on Earth, but even Corinthian didn't seem to have enough traffic to warrant them. But then, maybe it was just a precaution against the day when the planet became the centre of a much larger empire.
“Bring up the drives,” she ordered, once she’d finished reading the instructions. “And then signal System Command and inform them that we intend to make our scheduled departure window.”
She sighed inwardly as the drives came to life. Her drink – and then dinner – with Tam had been informative; she’d played the young girl who had been out of touch for months to the hilt and Tam had responded splendidly. Earth, according to the rumours he had heard, had been ripped apart by civil war, a bare year – maybe less – after Mandy had been exiled from the planet, never expecting to return. Somehow, hearing it from Tam had brought it home; her friends, the girls she remembered from Imperial University, were gone. A civil war fought out in Earth’s orbit would dump a great deal of debris onto the planet below. Earth, so heavily settled that there were few places that weren't either covered with megacity or polluted beyond hope of recovery, would be rendered utterly uninhabitable.
“They’ve given us permission to leave,” Jones reported. “And they’ve also reminded us of our assigned trajectory.”
“Then take us out,” Mandy ordered.
A dull shudder ran through the freighter as the drives came up to full power, followed by a faint shiver as she started to move. A freighter was slow and unwieldy compared to the warships she'd commanded, ever since the Commonwealth Navy had decided that she could be trusted with them, but it had a certain inelegant grace of its own. Perhaps, when the fighting was over and peace returned to the galaxy, she could take command of a freighter and just move from star system to star system, trying to make a living through trading. God knew that the Commonwealth hadn't had any truck with the corporate-spawned regulations that had driven the Empire’s independent traders to the Rim – or into bankruptcy.
But that might be a long time, she thought. The Commonwealth was nearly a hundred light years across, but it was tiny compared to the Empire – and even Admiral Singh’s empire was larger, although it might be a long time before it matched the Commonwealth’s rate of industrial growth. Given a few years, between the starship construction program and some of the new technology, Admiral Singh might find the Commonwealth unbeatable. But it was unlikely that she would give them that time.
It was humbling – and quite beyond human comprehension. On a cosmic scale, Lightfoot was so tiny that she wasn't even a speck of dust ... and Mandy herself was a nanite, if that. The space the Commonwealth controlled was unimaginably vast – and yet it too was tiny, compared to the Empire. Mandy contemplated it for a long moment, then pushed the thought aside. It never did any good to dwell on the vastness of space.
If I’d wanted to do that, I could have stayed with the RockRats, she thought. A brief check had revealed that there were no RockRats in the Corinthian System – or if they were present they were hiding very well - something that didn't particularly surprise her. RockRats had often been at odds with the Empire; they wouldn't tolerate Admiral Singh’s more oppressive regime, not if they could simply leave. Hunting them down was generally considered a waste of time by the Empire; Admiral Singh, Mandy suspected, would see RockRat hunting as more trouble than it was worth.
“That’s us past the outer edge of the orbital perimeter,” Jones reported. “Captain?”
“Take us on a least-time course to Sturgeon Base,” Mandy ordered. “And then alert them as to our projected course. We don’t want to alarm them too much.”
She snorted. They hadn't really had a chance to compare notes with other merchant spacers, but she’d had the definite impression that the planetary authorities were just waiting for opportunities to penalise the independent shippers. Displeasing them in any way could result in fines, having one’s ship taken away, or worse. It didn't seem a smart way to run an interstellar economy – her father would definitely agree – but it was more to do with control than anything else. The regime wanted to keep everything under control.
And keep the Admiral in power, she added, silently. What else matters to it?
“Course set,” the helmsman said. “And we’re off!”
Mandy smiled. “Keep one eye on the sensors at all times,” she added. “We don't want anyone sneaking up on us.”
She pulled out a datapad from her chair and keyed in her password, accessing the concealed part of the system. It should have remained undetected even if Tam and his men had taken them apart, but she was silently relieved that hadn't been put to the test. Instead, once she’d entered the second set of passwords, she started to write out a report, outlining everything that had happened since they’d arrived in orbit around the planet, followed by her own observations on the system’s politics. If nothing else, the data package she’d been given by System Command included an updated set of star charts, telling just how much space the Admiral actually controlled. Greenway was listed as the Admiral’s latest acquisition – and there was nothing about the Commonwealth.
But just how long, she asked herself, is that going to last?
The Commonwealth had been encouraging independent traders – and some of them had started to probe beyond the Commonwealth’s borders, in search of new markets. A handful of ships had never even been seen again. If the Admiral had captured them ...
She would have known about us sooner, she told herself, tartly. The recording of the brief and violent battle between Harrington and Proud hadn't suggested any advance knowledge of the Commonwealth’s existence. Indeed, it was rather the opposite; the Admiral’s crew had seemed to assume that they were dealing with an isolated ship. That wasn't uncommon – Mandy’s own cover story rested on them being stranded on Gordon’s Pride for some months – and the ship’s CO might just have jumped to the wrong conclusion. It was unlikely that anyone would ever know the truth.
“We’re being lazed,” Jones snapped, suddenly. “Communications protocols; A-OK. Access codes check out, Captain.”
“Confirm,” Mandy ordered. Paranoia was a survival trait, particularly when they were so deeply in the star’s gravity well that they would be unable to reach the phase limit before they were run down by the system’s defenders. “Make damn sure they’re accurate.”
“Confirmed,” Jones said, patiently. He was a veteran of several covert operations; Mandy had never seen him get flustered, even when their ship was under the guns of two destroyers and enemy soldiers were boarding their vessel. “All codes check out.”
Mandy relaxed, slightly.
“Send them a full copy of our sensor readings,” she ordered, as she keyed the datapad. The hidden parts of the freighter’s network would forward her reports along the laser link, where Captain Delacroix and her analysts would study them with great interest. If something happened to Mandy and her crew, at least they would get some information out of the system. “And then purge the secure system.”
She sat back in her command chair, wishing that they could just rendezvous with Harrington in person and talk face-to-face. But it was impossible; they'd be detected
moving off their course and there would be tough questions to answer once they got back to Corinthian. Laser communications were completely impossible to detect, let alone intercept, unless someone got very lucky. In all the files she'd reviewed, Mandy had only noted one incident when someone had intercepted a laser transmission, purely through dumb luck and enemy carelessness.
“Messages away,” Jones said. “I’ll purge the secure system as soon as we receive an acknowledgement .”
Mandy nodded. “Make it so,” she ordered.
She shook her head tiredly. There was no point in keeping the files once they were copied to Harrington. Once they were gone, even a complete data analysis would have difficulty picking up even a trace of their presence. But then, if there was any suspicion directed at her or her crew, they would have to flee before the shit hit the fan. If there was time to flee ...
“They’ve got them,” Jones confirmed. “I’m purging the database ... now.”
Mandy smiled and leaned back in her chair, feeling the tension drain away. Right now, the stealthed probe would be drifting back into the outer system, where it would relay the contents of its secure data storage node to Harrington. In the meantime, Lightfoot would proceed along her course, dock with the orbiting station and transfer its cargo to the planetary base. And then they could go back to Corinthian.
Five more hours passed before they docked at the base. Mandy spent them trying to catch up on her sleep, leaving Jones in command of her ship. Her sleeping patterns had never been very good since she’d been kidnapped by the pirates; it had been all too clear that the senior pirates could have barged into her cabin at any moment and done whatever they wanted to do to the young and helpless girl they’d captured. But they hadn't realised, she reminded herself, as she always did when the memories threatened to overwhelm her, that she would turn the tables and cripple their ship. Sword had been left drifting helplessly in the Avalon System and the Marines had captured or killed the remaining pirates.
The Empire's Corps: Book 04 - Semper Fi Page 25
