by Mel Keegan
“If the cash account turned into investment property, it’s not an issue.” Marin stooped for his jacket. “Jagrethean financial law was drafted to stop liquid currency hemorrhaging offworld. It’s only cash they were trying to safeguard.” He stepped out of the bedroom, stood in the wide lounge and turned around on the spot, looking for items he wanted.
Big arms fell around him from behind and Travers said against his ear, “Let’s get out of here. You want to swing by the store on Wisconsin, pick up the champagne?”
“I do.” Marin turned into his embrace and opened his mouth to a long, searching kiss.
A light rain was falling as they walked the block and a half to the store. It was late; traffic was thin and the sidewalks were almost empty. The pavement glistened, the air was heavy with humidity which made the night feel almost hot, though midnight was no more than an hour away.
The store was deserted, just a whisper of steelrock playing to amuse the kids who took the graveyard shift. Travers chose brandy from a distillery on Velcastra; a twelve year old malt from the southern hemisphere of Borushek itself; to which Marin added a flask of local sherzake and two bottles of sparking white from a vineyard on Earth in a place called McLaren Domain. The wine was outrageously expensive, bottled in antique green glass with silver and gold labeling
“If you’re going to celebrate, do it right,” he said with dry humor as Travers tucked the carton under his arm and they stepped back out into the warm rain of Sark’s tropical night.
Lightning flickered on the horizon, where the Challenger Gulf stretched away toward the Cloche Islands. The overcast was ripped in the west, and the crescent of one of Borushek’s moons shone there. A heavy lifter scudded across its face, headed up from the Fleet compound to one of the orbital facilities. The thunder they heard was not the distant storm but engines, a long, low roar which rolled around the streets as they took the executive lift up the outside of their building to the air park.
The Europa’s engines were still warm when they swung in under the gullwings. At once Travers jacked into the comm and negotiated with Sark ATC, while Marin stowed the carton in the rear cargo space. Minutes later the aircraft bobbed up into the night sky, and they began to listen to the Mercury’s loop. Shapiro was talking personally to Security, and Marin’s ears pricked as he heard private codes known only to this group.
He was telling the last handful of his own staff, who had been managing the lockdown of his private levels in the Fleet building, to be on the up-shuttle no later than 2:00am, Sark time. Travers swore softly and Marin whistled.
“We’re bugging out so fast?” Neil whispered. The Europa was falling upward, passing vertically by the civilian traffic lanes and still accelerating. The civvy antlines faded below, and he jinked the nose over for an insertion into the Mercury‘s orbit and threw the throttles wide open.
“It could be trouble,” Marin guessed. “If a courier just dropped in from Velcastra, it could have the news of the failed hit on Shapiro, not to mention the complete disappearance of their man, Hume. We knew we’d have a safe window of a matter of hours.”
Without a doubt, elements of the Confederate Secret Service were installed in Sark, answerable to some office on Earth. Shapiro’s whole group could expect to be at jeopardy the moment the news arrived that he was not in a morgue on Velcastra. He had spent years hand picking his own staff, but Confederate agents were an unavoidable fact of life, and the surest way to attract the attention of men like Charleston Aimes Rutherford was to eliminate them.
The safe window on Borushek could be measured in the time it took a courier to make the crossing with data, outracing the Deep Sky data conduit. And those hours were up, Marin thought grimly, while the Europa closed swiftly with the cruiser, and the rudimentary AI traded signals with Ingrid. Shapiro’s AI was smooth, calm, with the massive potential of the Resalq AIs. Mark had upgraded it, rendering Ingrid a close cousin of his own Joss. If Richard Vaurien would allow a more comprehensive AI to control the Wastrel, he would have installed something very like Joss into the big ship’s mainframe.
The thought inspired a pang of something very like longing, surprising Marin. Like Travers, he had come to think of the Wastrel as home, or as close to a home as either of them had known for too long. She might still be in the Albeniz system, finishing and testing the Esprit de Liberté. The moment the new hull was spaceworthy, even if she must be finished in mid-flight by drones and armored technicians, both ships would be out of there, bound for Alshie’nya.
As the Mercury grew on forward sensors, Travers gave control over to the AI. He sat back, swiveled in the seat and studied Marin thoughtfully. “You’re starting to fret about which way to go. Shapiro’s mission, or Mark’s.”
“No. And … yes,” Marin admitted. “I’d give anything to talk to Mark.”
“Soon. He’ll be at Alshie’nya.” Travers took his hand, laced their fingers. “If we’re bugging out of Borushek already, we’re safe. It’s a milkrun to Ulrand. Pay a ridiculous price to buy the bastard senator, then we disappear into the Drift. It sounds insane, but Alshie’nya is safer at the moment than any of the outlying colonies. Even the Zunshu can’t get data out of the Drift – too noisy, too messed up. They don’t know we’re there, any more than Fleet ever knew.”
For the moment Marin set aside his misgivings and watched the courier swell up out of the darkness. The Mercury was outlined against the limb of Borushek, where the sun was ten minutes risen, causing the canopy to polarize. The Europa was already cutting speed, while the cruiser’s AI exchanged signals with a drone freight carrier. It had come up loaded, more than likely with Madam Deuel’s cargo, and the cargobots were already tucked back into storage.
Two hangars stood open to space, and as the Europa slid itself into the first, the freight hauler dropped out, on its way home. Travers cut into the loop as the bay doors closed over. While Marin released the harness and twisted in his seat to get the carton, he was saying,
“Mercury Operations, this is Mercury 101, we’re home. This is Travers, looking for Jon Kim.”
He called four times before Kim said into the loop, “Right here, Neil. What do you need?”
“A few minutes of your time,” Travers told him, “if you could meet us in the Ops room.”
“Problems?” Kim’s voice sharpened.
“No. In fact,” Marin said quietly, “the opposite. We just need your help to put the shears through a bale of civilian red tape. If anyone on this ship knows how to do it, it would be you.”
“Sure. I can be there in ten minutes,” Kim agreed.
“Thanks.” Travers paused. “We heard orders calling Shapiro’s core security to the Mercury. Trouble?”
“Not yet,” Kim said grimly, “but we know time has to be short. A courier can make the crossing from Velcastra as fast as we did, which only leaves us the amount of time it would take agents back there to find the wreckage, notice the paucity of bodies, dead or alive, report back to base and get orders to ship out here with their tail feathers on fire! Harrison’s riding the top of Fleet’s shitlist. We knew he would be.”
“It was only a question of when the whole barrowload would hit the fan,” Travers agreed. “And I think it’s about to. Ten minutes, Jon.” He cut out of the loop and popped the canopy. He gave Marin a crooked, engaging grin. “We bought the champagne. It’d be a pity to see it go to waste.”
“Second thoughts?” Marin was only teasing, halfway out of the cab.
“Me? Not a one,” Travers said with what looked to be perfect candor. “I’ll just swing by the crew lounge and pick up a couple of glasses.”
“Four,” Marin said pointedly.
“Four?” Travers’s brows rose.
“You, me … two witnesses.” Marin counted off on his fingers. “It might as well be legal.”
“Four,” Travers agreed, and hoisted the carton under his arm.
The Ops room was half-staffed, dim, quiet, busy with machines, rich with the smell of br
ewing coffee. It would not power up for another hour, when the cruiser broke orbit, and then the watch crew would stand down again as soon as the ship had made the e-space transition for a fast passage to Ulrand.
They waited fifteen minutes for Jon Kim, and he arrived with apologies, explanations involving Chandra Liang and a body of missing data. “It doesn’t matter,” Marin told him. “This won’t take long. Just pull up a chair and do what you do best.”
Kim cocked his head at them. “Red tape, you said. Okay, I brought my shears. What do you want cut?”
“You can access the civilian register?” Marin gestured at the nearest threedee.
“Of course.” Kim rolled a chair up to the circuit access and laid his hand on the pad. “What am I pulling up? Births, deaths, marriages, taxes, registrations, immigration, customs, quarantine –?”
“Marriages,” Travers said simply, deadpan.
“You got it.” Kim’s hand curved around the pad, access codes skimmed between Ingrid and the Sark mainframes, and data began to scroll. “Whose?”
“Ours,” Marin said softly. He looked over Kim’s head at Travers, whose eyes glittered with amusement in the instrument lights.
“O…kay.” Kim was working swiftly. “I didn’t know you guys had made it formal, and … hmm. You got a problem. There’s no record of the union in the system.”
“There wouldn’t be,” Travers said in mild tones, “until you put it there.”
For a moment Kim blinked up at him, and then at Marin. “You mean you’re handfasting? This is it?”
Travers indulged himself in a chuckle. “This is it.”
“But where’s the party? There’s supposed to be a wild party, and everybody dresses up to the eyeballs, there’s a lot of rice needs to be thrown, and you float out the door on an ocean of booze.” He wound down as Marin pointed out the two bottles from McLaren Domain, and the four flutes. “No party?”
“No party,” Marin said, feigning a sigh. “No rice. We just want the right documents filed in the right places, so they catch the next data squirt to Jagreth. Can do?”
“It isn’t a problem. Just two applications, a certification and two witness declarations. Easy.” Kim was already accessing forms as he frowned up at them. “You’re doing this because you’re heading out with Harrison, and you don’t think we’re going to make it back alive, aren’t you?”
“Not really.” Marin perched on the edge of the workspace and folded his arms on his chest. “It’s more about Jagrethean law and a lot of money Mark Sherratt’s been paying me. It’s complicated, Jon.”
The argument failed to convince Kim, but he did not press them. “I’m just dumping data out of your Fleet files into the civil forms … there they go. You need to validate them with an ID. Your service numbers would do.” He shoved the keypad toward them.
One long-familiar string of numbers rattled in, and Travers passed the pad to Curtis. “Is it done?”
“Half of it,” Kim mused. “Now you need the certification, which I can generate via the AI here. And the same validation of two witnesses.”
“You’re one,” Marin informed him as he keyed in his own numbers. “Who else is free right now?”
“It would have been great if Mick were here,” Travers said with an honest sigh.
Kim was listening to the loop, and held up a hand for quiet. “Harry, have you got a second?”
In Marin’s ear, Shapiro’s voice was quiet, measured. “That’s about all I have. Can you make it quick? Where are you?”
“It’s only a document for validation,” Kim assured him. “We’re in the Ops room.”
“Then, I’m on my way.” The comm clicked off.
“There’s your second,” Kim said thoughtfully as he set up the witness declarations, once again dumping data from existing records into the forms. Ingrid had already compiled the certificate; it was waiting only for the completion of the witness documentation. “Last chance,” Kim said teasingly.
“For what?” Travers was stripping foil from the neck of one priceless bottle of wine.
“To back out and run.” Kim chuckled. “Soon as the forms are filed, it’s done and dusted. You’re hitched, according to Borushek civil law, and Jagreth’s systems will update in two days.”
“Oh, I think we can live with it,” Marin decided with an odd thrill.
“Live with what?” Shapiro’s voice asked from the wide, open door. “Alcohol in the Ops room? I can’t imagine how many regulations you people are breaking.”
“Special occasion, Harry.” Kim pushed the chair back from the threedee to let him see the data on hold there. “When’s the last time anybody got handfasted, hitched, nuptialized, whatever they call it, in this Ops room of yours?”
For a moment Shapiro seemed to suspect a prank, and then he gave his hand to Marin, and to Travers, the first formal handshake they had ever received from him, and the last they expected. “Well, congratulations, gentlemen – and he’s right. I believe we can dispense with regulations for once. I’ll take a glass and toast you with it, Neil, if you’re pouring.”
It was done as simply as transmitting the documents. The cork popped quietly as Shapiro keyed in his service number, and Ingrid transferred the data in a microsecond burst. The civilian mainframe acknowledged, and sparkling brut streamed into four flutes on the workspace in the blue-green glow of the threedee.
“Hey, congratulations, man.” Kim lifted his glass in salute. “It’s been a pleasure.”
“I hope you’ll remember this day as a beginning.” Shapiro raised his own flute. “And I believe you’ll be remembering it for many decades to come … no matter which ride you take out of Alshie’nya – Lai’a or the Carellan Djerun.”
He drank on those words, and smiled, which was a rare expression on Shapiro’s face in recent months. Marin touched the rim of his glass to Neil’s and tried the wine. It was very old, very crisp, pungent and tingling. Travers’s taste ran more to lager, but he nodded in appreciation. “This is not bad.”
“For eight hundred credits a bottle, it had better be great,” Kim scoffed. “This is the real thing, isn’t it? Right out of a vineyard on Earth.” He held the glass to the light, studied the size and density of the bubbles. “Nothing like the rubbish they make on Ulrand.”
Marin was about to speak well of the Velcastran wines when the AI interrupted with a discreet chime. “Incoming datastream. Issuing ID, salvage tug Wastrel. Tagged priority.”
“Priority,” Shapiro echoed. “All right, Ingrid, run it.”
The threedee cleared and the corner of the Ops room aboard the Wastrel appeared. Richard Vaurien sat at a workstation, coffee in one hand, a handy in the other, and a grim expression on his face.
“Neil, Curtis, Harrison – you’ll be relieved to know we shipped out of Albeniz an hour ago. The Esprit is viable, the AI core has been installed and the Weimanns are operational. They’re jacking around a little, which I don’t like, but Tully rates them well inside of permissible parameters. He’s aboard, still working on them. If he sees anything he doesn’t like, he’ll scram the whole system back into normal space and start again. So long as she’s the hell out of Albeniz, I don’t mind. The Weimanns will fix, and if anyone can drag them into line, he can.
“We’re fifteen minutes short of an e-space jump, and we’re about to vanish. Fleet won’t know where we went, and we’ll see you in the Drift. So much for the good news.” He looked away. “You won’t have had the bad news, because they’re not broadcasting it. We picked it up out of encrypted Fleet comm, and double-checked the source to verify it.”
He looked back into the vid pickup, lips compressed. “It’s the mining colony, Hunan. There’s been another implosion, and this one’s bad. Harrison, if you get this before you jump out of Borushek space, access DeepSky Fleet transmissions to Earth Sector Command. We were monitoring all bands, particularly anything on level four encryption or higher, and Fleet is screaming, they’re just not sharing the data locally, not e
ven with lesser departments within Fleet itself. If we hadn’t filched it out of their high security transmissions to home base, we wouldn’t know a damned thing about it.
“I’m sending a data package with this. It’s little enough, but more than we need to know. They captured viddrone footage, exactly 6.4 seconds of it, before the signals quit and ground zero suddenly wasn’t there any longer – and here’s where it goes sour for Fleet.
“Hunan was a military operation. They can’t blame this one on civvy ineptitude. The mines were working out two lodes on the big moon of a hellhole planet that doesn’t even have a name. It’s coded LS-4924, after the Lan Shui survey expedition, late last century. It’s a damned nasty system, too dangerous for human colonization, and the star is hot, bright, so sizzling, the human engineers were working in bunkers, and sealed inside the Aotearoa. She was a Fleet cruiser a lot like the Mercury, hard-landed and plumbed in to supply power to the whole operation.”
His face was bleak. Marin glanced sidelong at Travers, who could read Richard like a book. Neil’s brow was creased, his eyes narrowed.
“Run the viddrone footage, Harrison,” Vaurien said quietly. “We’re making best speed to Alshie’nya, and Mark will be seeing this. Suffice to say, all of Fleet’s security couldn’t keep these units out of the Hunan system, much less off the Aotearoa, and the next thing you know, there’s three hundred people dead, along with several thousand industrial drones, several hundred billion in payload and about twice that in the value of lost hardware.
“And Fleet, Earth, can’t blame this one on some freak generator accident, a design flaw in the new Prometheus machinery. You can look up the specs of the Aotearoa – she was an old ship, full of reliable old tech. Right now, Fleet will be trying to dream up some airtight cover story, table scraps for the shareholders, not to mention the insurance underwriters. You can bet your pension the human casualties will be recorded as killed in action. They’ll cook up some story of a battle fought, and lay the blame on us.” He shrugged with ruthless pragmatism. “There’s nothing we can do to set the record straight until this war is over and the truth starts to come out. Even then, a lot of Earthers will prefer to believe we butchered the non-combatant crew of a mining installation.
