“Yeah, I remember. Are you finally going to let us square our debt with you?”
“It’s time. I’m calling it in.”
Chapter 12
There had been two people aboard the craft. And the way Pellew told it, it had proven almost a contest between them to see who could surrender first. With their ship disabled and life-support failing, understandably neither had been too keen on the idea of being marooned in an asteroid field. Now they were in the brig with their hands in restraints, just in case they proved smarter than they looked.
Summers doubted either prisoner was particularly dangerous. One was an old man who sweated a lot and struggled just to walk a brisk pace, the other was as scrawny as a man could be without looking like a complete skeleton. Whatever small arms they’d possessed had been confiscated by Pellew’s soldiers, and both had been thoroughly searched. Now they were behind a forcefield. The security measures seemed almost comically extreme. Both men looked weak, Summers guessed she could lift heavier weights than either of them, but she knew looks were often deceiving. Far too much was at stake, with isotome weapons on the line, so she intended to communicate total superiority and take no chances whatsoever, no matter how slim.
“What do you want us to do with them?” asked Captain Pellew. He stood at Summers’ side as they gazed through the forcefield, studying the prisoners like bugs behind glass. The skinny one stared at the floor but the old one would meet their gaze from time to time, though he never held it for long. Eventually his wrinkled face would turn away.
Summers gestured for Pellew to follow and she stepped out into the hall, where the prisoners could not hear.
“We will question them,” said Summers, once the door was shut. She believed these two men represented their only clues as to the whereabouts of the isotome weapons, so she wanted to be thorough and exact in their interrogation. Especially since no isotome weapons had been found aboard the disabled ship—indeed none would have fit, the vessel was too small it turned out, after space had been allotted for crew, life-support, and an alteredspace jump drive. Which begged the question of what these men were doing here. And if they even had anything to do with the isotome weapons at all.
They’d better, thought Summers. Convinced it was too much of a coincidence for them to be here in this obscure place, where all of the isotome signatures coalesced, and in hiding to boot. No doubt they were involved, clearly up to something, the question was, how to extract that from them. Summers considered gentler tactics against rougher methods: from bribing the prisoners into sharing their information to the use of fear and torture to make them spill their guts—physically if necessary. As a rule of principle, she had always been categorically against torture. But as she stood here, trying to decide how to proceed, and knowing that billions of lives likely depended on how she handled the situation, she found it increasingly difficult to care about the ethical treatment of prisoners.
“What are you hoping to learn exactly?” asked Pellew, folding his arms.
“These men are going to lead us to the isotome weapons.”
“I thought as much,” said Pellew. It was obvious to Summers, however, that Pellew was hoping to glean more information from her than that. I’m sorry, Captain, she thought, but I have no new insights to give. But hopefully these men will.
“I’ll oversee the interrogation,” she said. “Separate them, convince them that the other is cooperating with us. Make it clear that the reward for cooperation is kinder than the alternative.”
“And that any refusal to cooperate is quite… undesirable,” said Pellew knowingly.
“Exactly,” said Summers. As a defense officer in the navy, and later a command officer, she’d never gone through the rigors of learning to properly interrogate a prisoner, but she had studied a great deal of math—it had been her minor at university—and it was a concept from math that she wanted to employ here. The aptly named Prisoner’s Dilemma. “If we do this correctly,” she explained. “The prisoners will do the calculus for themselves and decide, individually, that the risks of not cooperating are too high, and that the only rational thing to do is to cooperate with us, so long as we make them believe it is likely the other has flipped. And the incentives are properly arranged.”
Pellew nodded. “I understand.”
Summers hoped so. But, just in case, she would make certain to supervise this process herself. Pellew could ask the questions, but Summers would listen to every word. And make certain the strategy was correctly employed.
“And what if they don’t flip?” asked Pellew, a menacing look in his eyes.
Summers sighed, not wanting to even consider that possibility. “They’ll flip,” she insisted. “They have to.”
“But if they don’t?”
Summers hesitated. This wasn’t an order she wanted to give, but she knew, if that situation arose, there would be no alternative. “Then we do whatever it takes to make them flip.”
Pellew looked her squarely in the eyes. “Yes, sir,” he said.
They set it up.
The skinny prisoner was kept in the brig, the old one was taken to Special Forces HQ on deck one. Each was made to believe they were being interrogated simultaneously, Pellew even made sure to mention repeatedly that “if your friend gives us this information before you do, the deal’s off” and similar rhetoric meant to keep the pressure on, but in truth Summers and Pellew focused on the skinny one before the old one was even asked a single question.
At first, the scrawny one resisted. But once the picture was clear to him that he had no friends out here and the only thing of value he had—with which he could barter for his life—was his information, he spilled what he knew. Once they’d bled what they could from him—which to Summers immense relief was intelligence and information and not literal red ooze—Summers and Pellew proceeded to deck one and repeated the process with the old prisoner.
This one didn’t even try to resist. Sometimes he even answered Pellew’s questions before the special forces captain could ask them, anticipating what would be of value. Sometimes he was right, sometimes he wasn’t—and ended up wasting time prattling off useless information about his family and so on that was of no value or relevance whatsoever—but at least he cooperated. His aged brow sweated so much during the interrogation that Summers was sure the man would dehydrate where he sat, shriveling up into a heap of dried, wrinkly sponge before their eyes. Fortunately that proved not to be the case.
When the interrogation ended, Summers was satisfied. She had the old prisoner removed from HQ and returned to the brig. Once she and Pellew were alone in his office, they took opposite seats around his desk and began to compare notes.
We should have had the skinny one down here and kept the old one in the brig, Summers thought. The carpet was wet from where the old man’s sweat had dripped off him like rain, as was the surface of the table where his ancient sweaty palms had rested, ghost-white, as he pleaded for his life.
Pellew seemed not to be bothered. “As far as I can tell, except for a few minor details, their stories seem to match.”
Summers thought the same thing. She looked at the notes she’d taken, knowing that both conversations had been recorded and it would be wise to compare them side by side, but from the notes she’d written during each interrogation, the basic narratives offered by both prisoners seemed to corroborate one another.
“Let’s see… They work for someone named Zander,” said Summers. “They were here in the system waiting to relay a message to the Enclave. The message is: ‘Zander will transfer The Cargo personally to the Enclave,’ but neither of our prisoners knows what exactly The Cargo is.”
“It’s obvious, The Cargo is the isotome weapons stockpile,” said Pellew.
“I quite agree,” said Summers. Though technically they didn’t know that for a certainty, no matter how evident and likely it seemed. “Which means we need to intercept this Zander and destroy the weapons before he transfers them to the Enclave.”
“The Enclave is a secretive group of vampire-like bastards that live in hiding in the DMZ. I know a whole pack of them live on Tybur.”
“Yes, I remember,” said Summers, recalling the post-mission debriefing.
“All I’m saying is, these are some dangerous people—if you can call them people—and the isotome weapons would be extremely dangerous in their hands.”
“They’re extremely dangerous in anyone’s hands,” said Summers matter-of-factly. “That’s why we must destroy them.”
“Right,” said Pellew. “But you didn’t let me finish. What I wanted to add was, even though the Enclave is dangerous, I don’t think the Enclave plans to use the weapons. If I recall, when Calvin and I met with Samil on Tybur, he told us that the Enclave was selling the weapons to the Rotham Republic. We destroyed those weapons. So maybe, to get back into the Rotham’s good graces, they’ve arranged to buy the rest from Zander and sell them to the Rotham. Which would be very bad news for the Empire. A Rotham fleet with no resistance from the Empire—because of our civil war—would already be a devastating thing. But a Rotham fleet with isotome weapons ready to be brought to bear?”
Summers pursed her lips. Pellew had a very good point, and it was indeed a grim thought. But she didn’t want to allow herself to think it would ever come to that—because she would not allow it to happen. Should things dissolve to such a state, there would indeed be no hope. Which was why they needed to focus on the here and the now, and not speculate about the what-if’s, and quash the threat immediately. “What matters now is that we know who has the isotome weapons, and it isn’t the Enclave. Not yet anyway. For now they’re in hands of this Zander. And when he attempts delivery to the Enclave, it’s possible he’ll have the rest of the weapons—the whole lot of them—in the cargohold of a single ship.”
“And if we destroy that ship, we rid the galaxy of the isotome weapons once and for all,” said Pellew.
“Yes, if we have no other option, that is definitely on the table,” said Summers. “However I would prefer to board the ship and visually confirm that the weapons are there before we destroy them. If possible we should count them. Calvin’s intelligence suggested to me that there were originally thirty isotome weapons; half were confirmed destroyed on the surface of Remus Nine, and half remain unaccounted for. If we seize Zander’s ship and detonate the weapons manually, inside the hold of the ship, we can know for certain how many of the fifteen remaining weapons are destroyed. Hopefully it will be all of them.”
“Those numbers are based on the word of one individual,” said Pellew. “I was there, I remember. When we were on the ground on Remus Nine we counted fifteen isotome warheads. The contact there—who was working for the Enclave and expecting to sell the weapons to the Rotham—told us that half the weapons were in the silo and half were elsewhere.”
“Yes I recall,” said Summers. Again, she hadn’t personally been there. But she did remember the intel meeting afterward, and she’d made certain to familiarize herself with every new scrap of information the Nighthawk’s people had uncovered. “And from what I remember, the contact told that to Alex, while believing him to be an agent of the Rotham Republic, so I doubt he told a lie.”
“Perhaps,” said Pellew, still seeming unconvinced. He looked back down at his notes. “For delivering the message to the Enclave, both of our prisoners were to be paid by Zander’s people an amount equal to twenty-five thousand q, half up front and half after performance. And both prisoners claimed that Zander was not to retrieve them afterward, that their business with him was complete and they had instructions never to see him or attempt to speak to him again. In fact, they claim he gave them no means by which they could even contact him to report on the success of their mission.”
“Yes,” said Summers. “That matches what I have. And our prisoners don’t know much about Zander, apparently he’s very secretive. But they know that he’s human, and that he’s male, and that his ship is a seven-year-old Endelvian Corporation cruiser called The Duchess. They also don’t know much about the Enclave, just that they were to wait here for a ship called Hunter Six, one of a series of ten Hunter ships, specially-designed by the Rotham Advent to be undetectable, so long as the ship is moving.”
“Surely their stealth can’t be better than ours,” said Pellew. “No doubt these prisoners were exaggerating.”
Summers shrugged. She kept hearing about how advanced and state-of-the art the Nighthawk’s stealth system was, but based on what she’d seen in Abia, and in the Vulture Nebula, and in Remus System, plenty of ships had been able to counter the Nighthawk’s stealth system without much trouble. Perhaps they’d been the exception, very special cases with very special, extremely rare and expensive detection equipment installed. But all the same, Summers was far less confident in the Nighthawk’s ability to fly unseen than she had been when she’d first stepped aboard.
“I mean, if the Hunter ships are so undetectable, how were our prisoners supposed to recognize them and deliver their message?” asked Pellew.
“According to them, they said the Enclave ship would find them, and hail them. They only had to wait.”
“And you believe that?” asked Pellew.
“I don’t know,” said Summers. It seemed plausible enough to her. But she wasn’t a starship engineer, and for that matter neither was Pellew, so neither of them was qualified to really say if the intelligence was good. She would send the recordings of the interrogations to the lab for analysis but for now all they knew for certain was that the stories the prisoners had told them had aligned on this point. Which would have to be good enough for the time being. “At least they gave us something, we know what Zander’s ship looks like.”
“And we have a list of places Zander’s ship made port while these two were aboard. If we keep eyes on those places, then when a ship matching Zander’s shows up, we’ll know and we can interdict it.”
“Assuming he makes port again before transferring the weapons,” said Summers. She liked Pellew’s idea, it was certainly a necessary course of action to take, but she wasn’t satisfied that it would prove enough. While it was true that every ship needed to make port periodically, most starships carried enough supplies that, with a working life support system, they could go several months before absolutely needing to make port. It was rare to go so long without making port, no starship captain would want to run the risk that a critical failure is developing in an essential systems, one that could leave him dark and stranded in the great void of space, or cause his ship to self-destruct upon alteredspace jump, but it was possible that a captain who didn’t want to be seen might risk keeping his vessel exposed to the elements of space for longer periods without docking. It seemed rather likely to Summers that Zander would not make port again before transferring the weapons, assuming the transfer was indeed meant to happen ‘soon.’
“What else would you suggest?” asked Pellew.
“We keep an eye on this asteroid field; if it’s true that the Enclave is coming, we can get a fix on this Hunter Six ship and maybe capture it too.”
“Board the Enclave ship? And if by some miracle we succeed in capturing it, what then?” asked Pellew. He was obviously against the idea. Perhaps the thought of throwing his soldiers—many of whom were mercenaries and not true military professionals—against the likes of type two Remorii. Regrettably, Summers knew, such fear was justified. If Calvin’s story had been true about the ISS Trinity, then anyone trying to fight hand-to-hand against the Remorii would only be lambs charging into a gruesome slaughter, unless they had sheer overwhelming force. But still, Summers felt she had to exercise any option, no matter the risk, if it meant a shot at eliminating those damned isotome weapons.
“I don’t know,” she said, after a moment’s thought. “We have to do everything we possibly can.”
“I agree,” said Pellew. “But there’s no reason to tie the Nighthawk down here to this spot, waiting, hoping to see a ship that we might not even be a
ble to detect, and then attempt a capture operation that we probably couldn’t even successfully execute. Especially when that doesn’t even accomplish any clear goal.”
“No clear goal?” Summers stared at him in surprise.
“Yes,” said Pellew. “Suppose we did capture the ship, what would we do with it? What’s the goal?”
“We would tear it apart for answers.”
“And find what?” he pressed her.
“I don’t know. Interrogate the crew? Find out where this Zander is and take him out.”
Pellew looked skeptical. And, truth be told, Summers didn’t blame him. “We’d have an easier time finding Zander on our own, through other means, and getting to him before the Enclave does,” said Pellew.
“Yes, that would be ideal,” said Summers. “But there is no guarantee that we’ll find him in time.”
“There are no guarantees in the universe of any kind anyway,” his eyes danced off hers with surprising certainty. “We can only do our best. That is all. We must destroy the ship we just captured and move away from here before the Enclave shows up.”
“Destroy it?” Summers didn’t like the idea of getting rid of an object that might provide more information, and might ultimately generate some kind of lead. Though she wasn’t sure how.
“What would you have us do?” asked Pellew. “Leave the ship here derelict for the Enclave to find. Then, when they see the battle-damage, and note that there is no crew aboard, that will help us how exactly? Maybe they’ll alert Zander and decide to get the weapons from him sooner, or spook him into going even darker than he already is. Make him disappear completely.”
Summers knew he was right. But still… “If they find the debris of the ship, won’t that make them just as suspicious?”
The Phoenix War Page 18
