by Alex Stewart
From which you’ll probably infer that I was meshed-in as we approached the station, observing all that I could, and recording it too: I’d no doubt that Aunt Jenny would be more than a little interested in a first hand look at a major League naval installation. To my relief, as before, nearly all the off-duty crew were doing the same (apart, I presumed, from the recording part), which would act as a useful smokescreen for my intelligence-gathering: if I’d been the only one meshing in on our approach, I might as well be walking around in a T shirt saying Commonwealth Spy. If, indeed, that’s what I was any more. I found myself remembering Aunt Jenny trying to explain how her two roles intermingled; a conversation which made a great deal more sense to me now. These days I felt more like a Guild apprentice than her eyes and ears, although the promises I’d made, and a residue of familial loyalty, kept me working at the commission she’d given me.
My first sight of the station itself, through the hull-mounted cameras, came as a surprise. I’d been expecting something like Skyhaven, though not quite on the same scale, but this looked completely different. One of the countless fragments of orbital flotsam had been built on and burrowed into, about a third of its grey, rocky surface encrusted with pressure domes, antennae, and docking cradles. Much of the rest was pocked with viewports and exterior hatches, leaking light out into the void, as if the whole thing had been turned into a gigantic halloween lantern.
And gigantic was the word. As the Stacked Deck swooped lower, the Presumption of Innocence maintaining her station at our side, I began to pick out a few details which enabled me to gauge the scale of things; the rock, and the base it contained, must have been roughly half a mile from end to end, and two thirds that across the middle, tapering slightly towards roughly rounded ends. Absurdly, I was reminded of a baked potato, left too long in the oven, to shrivel in its own skin.
“Kincora Base, this is the Guild merchantman Stacked Deck requesting permission to land,” Remington transmitted, as if we had any choice in the matter, never slow to take the initiative in reminding our hosts of our privileged status.
“Acknowledged, Stacked Deck. Proceed to docking cradle delta zero niner.” So, there were at least four different clusters of cradles on the surface of the rock. Or Kincora Base, as I supposed I’d have to start thinking of it from now on. For different types of vessels, or just to minimize the movement of goods and personnel around the interior? I made a mental note to find out.
I returned my attention to the visual image, while Sowerby’s feedback from the power plant and the gravitics streamed through my wider ‘sphere more or less unnoticed; to my inexpert eye they both looked pretty much optimal, which was hardly surprising for an engineer of her caliber. We were slowing, drifting over the base’s surface, gradually descending towards what, for a moment, I’d taken for a cluster of craters, in shadow from the gas giant’s baleful red glow. A moment later I realized they were too regular, and too regularly spaced, to be natural, an impression enhanced by the metal lining which became clearly visible as we began to drop into one. In an almost complete reversal of our undocking from Skyhaven, the field of view gradually narrowed and darkened, to finally disappear altogether.
“Down and docked,” Rennau reported from his station. “Engaging clamps.” Not that they ought to be needed, the local gravity field would be focused on the cradle, so the Stacked Deck would feel it was resting comfortably on the ground (which would actually have put intolerable stresses on the hull, but you know what I mean). But in the event of a power failure or some similar emergency the rock’s miniscule natural gravity field wouldn’t be sufficient to keep her in place, so a physical connection made a good deal of sense.
“Powering down,” Sowerby said, and the readouts I was monitoring from her station started tending towards zero. “Initiating standby mode.”
That was when it hit me just how long we were likely to be here. While we’d laid over on Numarkut, the power plant had been running on a reduced load, but shutting it down almost entirely, producing a mere trickle of energy to keep the onboard systems ticking over, implied that we’d be away from the ship for weeks, if not months.
“All hands, stand by to disembark,” Remington ordered over the Stacked Deck’s internal speakers. “And don’t forget to pick up your kit. Anything you leave behind, you’ll just have to do without.”
Forewarned, I’d packed my kitbag on the journey here; all I had to do was pick it up off the bed. I did so, and stood, feeling the space of my cabin all around me, wondering why I was suddenly so reluctant to leave it—then it struck me, this was the first real home I’d ever had. The house I’d grown up in was Mother’s, suffused with her presence even in her long and frequent absences, and my dorm room at Summerhall had been just that, somewhere to sleep, between more interesting activities. (And the odd tedious lecture on estate management.) But this cramped stateroom aboard the Stacked Deck was entirely mine.
After a moment I got a grip, and opened the door, only to step back inside again almost at once as Rolf and Lena strode past, sweeping all before them like a flesh tsunami.
As soon as the corridor was clear again, I stepped out into it, pausing only to grab the white cloth from my door handle; even if the Leaguers knew what it meant, I didn’t imagine for one moment that they’d respect it. I wadded it into a ball, and turned back momentarily to chuck it onto the bed, taking the opportunity for one last look round.
Of course I had no idea at the time that I’d never set foot in that room again.
CHAPTER TWENTY
In which Clio makes a new friend.
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect as my shipmates and I assembled in one of the mid-level cargo holds, never having been interned as a suspected enemy agent before, but no one else seemed particularly worried. If anything, there was something of a party atmosphere, most of the crew treating it as a break in their normal routine; a couple were passing round bottles (“I’m not leaving the good stuff for some thieving squaddie to nick”): a quick gulp of one went a long way towards restoring my own good humour, not to mention providing a quick object lesson in the subjectivity of what constituted the “good stuff.”
Not all the conversation was verbal, of course, the constant exchanges blizzarding through the datasphere neatly counterpointing the background hum of chatter echoing round the cavernous storage space.
Simon. A message from Remington cut through the babble, marked urgent, and layered with privacy protocols. I glanced round automatically, despite knowing he wasn’t there yet, still locking down the bridge with Rennau, while Sowerby and her assistants did much the same thing in engineering. Any luck with that thing you’ve been working on? He didn’t need, or dare, to be any more specific than that—the Leaguers might not use or approve of neuroware, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t find other ways to monitor our exchanges.
Needless to say, I’d spent much of our journey across the system tweaking and fiddling with datanomes, trying to put something together which would let me get into the next handheld I came across; or, better still, into a full node, if the opportunity presented itself.
A bit, I sent, keeping things simple. In truth, I was pretty confident, but I liked to sound less so than I actually was—mainly because it wasn’t so embarrassing if I turned out to be wrong. I won’t really know how well it works until I try to get into something, though.
Then don’t try, Remington warned. The last thing we need now is for one of the crew to look like they really are spying. It’d take forever to sort out, and we’d lose a fortune. In truth, the compensation payment for a delay in completing our contract wouldn’t be quite as generous as all that, but it would certainly come in handy—and, if the League wanted to play by the letter of the Guild agreement, keeping the Stacked Deck impounded until details of an operational military base were no longer of immediate use to an enemy would effectively maroon us all here for life. Of course it wouldn’t come to that, the local Guildhall would send an intermediary, who wou
ld broker some sort of compromise—but that would take time, and undoubtedly involve an undertaking not to set foot in Commonwealth space again for the foreseeable future, neither of which was going to sit well with my commission from my aunt. Come to that, I didn’t suppose it would win me many friends among the crew either.
Got it, I sent back, careful not to make any actual promises: I really was starting to think like a Guilder.
“I hope so,” Remington said, materializing at my shoulder. “Because pissing off people with guns seldom ends well.”
“Neither does shooting Guilders,” I said, trying to sound a lot more casual than I felt.
“True.” Remington nodded, conceding the point. “But retribution after the fact’s not much good to a corpse.”
“Someone’s cheerful this morning,” Rennau said, hefting a bulging kitbag onto his shoulder as he approached us. He glanced meaningfully in my direction. “But if this conversation’s about what I think it is, you’d better be listening. Because if I find out you’ve been doing anything at all to complicate matters, I’ll get to you long before our hosts do. Are we clear?”
“Pellucid,” I assured him. Quite what he proposed to do if he caught me prying into areas I wasn’t supposed to I had no idea, but I knew him well enough by now to be sure that I never wanted to find out.
“Good.” He turned to Remington. “And talking of our hosts—”
He never got to make whatever disparaging remark he’d prepared about their tardiness, though, as, with a thunk! of disengaging bolts, and a faint hiss of equalizing pressure, the main hatch began to grind open. Through it stepped Neville, and what looked to me like the same boarding party which had accompanied him before: although it was hard to be entirely sure, as people in uniform pointing guns at you tend to look pretty much alike. Behind them hovered a dozen or so drones, bristling with sensor gear, peering into every corner of the electromagnetic spectrum: I tried to take a peek at what they were seeing, but their integral processors shrugged me off with some heavy duty encryption. Which, to be honest, was pretty much what I’d expected; nevertheless, I recorded the attempt, particularly some promising datanomes I just might be able to reverse engineer a key from. A moment later they’d scattered, no doubt to examine every square inch of the vessel for nonexistent evidence.
“Ensign Neville.” Remington stepped forward, his hand extended for a shake, neatly wrong-footing the young officer, whose own right hand had been hovering unobtrusively next to his sidearm. The inadvisability of shooting Guilders notwithstanding, it seemed, Neville wasn’t one to take anything for granted, particularly the goodwill of people whose home and livelihood he’d just impounded. (Well, not him personally, of course, he’d been acting under orders from his captain, who’d got hers—or possibly his, given the League’s much-vaunted egalitarianism—from somewhere a great deal further up the chain of command.) “Nice to see you again.” After a moment, Neville took the proffered hand and shook it as though he suspected it concealed something squishy.
“It certainly is,” Clio agreed, with rather more enthusiasm than I thought was warranted under the circumstances.
“If you’ll all follow me,” Neville replied, speaking directly to Clio for some reason, as though she, rather than Remington, was in charge, “I’ll show you to your quarters.”
“Thank you.” Clio smiled at the ensign, which seemed to disconcert him even more than Remington's handshake had, and held out a bulging kitbag. “If you wouldn’t mind? It’s rather heavy.”
“Not at all.” Neville was clearly losing the initiative, much to the inadequately concealed amusement of the men and women under his command. He hefted Clio’s bag, which was, in truth, far lighter than loads I’d seen her lugging around the holds without a second thought, and began to lead the way towards the cargo hatch.
“She’s quick off the mark, I’ll give her that,” Remington remarked, as the rest of us lined up to follow, the members of the boarding party considerately not quite pointing their guns in our direction.
“Takes after her mother,” Rennau said, with a fond paternal smile.
My first impression on stepping through the hatch was of a smaller version of the docking ports on Skyhaven—although in this case “smaller” was something of a relative term. A broad plain of flat gray rock, broken by the smooth metal domes of the docking ports, stretched across a vast cavern, illuminated by floodlights depending from the ceiling. Ours wasn’t the only berth occupied, of course, but whether entirely by other impounded merchantmen, or a mixed bag of those and other vessels, I couldn’t be sure. The latter seemed more likely, though, given the number of drones and light vehicles buzzing around one of the docked ships in the distance, which seemed to be in the process of unloading: I was fairly certain that the cargo aboard the Stacked Deck would be considered under the protection of the Commerce Guild, and that the League would therefore leave it alone. Of course any non-Guild freighters that had had the misfortune to be seized could be looted with impunity, but it still seemed more likely that I was seeing the arrival of a regularly scheduled cargo run. And it went without saying that Neville’s presence meant that one of the adjacent domes was certain to be concealing the Presumption of Innocence.
I glanced around, wondering which of them it was. Which was a stupid question: it just had to be the next docking port over, Neville’s captain apparently having taken his or her instructions to keep a close eye on us more or less literally. It wasn’t that hard to spot, given the number of people in League naval uniform milling around its gaping hatches, although what errands they might be on I didn’t have a clue.
I stretched out my ‘sphere, searching for anyone in the vicinity who might be out of my line of sight, but, as I’d expected, the only neuroware interfaces I could detect were those of my shipmates. Many of the hurrying figures had bright flashes of data hovering around them, though, indicating the presence of handhelds, or other information-handling devices, but none of them seemed linked to a node anywhere in the vicinity, which effectively shut me out of any attempt to get into them. And even if I had seen an opening, I’m not sure I would have taken it, with Remington and Rennau’s warnings still fresh in my mind: I was pretty sure they were both keeping a wary eye on my own ‘sphere, to make sure I complied, and I wasn’t stupid enough to test the hypothesis the hard way.
The biggest difference I could see from the docks on the orbital was that everything was on the same plane, all the gravity in the chamber pointing in the same direction: which was hardly a surprise, now I came to think about it. Unlike the Skyhaven docking arm, which was free to add cradles on any edge, this gash in the rock only had one side directly facing the void. The other three would be surrounded by solid rock, or, more likely, whatever other passageways and chambers had been burrowed into it. I made a firm resolve to find and access a detailed plan as soon as I could—not just for its intelligence value, although I was sure that would be considerable, but to satisfy my curiosity about our surroundings.
Which was only piqued by Neville, who escorted us to a waiting utility sled, hovering a few inches off the floor. It was a heavy duty model, about twenty feet long, the kind of flatbed I was more used to seeing scurrying around under an open sky in the streets of a city, or hovering over the fields at harvest time while the drones piled it high with root vegetables. Bench seats had been installed, temporarily, judging by the finish, and the way they’d been locked into place with the retainers normally used to secure cargo pallets.
“This looks comfortable,” Lena said, with patent insincerity, climbing easily over the tailgate. The power plant hummed as the sled began to tilt, and the onboard system fed a little more energy into the emitters on that corner to compensate. The buzzing went on, rising and falling in pitch, for several seconds while she found a seat, stowed her kit under it, and her husband joined her. I couldn’t be entirely sure, but it looked to me as if the sled’s nose had tilted up about a quarter of an inch by the time the two of them had s
ettled.
“I’m sorry it’s so basic,” Neville said, still apparently talking to Clio rather than the rest of us, as he extended an arm to help her up. She slipped, and, to my surprise, he took her weight easily, clearly a good deal stronger than he looked. “There wasn’t much time to make the arrangements.”
“I can appreciate that,” Clio said, with a disarming smile. “Having to accommodate what, half a dozen ships’ crews on a couple of days notice?”
“Five,” Neville said, without thinking, and paused, as the belated realization that he might have been a little indiscreet began to sink in.
“That many?” Remington stepped into the awkward silence. “Ellie was a busy girl.” He fixed the young ensign with an affable grin, through which the underlying steel barely showed. “But of course we’re not all part of her network. I think you’ll find most people undertook contracts with her entirely in good faith.”
“Damn right.” Rennau didn’t bother even pretending to affability. “And I’ll thank you not to flirt with my daughter while you’re waving a gun in my face.”
“I wasn’t—I’m not—” Neville flushed, taken completely aback, much to the almost-concealed amusement of his subordinates.
“What are you going to do, ground me?” Clio shot back. “And he’s not waving a gun, it’s still in his holster.”
“It’s a metaphorical gun,” Rennau snapped, throwing his kitbag aboard the sled, and vaulting over the tailgate.
