by S MacDonald
Nineteen
A week later, the incident of Silvie’s rescue was, if not forgotten, long since superseded as a topic of conversation on the ship. There was always so much happening both on the ship and off it, so much to do and talk about.
One of the biggest events of that week was the anticipated earthquake, together with its aftershocks. That went very well. With ample warning, the villagers on the affected islands dismantled their houses as a precaution and got themselves into safe open spaces, with their liaisons talking to them throughout and telling them exactly when the worldshake would hit. When it did, there was a great rumbling and shaking, some yelling, but no damage and no injuries. The tsunami was only moderate too, less than half a metre high and so not reaching past the top of the beach. There were, however, quite a few aftershocks – by day three, the aftershock alert had been sounded so often that those on the Heron, other than for those crew actively involved, took hardly any notice. People were far more interested, that day, in Buzz’s report on ‘familial and intimate relationships’, filed for the log by the anthropology team.
This held no surprises for anyone who’d been paying attention to normal life on the islands. It had been apparent right from the start that the Carrearranians had a high degree of modesty, full-body clothing the norm despite the climate being so mild as to make it unnecessary for warmth. True, they only wore the full tubular tunic and pants for special occasions, but even when fishing or swimming they’d wear cut-down pants like shorts, with a bandeau, a strip of cloth worn around the chest, worn by men and women alike. They did not go nude in public, and when they needed to relieve themselves went off into the trees, making a hooting sound from time to time so that nobody would intrude on them while they were doing their business.
As for what Buzz’s report described so primly as ‘intimate relationships’, those were rampant. Flirting was normal both within and between genders, as was the kind of intimacy that Arak described as ‘sex for fun’. This was particularly popular with the younger islanders – one lad, travelling between three islands, had been so popular in that regard that the anthropology team had nicknamed him Amoris. ‘Sex for love’ tended to come later, as people settled into living-together relationships which could, again, be with partners of either gender. ‘Sex for making babies’ was a more community-based decision, as the death of a member of the family would trigger discussions about which of the younger women would have the baby to replace them.
Whatever the nature of it, though, intimacy did not take place in the home. Their houses were shared with an extended family, for one thing, and for another they slept individually in cotton hammocks which did not lend themselves to any kind of bedroom gymnastics. There were, therefore, established trysting places on all of the islands, little sheltered private places, with some signal like a rag tied to a tree which told other people to stay away.
The Fourth had not been watching this, specifically – on the contrary, having identified those trysting spots they were routinely blurred out by cameras to respect the islanders’ privacy. All the same, there were statistics in the report for how often various pairings had been seen going to the trysting sites, and it was this data which was so keenly anticipated and talked about when the report was filed.
‘Of course,’ said Buzz, reporting to Alex, ‘it would be entirely inappropriate for our liaison teams to have a sweepstake running on which of the islands has recorded the most intimate activity.’
‘Oh, entirely,’ Alex agreed, straight faced, as if he’d never even heard of any Randy Island sweepstake and was mildly shocked by the very idea.
‘But if they had,’ said Buzz, ‘the winner would have been 125274.’ A distant cheer on the open comms indicated that the winning team was celebrating, but neither Buzz nor Alex appeared to notice it. ‘Thirty seven incidents in ten days,’ Buzz remarked. ‘A result boosted somewhat by our friend Amoris who was seen to go trysting with six different partners during that period.’
‘Lucky Amoris,’ observed the rating at the helm, which again, the skipper and exec pretended not to notice even though it caused a splutter of giggles across the command deck.
No, there was no shortage of things to keep them busy. Mail arrived, too, a daily blast of contact with the worlds beyond. Sometimes, that contact could be beneficial. Mostly it was a nuisance. And occasionally, just occasionally, it could hit them with much the same impact as a sewage grenade.
Only once, though, in all the weeks that they were under that barrage, did any piece of mail make Alex von Strada really angry – so deep, raw, fighting-mad angry that his crew spent several hours as if walking on the most fragile of eggshells.
The piece of mail in question was a legal document, passed on to the skipper because the court which had issued it required that it be dealt with by the officer in command. In this case it was a warrant, issued by a judge on Mandram, requiring an interview under caution of a member of their crew.
It happened. Even back in the regular Fleet Alex had had to deal with such requests, when the police wanted to interview someone either as a suspect or a witness. There was a long standing agreement between the Fleet and the League’s police services that the first step in that would be to ask a Fleet officer to conduct the interview and provide the police with a full recording. Only if they were not satisfied with that would they then proceed to the arrest or subpoena which would compel the Fleet to hand that person over to the world where the warrant had been issued, even if that meant transporting them right across the League.
This was, therefore, as step one, nothing more than a request that Captain von Strada carry out a formal interview under caution and send that recording to the police who were investigating the case. In order to do so he was provided with a case outline, grounds for suspicion, the points that they wanted to establish and the questions that they wanted to be asked. It was as routine, really, as the interview he’d carried out for Ali Jezno, only that this was a criminal court rather than a civil one.
Even this was nothing unusual. The Fourth’s reputation, undeserved as it was, meant that all manner of allegations were made against them, and police forces were developing a tendency to send out these requests even if for no other reason than to close the case as no further action to be taken. Alex was used to that; so was his crew.
The differences with this particular case were that the matter concerned was no allegation of threatening behaviour while on shoreleave or anything so trivial – it was a major felony case, an investigation into the cyber-theft of more than half a million dollars. Alex was astonished, not least because it came from a world the Fourth had never visited.
He was even more astounded when he saw the identity of the suspect and the grounds for suspicion. The suspect was Jok Dorlan, one of the original ‘Cestus Three’ who’d been the reason for the Fourth being founded in the first place. He was a computer whizz and had served time in the military prison on Cestus after a hacking prank had crossed the line into interfering with and rewriting classified documents. As with the other two members of the Cestus Three, he had been discharged from prison on parole before joining the Minnow, resuming his Fleet career on a rehab basis. It had been the Fleet’s ill-advised and ineffective attempt to keep this quiet which had resulted in the media bursting out with the explosive story that the Fleet had a secret ‘black ops’ unit using prisoners.
Jok Dorlan had dropped off the media radar somewhat, since then. He was such an earnest, inoffensive man that even the most creative scandal-channels hadn’t been able to keep up public interest in him for more than a few months. He’d made good in the Fourth, too, and was held in high esteem – a solidly dependable member of the crew and a real asset to them on the computer team.
Now, he was being accused of robbing a number of stockbroking firms of a total amounting to just over half a million dollars.
And the reason?
He’d been on the planet at the time.
It really did, as Alex con
firmed with his second incredulous reading of the file, amount to no more than that. When the Heron was on long leave at their base world, members of the crew could either have travel passes for their families to come and visit them there, or head to their homeworlds themselves. Jok Dorlan had chosen to do the latter, hitching a lift on couriers to spend as much of his leave on his homeworld as he could. He’d been there for a month, spending time with his family, catching up with old friends, doing the usual ‘on holiday’ things. It was utterly insane to imagine that while he’d been there he had also masterminded a sophisticated plot to steal half a million bucks from the stock markets.
This, however, was the rationale. A top cyber-security consultant on Mandram had told the police that there were only eleven people on the planet at the time the offence had been committed who were capable of busting the security systems they managed – it was, he said, part of their business to know and track super-hackers, and they had closer surveillance on them than other security services had on suspected terrorists.
Jok Dorlan, though, had come in under their radar. They’d known he was on the planet but he had hardly seemed to access even the most basic datanet services, no hint of even the smallest hacking violation. Which was, they said, suspicious in itself for such a well-known super-hacker.
The police investigators, having had this finger pointed at a suspect, had no sooner discovered that he had previous for hacking classified files than they’d decided that they’d got their man. And that was it. No evidence. The fact that they couldn’t find any evidence that he’d so much as hacked a drinks machine to get a free coffee was being taken as evidence that he was so good he could cover his tracks so completely as to leave not a trace of evidence behind. And the fact that with half a million dollars stashed away beyond their ability to track or retrieve he had come back to work for the Fourth at a salary of eight and a half thousand a year, well, that was just cunning and cover, wasn’t it?
The file made it clear. They were pushing for arrest. No other suspect under investigation. And the list of points and questions that they had provided would take days to go through. Days. The estimated time for the interview given for the warrant was forty hours, to be spread over five days so as to comply with police interview regulations.
‘No.’
The look on Alex’s face as he said that was very familiar to several people at the Admiralty. It was the same look he’d got on his face during that period when he’d been fighting against the injustice done to one of his crew. Jace Higgs had also been sent to prison on Cestus, in his case for punching an officer. Alex had been adamantly of the view that in the particular circumstances of the incident, that had been almost entirely the officer’s fault. He had set about getting his crewman out of prison with a combination of outrage and determination which had ultimately seen him marching into the First Lord’s office with just this look of wrathful intent.
‘I am not,’ Alex declared, putting his hand down on the displayed document in a gesture only just short of a slap, ‘going to accept this…’ he broke off just before the word which would have escaped him, and forced it, instead, to be one Fleet officers were allowed to use, ‘rubbish. Even if it was for just half an hour, no, on principle, no. But to ask me to spend forty hours interrogating an innocent man on the basis of this… rubbish…’ He drew a breath and spat it out again with a blistering, explosive ‘NO!’
Buzz looked at him with calm interest and not the tiniest hint of a smile. Nobody was smiling. Not on the command deck and not anywhere around the ship, either. Word had spread quickly. One or two people had noticed him frown as he first read the document, then his face had darkened and his shoulders gone rigid. By the time he’d read it a second time the whisper was rushing round the ship – something’s up, look at the skipper…
They were not looking at him now, not directly anyway. His rage was like a fizz bomb sparking on the command deck and nobody wanted to catch his eye, even through comms. The skipper’s on the warpath… word of it, the sense of it, pervaded the ship like the tang of smoke.
‘There are,’ Buzz ventured, ‘legal…’
‘I don’t care!’ Alex was not shouting, but those words snapped at Buzz – at Buzz, of all people – were like the crackle of fire. ‘This is about justice,’ he stated, with a passion that bordered on fanaticism. ‘This is about common justice and common sense and common decency. This…’ another near-slap on the screen containing the offending document, ‘is a travesty of all three and I will not allow it or be part of it and that is not a matter open to discussion, Buzz, I am not having this and that’s final!’
He looked around and saw that Jonas Sartin was coming onto the command deck – a brave man, Jonas. He held the unpopular role of Internal Affairs officer, the IA representative on the ship and required, in that role, to monitor adherence to Fleet policies and to intervene if there were any violations. This was an awkward position for any officer to be in when it meant monitoring and advising their colleagues; still more awkward when it meant registering objections to superiors.
Jonas was looking grim. He got copies of all such legal documents too, always by the same mailing – as the IA officer he could also be called on to advise and support any member of the crew in such proceedings, not to defend them, but simply to advise them about the regulations and policies and see to it that those were properly followed.
‘Ah!’ said Alex, and a lesser man than Jonas would have flinched. It would have been understandable, indeed, to turn about and leave at once. Jonas kept coming forward. ‘You’ve seen this?’ Alex did not wait for an answer. ‘I am not going to have it, Mr Sartin.’ He looked beyond him then and saw Jok Dorlan himself coming up the ladderway from the deck below. He looked stunned, a comp screen still open in his hand which he was pointing to as he stepped out of the zero-gee zone, looking at the captain with bewilderment and fear. IA also sent notifications to the subjects of such warrants, informing them that they were to be interviewed under caution and what the allegations were. ‘Mr Dorlan,’ Alex saw him hesitating by the hatchway and gestured him forward imperatively. ‘Come here.’ As Jok obeyed he went on, ‘Do not worry about this, I’m sorting it out.’ He pointed to a seat at the command table. ‘Sit. Just give me a minute.’
Jok sat down very quickly. Jonas, however, remained standing, keeping a little distance between himself and the skipper.
‘All right,’ said Alex, glaring back at the IA officer. ‘I understand – duty compels. So go ahead, file your advisories and make your reports. But understand, Mr Sartin, that I’m not going to allow any member of my crew to be accused and interrogated on the basis of rubbish like this, on zero evidential grounds and circumstantial which amounts to no more than that he happened to be on the planet at the time. So I am making a command decision about this and I want to hear no argument about it, understood?’
‘Sir,’ Jonas acknowledged, very calmly, and at the captain’s curt nod came forward and sat down, saying nothing at all but taking quiet notes.
‘Mr Dorlan.’ As the skipper looked back at him, Jok jumped to his feet automatically. He looked grey around the mouth, his eyes had widened with fear and his hands were visibly shaking. Perhaps because of this, he shoved them rapidly behind his back and assumed the pose used in the Fleet for ‘attention.’
‘Sir!’
‘All right – breathe,’ Alex told him, intending it to be comforting but in fact barking it at him as a sharp command. ‘You haven’t done anything wrong and I am not going to have you harassed or upset by this, understand? I am not even going to insult you by asking you if there is any basis for truth to these allegations – the only thing I will ask you, for the record, is whether you know anything at all about the crime you have been accused of - anything which might be of help to the investigation?’
‘No sir.’ Jok replied, and indignant innocence shone in him. ‘First I’ve heard of it!’
‘All right,’ Alex said. ‘That will be all.’ He look
ed sternly at the crewman. ‘I don’t want you worrying about this,’ he told Jok. ‘It is utter nonsense, as should have been apparent to the judge who signed it. I will be writing to the people concerned to express my opinion on the professionalism and probity which resulted in that…’ a disgusted glance at the warrant, ‘being sent out to us, and you can rest assured that I will be requiring an apology. So, unless you want to talk to Commander Sartin about your rights to complain about judicial misconduct, I advise you to put the whole thing out of your mind, just forget it and go back to work.’
‘Sir – thank you, skipper,’ Jok still looked agitated, though, and having shot a glance at the impassive Jonas, struggled for a moment to get his head together and then blurted, ‘I think I would like to talk to Mr Sartin, sir.’
It was evident that he meant now, and Jonas looked up with a nod of confirmation and an enquiring gaze at the skipper.
‘Use my daycabin,’ Alex told them both, and with thanks, at that, they departed.
They had only been gone for a couple of minutes when Davie North appeared on the command deck.
‘May I?’ He sat down too, and indicated the files which were still on Alex’s recent activity screen. ‘Please,’ he said, as Alex was obviously about to refuse, ‘I’m not being nosy,’ he gave a slight smile. ‘I have expertise;’ he pointed out, ‘which I believe may be of assistance.’
Alex considered for a moment, then gave a reluctant nod and authorised Davie having access to the files.
‘Ah.’ It took him only moments to read them, even the weighty document which detailed the crime itself. ‘Thought so,’ he observed, and looking back at Alex, ‘Poor dears, they never can seem to get their heads past the idea that if money has been taken then it must have gone somewhere. They’ve spent months trying to figure out who got the money and how, as if it’s been somehow turned into cash cards and spirited away. But the money was never real in the first place; it’s just asset devaluation, that’s all.’ He remembered who he was talking to and stepped things down to a very much more basic explanation. ‘I need to make sense of it for you… let’s just say that you and I have agreed between us that your mug of coffee is worth a dollar, okay?’
