‘Well, when you put it like that…’ Davie had to admit that she had made a valid ethical point, there. ‘Though it really isn’t our job to …’ he sighed as she lifted her chin and glared at him. ‘Okay, okay!’ he surrendered. ‘But I can only do this if you promise me faithfully, an absolutely firm commitment, that you will not go aboard or even contact any ship we encounter, without discussing it with me first. And if you decide at any point that you no longer feel that promise to be holding, you tell me straight away, yes? Immediately?’
‘Agreed,’ she said, seeing that this was an absolute condition and not something he was prepared to compromise about. ‘I promise,’ she said, and crossed her heart.
Davie smiled, feeling for the first time that they might actually have made some progress, building a relationship of mutual understanding and trust in which she would tell him when she was no longer willing, for whatever reason, to hold to this agreement.
‘Thank you,’ he said, and nodded. ‘Starseeker patrol it is.’
Actually, the starseekers were not much of a problem. A Fleet corvette had left on this route two days before them. There was also a Customs and Excise ship coming into port which had dealt with several distress calls en-route, so there weren’t very many for the Stepeasy to deal with. Davie was, in fact, absolutely right in his evaluation – they had three starseeker distress calls to respond to between Chartsey and Karadon; one switched on inadvertently by a pilot who’d thought it was something to do with the auto-helm and turned it on before going to bed, one turned on by a pilot hysterically convinced that his yacht was ‘listing dangerously to starboard’ because one of his gravity plates had gone wonky, and the third signalling a medical emergency because they’d run out of travel sickness meds. In each case, as Rep pointed out, they had performed a useful service – educating the first, reassuring the second and relieving suffering for the third. As far as Davie was concerned, though, the encounters just made him even more determined to do something about the starseeker menace, and as quickly as possible.
It was, however, the Incident with the White Star liner which really brought him down. They were passing a lot of liners – White Star alone had a liner leaving Chartsey for Karadon every five hours, as did their main rivals, Red Line, and there were any number of smaller operators competing on the busiest route in the League, too.
And then, on day eight, they passed the Empress of Cartasay, just at the point where Rep decided to try on another persona.
She had been chatting to Tina about what kind of operations the Fourth might be going to undertake, and Tina had told her that they would almost certainly be using the cover of anti-piracy ops in the Kavenko-Telathor region. She’d laughed as she said it, and explained that that was funny because spacers knew very well that there was no piracy issue on that route, but it was a story groundsiders would believe.
‘As to what they’re really going there to do, I can’t say,’ Tina said, with regret but certainty, too. ‘I don’t know, officially, so I’d only be guessing. If I guessed right I’d be telling you classified information I’m not authorised to disclose, and if I guessed wrong I’d be making a fool of myself and misleading you – either way, it isn’t something I’m prepared to speculate about.’
‘But – exciting?’ asked Rep, though it was more of an observation than a question.
‘Well – if they’re doing what I think they’re doing, yeah!’ Tina said, and laughed. ‘Though I know there’s hardly any chance that we’ll be in on that, obviously,’ she remembered and added conscientiously, ‘whatever it is.’
It was after that that Rep did some reading – eleven minutes of reading, in fact, which was long enough to satisfy her curiosity about pirates – fact and fiction, historical and modern, pirates in popular culture and the socio-psychology of why pirates were often regarded as dashing adventurers while burglars, by contrast, were considered sneaky and contemptible.
Shortly after this, having given it some thought, Rep decided to investigate this phenomenon further by adopting what she considered to be an appropriate and indeed socially beneficial persona as a pirate. So she created a look – costume, hair, makeup and accessories – and took a shuttle over to the Empress of Cartasay.
It was late evening, heading towards midnight. Most of the eight hundred first class passengers aboard the liner were enjoying the elegant facilities provided for them – the restaurants, casino, bar-lounges and promenades which were exclusively for the use of first class.
The Empress of Cartasay allowed her shuttle to dock at the first-class entry airlock, of course. None of them knew that it was Davie’s father who owned the White Star shipping line but they recognised the Stepeasy at once as one of the ships they had standing orders to treat like royalty. Anything they wanted, anytime, they were to be given without question. The Empress’s first-class purser was actually thrilled when he was told that the Stepeasy was sending over a shuttle, delighted that such high status guests wanted to use the facilities aboard their ship. He went running, himself, in order to get to the airlock in time to meet the anticipated VIPs, and had summoned several stewards, too, as a kind of unofficial honour guard, telling them to stand in a line facing the airlock while he fronted up, catching his breath and adopting a gracious smile.
Then the airlock opened.
‘Hi.’ A stunningly beautiful young woman wearing a fantasy pirate outfit stepped through the hatch. There was a rakish hat on her platinum ringlets, a great many ruffles and a leather bodice. She was carrying an obviously toy gun, the kind of garish plastic ‘space gun’ a kid might play with. This she pointed straight at the purser, giving him a sunny smile. ‘I am Captain Sapphire,’ she told him, ‘Terror of the Spaceways.’ She flourished a loot bag with her free hand. ‘I’m here to rob from the rich and give to the poor.’
They let her do it. They actually showed her to the casino and let her hold up the first class passengers, at first because they really didn’t understand that she was serious and then because Davie had gone tearing over there after her and was running interference.
‘She’s my cousin,’ he told the captain, having apologised for springing this on them without prior agreement. ‘She can be a bit impetuous, you know, but she doesn’t mean any harm – I’ll see that everybody gets their stuff back, obviously, and settle any compensation if required.’
The captain looked at him and Davie recognised that she had nothing but contempt for him and for his cousin – playboy brats, swanning about in their yachts, doing whatever the hell they liked and throwing money at it to make the consequences go away.
Davie squirmed inwardly. It really hurt to have anyone believing that he was a social parasite, particularly the kind of rich yob he himself considered to be the lowest form of life in the League. What made it worse was that the Empress’s captain was highly influential amongst spacers – a senior captain in White Star, well known and respected throughout the spacer community. When she told other skippers that she’d had trouble with yahoos from the Stepeasy, word would get around.
It was small comfort to know that if he could tell her the truth she would have a very different opinion, and pointless to tell himself that other people’s opinions didn’t matter anyway. Right here and now it felt as if they mattered a lot, as he withered under the captain’s cool, dispassionate gaze. Then, on the screen beside her, he saw the quarian ambassador helpfully wriggling a spectacularly vulgar ring off a woman’s finger and dropping it into her loot bag, while the woman herself laughed. Several of the onlookers were actually crowding forward, evidently competing to be next.
Davie closed his eyes, just for a moment. He knew that he should be able to rise above this, that in other circumstances he would even find it funny. It was absurd, just bonkers that the passengers were actually pushing forward to be robbed, laughing as they handed over their jewellery and expensive wristcoms. They were clearly assuming that this was some kind of charity fundraising stunt, in which they would be able to
reclaim their stuff later by making a donation to the charity concerned. At any rate nobody seemed to mind at all being robbed by such a very glamorous, charismatic pirate.
Davie felt a wave of despair. This was like being back at Chartsey again – the same sense of nightmare, of being swept up in events beyond his control. It was always going to be like this. Every time he felt as if he had made some progress in mutual understanding with the quarian she would flip into another persona and go off creating chaos again. This was just pointless. It was just going to be another epic fail in the long history of failed diplomatic efforts with Quarus. And this one, for sure, would result in them closing their borders, with all the damaging consequences there would be not only in the loss of that relationship but the knock-on effect it would have in discouraging others to make contact with them.
And this one, he felt, was all down to him. And not just because he was officially responsible for handling the visit. The quarians had engineered her to be their ambassador based on the DNA his father had used to create him. If his father had not done that, Davie thought, if he’d just settled for having a normal human offspring, the quarians would not have created her either. He couldn’t help thinking that, the way things were going, humanity might be better off without either of them.
‘Are you all right?’ The captain enquired. ‘You’ve gone very pale.’ There was suspicion in her look, and Davie had to force a weary smile. Now she thinks I’m drunk or on something, he realised. But there was nothing he could do about that either.
So he pulled it together, noting that the passengers were now posing for holos, taking selfies of themselves being robbed, and that as word went around that something entertaining was happening in the casino, more of them were hurrying in.
Okay, he told himself. Just deal with what’s in front of you.
So he did that, efficiently if rather wearily. Within half an hour he had Captain Sapphire, Terror of the Spaceways, back aboard the Stepeasy with her loot safely in the hands of the Empress of Cartasay’s purser and the passengers none the wiser. They had, in fact, applauded her as she left the casino, with some whistles and cheers as she’d given a flourishing bow.
‘Grumpy guts,’ she complained, as Davie saw her back aboard the ship. ‘I was enjoying that!’
Davie looked at her. ‘You promised,’ he said.
She looked back at him with complete incomprehension.
‘But I’m a pirate,’ she pointed out, as if this was entirely reasonable. ‘Pirates don’t follow the rules. And anyway it was in a good cause and everybody was having fun.’
‘Yes, I know,’ said Davie. ‘Because they had no idea that you were actually robbing them.’
Her eyes widened. ‘But I told them,’ she protested. ‘I demanded their valuables – hand over, me hearties – and I told them it was for the poor, and they were all very happy to give me their stuff.’
‘Only because they thought it was the kind of fake hold up charities do sometimes at fundraising events,’ Davie said. ‘They’re given their stuff back in exchange for making a donation. But you never had any intention of giving it back to them, did you?’
She looked surprised. ‘No, of course not.’ She said. ‘I told them, it was for the poor.’
‘So – just out of interest,’ he asked, ‘what exactly did you intend to do with it all?’
‘I was going to take it down to Economy,’ she told him, looking a little puzzled at his exasperation. ‘And give it to the people there – they are poor, aren’t they?’
Davie closed his eyes again, wishing that he believed in a god so that he might pray for strength.
‘If you had done that,’ said, with great restraint, ‘and they had been daft enough to accept, you would have made them guilty of receiving stolen goods, if not accessories after the fact, and you yourself have just pulled off a genuine act of piracy – criminal piracy, though a jury might find it hard to believe that you waltzed aboard that ship with an obviously toy gun and people just gave you their stuff. But what you just did there was criminal, and yes, I know, you have diplomatic immunity, but I did have to intervene there and do some fast talking to prevent that becoming a very unpleasant situation.’
Captain Sapphire, Terror of the Spaceways, surveyed him with concern.
‘You,’ she observed, ‘are in a very grumpy mood. Perhaps you need to go and get some sleep.’ She considered. ‘Or maybe have sex with someone?’
Davie walked away.
Six
The Fourth’s squadron swung neatly into orbit around ISiS Kavenko.
This was one of the smallest and normally one of the quietest of all the Independent Space Stations. It had hotel capacity for just two thousand visitors and even that was rarely more than half full. Only three liner routes converged on it – the one from Karadon which brought a small liner out to them every other week, the one from their nearest neighbour world, Kenso, which sent a ferry every month, and the one which led to Telathor itself, from which a liner arrived, optimistically, every week. Besides that there might be a handful of freighters in port at any given time, a few small commercial passenger craft and very occasionally, a yacht. They might also, even more rarely, have the excitement of a visit from an Exploration Corps ship, as they had a base at Telathor and used this sector for training. The last Fleet ship they’d seen, heading out after being relieved from the Telathor homeworld defence squadron, had been three years previously.
But that, of course, had been before the news went out that the Fourth was coming. Many people felt that that announcement had to mean that they were going anywhere but here, but spacer goss had picked up clues from all manner of sources and the general consensus was that the Fourth might, in fact, turn up here.
That ‘might’ was good enough to draw quite a number of ships to head over to Kavenko and to stick around. Some of them had encountered the Fourth before, while others had just heard the stories. It seemed unlikely that the Fourth would turn the gravity upside down on Kavenko as they had done once at Karadon, but people lived in hope. And there were, at any rate, almost bound to be explosions, as the Fourth hardly seemed to go anywhere without blowing something up.
There were, by then, forty eight freighters in orbit at a station which considered that having six of them in port was a really busy day. There were also twenty three charter ships and seventeen yachts, not to mention the Excorps ship, the official Telethoran presidential transport, a Fleet patrol ship and four high speed media craft. Admiralty couriers seemed to be ripping into orbit every few hours, too – as soon as one arrived, the one already in port would go tearing off again, either back towards Karadon or on towards Telathor.
Alex took in the unprecedented numbers of ships in orbit around the little station with a look of keen interest. He had nothing like Davie’s superhuman abilities, but even so the Heron had not even completed its first orbit before Alex had taken stock of what was going on there.
Five things struck him at once – the absence of one ship he was expecting and the presence of four that he wasn’t. The missing ship was of course the Customs and Excise vessel that was supposed to rendezvous with them here. The four ships he was not expecting were the Telathoran Presidential Transport, the Fleet patrol ship, the freighter Calliope and a corporate yacht called the Comrade Foretold.
The Telathoran Presidential Transport, he was relieved to notice, was not displaying the insignia it would have if it was actually carrying the system president. It was an elderly, rather lumpy ship, though beautifully decorated with elaborate floral paintwork. The Fleet patrol ship was part of the Telathor Homeworld Defence Squadron – Alex couldn’t see any reason why they would feel the need to send out a ship, but time would tell.
The freighter Calliope was more intriguing. It belonged to the First Fleet Irregulars, also known as Fleet Intelligence. As far as Alex knew, it was still being skippered by Yula Cavell. He hoped it was. It would be great to see her again.
The Comrade Foretold, th
ough, was another matter. It appeared to be an ordinary yacht of the type used by executives for business travel and corporate hospitality. The company ID it displayed, that of Comrade Life and Finance, was an insurance firm on Telathor.
Alex, however, knew that it was rather more than that, as he had been given a point of contact at the Comrade Life and Finance offices in case he needed to call on the services of the League Intelligence Agency. Having the LIA on scene here was unnecessary and a complication Alex could have done without, but he made no comment. The only thing really concerning him here was the absence of the Customs ship. Far too many joint Fleet and Customs operations had fallen down over poor communication, mistrust and inter-service rivalry. The fact that the Customs ship was not at the rendezvous did not augur well.
His immediate priority, though, was responding to the incoming call from ISiS Kavenko’s Director.
‘Welcome to Kavenko, Captain,’ the Executive Director of Kavenko was a slick corporate critter by the name of Guiliano Espetti. He had been enjoying his time on Kavenko very much, until the dreadful words The Fourth is coming hit his desk. ‘And of course, of course, if there is anything that we can do for you – supplies, facilities… we are already providing an open link to our computers, of course.’
That was part of the ‘freedom’ package the Fourth had been given – surely a tongue-in-cheek condition, that, since the Fourth had demonstrated their ability to hack Karadon’s computer systems from orbit.
They were, in fact, already availing themselves of the comms-link which the station had offered immediately they came into range. Teams on all three ships were vying with one another to carry out intel searches on the station’s systems. It wasn’t that Alex had any reason to suspect that Kavenko was involved in drug trafficking, piracy or any other kind of illegal activity, but since they had the unique privilege of access to their records, the authorities required them to carry out full-search on ISiS systems, routinely.
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