Mission Zero (Fourth Fleet Irregulars)

by S J MacDonald

  ‘But that’s not all he’s had to contend with. He and his wife had the usual kind of pre-nup so as the divorce went through, she was entitled to half the marital assets, including half the value of their home. But she put in a claim for more than that. She said she was entitled to more than half because she’d put her legal career on hold, to have and look after Etta, so she should get compensation for the damage that had done to her career.’ She nodded as Mako’s expression showed shock at such mercenary exploitation of her daughter’s death.

  ‘Yeah.’ She said. ‘That’s how we felt, too. It dragged on for months. Officially, of course we knew nothing about it. In fact, we knew everything that was going on. Like I said, no such thing as privacy in the Fleet.

  ‘It got very dirty indeed by the time it was over. The skipper wouldn’t give a millimetre, fought her every way he could. He even sued her for Etta’s death, and won. In the end she got nothing. As if that mattered, really. The day after the divorce was finalised and all the assets were his to dispose of, the skipper sold the lot. And I do mean everything – house, contents, car, absolutely everything, even down to Etta’s toys. Then he gave every cent of it to a children’s charity and walked away.

  ‘He doesn’t go to Chartsey now unless it’s to Admiralty HQ or some official thing he’s under orders to attend. I don’t know whether he doesn’t want to take the risk of running into his ex-wife or whether there are just too many places with memories of Etta, but its common knowledge that he loathes Chartsey. He spends all his shoreleaves at the Fleet moonbase. It’s been more than a year now and well-meaning friends have tried to set him up with dates and things, but he doesn’t want to know. Most people think he’ll meet someone else, get married again, even have more kids. Me, I dunno. I think he may never get over Etta or be able to trust another woman after what his wife did. If he does, I think it will be a very long time and it’ll need a very special woman.

  ‘But that’s what happened, see. It would have been terrible for anyone, just not something I’d wish on my worst enemy. But for something like that to happen to a really good guy like him is just so lousy rotten unfair.’

  Mako nodded soberly. He’d never had to go through anything like that kind of pain himself so could only imagine what Alex von Strada had endured. He could certainly understand now, though, why Minnow’s crew had been so outraged by Lt Audri Simon’s cruel taunt. ‘Life can be very unfair,’ he agreed. ‘But thank you, Hali. I couldn’t ask of course, but I did want to know what had happened. I feel I understand him a bit better now.’

  Hali smiled. ‘He’s not that hard to understand,’ she said. ‘He’s got the words duty, honour, loyalty and justice encoded in every cell in his body. Once you know that about him, the rest is just detail.’

  That made Mako smile too, but he thought privately that Alex was rather more complex than that. He had a stubborn streak, too, and a mischievous sense of humour.

  He was also, as all spacers were by definition, a science geek. Mako learned a good deal about the formation of solar systems while they were waiting in ambush and Alex was one of his most enthusiastic teachers. Alex, in fact, was attempting to distract Mako from worrying by interesting him in the spectacle taking place outside the ship, though Mako just thought he was sharing his own interest in it.

  ‘I mean, just look at it,’ Alex said, a couple of days later as they sat on the command deck. ‘There’s a solar system forming there right in front of you. How often in your life will you get to be up close and personal with something as amazing as that?’

  Mako responded politely. In truth, he could see nothing particularly amazing about the solar system they were in. It just looked messy to him, with all the millions of rocks hurtling about amidst sprawling gas clouds. There was none of the elegant dancing orbits of planets and moons he thought of as a ‘proper’ solar system. If they were able to come back in a few million years there would be, but for right now, Mako felt that it was just chaotic.

  Perhaps you had to be a spacer to see the beauty in that. The crew, at any rate, thought it was magnificent. They’d spotted a planetismal that was on a collision course with a rather larger planetoid. If the impact happened as expected, the planetismal would be absorbed into the already semi-molten substance of the planetoid, adding to the mass of what was likely, one day, to become a planet. The impact was due five weeks and three days after they’d taken up station in the system. Many of the crew were looking forward to the collision. It would, they said, be one for the holoalbum, that.

  The doomed planetismal was, however, still eighteen days away from its obliteration when the smugglers arrived to pick up the container.

  The ship went to action stations with the familiar whooping siren, all decks going into freefall and the crew racing about with swift, quiet purpose. It had long since been agreed that Mako’s station could be on the command deck if he wished so he scrambled into a suit and made his way there. The images he could see on the scopes were like cheap stop-motion holography, a series of still shots rather than a movie. It was apparent from it, though, that there was a shuttle blasting its way into the system, decelerating sublight and approaching the cargo container.

  ‘That’s a cargo shuttle,’ Buzz informed him quietly, in case Mako’s knowledge of starships was not up to identifying the vessel. ‘Carrying another container.’

  Mako nodded but said nothing. A magnified still of the shuttle spoke for itself, really. The shuttle was about fourteen metres long, carrying a cargo container beneath it in heavy grips. It was not displaying ID lights and both the painted ID on the hull and on the container had been obscured with tape. They were going to have to wait to find out what ship it was from.

  For the next forty minutes, they sat watching while three figures in hullwalker suits took the crates out of the drug container and put them into the empty one they’d brought with them. This did not seem to surprise the Minnow’s crew, as Alex explained for Mako’s benefit.

  ‘That container will already have been customs cleared for a legitimate cargo of something like tetracitrine or cindar,’ he told him. ‘Which they’ll have sold off, to be run in somewhere else as heavy cargo. That’s a long range, deep space shuttle. It’s obviously come out here to pick up the drugs while the container ship continues on route. That’s so there won’t be any obvious disruption to its run if the authorities are looking for any tell-tale gaps or discrepancies. They must be going to rendezvous later, with the freighter holding to a pre-agreed, precise course so that the shuttle can find them.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ Mako looked at him in just as much bewilderment. ‘How do you know?’ he asked, meaning not just the skipper but all of them since that seemed to be entirely obvious to everyone but him.

  ‘Because they’ve taped over both their own ID and the registration number on the container,’ Alex explained, trying not to sound patronising with him. ‘The only reason they could have for doing that is that they’re passing through the Pagolis, knowing that we’ve been around here laying micro scanners. So if they are seen, see, they’re just an anonymous shuttle, almost impossible to identify. People have suspected for a long time that this is one of the ways that large quantities of drugs come into our worlds but nobody has been able to catch them in the act before.’

  ‘Ah,’ Mako said, and looking back at the scope which was showing the three figures moving crates into the container, ‘So… what are we going to do, then?’

  ‘Follow them.’ Alex answered that as everyone looked at him. ‘We’re going to follow them and identify the ship. Once we know that and which way they’re going, I will be able to make decisions about how to proceed. But speculating, until we know that, is pointless. Though I dare say,’ he added, with an amused glance around the command deck crew, ‘that a book will soon be running on what ship it is.’

  A book had already been running, in fact, on whether anyone would turn up to collect the drugs and if so, what ship that would be. The four members of the crew who
’d put their money on that being a shuttle would be collecting their winnings later, discreetly. And the skipper was right, of course, that there would be a list of suspect ships being bet on within minutes. It was technically against regulations to gamble but most skippers turned a blind eye to modest, harmless sweepstakes of this kind so long as the stakes weren’t more than a dollar or two.

  ‘And if you were going to have a dollar on it yourself, skipper?’ Mako asked, knowing that he was the only person on the ship who could ask such a question, from his position as a civilian guest.

  ‘Me?’ Alex looked even more amused, at that, though pretending to be shocked. ‘Fleet officers are not permitted to gamble, Mr Ireson. Nor would it be professional of me to guess on such little evidence. I will tell you that from the timing, and our last best information as to shipping on this route, there are five ships on the suspect list. But which of them it may be, or even perhaps one that is way off route and not on our radar at all, I must decline to speculate about. And it is likely to be three or four days, you know, before we find out for sure.’

  Mako nodded. He was just, he recognised, going to have to be patient, here. Though they didn’t have to wait long to get started on following the shuttle. It took the smugglers less than half an hour to transfer the crates and seal the newly loaded container up. Before the hullwalkers went back aboard, they gave the emptied container a shove that sent it rolling, tumbling slowly but inexorably in towards the centre of the system. In the unlikely event of it avoiding being smashed into or dragged into the gravity of one of the thousands of planetismals whirling about the system, it was on a direct course to crash into the sun. Either way, any evidence aboard it would be effectively destroyed.

  Alex von Strada watched this without comment and made no attempt to retrieve the emptied container. It was, clearly, far more important to track the one that now contained the drugs.

  ‘Stand by helm,’ he said, as the shuttle began to accelerate within moments of the hullwalkers going back aboard. A course had already been laid in for the Minnow to climb back out of the system but Alex was watching the time, estimating how long it would take the shuttle to pass beyond their own scanning range. If the Minnow rose too soon, the shuttle might see them, too late and they might lose them. ‘Orbit lift in forty seconds from my mark,’ the skipper instructed, without looking up. Then there was a brief pause before he added, almost casually, ‘Mark.’

  ‘Orbit lift imminent.’ Buzz Burroughs announced on the PA, with the customary warning. ‘Brace, brace.’

  Mako held onto the grab bar, unnecessarily as it turned out, since the Minnow lifted out of the system with the quiet, purposeful grace of a surfacing shark. Everyone aboard was glued to scopes and everyone broke into a grin at exactly the same moment.

  ‘Well done, dear boy,’ Buzz told the skipper approvingly.

  Alex had got it bang on right. As the corvette emerged from the Comet Cloud, the shuttle was just curving away from the system, heading back towards the shipping route between Chartsey and Karadon. They were in what Mako had learned to call the ‘sweet zone’ – outside the limit of the shuttle’s own scanners, which meant they couldn’t see the corvette, but within Minnow’s ability to see them. ‘Very neat,’ the Exec commended, and Alex spared a moment to grin at him.

  ‘Lock on to covert pursuit,’ he told the helm, and the corvette settled into tracking position, directly behind the shuttle, matching their speed.

  ____________________

  Chapter Eleven

  The next four days needed a good deal of patience and steady nerve. The shuttle changed course five times, clearly in an effort to mislead if they were picked up on micro-scanners. Maintaining station on them required constant vigilance on the part of the officer of the watch and the helm. Speculation about what ship they were from changed every time they changed direction, too, though there was one name that kept coming up, odds on favourite right from the start.

  That was the Might of Teranor. Mako remembered seeing that container ship launch at Chartsey, heading out just an hour or so before them. Buzz had pointed it out to him and they’d had a casual conversation about the route it would be taking. It was on its way to Altarb, Mako recalled, via Karadon, Canelon, Klenghorn and Cwmbracha.

  There was not, he learned, any particular reason to suspect the Might of Teranor of drug running. Buzz had merely pointed it out as a very well known ship. It had a clean reputation. It was not on any list of Customs concern and there was no mention of it in any drug-related intelligence. They were, however, considered odds-on favourites by the Minnow’s crew.

  Firstly, Mako had gathered, they were the most probable ship navigationally. From the timing and their known cruising speed, they would be passing the Pagolis about now, where the other suspect ships would be further away.

  Secondly, they were also known to be in the habit of running slightly off-route. There was nothing inherently suspicious in that. Big, slow freighters had a tendency to hang off to one side of the central line, staying out of the way of the stream of faster shipping. The Might of Teranor was hardly the only freighter that tried to avoid acquiring a cluster of annoying little yachts, either. Given that they routinely cruised out of the main shipping stream, though, the chances of anyone seeing them picking up a container were practically non-existent.

  The real clincher though, at least as far as the crew was concerned, was the manifest. None of the other container ships was hauling anything remotely like a container full of compacted powder. The unfriendly Colestar 11 was hauling containers full of liquid fertiliser made from recycled food waste, while the Freightmaster 24 was hauling scrap metals. Both the freighters heading towards Chartsey were carrying mixed cargoes of tech, fabrics, and luxury goods.

  Mako did not want it to be the Freightmaster 24. That was a wholly irrational feeling because they had been friendly when he went ship visiting, giving him breakfast and showing him around. He knew realistically that that did not preclude them being drug runners. In fact, the intelligent thing for any such ship to do would be to maintain easy, friendly relationships with the Fleet, rather than be suspiciously hostile like the Colestar 11. He had liked them, though, and was secretly rather relieved to find that they were right at the bottom of the list of suspects. It seemed to be self evident to the spacers that they were looking for a ship which was already carrying a legitimate container of cargo very similar to that of the drugs, and neither the Colestar 11 nor Freightmaster 24, nor the other two freighters inbound for Chartsey, had anything like it.

  The Might of Teranor, however, did. They had taken a container manifested as tetracitrine into port at Chartsey but had not sold it there. That was, again, not suspicious in itself since the Teranor would sell their cargo wherever they could get the best price for it. Chartsey was not likely to give the best price for tetracitrine so it had been manifested as a transit cargo for the Teranor’s next port of call, Canelon.

  This, for the crew, was the decisive factor. The Might of Teranor was in the right place at the right time and with the right cargo on the manifest to make them number one suspects. By the third day, with the shuttle emerging from the Pagolis and settling onto a course that angled them very definitely away from Chartsey, it seemed pretty much a certainty.

  They still had to wait, though. Early the following morning heatscan showed the presence of two small blips moving around outside the large one. They were hullwalkers, it was explained to Mako, removing the tape that had concealed the identity of the shuttle.

  ‘They’re moving back into shipping lanes now and if anyone saw them with their ID taped over that would be even more suspicious than the sight of a shuttle hauling a container around in deep space.’ Buzz told him. ‘There might after all, be conceivable legal reasons for a shuttle picking up a container. That does happen sometimes, as companies agree private stashes amongst themselves entirely legitimately. Even if they suspected it to be a heavy cargo, few spacers would take much notice of that, but a
shuttle with both its own ID and that of a cargo container concealed would arouse very definite suspicions.’

  ‘If only we could just get close enough to see them,’ Mako said, burning with frustration as they continued to tail the shuttle at a distance beyond visual range. ‘I know, I know, if we get close enough to get them on our visuals, they’ll see us on their heatscan, but if only we had something like a really powerful telescope.’

  This caused one of those moments of disbelief, followed by a burst of laughter that had become less frequent over the weeks. This, as he recognised at once, was hilarity at his civilian daftness.

  ‘Even the most sophisticated telescopes out there could not pick up an object of the size of that shuttle, at that range, as anything more than a blurred pixel.’ Buzz pointed out, quite kindly. ‘They are only fourteen metres long and they are more than six hundred billion kilometres away.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Mako, finding that, not for the first time, he just did not have his head around the immensity of scale you were dealing with in deep space. The fact that they were able to see the shuttle on heatscan in such detail as to be able to make out the two little hot spots moving around outside the shuttle was, in itself, remarkable. He was, he realised, just going to have to be patient for a little while longer.

  Five and a half hours longer, in fact, since that was how long it took before the shuttle came up on an enormous ship lumbering along at L12.

  Even Mako recognised it immediately from its heatscan signature. He had been shown the heatscan signatures of all the suspect ships, and was spacer enough by now at least to be able to tell the difference between the various classes of container ship.