Karadon (Fourth Fleet Irregulars)

by S J MacDonald

Alex responded at once.

  “Put your weapon in the airlock and close the internal door,” he instructed. “I will send a shuttle to get you.”

  “No need,” Sadie Kettle was evidently hopeful of being allowed to go aboard the Heron herself, though she had to know she would not be allowed to film there. “Give me flight clearance, I’ll bring him to any airlock you specify.”

  “Negative,” Alex answered firmly. “Come to this course.” He signalled a course that would bring the shuttle to the outside of the frigate, shielded from the station but staying at a clear distance. “Be advised that if you violate our security zone, we will fire on you without further warning.”

  “Okay, okay, okay,” Sadie muttered, bringing the shuttle onto the course Alex had directed. Leo, however, didn’t move. His grip had tightened on the pistol.

  “I need a guarantee,” he said. He seemed suddenly hesitant now that he was facing the reality of handing himself over to the Fourth. “I need a guarantee that you’ll protect me.”

  “You have my word,” said Alex, calmly.

  Leo grimaced a little, as if he felt that that was a very slender thing to trust his life to. It was all he had, though, so he nodded and got up, looking resigned now.

  “I’m putting the gun in the airlock,” he said, holding it up to the camera to show, and making sure it filmed him putting it on the airlock floor, then shutting the hatch.

  “Snatch teams alpha, beta, gamma, away.” Alex said.

  The three shuttles broke away from the frigate immediately. Buzz was in charge on the alpha shuttle, directing the others to a manoeuvre they’d practiced many times in training. The alpha shuttle approached while the other two flanked the ABC craft, close enough to dart in if needed.

  “Stand away from the airlock,” Alex commanded, and watched as Leo Arad got that message and moved back, holding up his hands. “Clear to board,” Alex told Buzz. It was a great help being able to see what was happening on holovision. Alex was relieved to see the gun still in the airlock as Buzz led his team aboard. They retrieved it into a forensics box and one of the team took it back aboard their own shuttle to secure it there while Buzz opened the inner door.

  Leo Arad was still standing there with his hands up. There was only just room on the ABC shuttle for the cyber-suited Buzz and Hali Burdon to go aboard.

  He did not resist as they arrested him.

  “Leo Arad, I am arresting you on suspicion of trafficking Class 3 drugs,” Buzz said. “I am required to inform you that this is being recorded and that any statement you make may be used as a matter of record for legal purposes. You are advised not to make any statement until you have obtained independent legal representation.”

  By the time he’d finished saying that, Leo Arad was in handcuffs.

  “I want to talk to von Strada,” he said. “I will only talk to von Strada.”

  “You will,” Buzz told him, and nodded to Hali. She escorted the prisoner off the shuttle. Buzz remained, holding up a hand to prevent Sadie Kettle from following. “Thank you,” he said. “You and your colleagues may well have saved his life.”

  “Don’t you want me to come and make a statement?” Sadie asked, hopefully.

  “If we need a statement from you, we’ll arrange for that later,” Buzz said, and with that, stepped backwards into the airlock. He closed the hatch on her frustrated glower, smiling to himself behind the privacy of the blank visor. Sadie Kettle would just have to settle for the exclusive on filming Leo Arad’s arrest.

  She was making the most of that as she piloted her shuttle back to ABC’s ship, already giving an interview that she knew would be played to audiences across the League.

  On board the ship, Leo Arad was already being processed aboard. He was taken straight into the interview room, where he was uncuffed, provided with a written copy of his rights and offered a cup of tea. Rangi Tekawa came to do a preliminary medical evaluation of him, too, confirming that he was uninjured, in reasonable health, and fit to be interviewed.

  “When can I see von Strada?” Leo asked.

  “Skipper von Strada,” said Rangi, with unusual severity, “will see you when he is ready.”

  In fact Leo only had to wait a few more minutes. Alex knew that Chok Dayfield was safe, by then. The corporate yacht Belassa Torres was living aboard was no little runabout but a three deck ship capable of carrying up to fifty passengers as well as its seventeen crew. The Director had her own staff aboard with her, including a couple of security people who’d met Chok and his media escort at the airlock.

  Chok was clearly in a bad way. He was having to be supported by a couple of the journos as they approached the hatch. He was ashy pale, shaking and hyperventilating.

  “He needs a medic!” several of the journos told the four people who appeared at the hatchway. They were wearing ISiS yacht uniforms, but had the unmistakeable military manner of ex-Fleet crew.

  “We’ll take care of him.” They took Chok through the airlock immediately, but would not allow the journalists aboard with him.

  “You would be well advised to leave the station as quickly as you can,” the officer in charge told them, just before he closed the airlock in their faces.

  Predictably, the journalists did no such thing. Instead they stayed right there. Those of them with studios on the station immediately launched into giving interviews. The rest just filmed themselves talking to camera about what had happened. Then, in their excitement, they started interviewing one another.

  Intel showed that Hale Ardant had messaged Durb Jorgensen with a terse action? and had got back Arad = mental breakdown.

  Interpreting that to mean that the gang would stick to their policy of denying everything, at least for now, Alex stood the ship down from action stations and went to see Leo Arad.

  The trader’s relief when he saw Alex come in was obvious. He got up and made as if he was going to offer to shake hands with him. Then he saw the cold look on Alex’s face and thought better of it. A guard came in, too, armoured up the way they were for boarding operations and carrying one of their terrifying rifles. Leo looked uneasily at the figure as it took up a protective stance next to the door.

  “You are aware that everything in this room is recorded and may be used in evidence?” Alex asked.

  “Yes, and I’ve been told my rights to legal representation,” Leo Arad answered. “Which I waive. I don’t want anyone from that station coming anywhere near me! I want to make a deal, all right?”

  Alex sat down and gestured for Leo to resume his seat too.

  “What kind of deal?” the skipper asked.

  “I’ll talk,” Leo said, sitting down, “I’ll tell you everything I know, but in return I want an absolute guarantee of protection.”

  Alex looked unemotionally at him.

  “I am authorised to offer an assurance of a place on the witness protection programme…” he started, but Leo waved that aside impatiently.

  “Don’t make me laugh,” he told the skipper, with anything but humour. “The Landorns can get past that any time they like!”

  Alex could not in all honesty deny that. Previous witnesses against the Dortmell drug lords who’d been put into that programme had been murdered, despite every effort to conceal their new identities.

  “Well, what do you want, then?” he asked.

  “I want to be allowed to live at your base,” Leo said, fixing him with a determined look. “I want to be allowed to give evidence in court via remote link from there, and never to have to leave it.”

  The slight raise of Alex’s eyebrows conveyed his astonishment.

  “You’ve evidently given that some thought,” he observed.

  “Wouldn’t you, if they were starting to look at you as a liability?” Leo asked, with considerable feeling. “You did that! You know you did. You deliberately targeted me as a weak link in the chain and you piled on the pressure and piled it on and piled it on and piled it on…” his voice was rising with hysteria but he choked him
self off, taking a deep breath and staying as composed as he could. “You owe me!” he accused Alex. “You could have got me killed. Very nearly did get me killed!”

  “No, you did that,” Alex told him, unmoved, “when you involved yourself working for the Landorn cartel.”

  “Good grief, man, do you think I knew it was them?” Leo exclaimed, indignant, now. “I didn’t know it was them till it was far far too late to get out of it! Don’t you come it the “holier than thou” thing at me! What happened to me could have happened to anybody!” He saw the sceptical look pass fleetingly over Alex’s face. “Anybody!” he insisted, leaning forward and slapping his hand on the table between them for emphasis. “I’m not a bad person, Mr von Strada! I’m not some evil psycho! I’m no threat to anybody, me!”

  This, from a man who’d just held the station’s director hostage at gunpoint, did not carry a great deal of credibility. Seeing that in Alex’s cynical silence, Leo appealed to him.

  “I wouldn’t have fired! I’ve never hurt anyone in my entire life! I was just desperate to get off the station. I only had the gun for protection in case they came for me. Don’t you understand how terrified I was?” As Alex still didn’t respond, Leo attempted a more forceful demand. “You’ve got to let me stay at your base. It’s the only place I’ll ever be safe!”

  Alex did not ask him how he’d worked that out. It was probably true, in fact. The Fourth’s base was extraordinarily secure. They did not even allow delivery trucks to come into the base itself. They had to deposit their loads at a gate-stop three hundred kilometres distant, to be thoroughly checked before they were brought on into the base. The only way the Landorn gang would be able to get to him there would be to bribe a member of the Fourth, one of their families or one of the very few authorised visitors to kill him on their behalf. The chances of that were remote.

  “I am not having you living at our base for the rest of your life,” Alex said, flatly. “I have the welfare of our families to consider. I will, however, offer you protective custody there until your part in any legal proceedings there may be against the Landorn gang is concluded. After that, if you hold up to your end of the bargain in giving substantive evidence against them, I will undertake to get you out of the League with a new identity and sufficient funds to start a new life.”

  “Out of the League?” Leo repeated, as incredulously as if Alex had suggested dropping him out of the universe. “What do you mean, “out of the League?””

  “I don’t believe you would ever be truly safe, inside our borders,” Alex said. “There are too many ways for records to be accessed. There are, however, many worlds beyond our borders which have little or no contact with the League, worlds where even the Landorn cartel could never find you.”

  “But you can’t send me out there!” Leo protested. “Those worlds are primitive, barbaric! And there’s the Marfikians!” He came close to shuddering, even at the thought. The Marfikians were a cyborg race, genetically engineered and enhanced with cybernetic implants. They lived by the belief that all life was a struggle for power, the strong dominating the weak. They had no concepts of mercy or compassion. If a world did not comply immediately with their orders, they fired missiles at its cities, destroying them one by one until the world surrendered. Unlike other conquerors, however, they did not settle on the worlds they defeated. They rarely occupied a world for more than two or three years at a time. Then they might stay away for as much as a century, as long as that world was continuing to send the raw materials they had demanded it produce for them.

  So far, at least, they regarded the League as too big and powerful to take on in all out war, but sooner or later they would have built up their forces to the point where they would move into League space. They were the bogey-men, the terror beyond the League’s borders. That fear was reflected in Leo’s face.

  “No!” he said. “I won’t go out there, and you can’t make me!” He seemed to realise even as he said it how childish that sounded, and scowled at the skipper. “You gave me your word you’d protect me!”

  “Yes, and I will honour that,” Alex said. “I will keep you safe aboard this ship. If you are willing to give evidence I will give you protective custody at our base for as long as that process lasts – and that, I should mention, may be in the region of two to three years. After that, I will give you the safest options available. If you are not willing to leave the League then you may either enter the witness protection programme or I’ll make similar arrangements for you myself without involving any other authority.”

  Leo looked suspiciously at him.

  “You can do that?”

  Alex nodded, matter of factly.

  “I can do that,” he confirmed.

  “Well, all right, I suppose,” Leo said. “But what’s this “protective custody” going to involve? It hadn’t better be like being stuck in prison. I want a proper apartment and freedom to go about the base.”

  “Mr Arad,” Alex said, drily, “Your only alternative to cooperating fully in turning state’s evidence is to face charges yourself. In that case I will hand you over to the relevant authorities the moment we get into port at Therik. I will leave it to you to decide the likelihood of your surviving through a trial, let alone the minimum of twenty years you’d be sentenced to in a maximum security prison. You are not in any position to be dictating terms here. Nor am I prepared to allow you the freedom of our base. That is a safe haven for our families, our children, and you are not someone I want around them, understood? While you are aboard this ship you will be kept in our detention facility. At the base, you will be under house arrest. I will provide you with a comfortable house with a garden and exercise facilities, but you will not be allowed to go about the base.”

  “I don’t want to be in with the Demella’s crew,” he said.

  “You’ll be kept separately,” Alex said.

  There was a short silence while Leo considered this, and then he nodded. It was not, as Alex observed, as if he was in any position to be dictating terms.

  “All right,” he said. “All right. Deal. But don’t you forget,” he pointed at Alex again, repeating, “you owe me! You put me in this position, knowing that they’d kill me if they thought I was going to crack. Look me in the eye and deny it!”

  Alex looked him straight in the eyes and did not deny it.

  “I had the evidence to apply for your extradition six days ago,” he observed. “Did it not occur to you to wonder why I hadn’t?”

  “Did it not occur?” Leo echoed. “Everyone’s been going mad trying to work out why you hadn’t!”

  “Because I knew that if I did, they would never allow you off that station alive,” Alex said. “I have been holding off, hoping that you would come to your senses and realise that your only chance lay with coming to us with your evidence. I did not expect you to take Mr Dayfield hostage, though. What was going on with that?”

  “He turned up at my apartment,” Leo explained, with a bitter note. “I tried to tell him that it was being bugged. Hale Ardant actually told me that they had cameras in there and were watching me round the clock so not to get any ideas about calling you or anything. I tried to tell Mr Dayfield we were being watched but he’s as thick as yesterday’s custard, him, clueless. After all this time refusing to believe that anything was going on at all, he turns up at my place at five in the morning and starts asking questions. I could see he was suss, obviously, so I tried to fend him off, but it was written all over him that he didn’t believe me. It didn’t seem to occur to the fool that they’d never have a better opportunity for getting rid of both of us than right then. I mean, Hale Ardant turns up, shoots me then shoots Mr Dayfield with another gun, puts it in my hand, job done. All he has to say is that I shot Mr Dayfield and he, Ardant, shot me in self defence. I knew someone would have woken him up by then, seeing Mr Dayfield come to my place, and he could be there at any second. So I had to make a run for it. I had to get Mr Dayfield out of there, too. I mean, he’s a
daft old duffer but I wasn’t going to leave him there to get shot and then them say I did it. I was saving him, really, not taking him hostage. I knew our only chance was to get to the media, so everything was on camera. Even then I thought Ardant might shoot me and claim he’d done it to save Mr Dayfield. That’s why I needed journalists all around me – no clear shot.”

  He evidently didn’t have any scruples about using journalists as a human shield, and Alex merely nodded, too. It had been apparent just from their manner that the journalists had not been there under compulsion. Leo would have had to be threatening them with the gun to make them stop following and filming.

  “And that journalist who flew me over,” Leo added, with an air of virtue, “she offered. I never held the gun on her.”

  Alex nodded again, having seen that on the holovision footage.

  “All right,” he said, feeling that he had a clear picture now of how that sudden, desperate flight had been precipitated. “Let’s start at the beginning, then. How did you get mixed up with these people, Mr Arad?”

  Leo swallowed. Now he was actually going to have to commit himself to going on record with evidence that could be used in court, even if he attempted to withdraw it later, his mouth had gone dry.

  “I think I’d like that tea, now,” he said, having declined the offer, earlier. “Or coffee, if you have it.”

  Alex got up. He did not ask how Leo liked his coffee. He just got two mugs, one for himself and the other for the prisoner, setting it down in front of him.

  Leo looked at the black, heavily spiced and sweetened coffee, and raised his eyes to Alex’s. That gesture, he felt, was deliberate, making it clear that Alex knew everything there was to know about him, right down to how he liked his coffee. If it was intended to intimidate him, it worked.

  “It was just…” he said, in a rather more conciliating tone, “It was eight years ago. I’d just been through a messy divorce. My wife took me to the cleaners. I was barely scraping by even as it was. The overheads are high on Karadon and ISiS Corps squeezes your profit margins to practically nonexistent. Mr Jorgensen knew I was in trouble financially. I’d been stuck with paying eight hundred dollars a month for child maintenance and school fees – we’d put our kid into a private boarding school on Chartsey, see, rather than have her in that cacky school on the station, and the judge said she shouldn’t suffer any loss in her education because of the divorce so I was stuck with paying the school fees as well. I was going to have to start selling my assets to pay it. Then Mr Jorgensen said he’d got a cargo he could put my way if I was willing to get into something a bit heavier than cindar and tet.