Karadon (Fourth Fleet Irregulars)

by S J MacDonald

  “Are you kidding me?” Leo replied, with an appalled look. “You’d have to be insane to even think of doing something like that! And no I did not have a wristcom on! Haven’t you ever heard of a fry call?”

  Alex had, though it was regarded as urban myth. There was, supposedly, some signal that could be sent to a wristcom that would trigger a lethal electric shock.

  Alex knew that an ordinary wristcom could not do that. The reality behind the myth, though, was that several public officials on Dortmell, having accepted the gift of what appeared to be expensive wristcoms, had died when the electrocution system they’d been rigged with had been triggered by a particular call. Leo might be a little paranoid to fear they were going to do that to him, but not that paranoid.

  “I got rid of my autobot, too,” Leo added. “Those things can be rigged to come up to you in the night and electrocute you.”

  That was pure urban myth, but Alex didn’t waste his time disputing it.

  “Well, if you’ve got no recorded or documentary evidence,” he said, “you’re going to have to come up with detailed, specific accounts with dates, times, everything you can remember.”

  Leo looked horrified. “That’ll take weeks!”

  Alex stared back at him coldly.

  “You have something else you’d rather be doing?” He waited till it was clear that Leo wasn’t going to answer, then went on, “You can start later. For right now you’ll be taken to sickbay for a full medical, issued with kit and allowed a rest break in the brig. You’re entitled to three meal breaks and an hour’s exercise slot per day in the dining and exercise facility. We already have two prisoner cycles with Jame Jablenko being kept separate from the other Demella prisoners. You’ll have to slot in after them – breakfast at 0800.”

  “0800!” Leo protested. “Can’t you make it later? I’m really not a morning person, and I don’t usually get up till…” his voice trailed off under the pressure of Alex’s glare. “0800, okay.” Then he recovered some of his self-obsessed bombast, “I won’t have to meet that Atwood woman, will I?”

  “That Atwood woman” was Murg, of course. Leo had no idea that she was anything other than a gullible spacer he’d sold one of his dirty crates to. It was understandable that he wouldn’t want to meet her, or any other spacer, come to that. Their fury at his having deceived so many of them into carrying DPC might not be as deadly as the Landorn gang’s, but it would not be pleasant.

  “No,” Alex said. “Former Fleet Petty Officer Atwood has been released from the brig. She is in protective custody, confined to a mess deck. And no,” he told him, as Leo opened his mouth, “don’t ask. That is not an option for you. Ms Atwood was the innocent victim of a scam, tricked into carrying a crate of drugs she knew nothing about. You are the person who scammed her, and so many others, into trafficking thousands of tons of DPC onto our streets. If you cannot see the difference in that, there is no hope for you.”

  “Hey!” Leo said indignantly. “I’m one of the good guys, now! I’ve turned state’s evidence! Don’t I get some credit for that?”

  Alex left the interview room. He felt in need of a decontamination shower. Prolonged contact with Leo Arad, he felt, would be like being exposed to a spiritual toxin, infecting everything it touched.

  “You can pick Arad up for full medical, now,” Alex told Rangi, calling him as he made his way back to the command deck. “Don’t forget to make sure that the shutters are down.”

  They had established a route between the sealed section of the ship and sickbay which the Second and everyone else involved had agreed people could be taken through, provided that security shutters were pulled down over a couple of readout panels and all comms screens on the way were turned off.

  “Will do, sir,” said Rangi, taking no offence at being reminded. He was often away in realms of thought in which the ordinary routine of shipboard life passed him by.

  “And,” Alex added, as he swung up a zero gee ladder onto the command deck, “I haven’t received your report, yet, about what you did with the lizard.”

  “Ah.” There was a very slight pause, and then Rangi said brightly, “There is just a slight difficulty with that, skipper. I’ll pop up to the command deck and explain, shall I?”

  “Later,” said Alex. “And you are not keeping it.”

  He ended the call and sat down, looking at Buzz. The exec had been able to watch everything that took place in the interview room. He hadn’t just been watching for interest, either, but profiling Leo Arad and analysing the relationship between him and the skipper.

  “He’s a vile little slimeball, of course,” said Buzz, and actually managed to raise a grin on the skipper’s face, with that far from professional analysis.

  “Well, really nice people don’t generally end up trafficking DPC,” Alex observed. “But my own impression tallies with Tom Sutherland and Murg Atwood’s profiling. Break the jovial crust, and he stinks, underneath.”

  Buzz nodded. “And,” he said, regretfully, “I wish I could say that you’re not the best person to interview him. But…”

  “I know,” Alex said, with a resigned note. They had already had that discussion. Buzz would willingly take on the role of key interviewer himself, knowing how time consuming and unpleasant that task was going to be. It was apparent, though, that Leo Arad had fixed on Alex as a trusted authority figure. That relationship was liable to be far more productive in interview, with more substance and less self-justifying whingeing, if Alex was the one in charge. “I’ll do short-burst interviews with him, getting him to write up detailed statements in between,” he said, and Buzz nodded agreement.

  “There are some interesting developments on Karadon,” he informed the skipper. “Chokran Dayfield is still aboard the ICV 12.” He meant the “ISiS Corporation Vessel #12”, the three-deck yacht Belassa Torres was using as a base.

  “There’s no news on him or what’s happening there,” Buzz reported. “But plenty going on elsewhere. In his absence, Durban Jorgensen has been giving orders. He’s told all the journalists they have to be off the station before nine, for their own safety, he says, after what Leo Arad did. He’s also made a statement claiming that Leo Arad has suffered a psychotic break due to the stress and pressure we’ve been putting on him with our false allegations and faked evidence. He’s also told Chantalle Rivers that he intends to shut down the Leisure decks and that all remaining Leisure personnel are to go to work for Freight.”

  “Busy man,” Alex observed, though this was only what the Freight Director had been demanding all along. “And Chantalle Rivers is ..?”

  “Leaving the station, along with all the remaining Leisure staff. They’re evacuating onto the Princess Rose, as the only ship that has room for them.”

  The Princess Rose was a Red Line ship that had only arrived the previous morning. It had come in from Mandram, a heavily industrial world with the League’s biggest shipyards.

  “Durban Jorgensen currently has all the remaining Freight employees gathered in one of the warehouses,” Buzz continued. “I was concerned, at first, thought we might be looking at going into a hostage situation. Several of them are sending what’s happening to the media, though, via wristcoms, and we’ve been able to tap into that.” He indicated a screen that was showing a text transcript of what the Freight Director was saying. Buzz had highlighted the words “…can’t prevent any of you leaving if you’re that kind of rat,” and also, “ISiS Corps rewards employees who stand by them in difficult times. If you stay, you’ll not only get five times salary but are guaranteed a job for life.”

  “Where are the journalists?” Alex asked.

  “Holed up in the Central,” Buzz told him. “Discussing whether they’ll go, or make a fight to stay. Chantalle Rivers has also told them to go. The sight of Leo Arad holding a gun to Durban Jorgensen’s head has obviously woken her up to the danger they are in, there.”

  He brought up footage with a TNN logo, timestamped a few minutes before. Chantalle Ri
vers was shown shepherding hundreds of people as they poured out of g-porters, some of them still in their nightclothes, though the more prepared were carrying bags. Chantalle was directing them to the shuttles waiting to take them to the Princess Rose, haranguing them with commands.

  “Come on – move! Twenty per shuttle, quick as you can! No, just twenty!” She stopped a woman who was trying to squeeze aboard a shuttle after the pilot had counted his twenty passengers aboard and was going to close the airlock. “Wait! There’ll be another shuttle there in seconds!”

  There was, too. A flotilla of shuttles from all of the liners, White Star and Red Line alike, had gone racing in response to the desperate call from Chantalle to get them off the station. The shuttles were queuing to get onto the bank of airlocks at the main concourse, moving in as fast as a space was cleared. It was quite something to see Red Line and White Star, so fiercely competitive, working together like that, but Alex already knew that the two companies had set aside their usual rivalries to cooperate, here, even accepting one another’s tickets in order to juggle the influx of extra passengers.

  Alex did note with approval that Chantalle Rivers was remaining on the concourse, seeing her staff off to safety before she left herself. She was even exhorting the journalists to come with her as she boarded the last shuttle. A few of them did, too, though only to film the arrival of the evacuees aboard the Princess Rose.

  “Give her half an hour to catch her breath,” Alex told his exec, “then give Chantalle Rivers a call and ask if she’d be willing to make a statement.” That would come much better from Buzz than from him, and Buzz nodded.

  “Zelda has also gone aboard the ICV 12,” he told him. “Durban Jorgensen didn’t know about that. He called Hale Ardant wanting to know what was going on when he saw footage of her going onto the yacht. She had several cases with her and security opened the airlock to let her aboard as if she was expected.”

  “Interesting,” Alex said, intrigued and just a little disappointed. He’d hoped that if Zelda left the station she would go aboard a liner. Both liner companies were being very cooperative with the Fourth and would certainly detain and hand over anyone the Fourth asked to interview.

  Zelda was more than a person of interest. If anyone could be said to know everything that was going on aboard that station, it was the mysterious Zelda. In a society where huge amounts of information about everyone were available on public-access records, there was virtually nothing about Zelda. What records there were had a suspiciously sanitised look, as if they had been created purely for the purpose of establishing a legal identity. There were very few people or organisations in the League with the power to do something like that. It was always possible, of course, that she was either another ace up Admiral Smith’s sleeve or perhaps a deep cover agent working on a similar basis for the LIA. The fact that she had retreated aboard the ISiS Corps ship, however, suggested that she either worked for the company, or the anonymous Shareholder who actually owned it.

  “Very,” Buzz agreed. “But since the ICV 12 severed all connections with the Karadon network, of course, we can’t get anything from them.”

  Alex nodded. It was obvious that they were about to lose their back-door access to Karadon itself, if Radio Karadon ceased broadcasting. The intel team would do their best to find some other way in, but they needed a constant two-way signal going out between the station and the shipping.

  “What really interests me,” Buzz went on, “is how many of the Freight staff will leave once Durban Jorgensen finishes his speech. For all his rhetoric and promises, I think it’s possible they may not even have sufficient staff to keep Freight up and running. I also think it’s possible that one or more of the minor functionaries may try to slip away under cover of the rush.”

  Alex’s eyes widened.

  “Logan Tantrell?” he queried, in a tone that showed he hardly dared to hope that they could be that lucky.

  “Murg thinks it’s possible,” Buzz told him. Murg had endured only a couple of days of resting, being pampered on the mess deck, before she’d asked to be allowed to help with intel analysis. Alex was aware that she’d been monitoring all the intel being picked up on Zelda and on Logan Tantrell, keeping a particular eye on what was going on with them.

  “She picked up on him buying indigestion capsules at the dispensary. Apparently they’re a brand used for acid reflux, the strongest you can get without prescription. He has a history of stress-related stomach and bowel complaints.” Buzz opened a screen, showing the intel advisory that Murg had sent within the last few minutes. He’d highlighted a phrase on that, too, Significant likelihood that if more than 20% of other Freight employees are leaving the station, he will go too.

  Alex did not ask how she’d come up with the figure of twenty per cent. Murg was a trained and experienced profiler, and a brilliant one, too, as evidenced by the fact that she was the only one of all the agents working on that station to notice the relationship between Zelda and the unimportant clerk. Clearly, Logan Tantrell was feeling increasingly stressed and exposed as there were fewer and fewer people remaining on the station. If Murg thought that another fifth of the staff evacuating would cross some psychological threshold for Logan Tantrell and get him going with them, she was probably right.

  “We can only hope,” said Alex. Even as he spoke, though, he was aware of a burst of stifled mirth on the command deck, and looked up to see Professor Sam Maylard approaching.

  Because the trials of his own pet project, the Maylard Cannon, were liable to be few and far between, Sam Maylard was also undertaking two of the other trials on behalf of their developers. One of them was the new comms array, monitoring it to see if it delivered the 4% faster transmission over longer range that the developers had promised. The other was the trial of a new kind of biovat being tested for starship use. They had three of them on board. They were no bigger than flash-ovens but claimed to be capable of producing sufficient fresh fruit and vegetables to supply the crew’s needs.

  This was the only one of the Second’s hot tech trials that was not going well. Having seen the dubious quality of what was produced when the biovats were first installed, Alex had made it a condition of their use that he would do quality control evaluations on the stuff himself before authorising it to be served to his crew. So far there had only been four days in the entire patrol that he’d authorised what came out of the vats to be served from the galley. Part of the problem was that Sam Maylard was not content to allow it to make the salad leaves and pinberries it could produce to edible standard and sufficient quantity to be useful. He kept trying to improve it, finding out what it could really do.

  He had been up all night with the latest batch and was now approaching with a big, hopeful, proud and happy smile. He was carrying a plate containing an apple and a small knife.

  Alex did not betray impatience by so much as a quiet sigh. This was just the kind of thing you had to put up with when you had civilians on board. He didn’t waste any time pointing out to the professor that they were a bit busy right now, what with the arrest of Leo Arad and Durban Jorgensen seizing control of Karadon. He knew Sam Maylard well enough to know that any such reproach would only get a bewildered look, modulating into hurt, and a lengthy assurance that he hadn’t meant to waste the skipper’s valuable time but was only doing his own job, here, as Alex himself had asked when he’d invited the Second aboard. It would be far quicker just to sample the apple.

  “Look!” If the professor was aware of developments on the station at all, they were clearly of nowhere near as much importance in his own mind as the successful production of apples from the biovats. “Perfect in every way!” he enthused. “We’ve got ninety three of them, overnight!”

  Alex took the apple from the plate Sam Maylard was proffering. It was a virulent green, as bright as a child’s colouring. He cut it in half. The flesh was creamy. There was no core, no stem, no pips. When Alex bit into it the texture was pulpy and the flavour highly processed, lik
e that of a pie filling. It felt, and tasted, as if a slightly waxy skin had been formed in a mould and then filled with carbohydrates formulated to taste like apple. It tasted like that because that was exactly what it was. That was the only kind of “fresh fruit” most people on Chartsey ever tasted. Alex very much preferred organic fruit, himself, but recognised that this was of a quality that most Chartseyans would consider acceptable.

  “Well done, professor,” he said. Then, forestalling the professor’s evident desire to tell him enthusiastically and in great detail about the apple production, he looked over at the junior officer of the watch. “Will you sign off on the production for me, Mr Carrington-Miles?”

  Andy understood at once that the skipper was asking him to get the civilian off the command deck without offending him, and grinned back. The last few days had seen a transformation in Andy Carrington-Miles. He’d been walking tall ever since his discovery of the toxies aboard the Maid of Canelon. The crew had stopped referring to him as “Unhandy” and had nicknamed him “The Nose” instead.

  “Sir,” he acknowledged, and got up at once, addressing the professor with a friendly smile. “What an achievement, sir!” He was already guiding the professor away with no more than an inviting gesture as he began to walk, himself. “How did you do it?”

  There was another ripple of mirth through the command deck and then the rest of the ship, as the professor was led away chattering happily about his apples. Behind him, without comment, Alex gave the other half of the apple to Buzz and they got back to the serious business of studying intel.

  Twenty eight minutes later, Durb Jorgensen finally finished his efforts to persuade the remaining Freight staff to stay and told them to go back to work.