Karadon (Fourth Fleet Irregulars)

by S J MacDonald

  Alex remembered going on a visit home shortly before he’d left his homeworld to complete his training on Chartsey. He had felt himself, at nearly eighteen and within striking distance of graduating as an officer, to be fully adult, responsible and even authoritative. His mother had insisted on feeding him up, though he’d never had the heart to tell her that the food at the Academy was better than he got at home. She’d been anxious over his habit of sleeping with his bedroom window open, too, worrying about “the damp” and warning him, repeatedly, about the Novaterran belief that exposure to night air caused rheumatism in later life. His father had taken him aside for a quiet father-son talk about being careful on Chartsey to live clean and decent and not be led astray into going out getting drunk or getting involved with girls who weren’t, you know, nice. Even now, their letters always expressed the hope that he was eating properly and not working too hard. Even if he did rise to be First Lord of the Admiralty some day, he knew, they would always be protective and concerned about him.

  Perhaps, he realised, Andrei Delaney was not so very strange, surrounding his teenage son with people he knew he could trust to look after him. Looking at Davie, too, he felt he could understand the combination of affection and exasperation with which the boy spoke of his father

  “My father has given me ISiS Corps and entrusted me with resolving this situation because it is sensitive,” Davie told him. “I am an adult now and ready to take on a responsible role in League affairs.”

  Alex put that together with Davie’s earlier remark about having got Zelda’s report before his father had received Bella’s. Evidently, Davie North had been sufficiently concerned to have his own agent in place aboard the station, and had discovered the truth before his father’s official sources. Alex began to understand why Mr Delaney had given the matter into the hands of his son. Zelda had been aboard Karadon for three years. Davie would have been eleven years old when he employed her as his agent there.

  It was at that point that Alex stopped thinking of him as a child.

  “It is important to all of us to resolve this matter quickly,” Davie said. “So, for a start, I want your help in getting that vermin off my station. It would be better, politically, if that is a joint operation.”

  He was right, and Alex nodded agreement. Tensions on both sides would be eased by that proof of cooperation between the Fourth and ISiS Corp. He couldn’t refuse ISiS Corp the right to be involved in the retaking of their own station, either.

  Then, just as he was about to speak, he noticed that Davie’s cake stand was empty. It was an odd thing to notice, but as his eye rested on it and he saw that all the cakes were gone, realisation dawned. Davie had had a cake in his hand all the time they were talking, taking what had seemed to be occasional bites. Somehow, though, he’d eaten the lot.

  Alex glanced at his own cake stand with the untouched array of gorgeous confections. There were eighteen cakes on the stand, and even a rough estimate of their calorific value ran into thousands.

  He looked back at Davie. He did not look like someone who was in the habit of eating eighteen cakes at a time. If anything, he was rather on the skinny side. Either he’d done it deliberately in some weird attempt to impress Alex or psych him out, or there was something more going on here.

  Davie looked back at him with those dark, mesmeric eyes, and chuckled.

  “Work it out, Captain,” he suggested, with that teasing note back in his voice. “I will give you some clues. I am the heir to the most important industrial empire in the League. My father believes that the Marfikians will attack the League during my lifetime. He wants the Families to have the strongest possible leadership to meet that challenge. Do you think, therefore, that he would take chances with his heir being born stupid or weak?”

  Alex looked at him searchingly. Many little snippets of gossip he’d heard over the years, mostly to do with exodiplomacy, were coming together in crystalline certainty.

  “You’re engineered?”

  “The correct term is “gehs,”” Davie-Boy informed him. “Genetically enhanced homo sapiens. And yes,” he added, as Alex stared at him, “That’s illegal. But only in the League. I was born on Flancer, of course. As my father’s heir, my League citizenship could not be called into question. I was, however, created outside League borders.”

  “Quarus?” That was the only world Alex knew of, other than Marfik, that practiced genetic engineering.

  “Where else?” Davie-Boy agreed. “I was crafted to order. One of a kind. My physical strength and speed is better than that of an olympic athlete. My intellect is off the human scale – I have multicognitive intelligence, capable of sustaining four separate strands of thought simultaneously. My metabolism burns calories at around five times the rate of a normal person, so I have to eat a lot of high energy foods. And now you’re thinking, “What a freak!”” he said, with a taunting note, as he saw Alex’s troubled expression. “What a monster his father must be, to have created this abomination!”

  “Not at all,” Alex said, honestly. “I’ve met solarans and would very much like to meet quarians some day. Your being genetically enhanced is not an issue for me. I was just thinking how lonely you must be.”

  Davie gave him a startled look and burst out laughing.

  “I have never,” he gestured at his retinue, “been alone in my entire life. Not even for one minute. Not even in the lavatory.” He pointed at one of the men standing in attendance. “See Tollo, there? He’s my bidet valet. His job is to come into the lavatory with me and attend to my personal hygiene.”

  The bidet valet smiled politely as Alex looked at him. Alex made no comment, just looked back at Davie without reacting. He’d been told that the very rich lived in weird bubbles, so closely attended by servants that they had little personal privacy. It seemed a dreadful way to live, to him, worse than being in prison. He understood, though, that normality was what you grew up with. He also understood that Davie knew as well as he did that the worst kind of loneliness was that experienced in the middle of a crowd. To be the only one of your kind, living amongst people who must seem so slow and stupid, could not be anything but isolating and lonely.

  If Davie did not want to acknowledge that, though, Alex would not press it. He wasn’t even sure, himself, why he’d made such a personal remark in the first place. It just felt, somehow, as if he and Davie-Boy North were connecting at a personal level as well as becoming professional allies.

  “Well, it isn’t an issue,” he repeated. “I do need to set one condition, however.” He looked steadily at the owner of ISiS Corps. “You don’t set foot on that station yourself until it has been security cleared, agreed?”

  Davie’s lip curled in a humourless smile. He seemed to be slightly disappointed in Alex.

  “You don’t want to risk my father being annoyed with you, is that it?” he queried, and knew that he was wrong when he saw the look of surprise flit across Alex’s face. It was so fleeting that you’d need superhuman acuity of vision to see it, but Davie had that. Other people might not be able to see Alex’s emotions when he had his stone-face on, but they were as clear to Davie as if he’d spoken them aloud.

  “No, it’s because you’re a fourteen year old civilian,” Alex told him. Even though League citizens became legal adults at the age of fourteen, they were still expected to be in education and weren’t allowed to sign up for military service till they were sixteen. “I don’t care how fast or strong or brilliant you are,” Alex told him, bluntly, “you’re fourteen and a civilian so you have no place in combat operations, understood?”

  There was another of those breath-holding moments amongst his retinue, then Davie laughed, tossing a playful mock-salute.

  “Sir, yes sir!” he joked, and Alex gave a brief smile back.

  “I also,” he told him, “need to consider your security clearance as to what information I am able to share with you. I may,” he glanced at the retinue, “have to ask you, and those members of your staff who rem
ain present, to sign the Official Secrets Act.”

  Davie burst out laughing again at that, and there was general amusement throughout his retinue, some of the more senior even giving vent to discreet little chortles.

  “I signed that the day after my fourteenth birthday,” Davie informed the skipper. “Along with a load of other documents. I have nine ack alpha clearance, Captain, and so does everyone else here.” He gestured to one of the suited retinue, “Charlie will give you the paperwork to confirm it.”

  There was an interlude of a couple of minutes while the stick-thin legal type referred to as Charlie did so. The paperwork appeared to be genuine and Alex had no reason not to accept it as such. He did, however, look questioningly at Davie as Charlie returned to his place.

  “Some of my companies have defence contracts,” Davie told him, understanding that Alex would be puzzled by why the authorities would have given that level of clearance to a fourteen year old, however wealthy. “Vetrix Shipbuilding, for instance.”

  Alex’s eyes widened. Vetrix was the company building the hyperliners and the Dart destroyers. They weren’t just a new style of ship, but a new development in ship building. Their innovative central spine and internal bracing was said to make them much more resilient under wave space acceleration. They used the latest, most compact kind of superlight mix core, too, packing in more cores relative to the mass of the ship than any other vessel of their size. The new Dart destroyer was rumoured to be able to cruise at L30.

  “You own Vetrix?” Alex asked. They were a new company, had only been on the shipbuilding scene for the last five or six years.

  “Own, and founded,” said Davie, and with a little touch of pride, “They were my first start-up, the first company I started from scratch. That’s something of a tradition in my family, to invest in ship development. I commissioned this design – the Stepeasy is the prototype. Do you like it?”

  “Very much,” Alex said frankly. “But can I ask, Mr North… did the Admiralty know, when they placed the order for the Dart destroyers, that the company building them was owned by a child?”

  “I don’t believe that was mentioned in the sales meeting, no,” Davie grinned. “That kind of thing is handled for me by proxies, of course. Rest assured though, Captain, Vetrix doesn’t turn out any rubbish. I hired the best engineers around and gave them an unlimited R&D budget to create the best ships possible at our current state of technology. The Dart destroyer, of course, was the priority. Defending our borders is always the priority. Improving transit links and trade are important too, though, obviously, so the same hull design has been developed for the hyperliner. They’re currently working on finalising the freight version, which should be out commercially in a couple of years.”

  Alex thought about those first investors, pouring their personal fortunes into the development of the very first superlight starship. Clearly, that spirit was still very much alive in their descendants.

  “All right, I’m impressed,” he said. “And I accept that you all have security clearance. I will, therefore, tell you that we have gained access to Karadon’s computer systems and are currently monitoring their comms.”

  “Yes, so are we,” Davie said. “It helps to have the master codes,” he observed. “Though my people are a little perplexed by the apparent disappearance of an office worker, Dale Hopkins, who has not been on comms for nearly three hours, now. Are you able to shed any light on that, Captain?”

  Alex grimaced. “Not specifically, no,” he admitted, since none of their efforts had got any more information on the fate of Dale Hopkins. “However, we suspect that the unusual and unscheduled usage of a waste incinerator shortly after his comm became inactive may be something of a clue.”

  “Ah,” Davie accepted this unemotionally. “We thought he might be one of your agents,” he explained.

  “No. The Fourth has no agents on Karadon,” Alex assured him. “Which isn’t to say that other League authorities haven’t employed agents there and shared their information with us, but we have no people on your station, Mr North.”

  “Oh.” He seemed a little regretful about that, but didn’t make an issue of it. “Well, no matter. I can muster a hundred and twenty three people for boarding operations, equipped with the same kind of survival suits the Fleet uses. We only have JT9s, though.”

  JT9s were the standard issue rifles used by the Fleet for boarding operations. They were lightweight pellet-guns capable of firing stun shot, tear gas, flash, sonic or smoke capsules either as single shot or spray fire. They were, in fact, extremely effective. The only issue with them was that they didn’t look very impressive, more like toy guns than serious weapons. People had been known to sneer at the Fleet’s “little pop guns”. News that the Fourth had been armed with something far more powerful, with glimpses of their big, malevolent-looking rifles, were a big factor in them being considered a great deal more intimidating than the regular Fleet.

  “We only have JT9s, too,” Alex told him. If they were going to make this work as a truly shared operation, he felt, it was important to be up front about that.

  Davie looked at him suspiciously.

  “Come off it,” he said. “I’ve seen footage of your guys with those big black rifles.”

  Alex gave a little grin.

  “Impressive, aren’t they?” he agreed. “The First Lord authorised it himself, as a legitimate strategy for us, on irregular service. Actually, to give credit where it’s due, it was my Exec’s idea. Buzz Burroughs, you know. He’s a socio-psychologist as well as a Fleet officer, and was instrumental in developing our new boarding ops rig to make it as intimidating as we’re allowed to be. The principle being, obviously, that if we look intimidating enough people will surrender without making a fight of it.”

  “So… you’re telling me that those are really just JT9s?”

  “In custom-made housings, yes,” Alex confirmed. “They’re just casings that snap on over the rifles but don’t affect their operation in any way. In strict confidence between us, Mr North, we had them made by a company that supplies props for movies.”

  Davie laughed so much at that that he had to wipe tears out of his eyes.

  “Oh, you’re good!” he said, with an admiring look at the skipper.

  “Thank you,” said Alex, drily, “though I didn’t tell you that either to impress or amuse you. If we are to work together effectively, Mr North, it is important that we have full understanding of the capability of our respective forces.

  “So, I can muster twenty four first-strike boarders in combat armour, which is as I’m sure you know already hullwalker rig, engineered for greater speed and agility in gravity and given a distracting mirror-finish. They are armed with standard issue JT9s in the prop housing. They are highly trained in boarding operations, accustomed to working together as tightly integrated teams, coordinating via their suit-comms. Their role is to seize the control centre, arrest anyone who puts up resistance and contain the others in a mess deck or similar area. Once that is achieved we send in our secondary boarding force with command, forensics and technical teams. They are equipped with survival suits and take over as a prize crew. I suggest that our teams will work most effectively together if my forces handle the primary boarding and yours come in to take over as we secure the situation.”

  Davie nodded.

  “My people are good,” he said, “thoroughly reliable. But they’re not trained to that degree. They’ll be led by Goph Murchson, who you’ve already met. He’s ex-Fleet, so you should be able to work well with him. He’ll take his orders from you, all right?”

  Alex was a little surprised. He would have expected a young man like Davie-Boy North to want more of an active role in the boarding of his station.

  “There can only be one commander in any operation,” Davie observed, reasonably. “And you’re not going to let it be me commanding your crew, are you?”

  “No,” Alex confirmed, and gave him a look that held respect for the maturity of tha
t decision. “Thank you, Mr North.”

  “You’re welcome,” said Davie. “Just do not damage my station. I know how much you like blowing stuff up, but I want it back in working order, agreed?”

  “We may have to blow open a few doors,” Alex replied. “But if we break anything, we’ll repair it.”

  “Oh, doors,” said Davie, waving that aside. “Kick or blow down as many of those as you need to, no problem. Just don’t blow up any important bits like computers or life support, okay?”

  “Agreed,” said Alex. He did not attempt to convince Davie that his appetite for large scale explosions was a myth. The kid had him bang to rights on that one.

  “Good,” said Davie, “and I want your assurance that you will not attempt to detain Zelda, either as a suspect or as a material witness. Bella will give you a full statement and cooperate with the authorities. You can have Chokky Dayfield, too – he’s had a breakdown, they tell me, and isn’t fit to be interviewed, but I will have him sent to Therik, to a private clinic, so as soon as he’s well enough the authorities there can decide what, if any, charges they want to bring against him.”

  Alex nodded agreement with that. In his opinion at least Chokran Dayfield was guilty of nothing more than being an idiot, but it would be up to the prosecution service to decide whether they had grounds to charge him. “Zelda, however, will have no part in it,” Davie said.

  Alex was silent, watching him and waiting. If that request was followed up by any kind of threat, he would dig his heels in on principle, asserting his right to question anyone he knew to have knowledge of the drug trafficking on that station. Davie, however, was as intelligent as he laid claim to be, and just left it at that.

  “All right,” Alex said, with full understanding between them that if he had made a fight of it, Davie-Boy North’s legal team could have made that one very difficult.

  “Thank you,” Davie gave him an appreciative smile, and glanced at one of his retinue, “Tell Zelda she’s safe and ask her to join us.”