by Dan Thompson
“Good, Skipper. I’m happy to hear it.”
“Well, thank you anyway.”
“All part of the service,” he replied, but then froze with a piece of dripping toast halfway to his mouth. “But if you felt like making it up to me in any way …”
“What?”
“Well, we’re heading into Cenita station,” he said, cramming the toast into his mouth. He chewed hastily and swallowed before speaking again. “That means we have to hold a watch and keep someone on board. Between the seven of us, I figure that’s a twelve-hour shift for each of us, maybe more than one for a couple of unlucky souls.”
“And you don’t want to be one of those unlucky souls?”
“Yeah. Truth be told, sir, if I could have my preference, I’d like to take that first shift and then be done. That way I can get some rest and head out to meet some folks. I know a place on Cenita station that I can spend some time at. And I mean some serious, uninterrupted time if you catch my meaning, sir.”
Michael nodded. “I think that can be arranged, Mr. Rodriguez, but know that it won’t be that way at every station.”
“I don’t care about much anywhere else, sir, but for me Cenita station is something special.”
Michael shrugged. “To each his own.”
Chapter 13
“Sometimes I feel sorry for those trust fund kids, never learning the hard lessons of the real world. Mind you, not so sorry that I won’t take advantage of them. Someone has to teach them, after all.” – Malcolm Fletcher
DOCKING AT CENITA STATION was much different than landing at the port would have been. Instead of powering their flight the whole way in, they got out to the hundred-kilometer boundary and handed their fate to a tug. It was particularly ironic, because given their relative sizes, the Sophie was probably more maneuverable than the tug, but it was a Confederate station, so regulations ruled the day.
They were eventually secured by docking clamps, and the station ran a docking tube to the side airlock. Michael had his packet ready for the station master, but he was not nearly as enthusiastic about it as he had been back at Rapoen.
“I’ll do it,” Richard offered. “You said you had to set up some Guild appointment, so let me get the cargo moving.” Michael began to object, but Richard waved him to silence. “Consider it a command lesson in delegation.”
Michael handed it off with a grin and headed back to his cabin. Winner saw the newlyweds off onto the dock. He thought briefly of wanting to see what, if any, reception was waiting for them, but instead he put in a call to the local Guild office. He was shunted through a few assistants but was quickly bumped up to Terry Johansen.
“Ah, Captain Fletcher. I hadn’t expected you so soon.”
It had been a month since Johansen had sent his news of the provisional membership to Michael on Taschin, but in these kinds of things, a month was not long at all. “Well, I thought I would make Cenita one of my first stops. I wanted to thank you for finding that provisional clause, and I had hoped to talk to you about some strategies for financing my bond.”
“I’d be glad to. Malcolm was a good friend. I have an opening at four if you can make it.”
It was still midmorning on the Sophie’s clock, but Cenita station was four hours ahead. He thought about it. The cargo would still be in progress, but Carlos and Winner would be able to handle that without him. “That will be great. I’ll see you then.”
Richard returned half an hour later with the word from the dockmaster. “We’re third in line, maybe an hour before they get a crew here.”
“Can you stay in case Carlos or Winner needs help? I have an appointment with the Guild.”
“Not a problem, sir. I have the second watch anyway, so I wasn’t going to do much more than grab a nap.”
“Excellent, Mr. Mosley,” he said. “Thank you for taking it off my plate.”
He changed into his dress uniform and made his way to the Guild offices on the upper ring. He showed his credentials at the door and was directed into the administrative offices. They were more crowded but much more elegant than the one back on Taschin station, and like Janet Bower’s office, Terry Johansen’s had a large bay window overlooking the ships docked on the lower rings.
He was older than Michael realized, older even than Malcolm had been. He shook Michael’s hand and offered him a seat. “I’m sorry about your dad, of course, but I’m glad to see you hung on to his ship. He was quite fond of it. Did you manage to keep any of the crew?”
Michael shook his head. “It’s a whole new lot, and I must say that getting that provisional status made a big difference in getting started. Without it, I was practically laughed out of the hiring hall.”
Terry frowned. “Well, that’s downright unprofessional. Guild or no Guild, no matter your age, anyone who aces the license exam deserves more respect than that.”
“That’s nice of you to say, Mr. Johansen, but I’m beginning to see now why everyone joins the Guild.”
“Everyone who can, and it’s Terry. You’re a friend of the family, or at the very least family of a friend. Mr. Johansen is for the jerks who don’t pay their bar tabs.”
“I appreciate that, Terry. Now, is there anything I can do to turn that provisional into permanent? I was thinking I might borrow against the Sophie’s Grace. I own her in the clear, so I wouldn’t think there would be any problem.”
Terry shook his head. “It’ll never pass the Guild underwriters. They’d consider it a lien on an unreliable asset because anything that’s likely to invoke your bond could easily reduce your ship to a salvage job. It’s a good idea, but unfortunately, it’s one that they shoot down on a regular basis.”
He sighed. “Then I’m not sure what I can do, not unless I can qualify for a loan on the basis of six months of profitable runs.”
Terry’s frown told Michael the odds of that happening, but he said nothing. Instead, he turned to his computer and typed in a few commands. “Actually, I was hoping we could hit up another one of Malcolm’s friends, or maybe a family connection.”
“I already tried one of Malcolm’s better friends, Captain Wallace of the Johnny Rose. He said his credit rating wouldn’t support it.”
“Yes, he mentioned that. Any family?”
“No, Malcolm didn’t have anyone else.”
Terry tapped a few keys. “I pulled your profile, by the way, and I saw that you pulled time on the Heavy Heinrich. I also heard that was some kind of family connection. I presume on your mother’s side?”
He nodded. “Something like that.”
“Was it actually one of the Schneiders or Williamses? Some of them might be able to help.”
“I guess it was, but I’m not really on the best terms with that side of the family right now.” He thought about Hans’s statement that the various S&W offices were to award him every reasonable courtesy, but he was pretty sure this was beyond courtesy. “At least, I’m not on good terms with the older set.”
“I see. Cousins perhaps?”
He nodded. “Gabrielle had money, but she’s probably saving up for her own.”
Terry tapped a few keys. “Gabrielle Schneider?”
“Yeah. She’s Hans’s daughter.”
“Well, she’s not saving up for her bond. That’s already been taken care of by a trust fund.”
“Trust fund?”
He nodded. “It’s something we sometimes do for special members, establish a trust at a young age, letting it grow to a size capable of covering the bond.” He tapped a few more keys and peered at the screen. “In fact, quite a few of the S&W scions have fully funded trusts. Gabrielle, as I mentioned, Quincy Williams, Michael Schneider, Walter Brookstone ...”
“Wait, did you say Michael Schneider?”
“Yes. Do you know him?”
“Son of Peter and Sophia Schneider?”
Terry tapped a few more keys. “Yes. The trust was established shortly after his birth… and from the looks of it, he would be 18 or 19 by now.�
�
“Shit,” Michael said.
“I’m sorry?”
He shook his head. “I am Michael Schneider. Malcolm adopted me after Peter and Sophia died. It’s a long story.”
Terry sat back. “I bet it is, but Malcolm never said a word about it to me.”
“Me neither.”
“I see.” Terry turned back to the computer. “In that case, we can do quite a bit for you. The trust is fully vested, and it’s already enough to convert to the bond. We can’t actually give you the excess, of course, but it will be converted to a line of credit should you ever need a buffer. Failing that, you might use it to help establish a similar trust for any of your own children down the line. I suppose the first step is to find the adoption paperwork. Can you direct me toward the appropriate world of record?”
The words flowed on past Michael, but he nodded. What good was a birth father anyway? Well, now he knew.
Winner strolled through the station, looking for the right kind of bouncer. It took two docking rings and eight bars to find one. He was short but powerfully built, and he simply looked mean. To top it off, he had four recent stitches near his ear.
She intentionally grazed his shoulder heading in, and when he turned to her, she was waiting with a snarl. “You look the worse for wear,” she said.
He laughed. “You should see the other guy.”
“I’d have liked that. I might even want to be the other guy.”
“What the hell?” he asked, but then shifted his expression. He looked her up and down, focusing on the remnant on the bruise on her cheek. “You want to take me on?”
“Not here,” she said. “Maybe not even you, but I’m sure there’s someplace with no shortage of toughs looking to throw down.”
He nodded and broke into a feral grin. “Yeah, I know what you’re looking for, but we don’t get many girls.”
She shrugged. “I take all shapes and sizes.”
He considered it. “You ever do zero-gee fights?”
“A few,” she replied. “What do you use for tethering, rope or elastic?”
He shook his head. “We use chain, five-centimeter steel links.”
She nodded. “Chain, huh? That should be interesting.”
Michael took a watch almost halfway through their stay. It was going to be another day before the paperwork would be finalized, but Terry Johansen was in the process of converting his provisional membership into a lifetime one.
His Schneider connection had come through after all, and he had not needed to go back to his uncle Hans and beg for a handout. No, his birth father, Peter, had made plans for him from the very beginning. He made a rare break from his routine of skipping randomly through Peter’s journals and searched through the last one until he found the entry:
It’s done. I had to cash out almost the last of my corporate shares to fund it, but it’s done. When the time comes, little Mikey will be all set to join the Captain’s Guild. Sophia thinks I’m being silly. “You’re planning out his whole career, and he’s still learning to roll over.” Maybe she’s right, but I’m his dad, and I think I’m allowed my pride. I can see it in those big blue eyes of his. This kid is going to be a captain someday, and when that happens, nothing is going to stop him from buying his old man a drink in the Guild Hall.
Michael left the journal open. He felt a little silly himself, thinking of Peter as a father, as if a pile of cash could sway his affection. Malcolm had been there. Malcolm had put in the work, year after long year, and as harsh as Malcolm had been at times, he had been a loving father.
But Michael never remembered seeing the kind of exuberance that Peter had captured on that page. He ran his hands over the paper. Beneath his fingers, he could feel the tiny ridges of the ink on the page. Peter had held this once and made a plan for Michael. He never got to carry it forward, but Michael had to admit that Peter certainly had had every intention of being a good father.
But in the end, he had died, leaving behind only his money and a few pages of ink.
Commander Collins was good at improvising. That did not mean he enjoyed it. Normally he would carry out an investigation with the full help of local navy personnel. Failing that, he could usually expect the full cooperation of local law enforcement, but not at Tsaigo. No, his official check-in with station security had netted him a brush-off and two unofficial tails.
The first had been a pair of uniformed security officers who kept showing up with annoying frequency. They never offered any assistance, and their most frequent query was “How soon will you be wrapping up your business here?” Ostensibly, they were there to keep him out of trouble, but Collins knew the real reason was to send a message to his bosses that the Confederate Navy was still not welcome here. Still, this tail was easy to slip, and Collins did so often enough that he knew he would be able to when the time was right.
The second tail was much more of a problem. In fact, he did not notice it until the fourth day, and he had been unable to identify all three members of the detail until the end of the week. These were civilians: a silver-haired woman, a pot-bellied man, and a lanky teen who had shaved his head down to a mohawk. These almost certainly reported to one of the local crime bosses if not directly into the Yoshido organization. These proved difficult to lose, and he knew that their bosses were doing what they could to sweep up any leads before he got to them.
But for all the difficulties, it merely slowed him down. Robert Bishop had indeed arrived at Tsaigo weeks earlier under the name Martin Escher. That identity had evaporated almost immediately. A hotel reservation had lapsed without Mr. Escher ever checking in. He could not get a warrant to access the local banking systems, but with a little work and some special tools he had brought with him, Collins was able to produce a spoofed financial ID for Mr. Escher and pull up his recent financial transactions. There were none.
False identification was maddeningly easy to come by. In theory, the digital certificates were supposed to be counterfeit-proof, but with so many local authorities spread out across the Confederacy, it only took a small amount of corruption to make them available to anyone for the right price. Still, there was much more than a simple certificate to a good false ID. He had seen enough of them in his years to appreciate the finer points of craftsmanship involved. If Bishop picked up a new identity here on Tsaigo, it would have come from one of the finest of such craftsmen.
Finding that craftsman was fairly easy if not straightforward. He started by gathering samples of the product. Collins already had a list of petty fugitives in the Tsaigo system, and all it took was a number of drunken collisions and a pair of minor bar fights to lift several forged IDs from their distracted owners. Collins discarded most of them in short order for their poor quality. They were not quite so bad as to be called amateurish, but they were not worthy of someone like Bishop. In the end, only five met the standards Collins was looking for.
Of those, two fell out of the running based on location. The official signing authority was local to Tsaigo on both. One on station, and another from a beachside college town on the planet below. They were of good quality and included decent biometric data, but Collins was confident that any identity Bishop picked up here would not bear a local digital signature. Bishop and the Yoshido organization were both too sharp for that.
The next one was of very high quality and bore a signature all the way from Callista Prime. The biometrics showed just the right amount of statistical noise to have been legitimate samples rather than computer constructs, and the physical workmanship was impeccable, even under a microscopic imager. If it were not for the fact that the owner was known to be a Shiantic intelligence agent, Collins would have thought the ID was truly legitimate. But the Shiantic intelligence organization would have produced the ID themselves, not procured it through a local supplier.
The fourth ID was of good quality and came from an authority on Arvin, which showed both irony and daring. The biometrics were a little rigid, but he knew they would pass most
civilian inspections. The problem with this one was the physical condition. It had enough scuffs and scratches that it was easily five or more years old, and that was borne out in the microscopic wear on the plastic cover.
But the fifth ID was exactly what Collins was looking for. The signing authority was Latera, a world so respectable that Parliament held a session there every third year. The biometrics were impeccable, and the visual appearance gave it the look of having rattled around in someone’s pocket for a year or two, especially the smudges in the corners where the owner was likely to have handled it more. Yet the microscopic wear patterns were too crisp. The scratches had sharp edges, and the smudge patterns looked injected rather than soaked in over time. This false ID was fresh, probably not more than two months old.
The owner was Giselle Henkel, an art dealer originally from the League of Catai. In Collins’s fugitive database, she was also Petra Schonberg and Valerie Koren, and while she certainly did broker a number of art deals—mostly painted sculptures from the Cotierre movement of the coreward Catai region—she was also one of the more reliably discreet fences for unique or rare collectables. Rumor had it that she actually financed the Stonefall Gallery heist eight years prior and still held on to a few pieces in her personal collection.
So on his tenth evening on Tsaigo station, Commander Collins joined Giselle Henkel for dinner at the Wandering Soul up on the first ring. She had not invited him, but he knew that was her regular dinner location on every third day. He strode past the hostess saying with a smile, “I’m meeting a friend.” When he sat down opposite his quarry, he laid the ID out on the table and said, “I believe I have something of yours.”
To her credit, she took it with ease. She glanced between the ID and the Naval Intelligence insignia on his uniform and replied, “While I would hate to disparage all such naval officers, I suspect that you are not merely returning lost property as a good deed.”
