The Phoenix Conspiracy

by Richard Sanders

Chapter 19

  When he entered the bridge, Calvin took the command position from Summers. “Yesterday I gave some of you intel assignments, and now I want updates,” he said to his crew on the bridge.

  “I have to remind you,” said Summers, “that our mission is to assist in finding and capturing the Harbinger, and anything else, including a detailed investigation of what Raidan’s been trying to do, is off mission.”

  If Calvin didn’t know better, he’d almost think Summers was in on it at some level, that she didn’t want Raidan’s true motives known. After all it seemed like, if there were a conspiracy, the fleet had to be compromised to some degree. How hard would it be to buy off one more officer, plant her on the pursuing ship, and encourage her to disrupt his investigation? To curtail his efforts and to keep an eye on him. It was only logical.

  But he saw through Summers enough to know she was a hardened duty zealot, which meant she had too much integrity to be bought off or coerced. If she were someone’s tool, which Calvin thought unlikely, she wasn’t aware of it.

  “Investigation is what we do here in Intel Wing,” said Calvin. “And every scrap of information we can get our hands on will get us that much closer to finding and capturing Raidan. If we know what his motives are, then we can predict his behavior.” Calvin was mostly speaking hot air. The more he learned, the less he wanted to trap Raidan. And he still had a commitment to the royal family—or, at least, to Kalila Akira—not to bring Raidan in, for now.

  Summers’s eyes narrowed; she saw through his thin layer of excuses, and he knew it. But he didn’t really care.

  “Thank you, Commander, for your pointless reminder.”

  He cleared his throat and avoided making eye contact with her. “About those intel assignments, I’ll give you a few minutes to collect your notes and organize your thoughts, if you need them. When you’re ready, let me know.”

  “I’m ready,” said Miles.

  “Good,” said Calvin. “Now, your task was to look into Tristan and find out everything you can.”

  “Yeah, and I got nothing.”

  “Okay, that’s not so good.”

  “I did my best. I searched every database, the network, everything. Tristan as a general search pulled up too many results, but tagging the name with lycan, werewolf, Remorii, anything else pulled up too few. I couldn’t get anything from the Rotham either. They gave me some police files from Aros Five, but nothing stood out. My guess is Tristan lied to you. Either that or the Rotham already whitewashed the files. Without more information to go on, I’m at a dead end. I’m sorry, Cal.”

  Calvin nodded. “All right,” he said. He wasn’t too surprised. Tristan still was as big a mystery as anything else. “What about the Remus System? How are the Remorii getting off it?”

  “I’m not sure. Once the Empire cracked down on Remus, they surrounded the system with mines and left everyone there. No trials, no investigations, no sentences. Anyone still alive remains there. Their fate is listed as unknown, presumed dead. Remus has even been removed from most star charts. The whole area is flagged as a hazardous Do-Not-Fly Zone. How any of the Remorii escaped is beyond our Intel Wing files. And unless we find someone who was there, I don’t think we’ll ever know.”

  “I see,” said Calvin. “Anyone else ready? What about you, Shen? Find out anything useful about the ships Raidan destroyed?”

  “Yes,” said Shen. “But my impression is that, instead of being classified, a lot of the info publicly available about these ships is just fiction. They’re all owned by the same company, a corporation that operates across Rotham and Imperial space called”—he stared at his computer and read what became a very butchered pronunciation—”Yut’hama’za … It’s a mishmash of the Rotham words for service and excellence. It’s a pretty small freight company that hasn’t attracted much attention.

  “Supposedly they’ve operated for about ten years and have delivered ten thousand shipments from Rotham space to Imperial space, but the earliest shipment I could actually verify was only a few months ago. The simple explanation is that, if the deliveries were to some of the smaller colonies, like in The Corridor or along The Rim, they might not keep data on shipments for more than a few months.

  “But I couldn’t get anyone to give me a specific list of places these shipments went to or what they were. Just a figure from customs that agreed the company had exported about 11,000 convoys of cargo. At an estimated worth of eighty-seven billion Q. The company doesn’t export anything from the Empire. It just brings in imports. All of its buyers are wholesale distributors that are privately owned.”

  “So who was buying the cargo Raidan destroyed?”

  “Kemmer Associated Goods. They—”

  “Tell me everything you found out about them,” said Calvin. The Roscos had mentioned Yanal Kemmer only moments ago. The tycoon who’d given Raidan a fortune on Aleator.

  “Kemmer Associated Goods was started by the Kemmer family almost a hundred years ago, but, recently, they sold the company to MXR at a loss.”

  Calvin raised an eyebrow. “How much of a loss?”

  “About two-thirds of the stocks’ value. Still an enormous fortune but less than they could have gotten, especially since the company was making strong profits. I couldn’t find any kind of public statement from them explaining why they sold. All I know is that the whole family sold out and then spread their new fortunes into all kinds of new random investments. Real estate, car factories, environmentally friendly technology, medical research, charity. They just kind of went their separate ways. Most people on the Nets think there was some kind of family dispute and they couldn’t keep it together, so they sold out while the going was good.”

  “When did they give up control of the company?”

  “It’s not clear how long the sale was in the works. The negotiations were private. Probably to keep the shareholders from speculating. But the sale was officially seven standard months ago.”

  “Is someone named Yanal Kemmer part of that family?”

  “Yes, he’s one of the heirs to the family fortune, along with his siblings. He’s a Capital World resident in his mid-fifties and has a considerable estate, even though his parents still control the majority of the family’s holdings.”

  So, provided the Roscos’ information was correct, Yanal Kemmer was connected directly to Raidan and indirectly to the import company, which had purchased the cargo aboard the Rotham ships, later destroyed by Raidan.

  Kemmer was giving Raidan money, and yet Kemmer could also be loosely linked to whatever was being transported by the Rotham ships, although the import company was no longer under Kemmer’s family’s control.

  Perhaps he was bribing Raidan to destroy the convoy to make the new owner look bad. But Calvin didn’t like that explanation. If this whole conspiracy was about an eccentric billionaire bribing an insane captain to seek revenge against a corporation who may have strong-armed Kemmer into selling his shares prematurely … Calvin would be extremely disappointed. It also wouldn’t go very far to explain why that was allegedly for “the good of the Empire.”

  No, that wasn’t it. The fact that the fleet had become this involved and that Raidan continued to strike against Rotham cargo vessels, all of which were heavily armored and military piloted, suggested this went much deeper than some kind of corporate vendetta. Especially since there were better ways to hurt MXR than to punch Kemmer Associated Goods in the nose. But Calvin couldn’t dismiss the idea of a corporate sabotage completely. People do strange things when money like this is involved.

  “Find out what you can about MXR,” said Calvin.

  “One step ahead of you. I’ve been digging into these guys for the last few hours. Officially they’re in the energy business. They’re a human-run corporation that operates its main headquarters and plants on Capital World but owns considerable real estate in The Corridor, including a plant on Praxis. The shares are not available publicly, and the company is owned by Brinton Martel, the fourth-ri
chest person in the galaxy and the second-richest man in the Empire. His estate rivals that of the Akira family, not counting government property under the royal family’s control.”

  “Martel …” said Calvin. “As in the Martel House on Capital World?” One of two rival families who’d tried to wrestle away the throne from the Akiras over the past several decades.

  “Yes, he’s from that Great House. But his sons are the ones making a ruckus on Capital World. Brinton’s divorced himself from politics and lives a relatively humble life in a small mansion in the Thetican System.”

  “Which is,” said Calvin, making what he thought to be an important observation, “not far from the DMZ.”

  “Exactly.” Shen wagged a finger. “The Thetican System is a blue-bleeding Imperial system with a better-than-average defense force—sorta like Praxis—but, at the end of the day, we can’t ignore its proximity. Anything that close to the Rotham border … who knows what kind of alien influence is there?”

  “You think Brinton Martel, one of the richest men in the galaxy, is being paid off by the Rotham government to be a spy or an agent or something?” asked Sarah; she seemed skeptical.

  Calvin wondered if his and Shen’s inference had gone too far.

  “There are ways of motivating people that don’t involve money,” said Shen. “They could have threatened him, or maybe they pay him in information or exotic luxuries.”

  “Or maybe they just have some leverage on him, a secret he doesn’t want found out,” said Calvin.

  “This is a waste of time,” said Summers. “We should be fulfilling our mission and chasing down Raidan, not sitting here accusing one of the Empire’s richest citizens of treason. Not only is there no motive, means, or opportunity, there’s no crime. The case you lieutenants are making is the weakest I’ve ever heard.”

  “No crime that we know of yet.” Calvin hated to admit it, but she was right. They were getting ahead of themselves. “What we have here is a long thin chain that ties Martel to Yanal Kemmer to Raidan, however loosely. Any connections we can find, no matter how weak, must be investigated.”

  “This whole operation isn’t about investigating Raidan.” Summers looked supremely annoyed. “His guilt was proven in a military court already. Our job is to hunt him down and, if possible, take him out. Nothing else.”

  There was more she wanted to say, but she held back; Calvin could tell. “If we can find out all of Raidan’s contacts and friends, we can be there waiting. He’d have nowhere to go. No friends to turn to. Then the fleet could get him.” It was a flimsy excuse to continue what he really wanted to do, which was investigate Raidan, not capture him.

  Summers didn’t buy it. “That’s not practical, and it’ll take too long. This ship is faster than the Harbinger, and we have every resource to track it down and coordinate a strike against it with the Fifth Fleet. Those are our orders. That’s what we have to do.”

  Calvin wasn’t sure what to say. Part of him wanted to retort, if nothing else, to assert, that he still had command of his ship. But, on the other hand, he didn’t want to encourage Summers to take up her grievances with the fleet any more than she already had—the extent of which Calvin could only guess at. Somehow the fleet had its hooks in Intel Wing, and orders from them were much harder to ignore than from the fleet or from some snippy Imperial executive officer. So he changed the subject.

  “The Harbinger was several hours ahead of us leaving Brimm but arrived at Iota less than an hour before we did. I know the Nighthawk is faster, but not that much faster. Once again the Harbinger experienced an unusual delay. This happened before when the Harbinger reached Aleator much later than anticipated. Thoughts?”

  “Yeah, I’ve been giving a little thought to that,” said Miles. “I wonder if it’s not a tactical delay. Choose arrival times that are hard to predict, keep the element of surprise, something like that.”

  “Good thinking,” said Calvin. “When I talked to Captain Anderson earlier, it was her opinion that the Harbinger showed up when it did because that’s when the Rotham ships were scheduled to leave. But it was risky. If he gave us too much time, we could have had the whole Fifth Fleet waiting for him. The Harbinger is powerful but not that powerful. The Andromeda alone could probably handle it.”

  “Now don’t start that with me,” said Miles. “I already argued this point with Sarah earlier. The Harbinger would win that battle.”

  “If the Harbinger were the better fighting ship,” said Sarah, “it would be the flagship.”

  “There are other considerations,” said Miles animatedly. “The Andromeda’s primary mission is to be some kind of luxury liner for the pampering of fat-bottomed dignitaries. The Harbinger’s primary mission is to shoot the hell out of anything that emerges from the wrong parts of the DMZ! The Andromeda has more fighters and missile launchers, I’ll give you that, but the Harbinger has more mounted guns, better mass drivers. And let’s not forget the Type X shielding on the Harbinger. It has a customizable repeating pattern. It’s impossible to predict and penetrate via modulation. The Andromeda is running a double layer of Type VIII. Sure it technically can absorb more force, but there are ways around it, if you know what you’re doing and if you have a little information.”

  “But the Andromeda is more maneuverable.”

  Miles laughed. “Bah, who needs that? The Harbinger’s weapons are still deadlier, even if it can’t get in a full broadside.”

  Sarah threw up her hands in a gesture of apathy. “Whatever.”

  “Once again we’re wasting our time,” said Summers. She looked at Calvin as if to say, handle this.

  “Sarah,” Calvin said. “I asked you to look into the Harbinger’s belated arrival at Aleator. Could the ship have rendezvoused with someone during that time?”

  “If it did,” said Sarah, “it met with an unregistered ship. There are no stations close enough for Raidan to have stopped at—and no one reported seeing the Harbinger. As for ships … there was one semipromising lead, but it didn’t pan out.”

  “Why not?”

  “The Liberty Sun was flying by at about that time. It’s an old frigate the Sixth Fleet decommissioned, disarmed, and sold to a human shipping company.”

  “A civilian corporation owns a warship?” asked Miles.

  “What used to be a warship,” said Sarah.

  “Who knows how it’s outfitted now,” said Miles. “It could still be a warship—illegally I mean.”

  “Anyway,” said Sarah. “The company that purchased it is owned by MXR.”

  “That does sound promising,” said Calvin. Their web of mysteries seemed to be getting even more tangled.

  “But there’s no way the Liberty Sun could have met up with the Harbinger. Because, while the Harbinger was late getting to Aleator, as we know, the Liberty Sun was not late getting to its destination.”

  “Maybe the records were forged to make it look like it had arrived on time,” said Calvin.

  “Except that it was visually accounted for,” said Sarah.

  “I see …” Suddenly what sounded very promising seemed almost worthless. “I guess we’re back to the working theory that Raidan was trying to conform to someone’s schedule and arrived at Aleator at a predetermined time. One that gave him enough of a window to make sure he wouldn’t be late.”

  “There was one other thing I discovered,” said Shen. “It’s not conclusive, but I think it’s important.”

  “Yes?” asked Calvin.

  “According to flight data we got from Brimm, the ships Raidan attacked—all of them—were scheduled to pass through the same point at nearly the same time.”

  Calvin became excited. “Where’s the bull’s-eye?”

  “Abia System.”

  Calvin had never heard of it. “What’s in Abia?”

  “Seemingly … nothing. A small outpost, more of a supply depot than anything. Fifteen people staff it. There’s also a dwarf planet that’s too cold to colonize. I don’t know why anyone woul
d want to go there, but that’s the place.”

  “Maybe because it’s somewhere deep in the Empire that nobody would be watching,” suggested Calvin.

  Summers was obviously getting bored with this conversation. “How’s the scan of the system coming?” she asked, now hovering over Shen’s console. “Have we isolated the Harbinger’s heading yet?”

  “I’ll check the computer,” he replied.

  “I don’t think it’ll matter,” said Calvin while Shen analyzed the ship’s findings. “I know where the Harbinger is going.”

  Summers raised an eyebrow. “Where?”

  The fact that she asked where before how told Calvin she was more interested in finding Raidan than anything else. “He’s heading for Abia System, obviously.”

  “What? Because the Rotham ships were passing by there? That’s ridiculous.”

  “And,” interjected Sarah, “I just realized something. Aleator, Brimm, Iota, Abia … think about it!”

  “What?” asked Summers, now looking as much baffled as she was annoyed.

  “See it?” asked Sarah. “Raidan went to Aleator, Brimm, and Iota in that order. If he goes to Abia next that completes the pattern.”

  “Abia,” said Calvin. “Brilliant!”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Summers.

  “Aah,” said Shen, now getting it. “The first letter of each place, it spells out Abia.”

  Summers rounded on Calvin. “This is the work of Intel Wing?”

  He shrugged. “It’s a clever discovery. But more important is the fact that those ships were scheduled to pass through that system. That alone is worth checking out.”

  “No, it isn’t.” Summers folded her arms. “Just because ships Raidan attacked were going by Abia doesn’t mean that Raidan is going there.”

  She was right. But Calvin still wanted to investigate Abia, and that meant convincing Summers the Harbinger would be there. And for all he knew, it would.

  “I’ve found their heading,” said Shen. “Zendricun Alpha.”

  Damn!

  “See,” said Summers. “Not Abia. Now we know where to go. Would you do the honors, or shall I?”

  Calvin knew what she meant. She wanted him to order a new heading and leave right away. The problem was Zendricun was more than a day’s flight in the wrong direction.

  “Not yet,” he said. “I haven’t checked the status of the belowdeck teams and the ship as a whole.” This was true, he wanted some updates on cracking the coded message Raidan had given him, and Calvin wondered if anything else useful was mined from the mountain of data they’d stolen from Brimm. It would buy him a little more time to think of a compelling reason to go to Abia.

  “We can do that on the way,” said Summers.

  Miles apparently decided it was his turn to speak. “Part of me wants to agree with you, boss lady,” he said. “We’re still owed a shore leave and hitting up Zendricun sounds pretty nice. Beaches, booze, babes in bikinis … but, since the idea is coming from you, I have to disagree with you on principle.” He grinned toothily. “You understand?”

  “Excuse me?” asked Summers. She shifted her full attention on Miles.

  Miles looked her up and down. “Although, speaking of bikinis, you should consider wearing one. It might be enough to um … sway me to your side.”

  As Summers berated Miles, Calvin took the opportunity to check in with the lower decks. “Please give me some good news,” he said as much to himself as he did to the comm. He imagined the junior officers below scrambling to get their notes together to make a proper report.

  “We came up with a few possible answers to the coded text message you sent us.”

  Calvin remembered it verbatim. I stop shiny sunsets. I find pale blue lights always.

  “But I wanted to do a complete analysis before reporting.”

  “What’s the best candidate?” asked Calvin. He’d hoped a single solution would be ultimate and convincing, but he’d take what he could get. Maybe the fact that multiple solutions seemed possible meant it hadn’t been a coded message after all. Or maybe they needed a better cipher.

  “The best we’ve come up with so far is this. Starting with the initial sentence, if you take the first letter of the first word, then the second letter of the second word, then the third letter of the third word, and the fourth of the last word you get I-T-I-S.”

  “Okay,” said Calvin. “Itis …” Other than as some disease, it didn’t ring a bell.

  “But,” said the officer over the comm. “Continuing that pattern through the whole clue doesn’t go anywhere. You get words without enough letters, and, if you skip over those, the result is just garbage. But if you reverse the pattern for the next line, take the last letter of the first word, then the second-to-last for the second word and so on, the complete clue is I-T-I-S-I-N-A-B-I-A.”

  Calvin saw the answer right away. “It is in Abia,” he said.

  “It’s a really simple cipher, but that’s the most coherent, strongest solution we’ve found.”

  Perfect. “Thanks,” said Calvin. “Keep working on it, but I think that’s the one.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He closed the channel and looked at Summers with a broad smile. Apparently she’d finished haranguing Miles, who was looking the other way. “Did you hear that?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “The coded message says ‘It is in Abia.’”

  “The riddle we found in that debris?”

  “Yes. We cracked it, and that’s what it says.”

  Summers looked skeptical.

  “It’s true,” said Shen. “They just forwarded me their report.”

  “So then you agree we have to go to Abia,” said Calvin.

  “No,” said Summers.

  He was afraid of that. “Why not?”

  “Several reasons. One, our mission isn’t to follow clues. Our mission is to hunt down Raidan. And we know where he’s headed. Zendricun Alpha. Abia is in the wrong direction. Two, that answer might not be the solution to the code. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. Three, the code might be a ploy by Raidan to throw us off his trail.”

  “I honestly think,” said Calvin, “that this is Raidan’s way of reaching out to us. The messages he’s sent, his warning, the code. He wanted us to board that ship …”

  “Which would have only served to delay us even more and maybe even provoke the war with the Rotham Republic that he seems to want.”

  “Or maybe he’s onto something big and, for whatever reason, he can’t tell us what he knows directly. He’s giving us hints to push us in the right direction of discovering it on our own.”

  “Or maybe,” said Summers, “we have orders from every admiral in the military and every controller at Intel Wing to track down Raidan and try to disable his ship for capture. Is that what this is about, Calvin? You’re afraid to take on the Harbinger directly?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with a little fear. Nature gave it to us to keep us alive,” said Calvin. “But, no, that isn’t what this is about. This is about getting to the bottom of it and finding the answers to everything. It’s who I am and what I do.”

  “What you’re supposed to do is follow orders, and our orders couldn’t be clearer,” she said, her tone hardened but her face relaxed to an icy cool.

  She didn’t want to be provoked into showing anything but pure, rational objectivity, but Calvin knew better. She wasn’t just a zealous officer trying to follow orders; she had some kind of vendetta against Raidan. It showed ever-so-slightly in her beautiful shimmering eyes. “It’s funny you mention orders,” said Calvin. “Because, last I checked, I give the orders around here.” Before she could retort, he turned to Sarah. “Set course for Abia, fastest safe speed. Let’s get to the bottom of this.” He was certain they’d find something in Abia and that whatever it was would be worth letting go of Raidan to find.

  “Yes, sir,” said Sarah, and she set to task.

  “You’re right. I spoke out of li
ne,” said Summers. Her voice had calmed, but her eyes hadn’t. “It’s my duty to follow orders, just like it’s my duty to send a report to the fleet.”

  “Tattletale, tattletale …” Miles whispered just loud enough to be heard.

  “You go ahead and send your report,” said Calvin. “In fact it’s time I sent one of my own.” They stared at each other for a few seconds, neither wanting to blink or back down. Eventually though Calvin stormed off toward his office to organize his thoughts. “I’ll be doing that now. You have the deck, Commander.”