An Airless Storm: Cochrane's Company: Book Two

by Peter Grant

  “I’d better not ask any questions,” she mused as she headed for her gig, carrying the electronic tablet. “Least said, soonest mended.”

  During that same day, two men traveled separately from the planet to the space station housing Constanta’s orbital cargo and passenger terminals, Orbital Control Center, System Control Center, and the headquarters of its System Patrol Service. They were dressed in clean, unremarkable clothes that did not stand out among the crowds of orbital workers and transients. Their holdalls were examined before boarding by security personnel, but contained nothing out of the ordinary.

  At the space station, the two men made their separate ways to a room in a transient hostel. It had been rented by a third man, who had arrived on the space station the week before from a passing freighter. He had stayed in the transient area of the station, and so had not had to go through customs and immigration, or endure security formalities. Neither had the big, heavy trunks and suitcases he’d brought with him.

  The two shook his hand respectfully. They unpacked the luggage and began to assemble components. Before long, each of the three had twenty tubes filled with military super-explosive, a hundred times more powerful than standard commercial explosives. On the bed lay three web belts. Their pouches contained timers, detonators, glue, cord, and various fasteners in different shapes.

  While the three were making their preparations, eighteen more men arrived at the space station from the planet, in three groups. They gathered at a bar near the shuttle bays, drinking a last beer before embarking on what was clearly going to be a working voyage. Each had a set of spacer’s powered trunks, stacked two or three high, following them around like trained dogs at heel, homing on the beacons hooked to each man’s belt.

  “When do we leave, Saul?” one asked.

  “Soon as our shuttle gets here. They’ll call me. We’ve got a couple of hours yet. Anyone hungry? They serve a real tasty tocana de carne at the local eatery.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Beef stew, nicely spiced up. It’s good. I had some when I got here.”

  “Why not? We’ll be on spacer rations for a few weeks, so we may as well make the most of the opportunity.”

  As the spacers sat down to enjoy their meal, the three men in the hostel room were focused on last-minute preparations. One swore casually as he tried, and failed, to screw a cap onto a tube. “What’s wrong with me, dammit?” he muttered, trying again, growing irritated as he fumbled with the cap, squinting at the seemingly misaligned threads.

  “What d’you mean?” another asked, swaying slightly, slurring his words as if he’d had too much to drink.

  “I – it’s a trap!” the first speaker snapped, trying to stand, feeling the unsteadiness already slowing his muscles and nerves. “They’re using some sort of gas!”

  One of the men was already too far gone to fight. The second tried to reach for his weapon, but fell forward onto the bed. The leader managed to raise his carbine and point it at the door, but could not fumble his finger onto the firing button. He stumbled, swayed, and collapsed.

  The inflow through the ventilation system died away for a moment, then was renewed with greater force. An exhaust fan in the attached bathroom spooled up to a much higher speed than normal, drawing air out of the bedroom. A baffle deployed in its outlet pipe, venting the contaminated air to vacuum rather than recycling it through the space station’s filtration plant.

  Five minutes later, the door to the room was slowly cracked open by armed men. They covered the prone figures while they were expertly searched, disarmed and secured. Each received a sedative injection to keep them unconscious, then they were strapped onto stretchers. Blankets covering their faces and bodies, they were carried away to a waiting cutter, and ferried planetside.

  As the cutter bearing the three unconscious men left the space station, the NCO in charge of the anchor watch aboard Molly Malone summoned the six spacers of his abbreviated crew. “Remember what I told you,” he cautioned them. “You may have to give evidence about this under a truth-tester, so keep it absolutely straight. If you don’t lie, you can’t be found out.”

  Each man, in turn, looked intently at a terminal on the counter in the docking bay. That would allow him to swear later, in perfect truth, that he’d been working. Someone – he did not turn around, so he could affirm later that he hadn’t seen his face or heard his voice, and therefore wouldn’t be able to identify him or recognize him again – then pulled a thick black cloth bag over his head, tapped him lightly behind the ear – so that he’d later be able to swear he’d been struck on the head – and bound his hands and feet, not too tightly. He was gently laid on a stretcher, and carried through an airlock into a cutter.

  When all seven of the crew had been loaded, the pilot of the cutter pulled away from the ship and set course for the planet. The crew would be dropped on the side of a farm road, from where they’d have to make their own way back to the nearest town. It would be an uncomfortable night, but not an unbearable one, and they would be well compensated for their trouble.

  Their report of being kidnapped from Molly Malone by a person or persons unknown would produce a powerful reaction from Constanta’s law enforcement agencies when it was filed the following afternoon. The delay would be officially described as ‘unfortunate’; but everyone understood that it had taken them a lot of time and effort to make their way back to town after their ordeal. That could not be held against them.

  Two hours later, Saul led his team aboard Molly Malone. They looked at him with dire suspicion when he informed them that the anchor watch had already left the ship.

  “Someone’s gone to a lot of trouble to set this up for us,” one of them said suspiciously.

  “And what if they have? Be thankful we don’t have to do all the hard work ourselves. Just remember your story, and keep it straight.”

  “Oh, I will! For what you’re paying us for this gig, I can keep a dozen stories straight if I have to!”

  “That’s more like it. All right. Tom, park the cutter below the ship. Beacon changeover at twenty. Everybody synchronize your timepieces with the ship.” There was a rustle of clothing as everyone pulled out comm units, or checked their wrists, and made the adjustment. “Tom, as soon as you’re back aboard, report to me on the bridge.”

  “Got it, boss.”

  At twenty precisely, Tom, now wearing a spacesuit, flicked a switch to activate the cutter’s beacon as it drifted in space, a couple of hundred meters below Molly Malone. It was set to precisely the same frequency and transponder code as the larger ship’s beacon – which, at that very instant, Saul switched off. Nobody in OrbCon or SysCon noticed the changeover. After all, they weren’t expecting anything out of the ordinary on what was a boringly normal evening, as far as they were concerned. Tom waited long enough to make sure nothing had gone wrong, then stepped out of the cutter’s open rear ramp. He used a personal propulsion unit to steer himself back to Molly Malone’s docking bay, and her waiting airlock.

  Saul took the ship out of orbit half an hour later, slipping away into the blackness of space under reaction thruster power alone, so as not to emit any gravitic drive signature. The cutter remained where it had been parked, its beacon pulsing steadily. In OrbCon, on the far side of the planet, nobody noticed anything. As far as their systems were concerned, Molly Malone was still in orbit, where she was supposed to be. After all, that’s where her beacon was. In SysCon, they were enjoying a game of electronic poker on their watch consoles. There was nothing requiring their attention. The only patrol craft on duty was three light hours away to the galactic north. It wouldn’t get back to the planet until the following evening – not that it mattered. Nothing interesting, in a criminal sense, ever happened in the Constanta system.

  Molly Malone turned toward the system boundary, heading galactic south. As soon as she was far enough away from the planet to use her gravitic drive at minimum power without fear of detection, she switched to it and accelerate
d away.

  In a comfortable apartment downtown, a man and a woman settled down to wait. The man tuned a radio and opened a computer channel, to listen for emergency broadcasts from orbit. The woman checked that weapons were ready to hand, just in case, and poison tablets too, in case capture appeared unavoidable. Neither wanted to risk the interrogation they knew their enemies would administer, if they were taken alive. The drugs they used – derived from their own interrogation kits, captured from their predecessors here and elsewhere – would leave a human mind blasted beyond function or recognition after a few hours. Death would be infinitely preferable.

  “Do you think they suspect anything?” the woman asked nervously.

  “I doubt it. We have been here for several months, and no-one has taken any action against us. They would not have allowed us to operate so freely, if they thought we were spies.”

  “I hope you are right. I cannot forget what happened to Vasil, Besnik and Gentius a year and a half ago – and to poor Pavli, of course. I still wonder whether they were able to give him mercy, or whether those Hawkwood swine murdered him after dealing with them. I suppose we shall never know.”

  “Probably not, but we can avenge them all. Tonight will see our first major strike here against Hawkwood. It will not be our last!”

  The leader of the trio of arrested agents was the first to recover consciousness. His head was covered with a dark cloth bag, through which he could see nothing. He was strapped to what felt like a gurney, with his arms fastened to some sort of steel trays, extending outwards at an angle. He could feel a slight pain inside his left elbow, and that arm felt a little cold – sure signs that a needle had been inserted, and a drip was flowing.

  He heard footsteps approaching, sounding muffled in some way. A door opened, and three people entered what was clearly his room, their footfalls much more clearly audible now. A muttered conversation, too soft for him to hear clearly, and a switch clicked. Even through the cloth bag, he was aware that a light had come on over his head. Someone tugged at the bag, and pulled it off. His eyes filled with tears as bright light, from a circular fixture above, aimed directly into his face, suddenly blinded him.

  A man’s voice spoke in Galactic Standard English. It was clearly directed into a microphone, because a speaker next to his head translated its words into Albanian, spoken in a mechanical-sounding voice. “You know why you are here. We need to know everything you do. I will not ask you to tell us, because we both know you will not. However, before I inject the drug, I give you five minutes to make your peace with whatever God you may believe in. After that, conscious thought will cease. You will not awaken again. Your two comrades will be treated in the same way.”

  He forced down the rush of panic, the urge to beg and plead for his life. He had conducted this sort of interrogation himself in the past. He knew what the drug would do to his mind. He would not be able to withhold any information at all under the interrogator’s relentless questioning. The only chance to preserve secrecy would be if his interrogator did not know what questions to ask. Judging by his present circumstances, he, she or they would probably not labor under that handicap.

  He wondered suddenly whether there was, after all, some sort of deity, or an afterlife of any kind. He’d always viewed those who believed in such nonsense as deluded fools, credulous idiots whose faith offered him an opportunity to deceive them, persuade them to do what he wanted on the grounds of belief, conscience or morals. Now… now, in the last conscious moments of his own life, he felt a desperate need for hope in the fight against despair. It would be very comforting to believe that there might be something waiting for him. He mentally hesitated… but no. If there was an afterlife, too many of those he’d sent to it would be waiting for him – and they would not welcome him with open arms, to put it mildly. Better by far if they had vanished forever into the void, as he was about to do.

  Grimly, hopelessly, the sick, acid taste of final despair in the back of his throat, a thin white-hot wire of fear and anticipation griping his stomach, he waited for oblivion.

  Cochrane was waiting in his office when Argyll entered. He looked up, saw the disgust and self-loathing in his subordinate’s eyes, and gestured to a bottle on the sideboard. Tom nodded without speaking, and poured a couple of fingers of Aberfeldy into a glass. He slugged it back, coughed, and poured another before sitting down at the desk.

  Cochrane lifted his own glass and sipped it moodily. “Bad?”

  “Yes, sir. It was bad, but we got the information we needed.”

  “Tell me.”

  “The three were Albanian Mafia, as we figured. The leader, the man who arrived a week ago, was the one who ‘persuaded’ Saul’s former employer to release him, so he could work for Dunsinane. He said Dunsinane accepted Saul’s excuse that he couldn’t hijack Humpback, because security aboard her was too heavy. Saul offered to steal our missile reserves instead, and Dunsinane fell for it. The Albanians planned to sabotage the space station at the same time, to punish Constanta for providing facilities to Hawkwood, and try to frighten other planets into denying them to us. They were going to plant explosives in the environmental systems, then go planetside before they went off. They wanted to vent its atmosphere to vacuum, killing everyone aboard, and make it impossible to use for a year or more until the systems could be repaired. They planned to cover their tracks by leaking information that Dunsinane and the Callanish consortium were behind the sabotage, as well as the theft of Molly Malone.”

  “Ruthless bastards, aren’t they? Did you let the Constanta authorities have a copy of the relevant bits of the recording?”

  “Yes, sir. The Minister of Defense will announce that the System Patrol Service learned that ‘interplanetary anarchist terrorists’ planned to sabotage the space station, and intercepted them before they could get to work. Their explosives and other equipment will be put on display for the news media. He won’t mention Hawkwood at all.”

  “He’s welcome to take the credit. What about the other two planetside?”

  “I suggest we leave them alone, sir. If they stay put, we can go on monitoring them and see who arrives to replace their friends. If they run for it, let’s follow them and see where they go and who they meet. We stand to learn more by leaving them alone than we do by grabbing them.”

  “I agree. Please congratulate your team, and tell them they’ve earned a nice bonus.”

  “I will, sir. Thanks.”

  “I’ll read your full report later, but are there any highlights?”

  “Mostly a lot of information about past events, sir. The Albanians look like they’re fanatical about secrecy and compartmentalizing information, just like we are. These guys didn’t know much about what others are doing elsewhere right now – only their own jobs. Still, they knew a lot about how things got to this point. That might be interesting, in a ‘know your enemy’ sort of sense.”

  “It will. What about more agents here, apart from those we knew about?”

  “The two local prisoners didn’t know of any, sir, but the one from off-planet said there was another ring of agents. He didn’t contact them, preferring to use only one ring in case something went wrong. He also named an agent on Callanish, who tried to stir up trouble for us with the consortium there. He’s still there, waiting to report on whether Dunsinane’s scheme worked.”

  “And we’ve no idea who the others are on Constanta?”

  “No, sir, but the new man had a contact point for emergencies – a dead drop location, and a coded message to identify himself. We can use that, if you like, and see who picks it up.”

  Cochrane thought for a moment. “Let’s monitor the dead drop location, and see whether anybody checks it. What did you do with the three agents?”

  “After we completed the interrogations, we handed them over to Albrescu’s people. They finished the job, then dropped the corpses where the Defense Ministry people would find them.”

  “I’m sorry, Tom. I know this was hard on you.�
��

  “I reckon it was hard on you, too, sir. Neither of us is cut out for this sort of thing. Unfortunately, we can’t fight barbarians by the standards of civilization. The sooner we can get this filthy business over with, the sooner we can get back to being human, instead of animals!”

  “I’m not sure that isn’t an insult to most of the animals I’ve ever met. I’ve heard enough for now. Pass the bottle, Tom. Let’s do our best to wash the sour taste out of our mouths.”

  CALLANISH

  Two weeks later, Molly Malone – now renamed Ponzey, with every trace of her former name and registration erased – slid into orbit around Callanish. Her crew departed for another freighter waiting nearby, while their boss went planetside to report.

  Dunsinane received Saul in his office. “You got her?” he asked eagerly.

  “We got her, Mr. Dunsinane. She’s in orbit, with her missile pods intact, as per my first report. Your own crew is already aboard her.”

  “Excellent!” He picked up an envelope from his desk. “Here’s the second half of your payment.”

  Saul opened the envelope, and smiled in satisfaction to see an interplanetary bearer bank draft for fifteen million Bismarck Cluster marks, plus the five percent fee it would cost to cash it off-planet. “Thank you, Mr. Dunsinane. This will do nicely.”

  He headed back to orbit to join his spacers. Within an hour, the waiting freighter left orbit and headed for the system boundary.

  It was two days before the skipper of Dunsinane’s anchor watch crew sent him a message. He noted that the latest inventory by Constanta’s System Patrol Service, as recorded in the ship’s official document storage, had listed thirty-two modern missile pods. However, when inspecting the ship, he and his spacers had only found nineteen, much smaller and older than those listed. He thought Mr. Dunsinane should know of the discrepancy, and asked for instructions.