Scornful Stars Page 17

  “Ms. Pavon, you look lovely today,” Sikander told her. He meant it, too—she wore a Zerzuran-style djellaba in a vibrant blue and black pattern, noticeably more form-fitted than the customary fashion on Dahar. “I’m curious: What is your connection to the university?”

  “My family has supported Dahar’s university for generations. In fact, there’s a library building across campus named after my grandfather.” She shrugged. “We also give to schools in Nuevo León and Meliya and half a dozen other worlds as well, but since Dahar is the capital of the sector and the seat of Zerzura’s government, well…”

  “It’s an opportunity to make a good impression in a place where you do a lot of business.” Sikander nodded. “It’s much the same for my family, although we tend to take an interest in institutions a little closer to home.”

  “Kashmir, Jaipur, or Ishar in particular?”

  “You’re familiar with Kashmir?”

  “Not really,” the heiress said. “I confess I did a little research after I visited your ship and read your official bio—it’s included with the press kit your consulate issued for Decisive’s port call. First Kashmiri to command an Aquilan Commonwealth warship? That’s impressive.”

  “I’m not entirely sure whether I find your interest flattering or unsettling.”

  “You should be flattered, of course. I stopped by Decisive to see if I could sting someone into finally taking some effective action about our piracy problems. I expected to find a pompous ass in command of an Aquilan ship, or perhaps a dull policeman who wouldn’t believe what I told him about what’s been going on behind his back. Instead, I found you.”

  “Sipping cocktails at a party days after you asked me to take some action.” Sikander waved a hand at the reception, encompassing the entire planet in the gesture. “This must be frustrating for you. I know it doesn’t look like it, but I take your concerns seriously. My operations team is scouring reports of attacks and ship data registries to turn up any lead we can, but frankly, we can’t do much until we develop better intelligence. I am sorry that it’s taking a while.”

  “Naturally I’m anxious to see results, but I haven’t heard anything new from my investigators either,” Elena said. “Like you, I have some diplomatic responsibilities—so to speak—to look after while I’m in Dahar. I only spend a few weeks here each year. But I hope that when I do give you something, you’ll be ready.”

  “Nothing would make me happier than having a reason to skip five more days of receptions and making remarks. Unfortunately, pirates don’t like to show themselves when the Navy’s in the area, Ms. Pavon.”

  “I can imagine. And please, call me Elena.”

  “Elena, then. I’m Sikander, or just Sikay.”

  Elena Pavon smiled warmly. “Well, Sikay, if you’re looking for something different to do while we’re waiting, I have a suggestion: Come up to my family’s coffee orchard at Mount Kesif tomorrow. We’re just starting to hull this season’s crop, and many of the local growers bring their own fruit to our mill. It’s something of a local celebration.”

  Sikander mentally reviewed his schedule, and decided there was nothing he couldn’t miss—Amelia Fraser would serve as a more than adequate replacement for the morning meeting at the consulate, and he had not yet taken any time off from his official duties. “I’d like that very much,” he told her.

  “Good! In that event, I’ll see you tomorrow. I’ll have Omar send you directions—it’s about a hundred kilometers south of Mersin. Noon?”

  “I’ll be there,” Sikander promised.

  The next day, he had his crew break out the captain’s gig—the smallest of Decisive’s various launches and orbiters—and changed into his dress whites. Aboard Aquilan warships, the gig was traditionally at the captain’s disposal for whatever he or she saw fit to do with it; Sikander told himself that he was cultivating positive relations with the local business community, not that he really needed to justify an afternoon off. Pilot First Class Kersey flew Sikander and Darvesh directly from Dahar High Port down to the sunny highlands south of the planetary capital, and made a wide, generous turn around the Mount Kesif plantation so that Sikander could take in the view before they landed in a field a few hundred meters from the old stone farmhouse and mill in the middle of the property. Sikander was surprised to see dozens of ground cars and light trucks parked near the buildings, with a small crowd of Dahari thronging tables that had been set up beneath canopies or listening to a band that played some local variety of folk music.

  “It seems to be quite the occasion,” Darvesh remarked to Sikander as they debarked from the gig.

  “Elena said it was something of a local tradition.” Sikander took a deep breath, enjoying the warmth of the sunshine and the brilliant blue sky. High golden-brown mountainsides cupped the plantation, forming a three-sided bowl that faced to the south; green coffee trees marched up the slopes and away down the valley in even rows. The air smelled clean and earthy, with a strong whiff of roasted coffee instead of the exotic compounds found in Dahar’s lower elevations. I see why people settled here now, he decided.

  He and Darvesh started off toward the house at the center of the orchard, following a dusty lane. Elena Pavon descended from the house’s grand porch to greet him when they reached the gate. “Sikay! Welcome to Mount Kesif. I’m glad you decided to come.”

  “It’s beautiful here,” he said. “You know, for all the coffee I’ve enjoyed over the years, I have never actually set foot in a coffee orchard. Are they all this pretty?”

  “Oh, we’re a small specialty grower, really,” Elena replied. “Just over those hills there’s an industrial grower with fifteen hundred hectares under cultivation. Mount Kesif is more of a family retreat than a big business, although I’m proud to say that we’ve won our share of medals and our plantation manager turns a tidy profit by selling into the gourmet market. When I’m on Dahar I work in downtown Mersin, but I spend my weekends up here.”

  “My family has something similar—a ranch on Srinagar at a place called Chittar Creek, although I don’t get to visit it very often.” Sikander fell in beside Elena as she strolled around the house, while Darvesh moved off to give them some privacy. “Thank you for sharing it with me.”

  “If all you ever see of a planet are the spaceports and big cities, you haven’t really seen it. I have a feeling you don’t find much opportunity to explore some of the worlds your ship calls at.”

  “You’re not wrong about that. It’s good to walk on grass and dirt every now and then.”

  “Well, we have plenty of that here. Very expensive dirt, I might add—prime coffee acreage is Dahar’s most valuable real estate.” Elena slipped her arm around his. “Come on, let me show you around a little.”

  Sikander allowed her to lead him in a tour of the plantation’s working buildings—big storage sheds filled with crates of fresh-picked coffee cherries, the pulping room where an old machine stripped the fruit from the bean, the open-air drying sheds with long tables covered in parchment beans, and the mill itself, where the dried beans were hulled, graded, and sorted. They also met quite a few of the Pavons’ Mount Kesif neighbors, who’d come to enjoy the daylong barbecue and harvest festivities. Some were wealthy dabblers like the Pavons, others were managers and buyers who worked in the area, and a few were small plantation owners who lived year-round on their property, maintaining family operations that in some cases went back for generations. The food was excellent, the music was good, and Elena proved to be a delightful guide; Sikander managed to forget all about pirates and Dremish spies for a couple of hours.

  He was just about to suggest a return to the buffet for another helping when his comm unit beeped at him. “Excuse me, please,” he said to Elena. “I’m afraid I have to take this.”

  “I understand.” Elena turned back to the gathering, moving off to greet some neighbors who’d just arrived.

  Sikander found a quiet corner of the plantation’s wraparound porch and answered the c
all: “This is Commander North.”

  “Captain, it’s Lieutenant Commander Herrera, command duty officer. Sir, we’ve just received word of a major incident in the Meliya system. The Velaran cruiser Vashaoth Teh was destroyed at its moorings by a bomb. Some Meliyan separatist group is apparently taking credit for the attack.”

  “Dear God. Any idea of the casualties?”

  “No, sir, not yet.” Herrera’s tone had none of his habitual humor; his voice was as harsh and abrasive as gravel. “The ship’s complement is listed as three hundred and fifty-five, though. And from what I’m seeing in this news footage, it looks like the bomb did a lot of damage to the orbital station where Vashaoth Teh was docked. I have to imagine there are civilians dead, too.”

  Sikander glanced up at the sky, as if he could somehow spot Decisive at its docking cradle in Dahar High Port. Suddenly the Mount Kesif coffee orchard seemed not quite real, a pleasant daydream from which he’d been shaken awake. “Secure the ship and the access points to the docking cradle immediately, Mr. Herrera. We’re tied up to a station, too.”

  “Already done, sir.”

  “Good.” Sikander didn’t think it likely that a local separatist group could pull off multiple attacks in different star systems, but he had no intention of allowing his ship to be caught off guard in case he was wrong about that. He stood in silence for a moment, rapidly reviewing Decisive’s orders for the current deployment to make sure he understood what action he’d be required to take. Pleiades Squadron operated under a fairly comprehensive set of standing orders; the requirement to respond to incidents such as what Jaime Herrera had just described to him was one of those. “Go ahead and recall the liberty party. We’ll need to get under way as soon as possible.”

  “It’s three and a half days to Meliya, Captain. By the time we get there, rescue and assistance operations will be a week old.”

  “I know, but the squadron’s standing orders dictate that we investigate and offer whatever help we can. Show the flag, as they say. If nothing else, we’ve got trained damage-control teams and heavy cutting equipment—perhaps we can help pick up the pieces.” Sikander shook his head, trying not to imagine what his team would find on a station shattered by a bomb big enough to take out a cruiser. “I’ll return to the ship immediately. North, out.”

  He set off in search of Elena, and found her chatting with another well-dressed woman by a table covered in coffee beans. Elena took one look at his expression and excused herself from her conversation. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “I am afraid I have to go,” he said. “We just received word of a separatist attack in Meliya—a Velaran cruiser was destroyed by a bomb. Decisive is the closest Commonwealth ship, and we’re expected to render whatever assistance we can.”

  Elena paled. “We have offices and a major cargo facility on the ground there.”

  “The attack targeted the orbital station—your people are probably fine. I’m afraid I don’t have any more details than that, but I’m sure the news is breaking throughout Dahar as we speak.” He paused, and took her hand. “Thank you for inviting me to Mount Kesif. I am truly sorry that I can’t stay and enjoy the rest of the afternoon.”

  Elena grimaced. “It’s hardly your fault,” she said, and then she leaned forward to give him a kiss on the cheek. “Be careful, Sikay. I hope to see you again soon.”

  “Me, too,” he said, and hurried back to his shuttle.

  * * *

  Decisive announced her arrival in the Meliya system with a spectacular high-speed terminal cascade eighty hours after Jaime Herrera’s call interrupted Sikander’s Mount Kesif visit. The greater a ship’s transit speed the more energetically its warp bubble collapsed when the warp generator cut off, and thanks to some particularly aggressive acceleration during the departure from Dahar, Decisive arrived in the Velar Electorate at nearly one-sixth the speed of light. Sikander did his best to project complete confidence in the ship’s navigation during the tense moments before arrival, but he didn’t miss the sighs of relief from the bridge crew when Ensign Carter and her sensor crew confirmed a clear arrival.

  “We missed our mark by four light-seconds, Captain,” Michael Girard reported. “We’re eighteen light-minutes out from Meliya Prime.”

  “Very good navigation, Amelia,” Sikander told his XO. In practice it was the ship’s senior quartermaster who worked out the details of most warp transits, but Amelia Fraser personally checked his math and oversaw the process.

  “Thank you, sir,” said Fraser, acknowledging the compliment. “Sometimes you just get a little lucky.”

  “Perhaps, but pass along a well-done to your team anyway,” Sikander told her. “Mr. Girard, depower and retract the warp ring, and transmit our arrival notification. Set course for Meliya Prime and secure from transit stations when you’re ready.”

  He pulled up a tactical window at the console by his command seat, and quietly studied the Velaran planet while the bridge crew changed over into their normal underway watches around him. A small near-terran world orbiting a Class K star, Meliya Prime had been settled by the Terran Caliphate six centuries ago during the same wave of colonization that brought humans to Zerzura. Meliya had remained part of the Zerzura Sector for almost five centuries, until the neighboring Velarans seized the planet shortly after the humans and Paom’ii of that region unified under the Electorate. But it’s been more than a hundred years since the Velarans took the system, Sikander thought. Meliya assimilated into the Electorate generations ago, and the Paom’ii are happy to let the planet’s humans manage their own affairs. So why did the Meliyan Human Revolution choose this moment to strike?

  “Captain, the orbital station’s now coming into view,” Fraser told him. She nodded at the bridge’s central display; powerful hull cams trained on Meliya Prime magnified the imagery by a factor of several hundred. Sikander stood and moved a little closer to the display anyway, hands clasped behind his back as he took in the scene.

  Where there should have been a domed city in space, a great debris field now tumbled above the planet. At first he thought the whole station had been literally blown to bits, but then the captured asteroid that served as the station’s foundation came into view. To Sikander’s surprise, the side of the spaceport that faced the planet seemed surprisingly intact, as did several docking terminals ringing the station’s imaginary waist. But a seventy-meter crater marred the large naval terminal on the station’s upper surface, surrounded by rings of wreckage, twisted alloy, and the shattered hulls of Electorate navy workboats and patrol craft trapped in what remained of their docking cradles.

  “God,” Amelia breathed, standing next to him. “How big was that bomb? And what did it do to the rest of the station?”

  “The station’s almost two kilometers across and that rock is mostly nickel-iron, XO,” Jaime Herrera pointed out. “That’s a lot of mass to absorb a bomb blast. It would take a pretty serious explosion to make a crater that big in hard rock, though … maybe a kiloton or two?”

  “Where’s Vashaoth Teh?” Sikander asked.

  “One moment, Captain.” Michael Girard consulted with the bridge’s sensor specialists, and highlighted a battered and blackened length of hull in the middle of the wreckage. Sikander barely recognized the handsome burgundy-and-silver warship he’d seen in orbit above Dahar only ten days ago. Vashaoth Teh remained secured to the station by her bow, but her stern floated free in a mass of cables and twisted conduits. Heavy scabs of rock and steel scarred her flanks—the cooled remnant of molten debris from the blast—and near the ship’s midpoint the hull had been wrenched through a ten-degree bend. Sikander could only guess that the ship’s aft section had been hit so hard that it had to give way before the forward portion could begin to move, a grim testimony to the power and placement of the bomb.

  Decisive’s bridge fell silent as Sikander and his officers stared at the imagery. After a moment, Girard cleared his throat and continued. “That’s not quite all of her. Several smal
ler pieces are part of the debris cloud around the station—weapon mounts and drive plates sheared free from the hull, I think.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Girard.” Sikander studied the debris field for a moment, not entirely certain where Decisive could even begin to help. It’s worse than Bathinda, he realized. The sight of the Velaran ship tangled in the wreckage of its moorings took him back thirteen years to the day the KLP’s strike at the port turned deadly. It had been a sultry afternoon, hot and humid even by Jaipur’s standards, and Sikander remembered the smell of smoke in the air—

  —as he stands on the concrete pier, surrounded by his father’s retinue. The burned-out hull of the container ship Blue Horizon lies in the shallow water only twenty meters from its intended mooring place. Sikander wonders how the KLP strikers managed to get a bomb powerful enough to hole the ship on board before it had even docked. Perhaps the radicals hid the weapon in Blue Horizon’s cargo at its previous port of call, or maybe they placed a mine on the seabed. But either way, the attack not only prevents the ship from unloading—it escalates the Bathinda situation into something much more dangerous than a troublesome labor dispute.

  “How many dead?” Nawab Dayan asks his escort commander, Colonel Nayyar.

  “Five crewmen are unaccounted for, Nawab,” Colonel Nayyar answers. A stocky woman of fifty with iron-gray hair, she wears a khaki-colored dopatta around her face in addition to the turban worn by male soldiers of the Jaipur Dragoons. “All of them worked in the engineering spaces, so it is presumed that they drowned when the ship settled on the bottom. The fire on the upper deck most likely prevented their escape. They were all Kashmiris.”