Scornful Stars Page 23

  “Helm, come left to course three-five-three, down fifteen,” Ensign Carter ordered. The sensor officer had the conn for the landing maneuver, another junior officer practicing her ship handling. Sikander tried hard not to dwell on the idea of twenty-six thousand tons of steel moving at a thousand kilometers per hour in the hands of someone who’d graduated from the Academy less than a year ago, and studiously adopted an expression of mild interest in Grace Carter’s approach. “Atmospheric maneuvering: all engines, ahead one-half.”

  Sikander shifted in his command couch, and decided that a little helpful advice wouldn’t hurt the ensign’s ego too much. “Take your time, Ms. Carter. I appreciate your enthusiasm, but we don’t want to greet the base with a sonic boom. It’s not too early to slow down a bit more.”

  “Er, yes, sir,” Carter replied. “Helm, all engines, ahead one-third.”

  “Atmospheric maneuvering, all engines ahead one-third,” Quartermaster Birk at the ship’s helm replied.

  “We’ve got gravity helping us now,” Sikander continued. “The planet wants us on the ground sooner rather than later. Speed is what gets you into trouble with docking maneuvers, both in space and on the surface.” Or that’s what Captain Garvey told me a hundred times or so when I was an ensign on Adept, he recalled. Not that I listened very well. Then again, I suppose captains have been telling ensigns to be a little more careful with their ships since navies sailed the waters of ancient Earth.

  “Yes, sir. I’ll remember, sir.”

  “You’re doing fine, Ms. Carter,” Sikander said in the most reassuring tone he could manage. He even managed to remain silent when Decisive splashed down hard enough to raise a two-meter wave in the mooring basin … which, fortunately, was not lined with spectators waiting for the ship to dock. Ensign Carter winced, but she remembered the rest of the mooring commands well enough, and finished up the landing sequence without any more trouble.

  “Not bad, Ms. Carter,” Sikander told her when she finished. “A little less speed next time; twenty-six thousand tons have a certain amount of momentum, after all. Secure from landing detail and establish the in-port watch, if you please. XO, pass the word: General liberty for all hands not in the duty section.”

  “My pleasure, Captain,” Fraser replied. “Shall I tell the squadron we’re on our way?”

  “Please do. Meet me on the quarterdeck in fifteen minutes—I’m sure Captain Broward is anxious to hear what we’ve been up to for the last seven weeks.” Sikander returned to his cabin with a few more gray hairs than he’d had an hour ago, and changed from his shipboard jumpsuit into the working whites Darvesh had laid out for him. Then he headed down to Decisive’s midships hangar, which doubled as its main access point when she was tied up alongside a pier. Naturally, Amelia Fraser was already waiting for him, and she’d ordered the quarterdeck watch to summon one of the base’s courtesy flyers for the trip over to the squadron headquarters building.

  “Commander North and Lieutenant Commander Fraser to see Captain Broward,” Amelia told the squadron receptionist when they entered the building lobby.

  “Welcome back, sir, ma’am,” the admin specialist replied. “The captain watched you land. He told me to send you in ‘just as soon as your feet were dry,’ as he put it.”

  Sikander exchanged a look with his exec. “Make a note, XO: Let’s make sure we don’t wash off the pier the next time we set down,” he told her. Then they headed back to Broward’s office.

  Wilson Broward stood at his window, gazing over at the slip where Decisive was moored. Sikander marched in and saluted. “Good morning, sir. I am pleased to report Decisive’s return to base.”

  Broward turned and acknowledged Sikander’s salute, but his brows drew together in an unhappy expression. “So I see. You’re almost ten days overdue, Commander—I was about to send out a search party. The last position report I received from Decisive was postmarked Meliya, and you indicated that you were heading for some place called Zafer … which, I note, was not on any patrol route I approved. Where exactly have you been with my destroyer?”

  “It’s a long story, sir, but the short version is that we were diverted by the terrorist attack in Meliya, where we received some actionable intelligence about a pirate base. Your standing orders required Decisive to investigate—and I think you’ll be surprised by what we found.”

  “We did file a position report from Bursa just a week ago, sir,” Amelia added. “We must have beaten the report home.”

  “Hmmph. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time communications in this sector lagged behind events.” Broward moved over to his desk and keyed the intercom. “Petty Officer Martinez, clear my schedule for the rest of the morning. Apparently I’m in for a long story.”

  “Yes, Captain,” the admin specialist who ran the office replied. “I’ll reschedule your eleven o’clock.”

  “Thank you,” Broward replied. He looked back to Sikander and Amelia, and nodded at the chairs in front of his desk. “Well, let’s hear it. You have my undivided attention.”

  Sikander drew a deep breath, and launched into a verbal summary of the major events in Decisive’s cruise: the trouble with generator two and the diversion to Bursa, the discovery of Carmela Día and the pursuit of Target Alpha to Tunis, the visit to Dahar—and his encounter with Otto Bleindel in the pasha’s palace, which required a fair bit of background all on its own—the rescue and assistance operation in Meliya, and finally the tip about the Zafer base and the successful raid. “We left one pirate vessel disabled at Zafer and handed another over to the Zerzuran authorities at Bursa, along with eighty-seven prisoners,” he concluded. “I’m afraid that one ship got away from us, though.”

  “We recorded Mazuz’s course just in case it turns out she was running for another base,” Amelia added. “One line of bearing isn’t much of a clue, but it’s a start.”

  “Well.” Broward slowly digested the news for a moment. Sikander glanced at the clock on the wall and realized he’d been talking for more than an hour … but the squadron commander’s expression had gone from vexed to troubled to thoughtful during the course of his verbal report. “Well. You’ve had an eventful cruise. I don’t even know where to begin with my questions.”

  “I’m almost finished with the complete report. I’ll send it along later today; it should cover any details I’ve overlooked.” Sikander offered an apologetic shrug. “I am sorry that we got ahead of our regular situation reports, sir. I used my best judgment in responding to some very unusual events.”

  “As a commanding officer should.” The squadron commander leaned back in his expansive chair, thinking. “All right, pending a review of your written report, I’ll endorse your decision to divert from your scheduled patrol. While you should have brought Decisive back home after your trouble with the generator, it seems that your decision to remain on station led to you being in the right place at the right time to stop the mining outpost attack in Bursa and eventually identify the attacker. Maybe it was a lucky break, but we’ve been waiting months for one of those. You showed some initiative and made sure you didn’t miss it.”

  “Speaking of lucky breaks, sir, I can’t help but notice that we started catching up to pirates the minute events upset our schedule,” Amelia said. “I think that Zerzura’s pirates are aware of our intended movements and have been using that information to avoid Pleiades Squadron.”

  “My XO makes a good case for it, Captain,” Sikander said. “Someone is telling the pirates where we’re going and when we’re going to be there. It explains why the squadron’s had so little luck at pirate-hunting over the last few months, and why Decisive’s luck suddenly changed.”

  “Surely you don’t believe that the pirates have a spy in my headquarters?” Broward said sharply.

  “I don’t imagine that any Aquilan personnel are involved, although I suppose it’s possible that someone’s managed to plant a listening device in the office or set up a backdoor into the squadron’s information systems,” Ame
lia answered. “Local contractors look after the janitorial services, after all. No, sir, I think it’s much more likely that the pirates have friends in Zerzura’s planetary governments or security establishments. Paying a spaceport administrator or a corrupt security officer for information on our expected arrivals and departures would seem a lot easier than spying on us here.”

  “So you’re saying that the Zerzuran authorities are helping their pirates to stay out of our way.” The squadron commander’s scowl returned. “Damn. That’s even worse than a spy on our base because we can’t put a stop to it! How can we do anything about cleaning up the sector if the cops and the robbers are on the same side?”

  “It’s probably a small number of informants and sympathizers, not systemic corruption,” Sikander pointed out. “But until we identify the sources of the leaks, we shouldn’t provide advance notice of our port visits to anybody in Zerzura.”

  “Or we could incorporate more uncertainty in our schedules,” Amelia suggested. “Instead of requesting a port visit in Tunis on the fifteenth, tell the planetary governor’s office we’ll be there sometime between the twelfth and the eighteenth. Or just be rude and start showing up a day early here or a couple of days late there—all we really need is a little more unpredictability, sir.”

  “The Caliphate’s likely to give our Foreign Ministry an earful about that,” said Broward. “They’re already touchy about Aquilan patrols in their systems.”

  “How long will it take for a complaint from Zerzura to reach Terra and for someone in the Caliphate bureaucracy to act on it, sir?” Sikander asked. “I think we could shake things up for at least three months before someone officially told us to mind our manners.”

  “Under most circumstances I’d agree with you, Sikander. Unfortunately, I’ve already received instructions to be very careful about Zerzuran sensibilities. The Foreign Ministry wants us to be on our best behavior while our man in Marid Pasha’s capital tries to convince the pasha that Aquila can be a better friend than Dremark.”

  “Mr. Darrow.” Sikander nodded. “I had the opportunity to speak with him several times during our stop at Dahar. And, as I noted earlier, we actually ran into the Dremish envoys while we were there.”

  “Then let me share some news about that you probably haven’t heard yet.” Broward’s frown deepened. “Two days ago, our intelligence dispatches reported a major deal between Dremark and Zerzura. It seems that the Imperial Navy has agreed to sell Marid Pasha’s government three old cruisers: Zyklop, Drachen, and Meduse. They’re already on their way to Dahar, along with a repair ship to assist in fitting them out.”

  “Three cruisers?” Sikander made no attempt to manage his surprise. That would be the most powerful squadron within a hundred light-years—the pasha’s new fleet would outgun Pleiades Squadron two or three times over. For that matter, three heavy cruisers could defy the entire Bolívaran fleet or a substantial portion of the Velaran fleet, too. “What in the world does Marid Pasha need that much firepower for?”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it?” Broward said. He glanced out the office windows at the row of Aquilan destroyers moored alongside Tawahi Island’s concrete quays; their white hulls gleamed in the tropical sunshine. “Those cruisers might be old, but then again, most of the squadrons and fleets in this region of space are making do with ships of the same vintage. Certainly no pirate in Zerzura is going to be able to stand up to even one of the pasha’s new warships.”

  “Using heavy cruisers for antipiracy patrols is just one step removed from swatting flies with sledgehammers, isn’t it?” Amelia observed.

  “I suppose the pasha wants to make a statement.” Broward gave a small shrug, and returned his attention to Sikander and Amelia. “But until Marid Pasha gets his new ships in service, we’ll keep on doing our best, and we’ll mind our manners while our diplomats try to top Dremark’s offer. Smashing up a pirate base is a good start, though. Welcome back, Commander, and enjoy some well-deserved rest. It sounds like you and your crew earned it.”

  * * *

  Decisive shifted into its in-port schedule: officers’ call at 0730, a workday that started at 0800, lunch at noon, knocking off around 1700, dinner at 1800 for anyone who chose to remain on board, and an informal department-head gathering at 1900 after most of the crew and the more junior members of the wardroom had gone ashore for the evening. Officers with families living on base or in the town nearby usually skipped dinner to get home earlier, although Amelia Fraser and Jaime Herrera often stuck around long enough to check in at the department-head gathering—it was something of an unwritten rule in the Commonwealth Navy that a ship’s senior officers and leading petty officers started their days before anybody else and were the last to head home in the evening. Sikander had certainly paid his own dues in long days during his department-head tours, although he tried to encourage his own senior staff not to overdo it when they’d just returned from a seven-week patrol. He made a point of canceling the evening gathering a couple of times a week and heading for his Tawahi Island bungalow at 1705 promptly just to make sure his people had no reason to stick around.

  Ten days after their return, Michael Girard presented his findings about the Vashaoth Teh bombing to the department-head meeting. He brought along Ensign Jay Sekibo, the ship’s communications officer and one of the division officers in his department. “I apologize for the long delay,” Girard began. “Frankly, planning the Zafer raid and analyzing our intelligence take from the pirate ships we captured pushed the Meliya bombing to the bottom of my department’s to-do list. Fortunately Mr. Sekibo kept the investigation on his radar, and I think he’s turned up something important.”

  “An understandable conflict of priorities,” Sikander admitted. “Very well, then. Mr. Sekibo, what did you find?”

  Taller and more slender than the already tall and slender New Caledonians and High Albionans who made up much of Decisive’s wardroom, Ensign Sekibo was a young aristocrat from Great Fionia, the son of the Senator Surmsey. Most Aquilan populations represented a centuries-old blend of the regional Terran phenotypes, but Great Fionia’s people retained a little more of eastern Africa in their makeup than most other Aquilans. If Sekibo was nervous about briefing Sikander and the ship’s department heads, he gave no sign of it. “I don’t believe the bombing was a suicide mission, Captain,” he said, pointing a remote at the nearest vid display to pull up his report. “This is a sensor log we downloaded from the station’s records when we arrived on the scene. You see this signal, here? It’s a simple short-range transmission of a numeric code: 62463791. It carries no other information, and repeats that code continuously for about five minutes before fading out. Note the time stamp, sir: It’s exactly one hour before the bomb went off underneath the Velaran cruiser.”

  “That looks suspiciously like a remotely triggered timer,” Amelia Fraser said.

  “That’s what my team thought, too, ma’am.” Sekibo advanced the presentation he’d prepared. “Here’s a sensor log from Dualifin, a freighter that was in an orbit close by the station at the time the signal was sent. You’ll see that they recorded the signal for a considerably longer time. We think that the transmitter left the station shortly after it was activated, but the ship outside the station continued to pick up the signal for a few more minutes until it passed out of range.”

  “The message the Meliyan Human Revolution released went out of its way to praise the ‘martyrs of the cause,’” Amar Shah said. “What sort of suicide bomber uses a trigger with a one-hour delay and then leaves the scene of the attack?”

  “Someone who’s not very interested in the suicide part of the plan,” Jaime Herrera said. “Damn. I have to say, it comforted me just a little bit to think that the assholes who’d set off that bomb had erased themselves from existence.”

  “How did you work this out, Mr. Sekibo?” Amelia asked the comm officer.

  “I had Petty Officer Jackson and Petty Officer Morton check back through the sensor data we copi
ed from the station, looking for anything out of the ordinary. It turns out that the station recorded hundreds of routine transmissions an hour, and the Meliyan authorities shared more than seventy hours of recordings leading up to the bombing. It took our people a while to find the anomalous signal.”

  “Good work, Mr. Sekibo,” said Amelia. “Make sure you put in Jackson and Morton for some extra recognition, too. That must have been some tedious work.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. I will.”

  “If the claim of martyrdom is a lie, there might be other claims in that message that are less than truthful,” Sikander said thoughtfully. “For example, anything the Meliyan Human Revolution said about how they came by a microfusion warhead.”

  “Or the claim that there’s such a thing as the Meliyan Human Revolution in the first place,” Michael Girard said. “While Mr. Sekibo was poring over comm logs, I went and took another look through news reports and our own intelligence files for anything about radical groups operating in Meliya. Sir, no one ever heard of these people before they managed to destroy a Velaran warship. It’s a very impressive debut, so to speak—most radical groups need years to build up that sort of capability.”

  “A false-flag operation, then,” Amar Shah said with a frown. “That begs the question of who is really responsible for the attack. And what did they hope to achieve by blaming it on Meliyan radicals?”

  I have a guess, Sikander thought, but he kept it to himself. As convenient as it would be to blame Otto Bleindel, he didn’t know that the Dremish agent was actually responsible … and it was generally a bad habit to assume you knew the answer to a question just because it fit nicely with your preconceptions. Maybe Bleindel had something to do with it and maybe he didn’t, but until Sikander could form a guess as to why the Dremish would have wanted to wreck a Velaran cruiser, he needed to make sure he kept looking for answers. Then again, just because it’s what I expect to find doesn’t mean that it’s wrong. Between the evidence of corruption in Zerzura’s security apparatus, terrorism in Meliya, the dark suspicions Michael Girard had raised about what Elena Pavon stood to gain from the pirate attack on the Grupo Constelación freighter, and the specter of Dremish adventurism, he was more than ready for an answer or two.