Scornful Stars Page 30

Hours later, he was still staring at the ceiling when Darvesh quietly entered the room with his freshly pressed uniforms. The valet winced when he saw Sikander lying awake. “I am sorry, Nawabzada. I did not mean to disturb you.”

  “You didn’t,” Sikander told him. He sat up in bed and swung his feet to the deck. “I hardly slept.”

  “You are troubled, sir?”

  “It’s something that Captain Broward said before we left Neda.” Sikander frowned at the deck plates, trying to pinpoint the source of his misgivings. “It seems to me that our pirate-hunting is turning … political. I was under the impression that we’ve spent the last year fighting Zerzuran piracy because piracy is bloody, cruel, and vicious, but Captain Broward reminded me that Aquila’s interests are not quite as altruistic as I’d believed. Don’t mistake me—if there are Zerzuran officers and officials getting rich from their support for piracy, I’ll gladly drag them back to Neda in irons under any pretext. Still, I find myself wondering if we’ve been ordered to Bodrum because the Commonwealth Navy stands for something, or because Aquila is falling behind in this small corner of the great game and is ready to risk a bold play.”

  “The fact that Aquila finds advantage in dealing sternly with Zerzura’s pirates does not mean that it is the wrong thing to do.”

  “All the same, I’d rather think of myself as a protector than a pawn,” said Sikander. He rubbed the sleep from his face as if he could erase his unexpected doubts at the same time. “Damn it. I think Devindar’s managed to get into my head.”

  Darvesh paused in his work. “I often disagree with your brother’s rhetoric, sir. But I have never found fault with his cause or his reasoning.”

  “You think Devindar is right?”

  “Nawab Dayan and Begum Vadiya have four admirable sons, sir. You should not be surprised by that.”

  “Admirable” was not a word Sikander expected to hear from Darvesh in connection with his brother’s politics. He watched the tall Kashmiri return to arranging the pressed uniforms, remembering the argument in Devindar’s kitchen at the end of his recent visit. “The last time I spoke with him, Devin told me that by serving here I endorsed Aquilan rule back home—that this uniform we wear stands for everything Aquila does, whether we personally participate in it or not.”

  “Aquilans are human, Nawabzada. All human institutions harbor potential for good and evil at the same time.” The valet turned his attention to the cabin’s small galley, and began to heat water for coffee. “I do not approve of the way the Aquilan governor-general discourages Kashmiri autonomy. I do approve of the effort Aquila is willing to put into suppressing piracy in this part of space. If that is not an entirely selfless enterprise, so be it, but we can see to it that our work secures a measure of justice for the dead of the Carmela Día. That is a worthwhile goal.”

  “It is, isn’t it?” Sikander sighed and stood up, abandoning the attempt to rest. “Thanks, Darvesh. I’m up now. I might as well get dressed.”

  “Very good, sir.” Darvesh handed him a fresh uniform and set out a pair of well-polished boots as though nothing in their conversation had been out of the ordinary. “Shall I fix you some breakfast?”

  “Yes, please.” That’s his way, Sikander reflected. Darvesh found purpose in making the small routines of life important. How many times has he told me that service has the value the servant chooses to give it? Few people lived up to their words as honestly as Darvesh Reza did. “Eggs, toast, and coffee—it could be a long day.”

  Half an hour later, Sikander made his way back to the bridge well ahead of the scheduled arrival time. As Decisive drew near, Bodrum revealed itself as a misshapen, potato-shaped body two hundred kilometers long, orbiting just outside Tepegoz’s rings. The naval station itself was built atop a two-kilometer rocky knob at one end, a spidery mass of habitats, docking cradles, cargo-handling modules, and fueling facilities; given the moon’s feeble gravity, Bodrum had more in common with open-space orbital stations than typical surface installations.

  Five hundred thousand kilometers and a little less than twenty minutes from their destination, Sikander had his crew set general quarters and don their battle armor. When all stations reported manned and ready, he took one last look around the bridge, taking in the tense and focused faces of his officers and crewhands. “I suppose we should announce ourselves,” he said, and made a show of casually crossing his legs and relaxing in his battle couch for the benefit of the watchstanders around him. “Comms, give me a channel to the station, please. Bodrum Depot, this is Commander Sikander Singh North of the Commonwealth starship Decisive. You have probably noticed that we’re heading in your direction; be advised that we intend to dock shortly. Please secure any small-craft operations you may have in progress and stand by for further instructions, over.”

  There was a long pause before anyone replied, and then the face of a woman wearing the military cap-and-headscarf of a female officer in the Caliphate navy appeared in the display’s comm window. She had a strong pattern of freckles across her cheekbones and dark, unfriendly eyes. “Decisive, this is Yarbay Rima Derki, commanding officer of Bodrum Naval Depot. I am not aware of any arrangements for an Aquilan warship to call at our facility. What exactly is the nature of your visit, over?”

  “Yarbay Derki”—a rank equivalent to lieutenant commander in the Commonwealth Navy, Sikander reminded himself—“I am under orders to conduct a search of your station for stolen goods and evidence of pirate activity. Please direct your personnel to assemble in a common area and stand aside while my search teams do their work. Your cooperation would be very helpful, over.”

  Derki’s nostrils flared in anger, and she drew in a deep breath. “Your request is highly unusual, Commander North. I cannot give you permission to dock until I determine whether my superiors want me to comply. Hold your position, over.”

  “You may consult with your superiors if you like, Yarbay, but I am proceeding with my search. I’m afraid it is not a ‘request,’ over.”

  “This is outrageous!” Derki snarled. “I don’t know what sort of evidence of piracy you think you’re going to find here, but this station is sovereign territory of the Vilayet of Zerzura and the Caliphate of Terra. Under what authority do you think you can land here and conduct a search?”

  Sikander referred to a memorandum on his dataslate; he’d expected that very question and had made sure he didn’t leave Neda without knowing what the answer would be. “The Neda governor-general’s office and the Commonwealth Navy’s Pleiades Sector Command have instructed me to conduct my search under the probable cause sections of the Interstellar Convention on the Law of Open Space,” he said to the Zerzuran officer. “Both the Commonwealth and the Caliphate are signatories, Yarbay Derki.”

  “Probable cause? What probable cause?”

  “I will be happy to show you the letter authorizing my search in—” Sikander checked the ship’s position. “—six more minutes. Tell your people to avoid doing anything foolish, and we will get through this as quickly and professionally as possible. Decisive, out.” Then he cut off the channel, simply to make the point that he intended to carry through on things instead of talking about whether he could do them.

  Another half minute passed, while Decisive continued to decelerate and the distance to the station steadily dropped. Then half the warning lights in the bridge suddenly illuminated at once. “Tactical, we’re being illuminated by fire-control systems!” Ensign Carter shouted in alarm. “Bodrum Station is targeting us, sir!”

  With what? Sikander wondered, forcing himself to remain seated calmly. His sensor operators had carefully studied the installation during their approach, determining that its defenses consisted of two old batteries of point-defense lasers—Bodrum was a support facility, not a hardened combat base. At a couple of hundred thousand kilometers, the small lasers could inflict some surface damage on Decisive, but nothing like what they’d endured from the repurposed mining laser at Fort Jalid.

  “Weapons, illumina
te the station,” Girard ordered. “Target the weapon batteries. If they engage us, be ready.”

  “Illuminate the station, aye,” Herrera replied from the weapons console. “It looks like only the one laser battery is trained on us, Tactical.”

  “Hold fire!” Sikander said, stepping in to make sure his combat team didn’t meet the station’s threat, small as it was, with lethal countermeasures. “Do not engage the target without my order.”

  “Aye, Captain,” both Girard and Herrera replied.

  He reopened the station communication channel. “Yarbay Derki, secure your fire-control system and point that laser somewhere else. I have ten times your firepower—if you attempt to engage my ship, your weapons systems will be neutralized before you even scratch our paint. Some of your people are likely to be killed over what amounts to token resistance, and we’re going to be at your door in five minutes anyway. Trust me: You will regret it more than I will if you make me fire on you. Decisive, out.”

  The Zerzuran station commander did not reply—but thirty seconds later, the station’s fire control switched off. Sikander sighed in relief. Searching another nation’s military post was bad enough, but firing on it first to disable its defenses amounted to an act of war in his view. Despite Captain Broward’s assurances and the support of the squadron commander’s superiors at Neda, he sincerely hoped that he wouldn’t have to fire a shot.

  “Hard to argue with eight Mark IX K-cannons pointed in your general direction,” Jaime Herrera observed.

  “Yes, it is, but it proves nothing except that we have more guns,” Sikander said; Herrera looked down at his console, chastened. It doesn’t hurt for my Aquilan officers to occasionally imagine themselves in front of the K-cannons instead of behind them. Jaime is a good man, but using firepower to win arguments is a bad habit. Sikander shook his head in ironic amusement: Devindar was definitely in his head today. Darvesh’s remark about the sons of the Norths came to his mind, and he found himself remembering the day Governor-General Braxton called at his father’s palace in Sangrur. Nawab Dayan and his four sons had met the Aquilan viceroy, strolling together—

  —on the sun-drenched terrace overlooking a peaceful vista of Sangrur. The jasmine is in bloom and the unrest breaking out in Bathinda seems like it belongs to another world. All the Norths wear their finest military dress, although only Sikander’s is Aquilan. Likewise the governor-general and his advisors wear immaculate uniforms and expensively tailored business suits; the “casual stroll in the garden” suggested by Jermaine Braxton resembles a military parade.

  “This situation in Bathinda troubles me,” the governor-general says to Sikander’s father, with the blunt affability that is his trademark. “We can’t have a city of ten million people immobilized by twenty thousand strikers. It’s been the talk of all Kashmir for a week now, and there’s no end in sight.”

  “It is difficult,” Nawab Dayan admits. “But what would you have me do? People have a right to strike for better working conditions.”

  “They do not have the right to disrupt half a planet’s commerce in the process. It’s time to send in troops, Nawab Dayan. Today, before this gets any worse.”

  “In my judgment, the use of troops is a dangerous escalation,” Sikander’s father replies. “Better to wait out the strike, Your Excellency. Let Bathinda’s store shelves remain bare a few more days, and I believe you will find public opinion turning against the strikers.”

  Braxton shakes his head. “If the KLP sees that they can shut down a major port any time they like, what will they choose to shut down next? Or, God help us, what happens if sympathetic strikes break out in other cities? The longer this goes on, the more likely it is to spread. We can’t afford to be patient.”

  Nawab Dayan halts to take in the view as if he hadn’t ever noticed it before, clasping his hands behind his broad back. “If the strike spreads to other states, then I will take whatever action the Khanate requires,” he says without looking at his guest. “But until that time, Ishar is a sovereign state, and public order is my government’s internal affair. I am not yet ready to send the port workers back to their jobs at bayonet-point.”

  The governor-general scowls. “Very well, Nawab Dayan. As you say, law and order in Ishar are your responsibility … until I declare an emergency, which I will do by the end of the week if you do not break up this strike. If I can’t count on you to restore order, I will find someone who will.”

  “That is your prerogative,” Dayan North says. Only someone who knows him well can recognize the anger in that deceptively mild tone. “But if you are concerned about the example the KLP is setting for people in other cities, you might also think of the example you would set for my peers if you intervene against my advice.”

  The Aquilan official’s scowl deepens, but he suddenly turns away. “The end of the week,” he says over his shoulder, retreating back to his waiting flyer. “Then something must be done!”

  Devindar looks furious, but Sikander is not surprised; he knows where his brother’s sympathies lie. Gamand, on the other hand, looks thoughtful. “I thought you favored breaking up the strike, Father,” says Gamand.

  “I did,” Nawab Dayan replies, watching the Aquilan official and his entourage leave. Then, unexpectedly, he smiles. “But sometimes—not often, mind you—I am wrong.”

  “Captain?” Michael Girard interrupted his reverie, pointing at the Zerzuran base on the bridge’s main visual display. “Which docking cradle, sir?”

  Sikander scanned the depot’s mooring spots. A few small craft clustered near one end of the station’s row of cradles, so he picked one a short distance away. “The third one from the right, Mr. Girard. Set us down, and muster the search teams in the hangar bay. I want to get started before Yarbay Derki’s superiors on New Kibris have a chance to tell her to do something stupid.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Girard replied. He keyed the ship’s announcing system. “All hands, prepare for mooring. Designated shore parties, report to the hangar bay and stand by to commence search and seizure operations.”

  “Very good, Mr. Girard,” Sikander said, and settled back in his battle couch to await results.

  * * *

  Four hours later, he was still waiting: Sikander’s search teams found none of the stolen goods reported in their intelligence brief in Bodrum Naval Depot, nor any sign that the goods had ever been there. Yarbay Derki’s anger mounted hour by hour, as did the inquiries and protests of the Zerzuran fleet’s New Kibris system commander. When his teams found nothing in the storage areas, Sikander dispatched Zoe Worth in Decisive’s launch to conduct a flyover search of Bodrum itself, just in case the missing cargo containers were stacked up in the shadow of a crater or buried under a few centimeters of regolith outside the base … to no avail.

  “What do we do now, Captain?” Master Chief Felicia Vaughn asked Sikander. A broad-shouldered Orcadian, she served as Decisive’s command master chief and represented the destroyer’s enlisted personnel in the command leadership team, which at the moment was huddled together in the hangar bay. Sikander, Amelia Fraser, and several of the ship’s department heads had gathered at the ship’s belly airlock to coordinate the search effort, only to watch frustrated sailors march out of the Zerzuran station, report their lack of results, then receive new assignments and march back in again. “Our people have been over every square meter of that depot twice now. If there’s anything here, it’s hidden pretty damned well. We’re running out of places to look.”

  Sikander glanced over to Amelia. “Anything on the station security recordings?” There was a real question about whether Decisive could demand access to Bodrum’s own recordings as part of their search, but since Yarbay Derki was already furious, he’d decided to have his people take a look. He wasn’t a judge advocate, and he wasn’t overly worried about preserving a future prosecution if the security records pointed his search teams in the right direction.

  She shook her head. “Tolbin and Morton have gone back six
months and haven’t spotted any civilian vessels or a cargo transfer of anything other than normal provisions. If the pirates moved stolen cargo through here, they were careful to keep it off the vidcams.”

  “We could send in hull-cutting teams and burn through the bulkheads,” Amar Shah suggested. “It might take a while to locate and open up all the structural voids in the station, but if there are secret cargo spaces, we’ll find them, sir. It’s just a matter of time.”

  “If,” Sikander said, and ran a hand through his hair. “Somehow, I find it hard to believe that criminals operating in the friendly environment of a station run by their accomplices would go to the trouble of cutting and resealing bulkheads to stash their loot.”

  “Then we take the station crew into custody, separate them, and see if anyone feels cooperative when they think they might be in danger of going to prison,” Shah suggested. “Someone can tell us where the cargo is concealed.”

  “You’re overlooking the obvious answer, Mr. Shah: We haven’t found anything because there isn’t anything here to find.”

  “That would mean our intelligence is completely mistaken,” Shah said.

  “Yes, it would,” Sikander said. “Or deliberately misled. But I think that’s more likely than cargo containers welded behind bulkheads or security recordings so carefully faked our experts can’t spot the loops or edits, don’t you?”

  Shah fell silent. Amelia Fraser folded her arms, and sighed. “Well, I think that brings us back to the master chief’s question, sir,” she said. “What now?”

  “Call it off, XO. Tell our people to clean up their mess, collect their gear, and return to the ship. I’m afraid we’re done here.”

  “The Zerzurans are going to raise holy hell over this,” Amelia said glumly. “Well, I suppose it’s not our fault. I’ll have the quartermasters lay in a course for home.”

  “No, not yet,” Sikander told her, giving voice to an idea that had been slowly taking shape in his mind as it had become clear that Bodrum was a dead end. “We’ll return home by way of Dahar. I’m sure the Admiralty informed our diplomatic mission that we’d been ordered to search this station, but Mr. Darrow needs to know that we didn’t find anything as soon as possible. And he might want me to personally apologize to Marid Pasha.”