Authors: Christopher Nuttall
“Eventually,” Glen muttered. Starships changed hands faster than the Federation could keep track of them, particularly out on the edge of explored space. The destroyer might have been sold to a planetary defence force, which might have been less careful when the time came to sell the craft for a second time. “Have you sent an inquiry back to Bottleneck?”
“Yes, sir,” Cynthia said. “Intelligence agents on the other side of the Great Wall can attempt to track down the craft’s history, once she left the Navy. However, there are other pieces of evidence I need to bring to your attention.”
She paused, then continued. “We pulled seventy-one bodies from the ship. Most of them are unknown, but seven of them were definitely former TFN crewmen, all dishonourably discharged for one reason or another. Their files suggest that they went looking for commercial work and vanished, but commercial work can cover a multitude of sins. They might easily have been mercenaries – or pirates. And we have no idea what they were doing on the enemy ship.”
“Raiding the planet,” Glen said, dryly. “Show me the files.”
He scanned them, quickly. The former TFN crewmen weren't great offenders, but their records would ensure that they had problems finding civilian jobs. There really wouldn't be much choice if they wanted to stay in space; they’d have to join a mercenary organisation and fight for pay. Even on the ground, they would have real problems finding employment. It didn't look as if they possessed skills that would make an employer overlook a dishonourable discharge.
They weren't villains either, he noted. Or at least they hadn't been villains at the time. Now, after years of working on the very edge of society, who knew what they’d become?
“Bottleneck can try to follow up on this,” he said, although he doubted they would turn up anything useful. Space was vast, far beyond the comprehension of most civilians. Someone who wanted to remain unnoticed – and had money – could escape attention for quite some time, as long as they were careful. “And the remaining crew?”
“Unidentified,” Cynthia confessed. She sounded annoyed. “We don’t have the slightest idea who they were.”
“Twelve of them came from Tarn,” Jane put in.
Glen and Cynthia stared at her in disbelief. “How do you know that?” Cynthia asked, finally. “And why didn't you mention it to me?”
“It’s in my report,” Jane said. The ship’s doctor smiled, rather dryly. “And why didn't you read it?”
She sobered. “As my report states, Tarn is a very high-gravity world, one of the worlds that should never have been colonised. The genetic modifications to enable humans to live there are distinctive. Even so, the world still imposes a toll on human life. I suspect that the natives lived there for most of their lives, judging by their physical conditions.”
“I see,” Glen said.
The thought offered some logical explanations. Tarn was poor, so poor that it was unlikely that the planet would remain viable. The natives, if he recalled correctly, were bent under by the weight of the gravity, even though their bodies had been extensively modified. Like other failing colonies, their greatest export was people, people who no longer wanted to live in such an environment and see their kids suffer. Quite a few of them went into the TFN or joined shady mercenary organisations. Their immense strength made them popular among the underground as enforcers or bodyguards.
He looked over at the doctor. “And the others?”
“None of them are native to Earth,” Jane said, simply. “They all have the off-word vaccinations and genetic tweaks that are uncommon on the homeworld, but apart from the Tarn natives there isn't much to separate them out let alone isolate a common homeworld. And that wouldn't lead us to the raider base in any case.”
Glen nodded. It was unlikely that Tarn was hiding the raiders. The planet had nothing to offer, apart from people; there were no shipyards or experienced workers to help maintain the raiding fleet. Everyone with sellable skills tended to emigrate as soon as they qualified, leaving the planet’s remaining natives without the benefit of their training. On the other hand, it was probably worth asking Intelligence to make some enquiries. The raiders might well be hiring on Tarn.
“The Marines are still going through the ship,” Cynthia said. “However, it looks as though we might have been unlucky. The raider crew owned dozens of pornographic datachips and entertainment flicks, but they don’t seem to have collected information we can use.”
“I’m not surprised,” Glen said. “Raiders don't normally keep diaries.”
He smiled. There were horror stories, passed from crew to crew, about the chaos caused when one crewman kept a diary and it fell into enemy hands. Federation Navy officers and crew were expected to keep personal logs, but they were warned in no uncertain terms that sensitive information was never to be written down, at least outside a secure store. No one knew for sure if the rumoured capture of an Admiral’s personal computer had allowed the Dragons to target their early offences so precisely, yet strict new regulations had been put into effect and no one had rescinded them after the end of the war. That, Glen suspected, proved that the Admiralty believed the rumours, even if the Admiral in question had never been held to account. But then, he’d died in a Dragon POW camp.
A TFN officer who broke the rules could expect to have a black mark on his record – or worse, depending on the consequences. What would pirates or raiders do to a crewman who kept a diary?
But it wasn't uncommon for their crews to be largely ignorant. Without access to the computers and navigational databases, the crew would have no way to know if they were scouting the edge of human space or flying through the Sol System itself. Those officers who
did
know where they were would never be allowed to talk about it, certainly not to anyone who didn't have any need to know. A lower-level pirate might know names, but not locations. There were a hundred pirate base names known to the TFN, yet they couldn't be destroyed because no one knew where they were.
“The only thing we did find of some interest were gambling chips from Dawson,” Cynthia put in. “That proves that they were definitely on that world within the last year, as the chips have a limited lifespan.”
That was good news, of a sort, Glen decided. At least Sandy and Jess were on the right world for recruitment into the raiders. Assuming, of course, that their covers weren’t blown wide open. If they were, Glen knew better than to think that either of the women would be allowed to live. Their hostage value would be non-existent, certainly not compared to the danger they represented to their hosts. It was quite possible that they would have picked up enough intelligence to lead the Federation Navy right to their base.
“It may also have been a form of payment,” Cynthia added. “They could trade in the chips on Dawson and no one would ask questions.”
“And probably be urged to gamble away their earnings,” Glen muttered. It was a common trick; spacers coming home from long voyagers tended to blow through their saved earnings at a terrifying rate. “Have we turned up anything else?”
“Not yet,” Cynthia said. “The raider ship is beyond repair, the engineer said; he suggested that she be broken down for scrap.”
Glen had to smile. If there was one thing he’d learned about Lieutenant Commander Stocker, his Chief Engineer, it was that he hated to give up. For the engineer to decide that the raider ship was beyond salvage was unusual, to say the least. The raider must have been heavily damaged in the fighting.
“In fact, he thought that the ship might have been deliberately designed to fail, if sufficient damage was inflicted,” Cynthia said. “The self-destruct system failed, but the rest of their precautions worked admirably. Their computer cores were reduced to dust, their crew were killed and the entire shipboard datanet fried. He’s still poking through the remains, looking for clues.”
That was odd, Glen knew. The Federation Navy built endless redundancies into its starships, at least until the demand for new starships had been allowed to outweigh the dangers of building them as quickly as possible. Half of
Dauntless
could be shot away and the remainder of the ship would keep operating. The raider had been crippled, yes, but the damage shouldn't have destroyed her life support systems. But she’d had no hope of escape.
“Sounds like something a raider crew would have done,” he said. He glanced at the two women, noting that they looked as tired as he felt. “Get some rest. We’ll set out for our next destination in two hours, leaving the enemy ship behind. The colonies can send a salvage crew out to recover her if they want.”
Three hours later,
Dauntless
was back in hyperspace and racing to catch up with
Independence
and the convoy. Glen took advantage of the time to read Stocker’s report very carefully, noting all of the questions the engineering crew had been unable to answer. The Chief Engineer was convinced, he saw, that the ship had indeed been primed to suffer a complete failure if she were badly damaged. A number of safety interlocks that should have protected the crew had simply been removed, years ago. The raiders had to have done it purposefully, Stocker had concluded. No decommissioning procedure would have removed such safety precautions.
The other oddity was one that puzzled and alarmed both Stocker and the Marines. In their experience, neither pirates nor raiders took good care of their ships. Their crews were too undisciplined to be forced into actually cleaning the decks, let alone replacing worn-out components on a regular basis. Some of the pirate ships the Marines had boarded had needed to be vented completely, just to get rid of the smell and rodent infestations the pirates had tolerated. But the raider ship was almost
professional
.
No
, Glen told himself, as he skimmed through the report. There was no shit and piss marring the deck, no hold full of sex slaves, not even sloppy maintenance.
It was professional
.
There was a patchwork quality to most pirate ships that made them dangerously unreliable at times, a quality shared by many Colonial Militia starships. They’d been so desperate to keep the ships running that they’d spliced hundreds of different components, including several that came from alien technology, into their systems. Few of them had been designed to work together; indeed, no matter how impressed the Governor had been with the rows of starfighters on Fairfax, Glen knew that the colonials would want to junk the older designs as quickly as possible. Standardisation made maintenance easier in the long run.
But the raider was built, almost completely, with Federation technology. The only major piece of equipment that wasn't Federation in origin was a pair of pulse cannons that had been bolted onto the hull. Stocker had noted that they’d been designed by a colonial shipping company and rushed into production to give their freighters some firepower during the early days of the war. In fact, Stocker had concluded, he would have assumed that the ship
was
Federation if the crew had been wearing uniforms and the safety interlocks still functional.
It raised questions that Glen didn't like at all. Could the raiders be working for a faction in the Federation? The Humanist League, perhaps? They certainly had a motive for wanting to exterminate vast numbers of aliens, even though their electoral showing had been poor even in the colonies. Or ... he shook his head. It was possible, he supposed, that someone in the government was trying to provoke a political crisis, but in his experience such plots never worked. Besides, if the tension between the Federation and the Bottleneck Republic exploded into war, the Federation might not survive.
But
, he asked himself,
what if that is what they’re counting on
?
There
were
Dragon warlords out there, beyond the edge of Federation territory. What if they were trying to spark off a human civil war?
“No proof,” he muttered, in frustration. “No proof at all, one way or the other.”
His terminal bleeped, reporting that a set of messages had been received and forwarded to his desk. Glen sighed as he realised that the first one was from the Governor. There was a joke among spacers that hyperspace was clear when bad news was being sent, but good news required several relay stations before it reached its destination. Glen didn't believe in the stories spacers told about strange gods and monsters in hyperspace – none of those stories had ever been recorded, let alone verified – yet there were times when he wondered. Bad news always seemed to come quickly.