Mission Zero (Fourth Fleet Irregulars) (30 page)

‘The cloud is actually very diffuse and you could pass through it easily at sublight speeds,’ Buzz informed him.  ‘But at superlight speeds, it’s all about whether you have time to manoeuvre in the time you have between seeing an object ahead and hitting it.  Comets are at the same temperature as the surrounding space so you can only spot them on radar and may only get two or three seconds to dodge them.  And while that’s fine – our auto-safety systems can handle a lot tighter impact than that – at these speeds, jinking out of the way of one comet almost certainly means you’re immediately heading straight for another one.  That can throw your ship into a highly reactive tumbling scenario in which you’re being thrown around like a 3D pinball.  

‘Going in hot is much safer.  Comets are only ice, and even rocky asteroids evaporate under cannon fire, so you can blast your way through very confidently.  The only problem with that is that, for a while at least, it leaves a detectable trail through the cloud, a clear path which certainly isn’t natural in a randomly distributed cloud. 

‘How long it
remains
detectable depends upon the density of the cloud and the energy with which it’s in motion.  In the case of a very highly energetic young system like this, we’d expect to be able to pick up a trail for maybe a few months, but it would degrade very rapidly.  That’s why we’re circling and scanning, looking to see if there are any traces of a path having been cut through.  We call that an ‘eye’ in the cloud.  Just to make it more confusing, they can occur naturally too, especially in young, forming systems like this.  If a planetismal comes careening out of the system, as they may do under impact, it may clear a path as it exits, see, just by crashing into everything in its way.  We’re not finding any clear paths, but there are areas of lower density that might once have been eyes.  What we’re attempting to do now, is analyse the data from those, to try to work out whether they were caused by something blasting in or crashing out.’

That took some minutes and was inconclusive, though opinion on the command deck was that something that might once have been an eye out on the edge of the system was too vertical to the plane of the system to look natural.

‘It’s more like a starship dropping in than a planetismal crashing out,’ Buzz explained.  ‘But our best estimate for how long ago it formed is six to nine months, so it’s highly unlikely that there’s anything to be found there now.’   

Still, having assessed the situation, Alex made the call to send in their biggest shuttle.  It was armed with lasers capable of taking out asteroids if need be, was far more agile than the corvette in jinking through obstacles, and should be able to get into the system without creating an eye.  More importantly, it could drop sublight under its own power to investigate the location indicated by the freighter skipper. 

As unlikely as it was that they would find anything, it was fascinating to watch the process of planning and prepping for the search mission.  It was more complicated than Mako expected, with a great deal of scientific and technical talk that went right over his head.  One part of it, though, was in his own professional field.

The snatch team for this was determined by the current watch rotation.  As luck would have it, the snatch team on call for that particular watch included A/S Roby Cortez, who happened to be Jace Higg’s oppo.  He was shadowing her, working alongside her as a microstep towards getting back on duty.  When she was called to the team, he came too.  He was trying to look innocent and just trying to take it for granted that he would be allowed to go along, perhaps in the hope that nobody would notice he was there.  They did, though, of course, with everyone looking from Buzz to the skipper.  Jace himself looked as beseeching as a small boy pleading for candy.  At Buzz’s, ‘Fine with me, sir.’ the skipper nodded too, at which there was a cheer and much slapping on the back of a now hugely grinning Jace Higgs.

Mako dutifully made a note that the parolee was being allowed to take part in an active operation, but he too congratulated him.  He understood entirely what an important step that was for the crewman in getting back to work.

He had no concerns about it either.  It wasn’t as if it was any kind of combat operation, after all, with the crewman’s role going to be assisting with the laying of comsats.  This, Mako gathered, was a technical challenge, but not one that needed more than a few minutes discussion.  There was full agreement amongst the officers on the route they were to take and the placement of the three comsats it had been determined would be needed to maintain comms link with their shuttle. 

‘That’s just good practice,’ the skipper informed him as the shuttle departed.  All of them were suited up by then.  The ship had gone to action stations, not with any kind of drama but simply as a precaution, in case they needed to go in hot after the shuttle.  ‘If your shuttle is out of comms range, obviously, they’ve got no way to call for backup if they’re having problems, so it’s standard practice to lay comsats into wild systems.  We’ll have to collect them again, after.  They’re
very
expensive, and yes, classified.  They can transmit between sublight comms to superlight arrays, which is highly complex, and they can transmit visuals too.’

Mako knew just enough to be impressed by that, having already noticed that starships talked to each other using voice only, unless they were close enough to engage a direct, high capacity datastream interface.  Normally, starship comms were all about coding the data to keep it as small a transmission as possible.

‘Will I be able to watch what they’re doing?’ he asked, hopefully, at which the skipper smiled.

‘Yes, certainly,’ he said, and provided him with echo screens.  By taking out all the feeds that would be incomprehensible to him, the skipper left him with a simple range of visuals in which he could switch between shots and listen on the comms between the shuttle and the ship.  There was a lot about that, even, that Mako didn’t understand, but he was able to follow enough to recognise that the comsat deployment was going as planned as the shuttle made their way into the system.  They were jinking a little but it was too quick and too subtle for Mako to notice the tiny course changes as they dodged around comets.  They were very soon approaching the coordinates the freighter skipper had given them, carrying out a textbook deceleration to sublight speeds.

It was at that point that everything changed.  Suddenly, in a second, the cheerfully purposeful manner of the team on the shuttle and the casual interest of those on the command deck froze into a moment of silence that just seemed to go on for an age.

Even Mako could see why, though he did not yet understand the enormity of what he was seeing.  He was only amazed to see, as everyone could see, that the small object the shuttle had come up to was not in fact an asteroid, but a cargo container.

‘Oh, hey, you
found
something!’  He exclaimed.  Then he realised that nobody else was cheering.  As he looked up, in fact, he could see that they were all looking stunned.  Alex himself had his stone-faced look.  He gave Mako a glance and brief gesture with one hand that requested, politely but definitely, that he keep quiet. 

Mako felt that he was bursting with questions but this clearly was not a good time to ask them.  So he did as he was asked and kept quiet, though looking rapidly between the skipper and what he could see going on aboard the shuttle.  Buzz Burroughs was looking very thoughtful and nobody seemed to be speaking or even moving much.  All of them were staring at screens or looking at the Exec, a question on their faces.

‘Well, that’s unexpected,’ the Exec said eventually, his manner reassuringly mild.  ‘Permission to proceed with forensics, sir?’

‘Granted,’ said Alex, and after a moment to think, touched the PA.  ‘Attention on deck,’ he said, his own manner composed.  ‘A cargo container has been located at the search coordinates and is under investigation.  Stand ready.’

There did not seem to be anything further that needed to be said at that point, or perhaps not even anything further that
could
be said.  The crew had gone very quiet.  After a minute or so watching the shuttle edging cautiously towards the container, however, the skipper seemed to realise that their passenger was the only one on the ship who didn’t understand what was happening.

‘We need to establish whether the container is full or just being used as a cache storing a few crates,’ he told Mako.  ‘It may be just a few crates of drugs or weapons, or a container load of uncustomed cargo.’

Mako nodded.  This, he realised, was serious.

How serious, began to be apparent about a quarter of an hour later.  There was an airlock hatch in the door end of the container.  The shuttle team investigated it first with a remote-controlled robo-probe.  It was like a giant long legged spider, touching needle thin probes and pad-like sensors to the airlock and the area around it.  One of those sensors was a pulse-sensor device.  When it showed that the container was full of solid material, the tension level on the corvette went up considerably. 

It was, in fact, apparent even to Mako that the container was stacked full of crates.  From the comprehensible part of the conversation between Buzz Burroughs and the skipper, Mako understood that the substance in the crates was reading as a compacted powder.  At that news, you could have heard a beetle cough aboard the corvette.

‘Estimated mass,’ Buzz reported, very calmly indeed, ‘16.72 tonnes.’  After a short but very eloquent silence, he added, without any great deal of conviction, ‘it could just be uncustomed chems.’

‘Well, there’s only one way to find out,’ Alex observed.  ‘Are you satisfied that the hatch does not appear to have any trigger devices?’

‘Entirely satisfied, sir, yes.’  Buzz confirmed.  ‘Request permission to dock and access container for forensics.’

‘Permission granted,’ said the skipper.  Without taking his eyes off the screens for more than the briefest glance at Mako, he told the inspector, ‘It is very probably a stash of a high value chemical like tetracitrine, which is one of the most commonly smuggled ‘heavy’ cargoes.  It’s used to create citrus flavours in food and drink production and is a very highly taxed import.  It may even be cindar.’ 

That was one of the most popular coffee additives, though only real coffeeholics like Mako were prepared to pay for organic cindar grown on Flancer.  It wasn’t cheap, retailing at more than ten dollars even for a twenty gramme shaker, but you only needed a very little of it to give an enriching, slightly spiced kick to coffee. 

This, however, was neither tetracitrine nor cindar, nor any of the other high-tax cargoes that smugglers tried to slip past customs.  It took the alpha team some time to get into the hatch, which was sealed by a ferocious security lock.  They could have popped it in seconds using explosives, but they were taking great care not to cause any damage.  They got through the lock, instead, by attaching a device to it, which Mako was asked not to take too much interest in, though it evidently forced the lock to decrypt itself and come open. 

When the airlock was open, they were faced with a solid wall of crates.  There were a hundred and twenty eight of them, stacked four across, four high and eight deep.  Attaching grav-grips onto a crate, the team were able to pull it onto the shuttle.  It was very similar to the kind of crates Mako had seen in the Minnow’s own hold, a cuboid a little more than two metres square and three deep.  It was locked, too, but succumbed quickly to the lock-overriding device.  Its front slid around to one side, revealing that it was full of plastic-sealed white stuff, compacted solid.  The forensics tech on the team inserted a micro-probe and everyone held their breath.

‘Sir,’ she said, showing Buzz the results with a rather unsteady hand.  ‘It’s DPC.’

Mako heard Alex von Strada catch his breath before the skipper’s breathing recommenced, slow and controlled. 

‘All of it?’  Even Buzz sounded a little shaken, with that.

‘All this crate, yes sir.  Consistent reading,’ the forensic tech confirmed.  ‘And sir?  It’s
pure
,’ she looked at the crate with awe on her face.  ‘Sir, we’ve found a motherload.’

There were just a few seconds while Buzz Burroughs considered that, gazing at the crate.  Mako still did not understand even then.  Though he gasped at the realisation that the crate was full of the powder used to make many illegal drugs, he was still thinking in terms of it being just that one crate.  Even that would be a tremendous haul.  He was aware that Customs and Excise had blazed a great fanfare some few years before when they’d intercepted a drug shipment of more than fifty kilos of DPC,
diacetyl-pethyl-camide
, and there had to be more than twice that in the crate.

A hundred and thirty kilos, in fact, as Buzz reported to the skipper.

‘All right,’ Alex said, coolly.  ‘Best get to work documenting it, then.’

Buzz broke into a grin, regarding the young skipper through the comlink.  ‘That’s
it
?’ he queried.  ‘That’s all you’re going to say?’

Alex gave a little grin, and for the first time Mako noticed that his eyes were sparkling with contained emotion. 

‘We can yell and laugh manically later,’ he told his exec.  ‘For right now, we need to keep a professional focus.  And as quickly as you can, please, Buzz.  For all we know, they may turn up at any moment.’

That certainly focussed everyone, Mako noticed, with an immediate acknowledgement from the Exec.  Activity became rapid and purposeful as the Exec instructed them to get a tether on the crate so they could get it out of the way.  On the corvette, Alex von Strada permitted himself one quick grin as he addressed his crew.