The Phoenix War (24 page)

After a few seconds, a familiar voice sounded
through the headset. “A secure hail from an alpha-class
dreadnought, very interesting,” said Grady Rosco. “Now tell me,
just what in hell do you want from me?”

“Grady, it’s me.”

“Calvin Cross? The famous Executor of the
Empire, well looks like you’ve got yourself a fancy new
starship.”

“Look I don’t have a lot time, so I’ll get
right down to it. Do you still have connections in the DMZ?”

“The Rosco Family has connections
everywhere.”

Not a very helpful response
. “What
about inside the Alliance?”

“Some,” said Grady Rosco, sounding less
enthusiastic. The mere mention of the Alliance seemed to bother
him. “That’s deep Khan territory.”

“So is that a yes or a no?” asked Calvin.

“Like I said,
some
. We have to keep
tabs on those bastards somehow. Why do you ask?”

“Remember that favor you owe me,” said
Calvin. The same favor that he’d tried repeatedly to make them
forget, the same favor that they technically owed his father—who’d
turned out to still be alive, though the Roscos didn’t need to know
that…

“Yeah, I remember. Are you finally going to
let us square our debt with you?”

“It’s time. I’m calling it in.”

There had been two people aboard the craft.
And the way Pellew told it, it had proven almost a contest between
them to see who could surrender first. With their ship disabled and
life-support failing, understandably neither had been too keen on
the idea of being marooned in an asteroid field. Now they were in
the brig with their hands in restraints, just in case they proved
smarter than they looked.

Summers doubted either prisoner was
particularly dangerous. One was an old man who sweated a lot and
struggled just to walk a brisk pace, the other was as scrawny as a
man could be without looking like a complete skeleton. Whatever
small arms they’d possessed had been confiscated by Pellew’s
soldiers, and both had been thoroughly searched. Now they were
behind a forcefield. The security measures seemed almost comically
extreme. Both men looked weak, Summers guessed she could lift
heavier weights than either of them, but she knew looks were often
deceiving. Far too much was at stake, with isotome weapons on the
line, so she intended to communicate total superiority and take no
chances whatsoever, no matter how slim.

“What do you want us to do with them?” asked
Captain Pellew. He stood at Summers’ side as they gazed through the
forcefield, studying the prisoners like bugs behind glass. The
skinny one stared at the floor but the old one would meet their
gaze from time to time, though he never held it for long.
Eventually his wrinkled face would turn away.

Summers gestured for Pellew to follow and she
stepped out into the hall, where the prisoners could not hear.

“We will question them,” said Summers, once
the door was shut. She believed these two men represented their
only clues as to the whereabouts of the isotome weapons, so she
wanted to be thorough and exact in their interrogation. Especially
since no isotome weapons had been found aboard the disabled
ship—indeed none would have fit, the vessel was too small it turned
out, after space had been allotted for crew, life-support, and an
alteredspace jump drive. Which begged the question of what these
men were doing here. And if they even had anything to do with the
isotome weapons at all.

They’d better
, thought Summers.
Convinced it was too much of a coincidence for them to be here in
this obscure place, where all of the isotome signatures coalesced,
and in hiding to boot. No doubt they were involved, clearly up to
something, the question was, how to extract that from them. Summers
considered gentler tactics against rougher methods: from bribing
the prisoners into sharing their information to the use of fear and
torture to make them spill their guts—physically if necessary. As a
rule of principle, she had always been categorically against
torture. But as she stood here, trying to decide how to proceed,
and knowing that billions of lives likely depended on how she
handled the situation, she found it increasingly difficult to care
about the ethical treatment of prisoners.

“What are you hoping to learn exactly?” asked
Pellew, folding his arms.

“These men are going to lead us to the
isotome weapons.”

“I thought as much,” said Pellew. It was
obvious to Summers, however, that Pellew was hoping to glean more
information from her than that.
I’m sorry, Captain
, she
thought,
but I have no new insights to give. But hopefully these
men will
.

“I’ll oversee the interrogation,” she said.
“Separate them, convince them that the other is cooperating with
us. Make it clear that the reward for cooperation is kinder than
the alternative.”

“And that any refusal to cooperate is quite…
undesirable,” said Pellew knowingly.

“Exactly,” said Summers. As a defense officer
in the navy, and later a command officer, she’d never gone through
the rigors of learning to properly interrogate a prisoner, but she
had studied a great deal of math—it had been her minor at
university—and it was a concept from math that she wanted to employ
here. The aptly named Prisoner’s Dilemma. “If we do this
correctly,” she explained. “The prisoners will do the calculus for
themselves and decide, individually, that the risks of not
cooperating are too high, and that the only rational thing to do is
to cooperate with us, so long as we make them believe it is likely
the other has flipped. And the incentives are properly
arranged.”

Pellew nodded. “I understand.”

Summers hoped so. But, just in case, she
would make certain to supervise this process herself. Pellew could
ask the questions, but Summers would listen to every word. And make
certain the strategy was correctly employed.

“And what if they don’t flip?” asked Pellew,
a menacing look in his eyes.

Summers sighed, not wanting to even consider
that possibility. “They’ll flip,” she insisted. “They have to.”

“But if they don’t?”

Summers hesitated. This wasn’t an order she
wanted to give, but she knew, if that situation arose, there would
be no alternative. “Then we do whatever it takes to make them
flip.”

Pellew looked her squarely in the eyes. “Yes,
sir,” he said.

They set it up.

The skinny prisoner was kept in the brig, the
old one was taken to Special Forces HQ on deck one. Each was made
to believe they were being interrogated simultaneously, Pellew even
made sure to mention repeatedly that “if your friend gives us this
information before you do, the deal’s off” and similar rhetoric
meant to keep the pressure on, but in truth Summers and Pellew
focused on the skinny one before the old one was even asked a
single question.

At first, the scrawny one resisted. But once
the picture was clear to him that he had no friends out here and
the only thing of value he had—with which he could barter for his
life—was his information, he spilled what he knew. Once they’d bled
what they could from him—which to Summers immense relief was
intelligence and information and not literal red ooze—Summers and
Pellew proceeded to deck one and repeated the process with the old
prisoner.

This one didn’t even try to resist. Sometimes
he even answered Pellew’s questions before the special forces
captain could ask them, anticipating what would be of value.
Sometimes he was right, sometimes he wasn’t—and ended up wasting
time prattling off useless information about his family and so on
that was of no value or relevance whatsoever—but at least he
cooperated. His aged brow sweated so much during the interrogation
that Summers was sure the man would dehydrate where he sat,
shriveling up into a heap of dried, wrinkly sponge before their
eyes. Fortunately that proved not to be the case.

When the interrogation ended, Summers was
satisfied. She had the old prisoner removed from HQ and returned to
the brig. Once she and Pellew were alone in his office, they took
opposite seats around his desk and began to compare notes.

We should have had the skinny one down
here and kept the old one in the brig
, Summers thought. The
carpet was wet from where the old man’s sweat had dripped off him
like rain, as was the surface of the table where his ancient sweaty
palms had rested, ghost-white, as he pleaded for his life.

Pellew seemed not to be bothered. “As far as
I can tell, except for a few minor details, their stories seem to
match.”

Summers thought the same thing. She looked at
the notes she’d taken, knowing that both conversations had been
recorded and it would be wise to compare them side by side, but
from the notes she’d written during each interrogation, the basic
narratives offered by both prisoners seemed to corroborate one
another.

“Let’s see… They work for someone named
Zander,” said Summers. “They were here in the system waiting to
relay a message to the Enclave. The message is: ‘Zander will
transfer The Cargo personally to the Enclave,’ but neither of our
prisoners knows what exactly The Cargo is.”

“It’s obvious, The Cargo is the isotome
weapons stockpile,” said Pellew.

“I quite agree,” said Summers. Though
technically they didn’t know that for a certainty, no matter how
evident and likely it seemed. “Which means we need to intercept
this Zander and destroy the weapons before he transfers them to the
Enclave.”

“The Enclave is a secretive group of
vampire-like bastards that live in hiding in the DMZ. I know a
whole pack of them live on Tybur.”

“Yes, I remember,” said Summers, recalling
the post-mission debriefing.

“All I’m saying is, these are some dangerous
people—if you can call them people—and the isotome weapons would be
extremely dangerous in their hands.”

“They’re extremely dangerous in anyone’s
hands,” said Summers matter-of-factly. “That’s why we must destroy
them.”

“Right,” said Pellew. “But you didn’t let me
finish. What I wanted to add was, even though the Enclave is
dangerous, I don’t think the Enclave plans to use the weapons. If I
recall, when Calvin and I met with Samil on Tybur, he told us that
the Enclave was selling the weapons to the Rotham Republic. We
destroyed those weapons. So maybe, to get back into the Rotham’s
good graces, they’ve arranged to buy the rest from Zander and sell
them to the Rotham. Which would be very bad news for the Empire. A
Rotham fleet with no resistance from the Empire—because of our
civil war—would already be a devastating thing. But a Rotham fleet
with isotome weapons ready to be brought to bear?”

Summers pursed her lips. Pellew had a very
good point, and it was indeed a grim thought. But she didn’t want
to allow herself to think it would ever come to that—because she
would not allow it to happen. Should things dissolve to such a
state, there would indeed be no hope. Which was why they needed to
focus on the here and the now, and not speculate about the
what-if’s, and quash the threat immediately. “What matters now is
that we know who has the isotome weapons, and it isn’t the Enclave.
Not yet anyway. For now they’re in hands of this Zander. And when
he attempts delivery to the Enclave, it’s possible he’ll have the
rest of the weapons—the whole lot of them—in the cargohold of a
single ship.”

“And if we destroy that ship, we rid the
galaxy of the isotome weapons once and for all,” said Pellew.

“Yes, if we have no other option, that is
definitely on the table,” said Summers. “However I would prefer to
board the ship and visually confirm that the weapons are there
before we destroy them. If possible we should count them. Calvin’s
intelligence suggested to me that there were originally thirty
isotome weapons; half were confirmed destroyed on the surface of
Remus Nine, and half remain unaccounted for. If we seize Zander’s
ship and detonate the weapons manually, inside the hold of the
ship, we can know for certain how many of the fifteen remaining
weapons are destroyed. Hopefully it will be all of them.”

“Those numbers are based on the word of one
individual,” said Pellew. “I was there, I remember. When we were on
the ground on Remus Nine we counted fifteen isotome warheads. The
contact there—who was working for the Enclave and expecting to sell
the weapons to the Rotham—told us that half the weapons were in the
silo and half were elsewhere.”

“Yes I recall,” said Summers. Again, she
hadn’t personally been there. But she did remember the intel
meeting afterward, and she’d made certain to familiarize herself
with every new scrap of information the Nighthawk’s people had
uncovered. “And from what I remember, the contact told that to
Alex, while believing him to be an agent of the Rotham Republic, so
I doubt he told a lie.”

“Perhaps,” said Pellew, still seeming
unconvinced. He looked back down at his notes. “For delivering the
message to the Enclave, both of our prisoners were to be paid by
Zander’s people an amount equal to twenty-five thousand q, half up
front and half after performance. And both prisoners claimed that
Zander was not to retrieve them afterward, that their business with
him was complete and they had instructions never to see him or
attempt to speak to him again. In fact, they claim he gave them no
means by which they could even contact him to report on the success
of their mission.”

“Yes,” said Summers. “That matches what I
have. And our prisoners don’t know much about Zander, apparently
he’s very secretive. But they know that he’s human, and that he’s
male, and that his ship is a seven-year-old Endelvian Corporation
cruiser called The Duchess. They also don’t know much about the
Enclave, just that they were to wait here for a ship called Hunter
Six, one of a series of ten Hunter ships, specially-designed by the
Rotham Advent to be undetectable, so long as the ship is
moving.”