Scornful Stars

by Richard Baker

  “Does that answer your questions about the Kartals, Ms. Pavon?” Marid Pasha asked.

  “It certainly satisfies my curiosity, but that’s not exactly why I asked you about Kartal and Pelikan. You see, since they’re old and worn-out and you’re going to scrap them anyway”—Elena carefully refrained from smiling, since Torgut al-Kassar had volunteered that very assessment of the gunboats just a moment ago—“I would like to buy them from you.”

  “Buy them?” Marid Pasha raised an eyebrow in surprise. “I’m not sure what use they would be to Pegasus-Pavon. They’re certainly not big enough to serve as freight carriers.”

  “No, they’re not. I don’t need additional cargo capacity at the moment, but I could make good use of a couple of armed patrol craft, ships I could post near crucial shipping hubs to discourage pirate attacks. I have observed that pirates don’t like to show themselves when warships are present—well, after the attack on Vashaoth Teh, the lack of naval protection in this whole region is now a crisis. Kartal and Pelikan might not be frontline combat units any longer, but I think they’d do a good job of discouraging attacks wherever they’re stationed.”

  The pasha exchanged a look with the admiral, hesitating before he answered. “I’m not sure I care for the idea of privately owned navies roaming our territory looking for pirates,” he finally said. “It sounds like a terrible tragedy just waiting to happen.”

  “Terrible tragedies are taking place every week somewhere in Zerzura,” Elena pointed out. “I’m glad to learn that you’ve got plans to reinforce your squadron here in Dahar, but I can’t wait months and months for help in places like Bursa or Tunis—or Meliya now, I guess. I need a solution, and it sounds like you’ve got two ships you can spare.”

  “They won’t be available as swiftly as you might like,” Torgut al-Kassar said, frowning. “The process of demilitarizing the hulls will take quite some time.”

  “I don’t believe you understand what I want them for, Admiral. The gunboats are useful to me as is. All I need are hulls that are in one piece and carry enough armament to put my crews on an even footing with the pirate vessels we’re encountering.”

  “And I don’t believe you understand what the admiral is telling you,” Marid Pasha said in a dry tone. “Caliphate law requires us to remove certain types of systems from a warship when we decommission her—cryptographic materials, certain weapons, military-grade sensors and communication systems, things that we’re not allowed to just hand over to civilians.”

  “My staff has been looking into the relevant laws,” Elena replied. And ways to get around them, for that matter. If Torgut al-Kassar didn’t want to sell her a ship armed with kinetic cannons, she had other ways to obtain serviceable weaponry. General Karacan, commander of Dahar’s ground forces, was perfectly willing to sell surplus artillery pieces for the right price, although it might not be a good idea to point that out at the moment. “We believe that we can work within those restrictions.”

  “You are persistent, Ms. Pavon,” the pasha said. “I have to ask: Under what authority do you think your gunboat fleet can operate in Caliphate territory?”

  “We’ll commission them as privateers, Pasha. You have the power to issue a limited letter of marque that would empower private citizens to serve as pirate hunters. Or in this case, antipiracy patrols.”

  “I do?”

  “The legal authority is there, even if it’s rarely used. For that matter, the Velar Electorate and the Principality of Bolívar have similar laws governing letters of marque.” That was Elena’s little way of suggesting that she might have other options available if the pasha said no. She leaned in to make her pitch. “But as far as I know they don’t have ships they’re planning to decommission—ships that are right here in Zerzura, I might add. Marid Pasha, you have two ships you’re about to sell for whatever the scrapyard pays—say, a quarter-million credits per hull. I’m ready to purchase them both today for two million credits.”

  “It would cost you fifty million each to buy your own gunboats!” Torgut al-Kassar protested.

  “Well, yes, but these are old and worn-out, as you explained. And you’re about to throw them away, so why not get something for them?”

  “I commend you, Ms. Pavon. You have a real gift for thinking outside of the box.” Marid Pasha squared his arms on his desk like a battlement. “But, in all seriousness, we need to consider your offer with some care. I am worried about the legalities of the thing.”

  “As you wish,” Elena said. She stood up. “There is an expiration date on the offer, though. If I don’t hear back in thirty days, I’ll move ahead with securing my patrol craft from another source. It will cost me more and take more time since the ships aren’t in-sector, so I’d prefer to take your hand-me-downs instead. But I can’t wait forever.”

  “I understand. One way or another, we will get back to you. Good afternoon, Ms. Pavon.” Marid Pasha smiled, and motioned for Nenet Fakhoury to return. The secretary showed Elena to the door.

  Well, that was harder than I thought it would be, Elena reflected as she followed one of the ubiquitous palace attendants back to the landing pad. I’m offering the pasha five times the scrap value of those old clunkers and real assistance with the single biggest problem facing the sector, so what’s his objection? Am I too young and female to be trusted with something that shoots? In theory, the Caliphate placed few restrictions on the sorts of jobs women could hold and treated them no differently from men under the law. No one on Dahar objected to Elena’s leadership role in the regional offices of Pegasus-Pavon or the influence she wielded as a powerful and wealthy businesswoman. But in practice, a certain degree of chauvinism lingered even centuries after the Caliphate had officially abolished the legal restrictions on women that its worlds had inherited from the Quranists who settled them. Few women in the Terran Caliphate chose military careers, or advanced to senior rank even if they did.

  Omar Morillo waited for her in her luxury flyer, busy with the dataslate on which he kept her schedule and managed her correspondence. “Well, how did it go?” he asked as she climbed in.

  “They had some difficulty in wrapping their heads around the idea—I caught the pasha completely off guard, and he really didn’t know what to think. Al-Kassar didn’t like it at all, but then again he strikes me as the dictionary definition of military inflexibility, so I didn’t expect anything else.” Elena shrugged. “Overall, it came down to a tepid we’ll-think-about-it.”

  “Home, or back to the office?”

  “The office, please. I need to distract myself with some work,” said Elena.

  Omar murmured a few words to the pilot, and the flyer lifted off smoothly from the palace landing pad. Elena paid little attention to the beautiful late-afternoon sunshine glinting on Mersin’s towers as they turned southeast and headed toward the city’s business district. “I really don’t understand their resistance to the idea,” he mused. “They’re disposing of the assets anyway. If we spend a lot of money to drag broken-down gunboats off to some other system where they accomplish nothing at all, what does it matter to the pasha?”

  Elena shook her head. “It’s a threat to the bureaucracy. The pasha might not care, but I guarantee you that Admiral al-Kassar and the Zerzura Sector Fleet would be pretty embarrassed if our privateering scheme actually works.”

  “There might be something to that,” Omar admitted.

  Pegasus-Pavon’s Dahar office occupied several floors in a high-rise ten kilometers from the palace. Elena’s pilot settled the flyer into her reserved space in the rooftop garage; she chewed on the problem posed by the defensiveness of government bureaucracies throughout the short lift ride to her floor and the walk through the busy common areas of the corporate office to her own suite, a magnificent corner unit. On one wall a vast vid display showed a map of the company’s Meliyan-Zerzuran region with icons representing the estimated locations of each Pegasus-Pavon ship in port or in transit. On the opposite side of the office, generous
windows faced north and west, back toward the pasha’s palace, gleaming gold in the afternoon light. Elena threw herself down in her comfortable chair and spun around to glare in its direction while she replayed the conversation in her mind. This might be impossible, she realized. People have been trying to fix government stupidity since the Egyptians started cutting stone for pyramids. Why do I think I can get better results?

  With a sigh of exasperation, she abandoned the fight for the day and turned her attention to the work that had piled up on her desk while she’d been looking into buying her own little fleet. She generally trusted the managers and specialists who handled the day-to-day affairs of the office, but as the local representative of the Pavon family she kept her eye on strategic concerns, executive staffing questions, reinforcing the values of the company … and thinking outside the box from time to time, as Marid Pasha had observed. The afternoon slipped away as she dealt with the messages and correspondence that had made it all the way to her desk; she hardly noticed until her comm device chirped, indicating a message to her private address.

  Elena glanced at the display; she didn’t recognize the sender, but the subject line read More information on Venture Salvage. Curiosity won out; she tapped the icon to read further. The message was brief:

  You don’t know me, but your agents hired my firm to look into Venture Salvage last month. I have evidence that implicates one of your competitors in Venture Salvage’s activities. Can we meet at 6:30 pm at the Mersin offices of Pegasus-Pavon? You need to see this as soon as possible.

  Yusuf Rahim

  Rahim Investigations, Izra, Dahar

  “What in the world?” Elena murmured, eyes narrowing in suspicion. None of the agencies working for Pegasus-Pavon should have had her private address, but then again, if this information was as urgent as the sender claimed, maybe he’d decided to go straight to the top. And it was already five thirty … Rahim must be in town, or on his way.

  She punched Omar’s icon on her comm unit. “Did we hire a detective agency named Rahim Investigations?” she asked when he answered.

  “Let me check,” he replied. His office was just down the hall from hers—within shouting distance, if she were so inclined. A moment later he appeared at her door. “We did. Why do you ask?”

  “I just received a direct message to my private address from Mr. Rahim. He says he wants to come by at six thirty and tell me something about what he’s found. And he’s making it sound important and a little cloak-and-dagger, to be honest.”

  “That’s not how our contractors are supposed to work,” Omar said. “I’ll tell him to follow the reporting procedures our people set up when they hired him.”

  “He says it’s urgent.”

  “People have a habit of developing an amazing sense of urgency when they’re dealing with excessively rich clients. This guy’s probably going to try to convince you that you need to give him a few hundred thousand credits so that he can go get the really good dirt.”

  Elena tapped a finger on her chin, thinking. Pegasus-Pavon had competitors, certainly—Suvar United and Grupo Constelación came to mind—but the major shipping lines had worked out their positions decades ago. Rate wars hurt everybody, so they mostly stuck to their own hubs and tacitly shared the routes whose control wasn’t obvious. Suvar United is run by the al-Kassars, she reminded herself. Is that what’s going on here? Is Torgut al-Kassar suppressing pirates only when they threaten his brother’s company? That would explain quite a few things.

  “I’ll see him,” she decided.

  “Okay, then,” Omar said. “But how much do you want to bet that I’m right?”

  Elena dismissed him with a wave of her hand, and sent Rahim a quick reply: 6:30 is fine. I’ll be waiting for you. Then she returned to her work, determined to clear as much off her desk as possible before the mysterious meeting.

  She did her best to put the whole thing out of her mind for another forty-five minutes, and largely succeeded. But at 6:20 P.M. she received another message: Apologies, running late. I will be there at 7:00. “Who in the hell do you think you are, Yusuf?” she growled at her comm unit. She didn’t have any particular obligations for the evening—a somewhat unusual situation, really—but she was getting hungry, and she looked forward to a quiet evening at home with good take-out food and some classic cinema. Fine, she replied. Let me know when you arrive and I’ll meet you in the lobby. She turned on her office lights and resigned herself to another half hour of catch-up work.

  At six thirty Omar wandered into her office. “Where’s our mysterious visitor?”

  “Running late,” Elena replied. “He says he’ll be here at seven.”

  “Tell him to come back in the morning.”

  “I’m already here, and it’s only another half hour.”

  Omar settled down in one of the guest chairs of her office with his dataslate to keep at it while they waited. Elena appreciated the company—the office could be pretty lonely after the staff knocked off and headed home, especially after it got dark.

  Seven o’clock came … and went. Elena gave up all pretense of working, and flipped on the local news station on one of the office vidscreens. Then, at 7:10, she received one more message. Can’t make it; will explain later. I will be in touch soon. Sorry, Yusuf Rahim.

  “Oh, you must be kidding!” Elena snarled. “He just canceled on me!”

  “After wasting an hour of my evening,” Omar observed. “Oh, I just can’t wait to hear Mr. Rahim’s story. Shall we go?”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Elena agreed. She secured her office while Omar called her pilot to warm up the flyer, and the two of them walked out through the now-deserted corporate office. She fumed the whole way up the elevator ride, profoundly annoyed by Rahim Investigations and already planning the scalding tirade she’d unleash on the man if and when he ever found his way to the office.

  The rooftop garage was as empty as one would expect an hour or more after most people in the building left for the day. Elena spotted her parked flyer and headed that way, Omar trailing half a step behind her. She was hungry, damn it, and—

  A man dressed in black stepped out from behind one of the concrete support columns just as she passed, and shocked her with a handheld stunner.

  Elena collapsed in midstride, losing all control of her muscles. She hit the garage floor hard enough to see stars and tried to scream, but all that came out was a sound like gyuhhh! To her surprise, she actually remained conscious—she could hear a desperate scuffle behind her, and she saw two more strangers in black run past her, weapons in their hands.

  Have to get up, she told herself.

  Not a chance in hell, her arms and legs answered, still convulsing from the shock. But she managed to twist herself onto her side.

  Behind her, Omar Morillo danced away from the man who’d stunned her, lunging and twisting to avoid contact with his weapon’s sparking electrodes while the two new assailants closed in. Elena couldn’t imagine how he could stay on his feet for more than another second or two, but then he reached inside his coat and produced a snub-nosed mag pistol, a small and highly concealable self-defense model. She hadn’t even realized that he carried a weapon.

  He stopped dodging, set his feet, and calmly shot the first attacker between the eyes. The tiny pistol’s chirp echoed shrilly through the garage, loud as a siren. Then he pivoted and dropped a second attacker with two point-blank shots in the center of the chest.

  The third man got to him.

  The black-clad attacker lunged forward even as Omar turned the gun on him, and rammed the stunner into the center of Omar’s chest. The weapon made a sharp snapping sound, and Omar collapsed in a mass of twitching arms and legs.

  “Son of a bitch!” the remaining attacker snarled. He kicked away Omar’s pistol, then kicked him in the ribs hard before backing off to speak into a comm piece fixed to his shoulder. “The assistant was armed. He shot Mert and Haluk. I’m going to need a hand here.”

  Elena co
uldn’t hear the reply the man received, but it didn’t improve his outlook. He muttered another curse, glanced at Elena to check on her, then returned to kick Omar again. “You’ve made quite a lot of trouble for us, you little bastard. We only need that whore you work for. Too bad for you!”

  The convulsions gripping Elena’s muscles eased; she realized that she could just barely think about moving again. Slowly, she rolled onto her belly. They attacked us with stunners, she realized. And they waited until the office was empty to make sure no one was going to be around. This is a kidnapping! And that meant her attackers had transportation somewhere nearby, likely on its way this very moment.

  She didn’t have much time at all.

  Grunting with effort, she dragged herself forward on her elbows. The third attacker should have heard her … but he was occupied with aiming cruel kicks at Omar while the Bolívaran lay helpless on the floor. Elena groped her way to the place where the first attacker had fallen, and she grasped his stunner with shaking fingers.

  “Hey,” she croaked.

  The last kidnapper wheeled back to face her—and she shocked him on the top of his foot with the stunner. He let out a strangled cry and collapsed in front of her, so she hit him again, jabbing the electrodes against his left ear. The stunner let out a brilliant snap! of electricity, and the man thrashed wildly in uncontrollable convulsions.

  Above the garage’s landing platform, a light-cargo commercial flyer came into view. As much as Elena would have liked to stay where she was and continue shocking the last living kidnapper, she doubted that she could spare the time. Staggering to her feet, she grabbed Omar’s arm and dragged him back toward the elevator, mere meters behind them.

  The door slid shut just as two more men in black utility uniforms leaped out of the sliding side door of the light-cargo flyer and lunged for her. Elena punched the button for the ground-floor lobby, and collapsed across Omar’s body. Every muscle in her body ached, like she’d just gotten over a full-body charley horse. Well, that’s pretty much what hand stunners are designed to do.