Scornful Stars

by Richard Baker

  Omar let out a small wheeze. “I told you it was somebody who wanted your money,” he said. “Kept you … at the office late … to make sure no one would be around. You sure … fell for that.”

  “Oh, shut up,” she told him. “You were right, I was wrong. There, that’s it.”

  “Not by a long shot … I’m going to enjoy holding this over your head.… Help me up.”

  Elena struggled to her feet, and helped Omar to his. The assistant took out his comm device and punched in an emergency code. “This is Morillo,” he wheezed. “Get security down to the ground-floor lobby. Someone tried to kidnap Ms. Pavon, and they know we’re in the elevator.”

  “Who would do this?” Elena wondered aloud. Someone after an heiress’s ransom? Or did it have something to do with her efforts to push the pasha’s government into taking action against Zerzura’s pirates? She couldn’t believe that anyone could have found out about her plan to outfit privateers; she’d held that close to the vest until the meeting with Marid Pasha. No, that’s not it, she decided. Whoever attacked me knew enough to use the name of one of the investigators we hired. And that means they might also know what our investigators told us. “The pirates, of course. They came after me because we got close to them.”

  “What was that?” Omar asked. He really was a mess, with a split lip streaming blood down his chin and a hunched posture that hinted at some cracked or broken ribs.

  “I think someone knows what we found out about Venture Salvage. And this was their way of making sure it didn’t go any further.”

  Omar nodded, and spat out a mouthful of blood. “The Rahim message was bait.”

  “Are you okay?” Elena asked.

  “Not really, no. I’m going to need a big raise.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Elena promised him. Then the elevator doors opened, and she sighed in relief at the sight of a lobby full of building security guards.

  13

  CSS Decisive, Bursa System

  Decisive made the warp transit from Zafer to the Zerzuran system of Bursa in a little less than five days. Sikander observed the usual arrival routine on the bridge, with the added anxiety of a second ship to worry about: the captured pirate Qarash, now under the temporary command of Jaime Herrera and a small prize crew. We’re going to need to carry a bigger crew if I have to keep parceling out prize detachments, he reflected as the arrival countdown ticked away. If The’eb had been in any condition to make a warp transit, Sikander would have been hard-pressed to come up with a crew for the second pirate without leaving Decisive undermanned … especially since the destroyer now carried eighty-seven prisoners locked in hastily cleared crew berthing spaces and guarded around the clock. He’d decided to tow the crippled The’eb back to Zafer Station and leave her moored there with her weapons and drive disabled until someone else could return to salvage the damaged ship and shutter the pirate base for good.

  “Clear arrival, sir!” Ensign Carter reported as Decisive unbubbled.

  “Very good.” Sikander studied the now-familiar navigational display for Bursa; Decisive had arrived a few light-minutes out from Bursa IV and its inhabited moon. “Is Qarash with us?”

  “Not yet, sir,” Michael Girard said. “She could—oh, wait, there she is. Zero-nine-five relative, distance fifty light-seconds. It looks like she missed her transit-arrival mark by a little bit.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Amelia Fraser observed. “Civilian-grade navigational systems aren’t quite as accurate as what we’ve got to work with.”

  “Oh, I’m not going to let Jaime off that easily.” Departing Zafer on parallel courses and identical acceleration, the two ships had planned to arrive in Bursa together. Naturally Sikander had spent much of the last five days imagining things that could go wrong on the prize ship while Decisive and Qarash were unable to communicate with each other in their own warp bubbles. He owed his gunnery officer a little good-natured ribbing about his navigation after days of worrying about Qarash. “Mr. Girard, depower and retract the warp ring, and send our arrival notice to Bursa Traffic Control.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Girard replied. “Shall I set course for Bursa orbit?”

  “Please do, and signal Qarash to follow us in—standard acceleration. The sooner we get these prisoners off our hands, the better I’ll like it.” The commonly accepted convention for dealing with captured pirates, ships and crew alike, was to take them to the nearest recognized planetary authority and hand them over to be charged and tried under local laws. The Meliya system in the Velar Electorate was actually somewhat closer to Zafer than Bursa was, but given the damage to Meliya Station—and Sikander’s preference for a route that led more directly back toward Neda, now that Decisive was supposed to be concluding her patrol and heading home—he’d chosen to bring his prize into the Zerzuran port instead. “And please give me a channel for the Bursa Flotilla headquarters. It’s Kaptani Hanan, correct?”

  “Yes, sir. The comm system’s yours.”

  “Thank you.” Sikander had spoken briefly with the Caliphate navy officer who commanded the Zerzura Sector Fleet’s local detachment when Decisive had returned to Bursa to pick up the Carmela Día prize crew. He silently composed his message for a moment, and then opened the comm window on his console. “Good afternoon, Kaptani Hanan. This is Commander North of CSS Decisive; my compliments. Please be advised that we are escorting a captured pirate to Bursa orbit. The vessel Qarash is currently under the command of an Aquilan prize crew. We also have eighty-seven prisoners apprehended during our raid on a pirate base in the Zafer system. In accordance with international antipiracy agreements, we are remanding both Qarash and our prisoners to your custody. We’ll also turn over to you the evidence we gathered from the scene. My report is appended to this message.” Sikander glanced over at the navigational display, confirming their course and position. “We should reach orbit later this evening. If you have any special instructions for the transfer of the prisoners or the prize, please advise us. Decisive, out.”

  Sikander decided to wait for a reply on the bridge, and busied himself for a few minutes with a review of the intelligence summary Michael Girard’s team had compiled during the warp transit. A thorough search of the captured ships and station had turned up more stolen cargo than Decisive could easily haul back to civilization, so Sikander had directed his master-at-arms to select a good set of samples for evidence while his intelligence specialists connected the dots between the loot they’d discovered at Zafer and goods reported stolen from pirate attacks throughout the sector. They’d also separated their prisoners for brief interviews to see if any of their captives had anything to say, but the interviews hadn’t provided much information—the captured pirates had denied any knowledge of wrongdoing, sat silent, or claimed to be legitimate miners who’d sue the Aquilan navy for millions of credits over “illegal detention” and the “use of excessive force” as soon as they got their day in court. Sikander would have worried about that a little more if his people had found any signs that the Venture Salvage “employees” at Zafer were actually operating the mining station. He’d personally interviewed a handful of the prisoners who seemed to be in positions of authority with no better results than his masters-at-arms, so he’d decided to let the authorities in Bursa sort it all out. Destroyer crews weren’t police, and as much as he would have liked to see if his people could get something out of their Zafer prisoners, Sikander had no reason to believe they’d do a better job of it than Bursa’s planetary authorities. Ultimately, his crew had caught two pirate ships and cleaned out a pirate base; conducting prosecutions was someone else’s job.

  After half an hour, the local naval commander’s reply arrived. Kaptani Hanan was a taciturn, hard-looking fellow with a black beard and a habitual scowl, but today he looked more than a little surprised by Sikander’s message. “Good afternoon, Commander North,” he began. “We are not aware of any pirate vessel by the name of Qarash, but it’s likely that we just haven’t seen her in Bursa bef
ore. Please bring your prize to the naval station; we’ll be happy to take her off your hands and transfer your prisoners. You are to be congratulated, sir—it’s been a long time since someone caught one of our corsairs in the act. Bursa Flotilla, out.”

  “Our pleasure,” Sikander said aloud, not bothering to transmit the remark. He stood and stretched. “Mr. Girard, I’ll be in my cabin. Call me if anything interesting happens.”

  A few hours later, Decisive and Qarash moored in the docking cradles of a rather old and cramped naval station built around the hulk of an old battleship that had been decommissioned fifty years ago. Kaptani Hanan came to greet Sikander as the station’s military police—hastily augmented by a number of ordinary sailors issued sidearms, or so it appeared—took charge of the prisoners Decisive’s crew marched down to the accommodation tube. “Is this the same lot you chased away from the United Extraction mining post a couple of weeks ago?” Hanan asked as they watched the prisoners file by.

  “Probably not,” Sikander said. “Mazuz was the ship we interrupted at United Extraction. She got away from us at Zafer. Most of these men we found aboard Qarash and The’eb, and some we captured on Zafer Station.”

  “How did you find the pirate base, anyway?”

  “We had a tip about a front corporation called Venture Salvage—they bought the mining rights to Zafer several years ago, and never actually put the place into production.” Sikander glanced at the Zerzuran captain. “I don’t suppose you have any Venture Salvage holdings here in Bursa? If the pirates used it as a front in one system, they might be using it in others.”

  “I am not familiar with any operation by that name, but I’ll have my staff look into it,” Hanan said. “Will you be able to stay to provide additional statements or testimony, Commander?”

  “I’m afraid we’re only in port for a day or so. We’re already overdue back at our home base. As soon as we fill our magnetic bottles and replenish our stores”—feeding eighty-seven prisoners during the transit from Zafer had sorely depleted Decisive’s food supply, and the dizzying number of transits during the last six weeks had used up quite a lot of the exotic lithium-c Decisive used to generate warp bubbles—“we have to be on our way again. The report I’m providing to your station includes sworn statements about what we found at Zafer. But if you need any of us to testify for a trial, send word to Neda, and we’ll do our best to return for the proceedings.”

  “God willing, your statements should suffice to convict these men.” Hanan offered Sikander his hand. “We will take it from here, Commander North.”

  * * *

  Once the prisoners were off-loaded, Sikander had Decisive shift to Bursa’s commercial spaceport for refueling and replenishing, and authorized a few hours of liberty for the crew. He didn’t bother to go over to Bursa Station, remaining in his cabin to work on the Zafer after-action report—shots fired in anger, even against stateless criminals such as pirates, required a great deal of explanation to the Admiralty. Amelia Fraser had prepared a first draft of the report, but a commanding officer was ultimately responsible for every piece of official correspondence transmitted by his command, and as much as Sikander trusted his XO, he still wanted to review it for himself.

  He was still at it early in the evening when Michael Girard knocked on his cabin door. The redheaded operations officer had a troubled expression on his face. “Captain? We just picked up some news from the latest courier arrival. Apparently there’s been another pirate attack—Meliya, this time.”

  “Weren’t we just there?” Sikander set down his dataslate and rubbed at his eyes. “Damn. I’d hoped that we’d dealt with all the active pirates when we neutralized the base. Did Mazuz circle back to attack Meliya after she fled Zafer?”

  “No, sir, it looks like we’re dealing with a different group here. Two pirate vessels working together ambushed a Grupo Constelación container ship the day after we departed for Zafer: Duquesa, one hundred and eighty-seven thousand metric tons. The pirates hijacked twelve cargo containers and shot the captain dead on the bridge.”

  “If it was the day after we left, that definitely rules out Mazuz, as you say. She wouldn’t have beaten us to Zafer, even with our slow transit. This group must have waited for us to leave before moving against Meliya.”

  “But one day after our departure is too soon for someone in Meliya watching our movements to summon pirates waiting in a nearby system,” Girard pointed out. “Either the pirates were hiding in Meliya when we were there—which seems unlikely, since we had several days to observe the system—or their arrival had nothing to do with our departure. The fact that they happened to show up after we left might be a coincidence.”

  Darvesh appeared in the doorway leading to the small galley that adjoined Sikander’s cabin, a tray with two cups of coffee in his hands. Naturally, he’d long ago learned the preferred beverages of Decisive’s senior officers. “Or the pirates responded to some event or circumstance we simply are not aware of, Mr. Girard,” he observed, offering a cup to the operations officer. “It only seems to be a coincidence because we do not know what led them to make their move.”

  “I believe that I’m with Darvesh on this,” Sikander said. He stood and came around his desk to take the second cup from the tray, stretching his legs as he worried at the puzzle his operations officer had just brought to his attention. “I spent enough time as an intelligence officer in Helix Squadron to stop believing in coincidences. And we already suspect that someone is spying on us.”

  Girard stood still, thinking hard; the natural uneasiness that marked most of his personal interactions dropped away as he grappled with the problem, and a look of intense concentration sharpened his expression. Sikander knew him well enough to remain quiet and let him develop whatever thought had come to him. “If it’s not a coincidence,” the operations officer said slowly, “then the only other explanation I can see is that someone knew we were going to receive information that we would choose to act on, information that would cause us to leave Meliya.”

  “Someone? Who?”

  “Ms. Pavon. She sent the message, didn’t she? And Grupo Constelación is Pegasus-Pavon’s largest competitor.”

  “You don’t think that Elena Pavon intentionally lured us away from Meliya?” Sikander said, surprised. He stopped in his pacing, examining the ugly possibility that Michael Girard had just suggested to him. He didn’t think the charming woman who’d invited him to the coffee orchard at Mount Kesif could be capable of that sort of duplicity, but how well did he know her, really? It’s clear that we’re all missing something about what’s going on in Zerzura, he reflected. And Elena had sought him out directly, engaging him as an ally and cultivating his friendship … or something more. But she came to see me after she learned what had happened to Carmela Día. She was angry about that. Furious, even. No, the Elena Pavon who asked him to help bring the criminals who’d murdered her people to justice was not likely to consign another crew to a similar fate, not even if they were competitors.

  He turned back to Girard. “I just don’t see it, Michael. The information she gave us turned out to be good. If Elena Pavon actually meant to use the pirates to damage her competitors, I don’t think she would have given us a useful tip—she would have sent us off to some completely empty system. Besides, the pirates are hitting Pegasus-Pavon harder than anybody.” Sikander resumed his pacing. “But that does makes me wonder who else knew about Elena’s message. Zerzura’s pirates seem to be exceedingly well informed. If they knew she’d sent us a tip about Zafer—”

  “—they might have guessed that we’d leave Meliya to chase it down,” Girard finished for him. He shook his head. “Good God, Captain. What if pirates fed the information to Ms. Pavon in the first place? Maybe there are multiple gangs at work here, and one of them figured they could use us to wipe out some of their rivals?”

  “Congratulations, Mr. Girard. You just made my head spin.” Sikander leaned against the front of his desk, arms folded. “All right
, I believe I’ve entertained all the suspicions I care to entertain for the day. But go ahead and take another look through the intelligence we collected from Zafer and see if you can find any evidence of rival pirate groups.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll check the transcripts of our prisoner interviews, too.” Girard finished his coffee, and headed back to his work.

  Sikander nursed his coffee a little longer while he thought about Elena Pavon. “Darvesh, what do you think?” he finally asked.

  “About what, Nawabzada?”

  “Did Elena Pavon send us to Zafer so that pirates could ambush her competitor’s ship?”

  “I believe you have already worked out the answer to that question for yourself, sir.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “It is, Nawabzada. The question you are really asking is whether I believe Ms. Pavon is the sort of person who could conceive a scheme to use Zerzura’s pirates to attack her rivals and arrange for the attack to take place after diverting you to another target. I have no reason to think that I know her any better than you do.” Darvesh shrugged. “Could she have feigned her outrage over the attack on her ship? I suppose that a masterful liar and manipulator could do so convincingly, but in my experience such people are thankfully rare. No, you do not doubt Ms. Pavon’s story, Nawabzada—you doubt your judgment where she is concerned.”

  “Am I that transparent?” Sikander asked.

  “You are drawn to powerful and confident women, sir.” Darvesh gathered up the coffee tray. “The thing that surprises me is that you are finally beginning to recognize that.”

  * * *

  Forty-nine days after departing for a forty-day patrol, Decisive returned to the Pleiades Squadron home port at Tawahi Island in Neda. Sikander relished the sight of the warm yellow sands and the brilliant tropical waters in the bridge’s sweeping display screens, and found that he almost couldn’t wait for the destroyer to make its stately descent to the surface—after all the troubles and complications of their long cruise, he was more than ready for some shorter workdays and actual weekends that featured a little fishing or golf. If Neda was not exactly Kashmir or New Perth, it was home of a sort, and no one could complain about the weather.