“Captain North, I have a suspicion that you’re looking for a way to keep me around.” Elena gave him a playful smile over the rim of her glass before turning serious again. “Yes, I can wait around a few days, especially if it means finding out something about the people who tried to abduct me. My yacht’s moored over in the civilian port.”
“I’ll let you know as soon as I set it up, then,” he told her.
“Good. In that case, how about some more of this wine? It’s been a long few weeks and my body clock is off by half a day.”
They passed the rest of the evening—and the bottle—comparing stories of their homeworlds and their families. Sikander, of course, came from a large clan with dozens of cousins to go along with his four siblings; Elena was an only child, although the families of Pegasus-Pavon’s board members had been allied for several generations and were the next best thing to blood relatives. As the third son in his family, Sikander had been sent off to the Commonwealth Naval Academy to find an honorable profession, since he wasn’t expected to inherit Ishar’s throne. Elena, on the other hand, had been groomed for her place in the family business from the time she’d finished elementary school, and couldn’t imagine doing anything else.
When the time came to say good night, she paused in his doorway to kiss him warmly. “Thank you,” she said. “Dinner was lovely. I’m sorry I had to bring up business.”
“Think nothing of it,” he told her, relishing the way she felt in his arms and the delicate scent of her perfume in his nose. “Are you sure you have to go?”
“Not really, but I think I’d better,” she said, and kissed him again. “I’ll see you soon, though. Good night, Sikander.”
“Good night, Elena.” He watched her climb into her flyer and lift off, then took a deep breath. After that good-night kiss he was fairly certain that the evening wasn’t all about business. Did she want me to try a little harder? he wondered. Or is it simply the game of savoring the anticipation? That was enjoyable, too. There was a time when he might have viewed the evening as a disappointment, since it hadn’t ended with Elena Pavon in his bed, but perhaps he was more patient than he used to be. Amelia Fraser was right about one thing: He’d spent the last year married to Decisive and had put any other ideas of romance on hold. Now that an alternative to the loneliness of command had appeared in the form of Elena Pavon, he found that he was anxious not to mess it up by rushing things. “If that’s really where this is going,” he murmured aloud. “Don’t get ahead of yourself, Sikay.”
As he’d guessed, it took him a couple of days to arrange for Elena to examine a lineup of the prisoners from Fort Jalid. He saw her twice in those two days—drinks at sunset at his favorite West Beach cabana bar, and a dinner for two aboard her warp yacht La Nómada, currently lying pierside at the large quay in Tawahi’s picturesque harbor. Sikander had never imagined he could be awed by displays of wealth; after all, the North family had a fortune measured in multiple billions, and his own small part of the family trust made him fabulously rich for a naval officer. On the other hand, private starships such as Elena’s cost hundreds of millions, and simply keeping the warp rings charged ran to millions of credits a year. With her hangar doors rolled open and stowable decking deployed above the waterline, La Nómada looked surprisingly like an oversized version of the waterborne luxury yachts he’d seen at Long Lake or thought about building at Mohali Qila.
The day after their dinner aboard La Nómada, Sikander received word that the base’s master-at-arms office was ready for Elena’s visit. He picked her up from her yacht in the middle of the afternoon, and took her to the brig. “You certainly know how to show a girl a good time,” Elena observed as they landed in front of the fenced-off barracks building.
“This is your idea,” Sikander reminded her. The Tawahi Island base had no brig facilities remotely large enough to handle the prisoners Decisive and Harrier had brought back; the base masters-at-arms had hurriedly repurposed an old barracks to serve as a cell block, erecting a fence around the building and stationing guards to keep order. Scores of men in prisoner jumpsuits sat in the improvised jail yard; a few played soccer on a half-sized pitch within the fence.
“What are you going to do with all these prisoners?”
“The judge advocate’s office is still drawing up charges. Two hundred and three defendants sort of overwhelm the local office, though. And of course fifty different civilian lawyers are now involved, each with their own ideas about how things should work when Aquilan sailors capture Zerzuran pirates in open space after those pirates attacked ships registered in Bolívar and Velar. From what I hear, our prosecutors anticipate that the Zerzuran government’s going to request extradition of the whole lot.”
“So it might wind up being someone else’s problem.”
“After seeing exactly how long our Zafer prisoners remained locked up after we delivered them to Bursa, I’m not inclined to put a lot of faith in Zerzuran courts. I’ve already spoken with Captain Broward about making sure that we conduct the proceedings here, under Commonwealth law. But it seems that catching the pirates was the easy part of the job.” Sikander led Elena to the mobile structure that served as the improvised brig’s headquarters, and ushered her inside.
A stocky petty officer with a shaven head and a pistol belt greeted them at the door. “Good afternoon, Commander North,” he said. “And you must be Ms. Pavon. I’m Senior Chief Master-at-Arms Vélez, base security. We’ve got a desk set up right here with a vidscreen for you to view mug shots of all our guests, ma’am. Take as long as you like, and let me know if you think you recognize anybody. Can I get you some coffee or tea?”
“Coffee, please,” Elena said. She took the offered seat in front of the screen; Sikander pulled up another one beside her while Vélez retreated to fix a cup for her. One by one, she paged through the compiled images, scrutinizing face after face. The majority consisted of young or middle-aged men, with the dark hair and medium complexions one might expect from a random sampling of Zerzuran worlds. Sikander wondered whether Elena would really be able to pick out the individuals who had attacked her in Mersin even if any of them were here; sometimes surprise and fear etched an indelible image in the memory, and sometimes they left a confused blur.
“Huh,” Elena said suddenly, pausing on an image. “I don’t believe it.”
Sikander glanced at the screen, and realized that he recognized the prisoner. “Al-Kobra,” he said. “The captain of the pirate ship Balina, at least until his crew decided that they didn’t particularly care to fight to the death on his behalf. Was he in Mersin?”
“Yes—at the pasha’s Founding Day banquet. That’s Gadi al-Kassar.”
“Who is Gadi al-Kassar?”
“The al-Kassars own Suvar United Shipping.” Elena stared at the screen, her mouth fixed in a thin and angry line. “His uncle Hidir is the president of the company. And his uncle Torgut just happens to run the Zerzuran fleet.”
“Wait a moment. This man is a close relative of Admiral Torgut al-Kassar?” Sikander asked.
“And his brother Hidir, yes. No wonder Suvar United managed to avoid the damned pirate attacks and the Zerzuran fleet never seemed to catch anyone! It’s the family business. Those dirty bastards!”
Sikander leaned back in his chair, wrestling with his astonishment. Gadi al-Kassar he hadn’t ever heard of, but he’d met Admiral al-Kassar, and he certainly knew of Hidir al-Kassar and Suvar United Shipping. Senior Chief Vélez glanced at the image on the screen, and made a note on his dataslate. “I had a feeling that al-Kobra wasn’t the name his mother gave him,” he commented in a dry tone. “Was he one of the men who tried to abduct you in Dahar, ma’am?”
“No, he wasn’t part of that. But he’s important—his family runs the biggest shipping line in Zerzura, and his uncle commands the Zerzuran fleet.”
“That sounds like a problem that’s above my pay grade,” the master-at-arms said. “Okay, if he’s a high-value detainee, we’ll separate him fr
om the others and let the intelligence types know. What else can you tell me about how you know him?”
“Not too much, really. I only met him once.” Elena described encountering the al-Kassars at the banquet, and explained Suvar United’s seeming good fortune in avoiding pirate losses over the last few years—Vélez didn’t know much about Zerzuran carriers, after all. Then the senior chief had her complete her pass through the prisoner portraits, just in case she recognized anyone else. Elena scanned through the whole file twice, but Gadi al-Kassar was the only face she recognized.
“I’m sorry, Chief Vélez,” she said when she finished. “I’d hoped I could pick out at least a couple more faces for you.”
“You did just fine, ma’am,” Vélez replied. “This al-Kassar character sounds pretty interesting. I wouldn’t be surprised if the intelligence specialists or the judge advocates want to ask you a few more questions about him. Will you be staying in Neda for a while?”
“I can give you another day, maybe a day and a half, but then I need to be on my way. Finding an al-Kassar in the middle of all this changes everything. I have to consult with my family on Nuevo León—and I can think of some other things I need to see to in Dahar and Meliya, too.”
“Dahar?” Sikander asked. “That strikes me as dangerous, Elena. If Admiral Torgut is involved in the conspiracy, you might be up against the Zerzuran government, not anonymous criminals. They don’t need to kidnap you if they can just have you detained by the planetary police.”
“Oh, you don’t need to be worried for me,” said Elena. She set a hand on his shoulder and gave him a small smile, but her eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “Mersin is the hub of our operations for five systems. I’ll have plenty of protection there, now that I know what to watch out for. Besides, I need to talk to my people in Dahar. As you pointed out the other night, I can’t be sure that my communications are safe, so I have to do it in person.”
Sikander hesitated. Maybe Torgut al-Kassar didn’t know about Gadi’s involvement in piracy, maybe he did know but he chose not to interfere, and maybe the admiral was an active partner who had to keep his participation secret, but it was all speculation. It seemed to him that Elena had no real way of knowing just what the al-Kassars were prepared to do or how much support they had from other elements in the Zerzuran government … but he had a feeling that she’d resist any effort to dissuade her from going, and he suspected the harder he pushed her on the topic, the more determined she’d be about it. “Thanks, Senior Chief,” he told Vélez. “If Gadi al-Kassar says anything that suggests Ms. Pavon may be in danger, make sure to let me know. I’ll see to it that she’s warned.”
“Aye, sir,” said the master-at-arms. “Take care, Ms. Pavon.”
Sikander and Elena returned to his flyer. The late-afternoon breeze rustled through the near-palms that lined the boulevards of the naval base; he realized they’d spent a couple of hours reviewing the prisoner pictures and filling in the master-at-arms. “Where to?” he asked her.
“Beats me. I’m anxious to get going, but I did just promise your investigators that I’d stick around for another day.” She shook her head. “I still can’t believe it. I had my suspicions about Suvar United, but this is one occasion when I would rather have gotten it all wrong.”
“It’s possible that Gadi al-Kassar is the black sheep of the family. His uncles might not be directly involved in what he’s been doing.”
“Not a chance, Sikay. Pirates haven’t touched Suvar United in years, and you told me yourself that the Zerzuran fleet isn’t keeping pirates locked up. No, the al-Kassars are in this up to their ears—the challenge is proving that the others are just as guilty as Gadi.”
“That might be hard to do. When they find out he’s been arrested, the rest of the family will take steps to insulate themselves from anything he’s involved in.”
“Sure, but they can’t convert hundreds of millions of credits of stolen goods and hijacked ships into cash without leaving a paper trail, which is the other reason I need to go to Dahar. It’s where the evidence is.”
“Assuming you find what you’re looking for, what will you do with it?” Sikander asked. “If it’s as bad as you think, the al-Kassars have little to fear from any Zerzuran court.”
“Well, I’m still working on that part of the plan. Give me a few hours to digest all the implications, and I’ll come up with something. Right now I want to go someplace where I can kick off my shoes, have a few good drinks, watch the ocean, and figure out what comes next.”
Sikander could understand that sentiment … and he thought there might be another step in Elena’s plan that she’d left unspoken. “At the risk of being forward, my house meets all those requirements,” he offered. “I’d be happy to fix you dinner, too. After all, this might be my last opportunity to entertain you for a while.”
She glanced over at him, and a smile crept back to her lips. “That sounds like just the place, then.”
He lifted off and pointed the nose of the flyer toward his house, only fifteen kilometers away, before keying his personal comm. “Darvesh, I’m bringing Ms. Pavon over for dinner,” he told his valet. “Set out something for the grill, and I’ll fix it whenever we get hungry.”
“Very good, sir. We have a couple of steaks that should do nicely; I will season them and leave them covered in the refrigerator,” Darvesh answered. “I may take the liberty of stepping out to run a few errands. Call if you need me.”
Darvesh was gone by the time they reached Sikander’s bungalow; as promised, steaks and a side salad were waiting, along with a pitcher of sangria and two place settings on the patio table. “Oh, he’s good,” Elena observed, taking in the preparations as she slipped off her shoes. “You gave him a ten-minute warning, and he managed all this?”
“Darvesh Reza might just be the single most competent man I’ve ever known,” Sikander admitted. “Something to eat, something to drink, or…?”
“Or?” Elena raised an eyebrow, and turned to gaze out at the ocean view. The late-afternoon sun silhouetted her shapely figure through the lighter panels of her summer dress; Sikander stepped up close behind her, slipping his arms around her waist to nuzzle at the back of her neck while he caressed her. She sighed and leaned into him for a long moment before reaching around to find his mouth with hers. “Oh, definitely ‘or,’” she murmured when their lips parted.
As it turned out, Sikander didn’t get around to fixing dinner until much later in the evening.
17
Tawahi Island, Neda III
Elena Pavon’s La Nómada left Neda late in the following afternoon, climbing up and away from Tawahi Harbor with a silver sheen of water dripping from the gold and green hull. Sikander found an excuse to stretch his legs with a walk along the naval base’s waterfront, watching the star yacht ascend on its crackling drive plates from across the bay until she disappeared from view. He wondered when he’d see her again—days, weeks, months, never? Usually I’m the one flying off to the stars, he realized, and shook his head at the strange irony of the situation. How many times did I have someone watching my ship leave and wondering when I would return?
He sighed, and turned his steps back toward Decisive. He didn’t really know where his relationship with Elena was headed, but he knew himself well enough to recognize when he was a little infatuated, and he’d miss her. The best distraction for a case of infatuation is good hard work, he told himself; he certainly had no shortage of things that demanded his attention aboard his ship. He studied Decisive with a critical eye as he strolled back in her direction, noting the pitted armor at the bow, the fading red pinstriping that accented the Aquilan white-and-buff paint scheme, the scaffolding that clung to the hull above the long black scar cut into the ship’s flank by Fort Jalid’s laser. She’s mine, he reminded himself. And she’s beautiful too.
He noticed Amar Shah and Jaime Herrera engaged in a discussion near the scaffolding, and detoured from the brow to wander over to where they stood on the pi
er. “Gentlemen. What’s caught your interest?”
Shah and Herrera turned and saluted. “Good afternoon, Captain,” Shah said. He pointed at the looming K-cannon turret on the spine of the ship, fifteen meters above them. “The turret ring, there. Mr. Herrera is concerned that the damage it sustained might cause it to fail when we fire the number-three mount.”
“A kinetic cannon kicks like a mule,” Herrera said. “If a full-power shot cracks a weakened turret ring, we’d lose the ability to train the mount.”
“I see. Have we done any resonance or integrity tests?”
“We did, sir,” Shah said. “It’s borderline between patching it and replacing it. But to replace the turret ring we’d have to remove the turret—”
“—and that’s a job for the shipyard,” Sikander finished. He frowned. Since Decisive just got out of the shipyard, she wouldn’t be due for another visit for a year or more.
“I can’t believe an outlaw’s laser hit us that hard,” Herrera observed. “That burn is fifteen centimeters deep in places. I think we would have been in real trouble if we hadn’t gotten on the other side of the planet’s ring. That was some quick thinking, Captain.”
“No, Mr. Herrera, that was dumb luck. I didn’t realize we were taking this sort of damage.” Laser fire was much harder to dodge than incoming K-cannon rounds and theoretically outranged kinetic weapons by hundreds of thousands of kilometers, but a laser that could burn through an armored hull fast required a lot of power and generated a lot of heat. On board a ship, managing the heat of your own laser fire represented a serious challenge—but the Fort Jalid laser had a whole moon to dump its heat into. That might be worth a memo to the Office of Construction, Sikander realized. It was hard to see how that could be made to work with a shipboard mount, but as a ground battery on an airless body, it might be useful. “Patch it for now, but go ahead and write up the replacement request; we might as well start the paperwork. And let’s do a little math and see if there’s a power level at which it’s still safe to fire number three, if we need it.”
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