The story now going out on broadcast was that the crew had mutinied, locking the officers into the wardroom, and that control had only been regained by force, and with some injuries.
That, in itself, was not a problem – worse stories than that went out about them all the time, often with no foundation in reality at all, so they’d have taken no notice of that. Any spacer, however, seeing that, would recognise immediately that what it actually meant was that they had been outside the League’s borders at the time when they were supposedly cruising about near Therik on a training flight. There was only one place they could have gone in that time, too, the secret base that most spacers knew was somewhere out that way. ‘Oh dear,’ said Buzz, mildly, which in another man might have been an obscenity-laden rant.
Alex, when it was pointed out to him, looked annoyed. The fact that they had been outside the borders was one of those ‘Do not tell anyone’ pieces of information, and all the crew knew that, the lines very clearly drawn on what it was okay to talk about and what it very definitely was not. He did not, however, leap to the assumption that someone had talked out of turn and start haranguing his crew about it. There had, clearly, been a breach of security somewhere along the line. A proper investigation should discover where, and then would be the time for tons of duralloy to land on the offending head.
It was hardly, though, as if that was the only thing Alex was having to deal with, right now. The several people responsible for organising the ceremony to give them the freedom of the station kept calling to finalise arrangements, and that was no trivial matter, either, when they were talking about security and a public appearance by upwards of twenty members of the Fourth. He also had lots of information coming in constantly – a freighter that had arrived that morning had passed on what they felt to be good information about the route that the Dortmell drug cartels were using, now, to get drugs to Chartsey. That tallied with other things they’d been told and with the latest intelligence from Dortmell itself, so was looking, at least, like a lead worth investigating. Alex would not be doing that, and nor would Harry Alington. The reports would be passed to the Admiralty and they would dispatch whatever ship or ships they felt appropriate to follow up that lead. A high speed courier, indeed, was due to leave Karadon for Chartsey that evening, so Alex was also busy compiling reports to be sent off later that day.
When he got a call from one of the LIA agents on the station, therefore, he took it briskly, hoping it wasn’t going to be something that would demand a lot of his time. The call came through on the comms link established with the station, but it read as caller and location of caller unidentified, and with a metallic voice distorter on it which made it impossible to tell even if it was a man or woman calling. The League Intelligence Agency had a rather gadgety and melodramatic approach to their work, at least in the opinion of Fleet Intel. But that they were prepared to even admit to being here, let alone share their intel with the Fourth, was something of a minor miracle, so Alex was doing his best to foster positive working relationships in that direction, too.
‘Look, if you want us to share data with you, you have to play straight with us,’ the robotic voice said. It couldn’t convey irritation with tone, but the words were clear and blunt enough. ‘If we’re supposed to be cooperating, here, you should have told us you have Professor Pattello on the station.’
Alex raised his eyebrows, though the call was audio only.
‘We don’t,’ he answered. ‘She’s aboard the Empress of Telathor on her way to Therik.’
‘She is not,’ said the LIA agent, flatly. ‘She is in room 328 at the Central Hotel. Are you seriously trying to claim that you didn’t know that she’d come back?’
‘Yes,’ said Alex, with a grim note, ‘I am seriously telling you that we have no idea she’s there. You’re absolutely sure about this, are you? Candra Pattello? Professor of applied engineering at Therik SU?’
‘We do have her ID.’ Impossible to tell whether the voice was bored or furious, but they were very definitely not happy. ‘And yes, shipmaster, we are very definitely absolutely sure.’ Calling him ‘shipmaster’ was either profound ignorance of Fleet etiquette or intended as some kind of sarcasm, like saying Mister with exaggerated stress. ‘She arrived aboard the Might of Canelon, checked into the hotel, and has booked passage on the Ruby Queen.’
It needed no calculation from Alex to work out the logistics of how Candra Pattello had been able to get back to Karadon. The Might of Canelon was a container ship, though not in the same league as the mighty behemoths. It would have crossed paths with the Empress of Telathor about three hours out from Karadon. By the sound of it, then, Candra Pattello had only stayed on the Tela for a couple of hours, getting aboard the first ship she could that would bring her back to Karadon.
She had the right to do so, Alex realised. Legally, she was a free agent now, fired by Devast, no longer on the project. They’d been able to put her aboard the liner on security grounds, avoiding the media picking up on her association with the Fourth, but there was, indeed, nothing to stop her coming back, or going anywhere else she wanted. The Ruby Queen, he knew, would be departing for Chartsey in five days’ time.
It didn’t take more than a few seconds for him to realise why she was heading for Chartsey. If she just went back to Therik, her career as an academic consultant would be over. She’d still have her university professorship, of course, but even with Alex’s limited understanding of academia he could guess that the loss of an important and lucrative consultancy like that would affect her standing at the university, too.
Quite what she hoped to achieve at Chartsey was not entirely clear, but Alex felt instinctively that she was heading for the centre of government, to the Admiralty, to try in some way to retrieve her position on the Ignite project. This first test-firing would not, after all, be the end of it. If the Fleet picked up the option on it there’d be years of development work ahead, and she would want in on that.
That such effort was futile was so obvious to Alex that he could hardly believe someone of her undoubted IQ could think it would work. But people, he’d found, could convince themselves of pretty much anything if they wanted something badly enough. And there was, too, a highly Chartsey-centric culture in the League, a feeling that all really important decisions could only be made on the capital world, and that there was where you needed to go, too, to get rulings overturning decisions made by provincial system authorities.
At any rate, regardless of why she was trying to go to Chartsey, she was here, right now, staying at the station’s most expensive hotel. That meant it was also one of the station’s most closely monitored hotels. VIPs and celebrities passed through Karadon all the time, and there was a small but busy pack of paparazzi there, always on the lookout for who might be staying at the Central.
‘She told a pap,’ the LIA agent continued, ‘that she’s going to Chartsey on business. And you’re saying that you did not know that, that she is not working cover ops for you?’
‘We did not know she’s aboard, and no, she is not working for us in any capacity whatsoever,’ Alex said, feeling a little chill run through him at that statement she told a pap. ‘But she’s talking to the media?’
‘One of the paps at the Central asked who she is. She told him – name, university, going to Chartsey on business. End of. No news value there. But if they click to her involvement with you that will change in a heartbeat. There is a SOLO in place of course but it’s generic and we prefer not to draw attention. So are you intending to run interference or are you asking us to do so on your behalf?’
Alex considered, briefly.
‘I would appreciate you keeping an eye,’ he said, having weighed up the options. ‘And – we have had a security breach with the release of information that reveals we crossed League borders. I’d like to be sure that didn’t originate from her, and if you could help with establishing that, that would be appreciated, too.’
‘Of course, shipmaster,’ the repl
y came, utterly expressionless. ‘That is what we are here for, after all, to clear up after the total cock-ups you people make of security.’
It could not be said, Alex felt, that Fleet and LIA relationships had been strengthened by this incident. He did not feel, either, that he would be in any position to dispute the LIA agents’ assessment of their performance. Candra Pattello returning to the station and checking in to its most exclusive hotel without their knowledge made them look pretty clueless, and though her SOLO – Security of the League Order – would hold, at least in terms of preventing the media reporting her identity in association with the Fourth, the media would not rest till they could report some version of that story some other way.
Reaction aboard ship to the news that Candra Pattello was at the station was predictably aghast.
‘Has she gone mad?’ people asked, amidst worried debate about what she might be up to, there, and what her intentions were in going to Chartsey. Perry Soames and the others from Devast were just appalled, apologising repeatedly, though it was not at all clear for what. Alex, however, had little time to discuss it with them. He had, after all, a ceremony to attend.
He did, however, make time to take Davie North’s call.
‘I just heard,’ Davie told him, set faced. ‘Pattello. I can only apologise.’
He was, Alex could see, mortified by this. He’d offered to help, taking charge of the problem in such grand style, and it had splatted right back at them worse than before.
‘Not your fault,’ Alex said, and meant that.
‘I should have made sure they took her to Therik,’ Davie said, rejecting this comfort.
‘I’m very glad you didn’t,’ Alex said, frankly, and when Davie gave him a startled look, pointed out, ‘If you’d done anything that infringed her civil rights you’d have put me in a very difficult position. We had the right to put her aboard the liner, fair enough, but she wasn’t under deportation order and we have no right to prevent her travelling freely anywhere in the League she chooses – Constitution Three, I believe.’
A little gleam of rueful amusement showed just for a moment, though Davie shook his head.
‘You can usually solve these problems,’ he said, ‘if you throw enough money at them. I could have done that. And I’ve no idea what Cal Bilof was thinking, not even to send a message back telling us he’d put her on the Canelon.’
‘He probably thought we already knew,’ Alex said, having worked that out for himself, too. Cal Bilof, he recognised, was the captain of the Empress of Telathor. ‘Look at it from his perspective – your tender pulls up, they put a passenger aboard with a Shareholder code asking for total discretion, a couple of hours later she asks to be put aboard a freighter coming back the other way, what are they going to think?’
Davie conceded the point with a sigh. The captain would, obviously, assume that that was a means to get the passenger to Karadon without any obvious association with the Shareholder, and when anything to do with the Shareholder was so secretive anyway, they probably wouldn’t even be surprised.
‘Same with the Canelon,’ said Alex, since Intel had already clarified that, at least. The freighter had accepted her aboard without asking many questions anyway. Groundhogs were weird, they said, you couldn’t expect sense in their incomprehensible antics. They had, however, agreed to her request to keep her arrival with them absolutely confidential. She hadn’t actually told them she was an intelligence agent, but when they’d assumed it, she hadn’t disabused them of the idea, either. And, since spooks were even more bonkers than the normal kind of loony groundhog, the Canelon’s crew had just dropped her at the station and left her to it. If she really had been an agent for one of the League’s intelligence services, such discretion would have been commendable. Since she could in fact have been up to any kind of criminal activity, however, it was also quite concerning to see just how easily they’d been persuaded to put her aboard without telling anyone.
‘Idiots,’ said Davie, comprehensively. Then he looked at Alex, a pained look still in his dark eyes. ‘Tell me,’ he implored, ‘that you didn’t think I’d done this myself.’
‘Not for a moment,’ Alex said, then, as Davie gave a quick little grimace at something he’d heard in Alex’s tone, Alex assured him, with a grin, ‘Well, okay, perhaps, but only for about half a second. I realised at once that there was just no way you’d do that to us.’
‘Thanks,’ Davie did look comforted by that, and though he sighed again, a grin was quirking at the corner of his own mouth. ‘In your place, I’d have wondered, too,’ he admitted. ‘Only for about a twentieth of a second, but then, my brain does work faster than yours.’
Alex cracked into a laugh, relieved to see that Davie was getting over his humiliation.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Anyway, just leave it to us now, okay?’ He saw the set of Davie’s jaw, and told him, quite firmly, ‘She’s my responsibility.’
‘It’s my station,’ Davie retorted, but Alex wasn’t budging.
‘Look, I don’t want you ‘throwing money’ at this or trying to resolve it any other way, understood?’ he said. ‘You giving her a lift to the liner, that’s one thing, but I really can’t agree to you bribing her to make her leave. That really would put me in a compromising position, professionally, so I have to ask you for an assurance that you’ll just step back and leave this to me, okay?’
Davie considered for a moment or two, then nodded reluctantly.
‘So, what are you going to do about it, then?’ he asked, with a little challenge.
‘Nothing,’ Alex informed him, and as Davie flared an eyebrow, ‘It doesn’t appear that she is talking to the media. She’s not compromising security since the media hasn’t picked up on any association with us, so I think the best thing to do is just keep a watching brief but otherwise leave her to it. She’ll be on her way to Chartsey in a few days, anyway.’
Davie looked dubious, but shrugged.
‘All right,’ he conceded. ‘But I wish you’d let me get rid of her – I have a bad feeling about this.’
Alex looked at him without speaking, and Davie threw up his hands.
‘Okay, all right, I said okay,’ he pointed out, then grinned, glancing pointedly at the time. ‘Anyway, you’d better get on, don’t want to be late - enjoy the glory, captain!’
There were many words Alex might have used to describe the experience of being given the freedom of the station, but glorious was not one of them.
Unnerving might have been. The ceremony itself had very tight security. Quill knew very well what would happen if the public had unrestricted access, after all. So the event was being held in a specially decorated hangar in the cargo section, with direct transport from there to a strongly secured hospitality suite where they and carefully selected fellow guests would be having lunch. This did not prevent the various campaign groups at the station from holding the loudest most attention-grabbing protests they could come up with, but at least they could only do them for the benefit of media cameras, well away from the Fourth themselves.
Alex, in fact, had felt obliged to apologise to Quill over the number of activists who’d set up some kind of presence on the station. Many anti-Fourth campaign groups had sent people to investigate what they’d been up to at Karadon, and the Admiralty’s announcement that the Fourth would be going back there on a courtesy visit had caused eight such groups to maintain a presence there. Quill said cheerfully that he didn’t mind them, so long as they restricted their campaigning to the harmless handing out of leaflets from information stands in an approved area of the station. It was, he said, actually beneficial – scored them points on community involvement and open business practice. When they weren’t campaigning against the Fourth, after all, most such groups had an axe to grind against some aspect of multisystem corporations. They were apparently oblivious to the irony of mounting such campaigns on corporate property and with the company’s own consent. They paid their own hotel bills, after all, so di
dn’t see that they were beholden to the station in any way. Like many groundsiders, they felt that they had some kind of civil right to be aboard the station, as if it were a public place.
Finding that they stood no chance of getting into the area where the ceremony was taking place, anyway, most of the groups decided to protest against ISiS Corps itself giving the Fourth that honour. Since all of them decided to do that in the most public area possible, the Grand Atrium of the shopping and leisure complex, the media certainly had no shortage of stories. They filmed gleefully as station security attempted to deal with six different campaign groups all protesting at once, footage they knew would make a news clip even on quite distant worlds.
At the ceremony itself, primary cameras were of course locked on to Alex throughout. Secondary cameras, however, focused in on one of the crew – Jenni Asforth, young, attractive and thrilled, and more importantly, someone already known to the media. She’d changed considerably since the news went out of her as a purple haired garishly made up adolescent announcing that the Fourth was hacking Karadon’s computers, but facial recognition software saw straight past the neat blonde hair and fresh-faced look. There were no actual journalists right there in their faces, at least. Quill had imposed the same kind of reporting restrictions as at sporting events, providing a commentary box for the media and limiting the range of the cameras to around, as it were, the field of play. They could all see the cameras, though, hovering just metres away, red lights flashing to indicate live broadcast, and most of them were using spotlights, too, as the most intrusive kind of filming they were being allowed to do, here. As the spotlights remained focussed on Able Star Asforth, on and on, she started to get pink, shoulders trembling a little as she fought off a fit of the giggles. A steadying look from the petty officer leading that section helped, as she took a breath and made heroic efforts to compose herself.
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