“Very bad maintenance,” Foxglove commented.
Sameena couldn't disagree. Steve had spent months showing her how the power distribution network on Logan actually worked – and the Imperial Navy had built far more redundancy into its ships. It was actually quite difficult to render the ships completely powerless without practically battering the ship into a hulk. On the other hand, if someone allowed the nodes to decay, the network might fail quicker.
“Shuttles away,” the helmsman reported.
Paddy would have loved this, Sameena thought, remembering some of his stories about boarding enemy ships. They were always nerve-wracking; one never knew if the crew would offer resistance, try to destroy their ship with the boarding party on it ... or if the ship would simply come apart, dumping them all into space. But Paddy had made it sound like an adventure. His wife had commented that insanity was part of the job description for a Marine.
“Signal the convoy to hold position,” she ordered. The destroyers would be back with them in twenty minutes. She could order one of them to wait with the pirate ship while the other escorted the convoy to Dueller. “Is there anything from the boarding party?”
“They’ve had to go through a gash in the hull,” Foxglove reported. “So far, they’ve not located any live crewmen, just bodies. Their life support appears to have failed spectacularly. As far as they can tell, the ship is completely depressurised.”
Sameena shivered. Logan had been honey-combed with compartments that could be isolated from the rest of the ship at the touch of a button, as was a standard warship. Even a major hull breach shouldn't have been enough to depressurise the entire ship. Yet another sign of bad maintenance or something more sinister? She could understand the pirates having backers who would not wish to be identified.
“Have their report sent to me as soon as possible,” she ordered. If the pirates were all dead, she could wait to find out what they could pull from the ship’s remains. “The convoy will resume course for Dueller, maximum speed.”
“Aye, Captain,” the helmsman said.
Sameena looked around the bridge and saw the same expression on everyone’s face; relief, combined with the exhilaration of surviving their first engagement. It hadn't been fair – they’d lured the pirates in, rather than revealing themselves from the start – but it hardly mattered. They’d won! And they were alive!
“Well done, all of you,” she said, calmly. She wished that Jamie had come with them, just so he could be with her. If he’d been there, they could have celebrated ... she pushed that thought aside, angrily. Wishful thinking was never helpful. “Our first engagement was a smashing success.”
“Our training was far superior,” Foxglove said. “With your permission, I would like to analyse the sensor readings closely. There may be clues as to their origins in there.”
“Granted,” Sameena said. She had her doubts, but one of the things she had learned from Steve was never to get in the way of enthusiasm. Foxglove would be more driven by his own determination than by any orders. “Let me know what you can deduce.”
Seven hours later, they arrived in orbit around Dueller.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Two hundred years before I left Earth, it was becoming alarmingly clear that the task was beyond their ability to complete. Infrastructure that had been built up over centuries was wearing away faster than they could repair it. This crippled the Empire’s ability to produce spare parts, which drove prices up and ruined businesses.
- Professor Leo Caesius. The Science That Isn’t: Economics and the Decline and Fall of the Galactic Empire.
“I don’t know what we would have done without you,” Governor Higgins said, as they stood together in Government House. “My world was about to die.”
Sameena nodded. She’d seen traces of the crop blight as her shuttle dropped through the planet’s atmosphere and came in to land. The crops had been darkened, rotting away into mush ... and becoming poisonous, rendering them completely useless. Even pigs, she'd been shocked and amused to discover, had been unable to eat the blighted food. Without algae-production plants, she knew, the entire planet would rapidly starve.
“We promised to assist any world that fell into trouble,” she said, remembering how hard it had been to work out a charter that everyone could support. “It might be another world tomorrow that needs your help.”
“And my people are grateful,” Higgins assured her. “I believe that many of them have already expressed a wish to meet you.”
“If I have time, I would be delighted,” Sameena assured him, although it wasn't entirely true. It was still hard to face crowds, even with Jamie’s quiet encouragement. “However, I cannot stay here indefinitely.”
“I quite understand,” Higgins said.
Sameena smiled as he turned to stare out over Landing City. It was older than Rosa’s capital city, built out of stone quarried on the planet’s surface – and yet they hadn't bothered to rename it. There were thousands of Landing Cities scattered across the Empire, which suggested a lack of original thinking to her mind. Or, perhaps, bureaucratic indifference. Even so, the planet had done very well until the blight had arrived. Sixty or seventy years might have seen the birth of an industrial economy.
Higgins, according to Intelligence, was surprisingly popular for an Imperial-appointed Governor. There were several worlds that had taken advantage of the Empire’s departure to appoint their own political leaders, but Dueller had stayed with Higgins. The cynical part of Sameena’s mind wondered if the blight had ensured that no one else actually wanted the job, although she had to admit that it was unlikely. There was always someone who wanted power, someone prepared to do whatever it took to get it.
“I understand that you are also working on setting up industrial nodes,” Higgins continued. “We would be quite interested in having one here.”
Sameena smiled. Appleseed – the converted colonist-carrier – had been moving from system to system, helping to set up the building blocks of a network of industrial stations. It would take time to build up the network, but her projections suggested that in ten to twenty years she would have a superb industrial base ... and one decentralised enough to make it hard for anyone to cripple. Dueller would have to agree to the standard contract she’d written – forbidding political interference, among other things – but it was definitely a good idea. Assuming, of course, that they could defeat the blight.
She looked over at his back. “Have you found any way to challenge the blight?”
“We’ve got biochemists working on finding solutions,” Higgins admitted. “They think they can grow crop strains that would be completely resistant to the blight, but it will take three to five years to replace the destroyed fields. So far, the blight hasn't shown any inclination to actually attack humans directly, but everyone who eats infected crops gets ill. Something must have been missed on the planetary survey.”
Sameena scowled. Imperial Law demanded that a planet be thoroughly investigated before settlement began, a law that had started out as common sense and mutated into yet another nail in the Empire’s coffin. Only the interstellar corporations could afford to pay for the inspections, which meant that independent survey teams had to sell their findings to the corporations, rather than independent settler groups. Often, it didn't really hurt if the law was ignored. But when it did, the results were always spectacular – and disastrous.
And yet it was rare, she had to admit, for a full investigation to miss something.
“It might not have been natural,” she said, softly. “Someone might have decided to kill your entire population without showing themselves.”
“A handful of rocks would have achieved the same result,” the Governor pointed out. “And besides, they’d have to tailor something specifically to this world. Why bother?”
It could be a coincidence, Sameena knew. “The timing seems odd,” she said. “Your famine starts bare months after the Empire withdraws. I could understand a life
support failure on a rocky airless world, but here? It's just a suspicious coincidence.”
“I don't have any evidence, one way or the other,” the Governor said. “But if you were right, surely the blight would appear on other worlds.”
“I’ve passed on a warning,” Sameena said. “But I don’t know how well it’s been heeded.”
For a moment, she felt a twinge of sympathy for the Grand Senate. It took six months for orders to reach the Rim from Earth, which meant that the situation might well have moved on before the orders actually arrived. They would always have to wait and see what happened, knowing that the people on the spot would have to make the real decisions. If she had problems handling a small sector, managing the entire Empire would be impossible.
But that had been their mistake, she knew. They’d sought to centralise the Empire, never realising that it was simply impossible. Instead, their orders always had been outdated, never taking the true situation into account. Maybe that was why they’d worked to limit the potential of the colonies along the Rim. A revolution could become quite serious before the Grand Senate heard the first rumblings of trouble.
Her own plan was to decentralise as much as possible, even though she knew it limited her own power. But there was no choice.
“Father,” a voice said. “This is the Captain?”
Sameena turned to see a pale-skinned girl with long green hair, barely on the verge of becoming a teenager. She felt a sudden stab of guilt as she remembered that she had neglected Brad, leaving him behind on the asteroid for a month. She’d tried to play with him each day, but there were just so many demands on her time. And then she hadn't really spoken to Barbara at all.
He’s your child, she told herself, sternly. You need to take him with you when you go.
But he’s still a baby, her thoughts answered her.
“This is the Captain, Gretel,” Higgins said. He picked his daughter up and held her in his arms. “Captain Hussein, this is Gretel.”
“Hi,” Gretel said, shyly.
“Hi,” Sameena answered - and smiled. The girl was sweet, although her hair colour wasn't natural. “Your father is welcoming me to your world.”
“I love it,” Gretel said. “I’m going to be a farmer when I grow up. I love the land and growing things and ...”
Sameena felt her smile widening as the child prattled on. “I hope you get the chance,” she said, gravely. Talking to children was definitely not her strong point. “We're doing our best to see to it.”
“You are,” Higgins agreed. He put his daughter down and motioned for her to go back to her quarters. “Captain, I honestly can't thank you enough.”
“It isn't necessary,” Sameena said. Her wristcom chimed. “Excuse me.”
She keyed the wristcom. “Captain, this is Foxglove,” Foxglove said. He wouldn't have interrupted her unless it was important. “I have the complete report from the boarding party. They found quite a few odd things.”
“Understood,” Sameena said. “I’ll be back on the shuttle in twenty minutes.”
“I don’t know why they were prowling the edge of this star system,” the governor said, as she closed the channel. “But I am very relieved that you beat them.”
Sameena nodded and accepted his offer of a car back to the spaceport. The complex was bustling with life, shuttles dropping down from high overhead and unloading their cargo of food and algae-production equipment. Given enough time, Sameena knew, they would be able to feed themselves once again, perhaps long enough to beat the blight and re-establish their farming industry. The governor had mentioned that they might be setting up on the uninhabited continent, although Sameena doubted that would work in the long run. It was quite likely that the blight – if it was natural – would be there too.
She couldn't help noticing the open relief on faces as they helped unload the shuttle. The population had gone on rations as soon as the Governor had realised the scale of the problem, but they'd known that they were on the verge of starving to death. And they’d also known that the Empire had abandoned them. Governor Higgins had to be very popular, or he wouldn't have survived. She couldn't help wondering what his long-terms plans were as she climbed out of the car and walked over to her shuttle, then pushed the thought aside. It wasn't her concern.
Inside, she breathed in the processed air and sat down, activating one of the consoles. The full report had already been transmitted to her shuttle, even though it was technically against Imperial Navy regulations. Jamie had spent a few days trying to revise the regulations to cope with their new situation, before admitting that they might as well start from scratch. It would probably take years, he’d warned, before everyone was following the same rules. She downloaded it to a datapad and settled down to read.
The first part of the report was simple; the enemy ship had been poorly maintained, as she’d suspected, and the battering it had taken had simply been too much for the abused system to take. One of the engineers on the boarding party had reported that they’d somehow obtained new spare parts – it was quite possible that Sameena’s industries had supplied them – yet they hadn't known precisely how to use them. He’d cited a few examples – datachips stuffed in the wrong way around, computer nodes not connected to the network – that would have made her laugh, if it hadn't been so serious. It was a testament to the Imperial Navy’s design skills, she decided, that the ships had even continued to function.
But the second part was downright alarming.
Seventy bodies had been pulled from the wreckage, all mangled beyond repair. Their DNA had been hopelessly scrambled, the medics had discovered; there was little hope of identifying their homeworld, or even comparing them to the Imperial Criminal Database. And their brains had been completely liquefied ... it was, the medics had concluded, an extremely unusual form of suicide implant. It looked to Sameena as if someone had wanted to bury their tracks thoroughly.
That was unusual, she knew. It wasn't like pirates to give a damn if anyone identified them; they were rare visitors to places where their DNA might be tested and checked against wanted lists. And they wouldn't even care if someone identified their homeworld, if that was even possible. Relatively few worlds were so isolated that a native could be pin-pointed through his DNA. It was far more common for pirates to leave DNA evidence all over the place. Some of Paddy’s stories had been so horrifying that they’d given her nightmares.
They want to remain unidentified, she thought. But why?
Jamie and Brad had both sneered at entertainment programs that had branded pirates as nothing more than misfits, misunderstood members of society. In truth, they ranged from simple thieves and robbers to rapists, mass murderers and outright sociopaths. It was rare for a pirate crew to do something that horrified the rest of the underground community; in fact, it was difficult to imagine what could horrify those hardened men, let alone convince them to tip off the Imperial Navy. Even if the worst of the scum were responsible for destroying entire asteroid settlements, after raping and murdering every last man, woman and child, betraying them would have consequences. The Imperial Navy didn't share the belief that pirates were misunderstood. They understood them far too well.
The third part of the report puzzled her. Every recovered body was male. It was rare, Sameena knew, to have a female pirate – they tended to be far more sociopathic than the males – but most pirates kept sex slaves on their ships. This crew ... hadn't. Pirates weren't the Imperial Navy, or even a trader crew; she found it hard to imagine a pirate commander telling his men that they couldn't have their pet whores. So where were they?
She shook her head and looked at the final part of the report. Annoyingly, the only part of the enemy ship’s systems that had worked was the computer self-destruct. The starship’s main computer core had been reduced to dust, while the distributed nodes had been wiped clean. It was possible, the engineers had concluded, that something might be drawn from the nodes, but they didn't seem hopeful. The ship was completely beyon
d repair.
At least we can use it as a source of raw materials, she told herself, as she put the datapad down. The mystery would be solved in time. Maybe someone just wanted to earn money through backing pirates and took excessive precautions to ensure that they weren't tracked down.
“Have the hulk towed into orbit,” she ordered, keying her wristcom. “The engineers can go over her and pull out anything we might be able to use, then we can have it picked up and transferred elsewhere.”
“Understood,” Foxglove said. There was a pause. “Captain, the loadmaster reports that it will take at least four more days to finish unloading all the freighters.”
“That shouldn't be a problem,” Sameena assured him, wryly. At least Dueller had an orbital station, but she wouldn't want to leave any of their cargo in orbit. If there were other pirates sniffing around, they might be tempted to try a smash and grab. The station carried some weapons, but it was also a sitting duck. A pirate ship could sit outside weapons range and hurl rocks at it until one hit. “We have time.”
Governor Higgins had plans for her, she discovered over the next two days. There was a brief meal with the planet’s government – thankfully, they only ate soup and bread, rather than a big feast – where they talked about the future of the union. They were rather surprised to discover that there was no real agreement on a name, which they seemed to think should come first. Sameena, who had been leaning towards Trade Federation, found it rather amusing that they could agree on the broad strokes without argument, but bogged down when it came to discussing the name.
The following day, they took her to see the blight. Sameena had never liked the countryside, even when she’d been on Rosa, but it was still depressing to watch cornfields decaying into a putrid sludge. Most of them had been abandoned, she’d been told; they’d actually been trying to burn fields to the ground in the hopes of eradicating the blight. Unfortunately, they’d established very quickly that a strong gust of wind could pick up tiny fragments of the blight and deposit them on untouched fields. Nowhere remained safe for very long.
The Empire's Corps: Book 05 - The Outcast Page 36