Knight's Move

by Nuttall, Christopher

  Mr. Ford held his eyes for a long moment, then nodded once.

  “There are three more worlds to receive the Governor’s largess,” he said, shortly. “I would like you to attack them.”

  Jason shook his head, flatly. “Sir,” he said, “it would be a grave mistake to repeat the pattern any further. They will be waiting for us.”

  “Unless they assume that you were burned hard enough to discourage you from pressing the offensive,” Mr. Ford said. His tone was mild, but there was an underlying steel that suggested that it would not be easy to dissuade him. “Pressuring the aliens is of upmost importance to our plans.”

  “Then I suggest you allow us to go after camps that the Governor has not decided to present with tons of food,” Jason snapped. “I do not wish to take my squadron into battle against any warship, particularly one with a commander that has shown himself ready and willing to gamble if it brings him victory. We got burned, as you put it, because we followed a predictable pattern. I cannot count on my crews following me if I continue to repeat the pattern again and again.”

  “Maybe you could launch an attack when you knew that the Federation cruiser was somewhere else,” Mr. Ford suggested. “Or perhaps ...”

  “I knew that the Federation cruiser was somewhere else last time,” Jason said. “And I was wrong. If you want us to go after a refugee camp, then let it not be a predicable one. Or, if you want to embarrass the Governor, find something else to do. Because I will not be able to keep control of my crews if we lose more ships while following a predictable pattern!”

  “As you said,” Mr. Ford said. There was a long pause. “Very well; you may pick a refugee camp that is not on the Governor’s list. However, my backers also want you to irritate the Colonial Militia. That is not negotiable.”

  “I’m sure it isn’t,” Jason grunted. He used his implant to check the list of possible targets, then smiled. “What about Xenophon?”

  “It would make a suitable target,” Mr. Ford said. Xenophon had been the site of bitter ground-fighting during the war. Now, it was the source of a surprising amount of the Colonial Militia’s manpower. The world also had an orbital battlestation providing protection, which would automatically make seem an unlikely target when the militia analysts tried to deduce threatened worlds. “And the aliens there are vulnerable.”

  “There’s also a great many supplies on the surface, at the last report,” Jason said, after a moment’s thought. “We could take them, giving the militia a further black eye. Unless they move them prior to the attack, of course.”

  “Of course,” Mr. Ford agreed. “Can I rely on you to carry out the offensive?”

  “Yes,” Jason said, simply. He stood. “But I think that we need to make our attacks a little less predictable.”

  “My backers are satisfied with the current rate of progress,” Mr. Ford said. “You will be paid. Content yourself with that, please.”

  Jason scowled, but held his tongue. Whoever was behind the whole plan had their own objectives, objectives that they’d chosen not to share with their employees. Maybe even Mr. Ford was in the dark ... he briefly considered slipping the man a truth drug, before dismissing the idea as foolish. No one would be sent on a mission that would incur the strongest response from the Federation or the Colonial Militia without implants that ensured interrogation was not a possibility. Mr. Ford would simply be unable to talk, no matter what was used. Even old-fashion torture would be unreliable.

  But he was still being paid, he told himself. As long as they were paid, everything was fine.

  ***

  The hand caught her butt as she walked down to the mess. Sandy swung around and threw the hardest punch she could right into the groper’s nose. She felt it break under her fist, blood splashing down to the deck; the groper fell down, gasping in pain. His mates roared with laughter, then beckoned Sandy to join them. She shook her head firmly and walked onwards, expecting to feel someone stick a knife in her back at any moment. But there was nothing until she stepped into the mess itself.

  It was surprisingly like a Federation mess, one where the crew could eat together. Most of the tables were full, but a handful were empty; she picked up a tray, walked over to the counter and helped herself to some dubious-looking stew. The raiders, if raiders they were, clearly didn't bother to steal food. It looked rather more like they took Federation-issue rations, added thick gravy and then called it a meal.

  “I’ve eaten worse,” Jess said, from behind her.

  Sandy jumped, cursing herself. She would have to watch her back on this ship; it wasn't a Federation Navy starship, or even a Colonial Militia vessel. The next person might have rape or murder in mind, rather than anything else.

  “They put me in with the ground troops,” Jess said, as they sat down. “Not too surprising, really. Even someone like me knows more than the average kid with a gun and bad intentions.”

  “Glad to see you’re all right,” Sandy said. They would have to check to make sure their implants couldn't be detected by the ship computer net before they tried to talk secretly. She would have to make sure of it, somehow. “Did they tell you anything?”

  “Just that there were no room for doubt or scruples,” Jess said. “This job pays well, thankfully. Or I might despair at teaching teenage kids.”

  Sandy heard the unspoken subtext and shivered. They were paid well to do the job – and the job might well be something ... objectionable. If the raiders were collecting utterly untrained teenagers and training them to fight, they had to want utter barbarians, people who thought mass slaughter was normal.

  And that meant they’d succeeded. They’d found the raiders.

  Now all they had to do was work out a way to get a message off the ship, without losing their lives. But she knew that wouldn't be easy.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Glen looked up from the autopsy report and asked the unanswered question.

  “So what killed them?”

  “Suicide implants,” Doctor Foster said, simply. “Their brains were completely fried.”

  “They must have been linked to the computer network,” Cynthia said. “Dead men tell no tales.”

  Glen nodded. As soon as the enemy ship had been secured by the Marines, his intelligence and engineering officers had gone onboard to see what they could pull from her hull and the remains of her crew. The ship’s computer system might have been disabled by the brief engagement, but her crew might have left physical evidence for the searchers to pick up.

  “We found enough to paint a worrying picture,” Cynthia admitted. “For a start, we have a positive ID on the ship itself. She used to be TFS Gadfly, a Polaris-class destroyer. We pulled the records and discovered that she was decommissioned five years ago, stripped of all sensitive gear and sold to a junkyard for disposal. I suspect that she was picked up by a shady dealer and transferred into pirate hands.”

  “Eventually,” Glen muttered. Starships changed hands faster than the Federation could keep track of them, particularly out on the edge of explored space. The destroyer might have been sold to a planetary defence force, which might have been less careful when the time came to sell the craft for a second time. “Have you sent an inquiry back to Bottleneck?”

  “Yes, sir,” Cynthia said. “Intelligence agents on the other side of the Great Wall can attempt to track down the craft’s history, once she left the Navy. However, there are other pieces of evidence I need to bring to your attention.”

  She paused, then continued. “We pulled seventy-one bodies from the ship. Most of them are unknown, but seven of them were definitely former TFN crewmen, all dishonourably discharged for one reason or another. Their files suggest that they went looking for commercial work and vanished, but commercial work can cover a multitude of sins. They might easily have been mercenaries – or pirates. And we have no idea what they were doing on the enemy ship.”

  “Raiding the planet,” Glen said, dryly. “Show me the files.”

  He scann
ed them, quickly. The former TFN crewmen weren't great offenders, but their records would ensure that they had problems finding civilian jobs. There really wouldn't be much choice if they wanted to stay in space; they’d have to join a mercenary organisation and fight for pay. Even on the ground, they would have real problems finding employment. It didn't look as if they possessed skills that would make an employer overlook a dishonourable discharge.

  They weren't villains either, he noted. Or at least they hadn't been villains at the time. Now, after years of working on the very edge of society, who knew what they’d become?

  “Bottleneck can try to follow up on this,” he said, although he doubted they would turn up anything useful. Space was vast, far beyond the comprehension of most civilians. Someone who wanted to remain unnoticed – and had money – could escape attention for quite some time, as long as they were careful. “And the remaining crew?”

  “Unidentified,” Cynthia confessed. She sounded annoyed. “We don’t have the slightest idea who they were.”

  “Twelve of them came from Tarn,” Jane put in.

  Glen and Cynthia stared at her in disbelief. “How do you know that?” Cynthia asked, finally. “And why didn't you mention it to me?”

  “It’s in my report,” Jane said. The ship’s doctor smiled, rather dryly. “And why didn't you read it?”

  She sobered. “As my report states, Tarn is a very high-gravity world, one of the worlds that should never have been colonised. The genetic modifications to enable humans to live there are distinctive. Even so, the world still imposes a toll on human life. I suspect that the natives lived there for most of their lives, judging by their physical conditions.”

  “I see,” Glen said.

  The thought offered some logical explanations. Tarn was poor, so poor that it was unlikely that the planet would remain viable. The natives, if he recalled correctly, were bent under by the weight of the gravity, even though their bodies had been extensively modified. Like other failing colonies, their greatest export was people, people who no longer wanted to live in such an environment and see their kids suffer. Quite a few of them went into the TFN or joined shady mercenary organisations. Their immense strength made them popular among the underground as enforcers or bodyguards.

  He looked over at the doctor. “And the others?”

  “None of them are native to Earth,” Jane said, simply. “They all have the off-word vaccinations and genetic tweaks that are uncommon on the homeworld, but apart from the Tarn natives there isn't much to separate them out let alone isolate a common homeworld. And that wouldn't lead us to the raider base in any case.”

  Glen nodded. It was unlikely that Tarn was hiding the raiders. The planet had nothing to offer, apart from people; there were no shipyards or experienced workers to help maintain the raiding fleet. Everyone with sellable skills tended to emigrate as soon as they qualified, leaving the planet’s remaining natives without the benefit of their training. On the other hand, it was probably worth asking Intelligence to make some enquiries. The raiders might well be hiring on Tarn.

  “The Marines are still going through the ship,” Cynthia said. “However, it looks as though we might have been unlucky. The raider crew owned dozens of pornographic datachips and entertainment flicks, but they don’t seem to have collected information we can use.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Glen said. “Raiders don't normally keep diaries.”

  He smiled. There were horror stories, passed from crew to crew, about the chaos caused when one crewman kept a diary and it fell into enemy hands. Federation Navy officers and crew were expected to keep personal logs, but they were warned in no uncertain terms that sensitive information was never to be written down, at least outside a secure store. No one knew for sure if the rumoured capture of an Admiral’s personal computer had allowed the Dragons to target their early offences so precisely, yet strict new regulations had been put into effect and no one had rescinded them after the end of the war. That, Glen suspected, proved that the Admiralty believed the rumours, even if the Admiral in question had never been held to account. But then, he’d died in a Dragon POW camp.

  A TFN officer who broke the rules could expect to have a black mark on his record – or worse, depending on the consequences. What would pirates or raiders do to a crewman who kept a diary?

  But it wasn't uncommon for their crews to be largely ignorant. Without access to the computers and navigational databases, the crew would have no way to know if they were scouting the edge of human space or flying through the Sol System itself. Those officers who did know where they were would never be allowed to talk about it, certainly not to anyone who didn't have any need to know. A lower-level pirate might know names, but not locations. There were a hundred pirate base names known to the TFN, yet they couldn't be destroyed because no one knew where they were.

  “The only thing we did find of some interest were gambling chips from Dawson,” Cynthia put in. “That proves that they were definitely on that world within the last year, as the chips have a limited lifespan.”

  That was good news, of a sort, Glen decided. At least Sandy and Jess were on the right world for recruitment into the raiders. Assuming, of course, that their covers weren’t blown wide open. If they were, Glen knew better than to think that either of the women would be allowed to live. Their hostage value would be non-existent, certainly not compared to the danger they represented to their hosts. It was quite possible that they would have picked up enough intelligence to lead the Federation Navy right to their base.

  “It may also have been a form of payment,” Cynthia added. “They could trade in the chips on Dawson and no one would ask questions.”

  “And probably be urged to gamble away their earnings,” Glen muttered. It was a common trick; spacers coming home from long voyagers tended to blow through their saved earnings at a terrifying rate. “Have we turned up anything else?”

  “Not yet,” Cynthia said. “The raider ship is beyond repair, the engineer said; he suggested that she be broken down for scrap.”

  Glen had to smile. If there was one thing he’d learned about Lieutenant Commander Stocker, his Chief Engineer, it was that he hated to give up. For the engineer to decide that the raider ship was beyond salvage was unusual, to say the least. The raider must have been heavily damaged in the fighting.

  “In fact, he thought that the ship might have been deliberately designed to fail, if sufficient damage was inflicted,” Cynthia said. “The self-destruct system failed, but the rest of their precautions worked admirably. Their computer cores were reduced to dust, their crew were killed and the entire shipboard datanet fried. He’s still poking through the remains, looking for clues.”

  That was odd, Glen knew. The Federation Navy built endless redundancies into its starships, at least until the demand for new starships had been allowed to outweigh the dangers of building them as quickly as possible. Half of Dauntless could be shot away and the remainder of the ship would keep operating. The raider had been crippled, yes, but the damage shouldn't have destroyed her life support systems. But she’d had no hope of escape.

  “Sounds like something a raider crew would have done,” he said. He glanced at the two women, noting that they looked as tired as he felt. “Get some rest. We’ll set out for our next destination in two hours, leaving the enemy ship behind. The colonies can send a salvage crew out to recover her if they want.”

  Three hours later, Dauntless was back in hyperspace and racing to catch up with Independence and the convoy. Glen took advantage of the time to read Stocker’s report very carefully, noting all of the questions the engineering crew had been unable to answer. The Chief Engineer was convinced, he saw, that the ship had indeed been primed to suffer a complete failure if she were badly damaged. A number of safety interlocks that should have protected the crew had simply been removed, years ago. The raiders had to have done it purposefully, Stocker had concluded. No decommissioning procedure would have removed such safety precautions
.

  The other oddity was one that puzzled and alarmed both Stocker and the Marines. In their experience, neither pirates nor raiders took good care of their ships. Their crews were too undisciplined to be forced into actually cleaning the decks, let alone replacing worn-out components on a regular basis. Some of the pirate ships the Marines had boarded had needed to be vented completely, just to get rid of the smell and rodent infestations the pirates had tolerated. But the raider ship was almost professional.

  No, Glen told himself, as he skimmed through the report. There was no shit and piss marring the deck, no hold full of sex slaves, not even sloppy maintenance. It was professional.

  There was a patchwork quality to most pirate ships that made them dangerously unreliable at times, a quality shared by many Colonial Militia starships. They’d been so desperate to keep the ships running that they’d spliced hundreds of different components, including several that came from alien technology, into their systems. Few of them had been designed to work together; indeed, no matter how impressed the Governor had been with the rows of starfighters on Fairfax, Glen knew that the colonials would want to junk the older designs as quickly as possible. Standardisation made maintenance easier in the long run.