Knight's Move

by Nuttall, Christopher

  “Open the portals,” he ordered. “Get us out of here.”

  ***

  “Enemy ships are opening portals,” Cooke reported. “They’re making their escape.”

  Glen cursed, inwardly. There was little hope of stopping them in time, or of preventing them from using a static bomb to cover their retreat. One by one, the portals closed ... leaving Dauntless behind. But the disabled enemy ship was still there.

  “Stand down from combat stations,” he ordered. “Dispatch additional Marine reinforcements to the enemy ship, then prepare a signal for the Governor and Admiral Porter. Attach a complete copy of our sensor logs. Let them see what we found here.”

  He rubbed his forehead as Dauntless reversed course and came to a halt, close enough to the enemy craft to supply help or fire support, without coming too close in case of treachery. It would be simple enough for someone to recharge a phase cannon and then fire on Dauntless from point-blank range ... he fought down the urge to watch the Marines as they boarded the stricken vessel. They had to be left in peace to do their job.

  But micromanaging had never seemed so tempting.

  ***

  Sandy clutched her pistol as she heard muffled sounds running through the starship’s hull. It was eerie being on the powerless ship; there were faint noises and scratches that were never heard when the ship was at full power. Indeed, she had a suspicion that she was hearing animal and insect life, the rats and cockroaches that often infested the bowels of human starships. The raiders had been cleaner than the average pirates, she had to admit, but even they hadn't followed proper cleaning procedures ...

  And there was no way to know what was going on outside the bridge, let alone the hull. The raiders might be about to slam a missile into her unprotected hull, or the Marines might be boarding the hulk, or both sides might just have abandoned the powerless wreck. There was just no way to know.

  She jumped as her communicator buzzed, so loudly in the silence that it was almost deafening. “Sandy?”

  “Jess,” she said, in relief. “Where are you?”

  “I've linked up with the Marines,” Jess said, cheerfully. “Most of the raiders we’ve encountered have been stunned, then left to drift. We’ll be at the bridge in a few minutes.”

  “Thank God,” Sandy said, softly. She would never want to be a Marine, even if she did enjoy sparring. Making her way through a drifting starship, with no way of knowing what might be beyond the next hatch, would be terrifying. “I’ll wait for you ...”

  She touched the collar around her neck, then swore. “Tell the Captain,” she said. It was quite possible that she wouldn't survive the next few hours, not if the collar couldn't be removed. God alone knew what security precautions the pirates might have worked into the cursed device. “Their next target is Bottleneck. I think they want to start a war.”

  There was a hiss of indrawn breath. “Understood,” Jess said. She wore a collar too. “I’ll make sure he knows.”

  ***

  “The Colonial Militia has reluctantly agreed to dispatch an armed freighter to take the remaining raiders into custody,” Danielle said. “I don't think they were prepared to send anything heavier.”

  Glen wasn't surprised. Battles had been won or lost before because of the absence of a single ship and, with war storms billowing over the Fairfax Cluster, the Colonial Militia would be reluctant to detach any of its starships. But he couldn't take the entire crew of raiders onboard Dauntless, not when there simply wasn't the room for them. They’d have to be abandoned on the hulk and picked up by the colonials.

  “Good,” he said. Sandy’s warning about the attack on Bottleneck had filled in another piece of the puzzle. The objective of the whole affair was to start a civil war in human space. “Helena, set course for Bottleneck. Maximum speed.”

  He smiled grimly as he started to compose his message in his head. If he could convince Admiral Porter to abandon the blockade and head to Bottleneck, they might just be able to catch the raiders before they could escape. And if they took the raider commander, he would be an invaluable source of intelligence. They might even be able to catch the backers ...

  But if his suspicions were correct, catching the backers would unleash another political shockwave over the Federation. The results might be worse than a civil war.

  Wonderful, he thought. The portal blossomed to life in front of Dauntless, sucking them into hyperspace. When people start learning to juggle, they don’t normally practice with chainsaws. The slightest mistake could cost them an arm, or a leg ... or even their life.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Sandy opened her eyes.

  “Lie still,” Doctor Foster ordered. “You took a hell of a shock.”

  “Doctor,” Sandy said. She reached up and touched her neck. The collar was gone. “What happened?”

  “Nasty little thing,” the doctor said. Her face twisted into an expression of disgust. “We ended up having to disintegrate it while keeping the rest of your body in stasis. Not the sort of effort most pirates would make, I’d bet.”

  Sandy nodded, reluctantly. “When can I get up?”

  The doctor examined the display beside Sandy’s bed. “I’d advise you to stay in bed for the next few days, but something tells me you’re not going to listen,” she said. “And while I could order you to stay in bed ...”

  She shook her head. “There’s a situational briefing you ought to read, then you can report to the bridge after you get a good night’s sleep. It’s still a day to Bottleneck ...”

  Sandy took the datapad she offered and scanned the briefing. It didn't make pleasant reading; Fairfax was being blockaded, the Colonial Militia was being assembled to lift the siege and neither side seemed to realise that they were being manipulated into war. The Governor was apparently under siege herself, in Government House, with Federation Marines preparing a rescue mission. It was all a hideous ghastly mess.

  “They’re not going to send ships to Bottleneck,” she concluded. “Are they out of their minds?”

  “More a case of not daring to take their eyes off one problem long enough to see the next,” a new voice said. Sandy looked up to see Cynthia striding into sickbay. “And someone has been manipulating the Governor.”

  Sandy kept her face carefully expressionless. She didn't like Cynthia at the best of times, even before she’d realised that Cynthia regarded her as a prime suspect. Just because she happened to have powerful relatives didn’t mean that she would betray her oath to the Federation ... she pushed the thought aside as she sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed. She’d been away for too long to rest.

  “There’s still some minor damage to your nerves,” Doctor Foster said. “I’ve fixed as much as I can, but the remainder will have to heal on their own. If you notice any adverse effects, come back to sickbay at once. I won’t hesitate to declare you unfit for duty if you ignore a problem long enough for it to affect your performance.”

  “I’ll come back if I notice a problem,” Sandy said, obediently. Technically, the Ship’s Doctor had the authority to declare a crewman unfit for duty, but it carried a stigma among senior officers that meant they would do almost anything to avoid it, even if it meant self-medicating or living with the pain. “What about Jess?”

  “We got the collar off her without problems, then she went back to Marine Country after her debriefing,” Cynthia said. “And if you’ll come with me, the Captain is waiting to see you.”

  The Captain looked to have grown older in the weeks she’d been away from Dauntless, Sandy noted as she was escorted into his office. He surprised her by standing and coming around the desk, then holding out a hand. She surprised herself by pulling him into a bearhug, then winking at Cynthia when she stared in disapproval. The Captain motioned for her to take a seat, then sat back on the other side of the desk.

  “We need to go over what you saw on the raider base,” he said, by way of introduction. “Just what happened and why?”

  S
andy sighed and started to talk. It took hours; Cynthia was a skilled interrogator, capable of pulling answers out of people who didn't know what they knew. Sandy might not have known who was funding the whole operation, but she had seen enough to guess at the sheer size of the investment ... and the surprising lack of concern about losses. Blowing up the asteroid alone had to have wasted billions of credits. And then there was the vast number of new recruits ...

  “Most of them came from the Rim, with a handful of TFN or Colonial Militia personnel to provide leadership and training,” she explained. “I think that they were almost completely untrained when they were recruited.”

  “Colonel Armstrong agrees,” Cynthia said. “The troops they wanted to deploy to the surface were almost completely raw, with next to no proper training. Odd, when you think about just how much they invested in the ships.”

  “Men are expendable,” Sandy pointed out, remembering days when the colonials had tried to drown the Dragons in bodies. “I don’t think they cared how many raw recruits were killed, not when there were literally millions of youngsters looking for work. They could take whoever they wanted and no one would give a damn.”

  The Captain stared down at his hands. “On the face of it, we have a force that seems intent on sparking off a civil war,” he said. “The colonies were to be blamed for attacks on aliens, carried out – apparently – by the Colonial Militia. These attacks were also staggered to ensure that the Colonial Militia could never concentrate against the raiders. Furthermore, the attack on Xenophon was accomplished by means of codes from Fairfax, without which the attack would have been impossible.

  “However, as the raiders hit colony worlds and killed humans, it is unlikely that colonials were actually picking the targets. The Colonial Militia would presumably mutiny if they were ordered to bombard a human colony world ...”

  “So would the TFN, one would hope,” Cynthia said, quietly.

  “The sheer level of funding suggests a source within the Federation,” the Captain continued. “In addition, the raiders also had access to secure information from Government House; the worlds we were meant to visit and our rough schedule. This information was used to target raider attacks and embarrass the Governor. It seems logical, to me, that both pieces of information came from Government House.”

  Sandy swore. “The military codes needed to assault Xenophon might have been stored there,” she said. “It served as headquarters for the Colonial Militia as well as the President of the Republic.”

  “Precisely,” the Captain said. “Next up; the ships themselves. All apparently purchased by the Colonial Militia, but never actually delivered to the colonies. The money used to purchase the ships was slipped in and out of the financial network, ensuring that any audit would actually notice nothing because the overall level wouldn't change.”

  “Pardon?” Sandy said. Financial affairs had never been her area of interest. “Nothing changed?”

  “Suppose I steal fifty credits from your account,” Cynthia said. “And suppose you only withdraw money on Monday morning. If I get the credits back into your account by Sunday evening, you wouldn’t notice what I’d done unless you downloaded a full account statement and checked it line by line.”

  “Precisely,” the Captain said. “In this case, someone slipped the money for additional ships into the colonial accounts, then took the ships and vanished. No one knew to check because there was no actual shortfall.”

  “And the colonial accounts are in a mess anyway,” Cynthia added. “Without an apparent victim ...”

  Sandy followed the logic, carefully. If the ships had been purchased legitimately, no one in the Federation would have kept an eye on what happened to them. And if the Colonial Militia didn't know that it had purchased the ships, it certainly wouldn't be expecting to receive them. If there was nothing seemingly wrong with the accounts, no one would check to find out that money had been added and then removed.

  “Right,” she said. “Where did the money actually come from?”

  “That’s where we hit a brick wall,” the Captain explained. “The agents who purchased the ships are dead. But we turned up a link between them and the Governor’s current staff. They were apparently working with Harrison Montgomery to arrange loans to the colonies towards the end of the war.”

  “The fixer,” Sandy said, recalling the odious little man. “What was he doing back then?”

  “He was working in the Federation’s Colony Support Agency,” Cynthia said, tartly. “The colonies needed support; the CSA was supposed to ensure that the loans were neither too onerous nor too light. But the officials were given bonuses for all the material they managed to convince the colonials to buy.”

  “More importantly, Montgomery is the person who reads and summarises the material sent to the Governor,” the Captain said. “The raw data only raises eyebrows; Montgomery presented it in such a way to suggest that the colonies very definitely knew that they’d purchased the ships for the raiders. And, if we look at the timing, it seems clear that the raiders were getting their orders from Fairfax, not somewhere on the other side of the Great Wall. Montgomery must be their local commander.”

  “Because he’s in the best position to obtain the data the raiders used against their targets,” Sandy finished. “Can't we arrest him?”

  “We don’t have any proof,” Cynthia said. “Just ... suspicions. And he has a lot of contacts in high places. We will need absolute proof before we arrest him.”

  Sandy sighed. “So ... what do we do about it?”

  The Captain spoke into the growing silence. “We stop the attack on Bottleneck,” he said, simply. “And I need you to do something for me.”

  Afterwards, Sandy sat at her desk in her cabin, staring at the bulkheads. It was strange just how little personality she’d brought to her cabin, even though she'd known that it would be her home for at least a year or two ... barring promotion or transfer. There was nothing on the bulkheads, apart from a Dragon flag she’d captured during a boarding mission and kept for herself. The weapons and tools her father used as wall decorations were conspicuously absent. If she left tomorrow, she knew, the crew could simply scrub the deck and hand it over to her replacement.

  And what would I do, she asked herself, if it does come down to war?

  The picture the Captain and Cynthia had worked out sounded plausible. It didn't answer the question of why anyone would want to trigger a civil war, but it seemed to explain everything ... unless, of course, there were two rogue groups involved, with different aims and objectives. But common sense suggested that there was only one.

  She looked down at the datapad, which showed the strategic situation. The Bottleneck Squadron at Fairfax, blockading the planet. Only bare light years away, the Colonial Militia was gathering, massing its ships to break the blockade. Soon, she knew, they would come to Fairfax ... and then Admiral Porter would have to choose between starting a war or falling back, abandoning the blockade. And, once the shooting actually started, it would be harder for the diplomats to stop the slaughter. Even if there was only one real battle, there could be no return to the status quo. Both sides would demand restitution for their losses.

  “Shit,” she muttered, miserably.

  She cleared her throat, then looked into the terminal. “Record message,” she ordered. “Father, I have important news for you ...”

  ***

  Once, Jason would have admired the Bottleneck. It was the most remarkable natural formation within hyperspace – and, if it was artificial, it was certainly the greatest piece of engineering in the history of the galaxy. Nothing humanity had been able to build, with the possible exception of the static bombs, had been able to manipulate hyperspace. But now, with the certain knowledge that their time as raiders was coming to an end, the Bottleneck was just another obstacle for his fleet.

  They may see us coming, he thought. The Bottleneck System was difficult to approach in hyperspace, with only a handful of possible approaches ... a
nd the Bottleneck itself was easy to patrol. But then, there shouldn't have been anything hostile coming out of the Fairfax Cluster ... he pushed the thought aside, dismissing it as little more than wishful thinking. The Federation Navy knew that something was about to explode in the cluster, even if they didn't know what.

  “I need to return to my ship,” Mr. Ford said. He'd come onboard at the RV point, seemingly to inspect Havoc and her comrades. “I ...”

  “Can remain here until the fighting is done,” Jason snapped, sullenly. He had his doubts about the wisdom of the whole idea, but he would carry out his orders, particularly if Mr. Ford remained on his ship. “We wouldn’t want anything to go wrong, would we?”