Mission Zero (Fourth Fleet Irregulars)

by S J MacDonald

  ‘And that isn’t sufficient evidence,’ asked Mako, the ex-policeman, ‘for you to issue a search warrant?’

  Everyone on the command deck laughed, and Buzz looked kindly at him.

  ‘Not even close,’ he said. ‘There are no regulations requiring ships to stay on any particular route or travel at any particular speed. If they choose to go off route, they do not have to explain that to us, we have no right even to ask that question. And if none of us are looking particularly worried about that, it is because there is no flag on their file for suspicion of dirty smuggling, so what we’re looking at there, almost certainly, is something that spacers call ‘the heavy’.

  ‘Essential spacer culture 101, okay? Virtually all spacers smuggle to some degree. It’s a fundamental aspect to spacer culture even in the Fleet. Almost all of that is what spacers call ‘light’ smuggling, which means the kind of goods you walk through customs and if they challenge you about it, you say they are personal property. Typically, that’s jewellery – Tyraxian gold, particularly, since that is very expensive and highly taxed. You would just be amazed how much jewellery spacers wear when they’re going groundside and how little of it they have left when they come back aboard. There are dealers, you see, who buy it from spacers in bars, and sell it on as ‘special import’.

  ‘It’s cheeky, of course, dodging the tax you’d have to pay on it as an import for sale, but it really isn’t something that even Customs takes seriously, on most worlds at least, so long as it’s kept within reasonable and traditionally tolerated grounds. Even in the Fleet, if crew go on shoreleave wearing as many rings as they can cram on their fingers and come back with nary a one, the traditional response, if any officer is daft enough to ask, is, ‘Lost them in a poker game, sir.’’

  Bursts of laughter erupted on the command deck at that and one of the ratings urged Mr Burroughs to tell Mr Ireson ‘what the skipper had said’, which evidently meant something to him since he laughed.

  ‘First shoreleave,’ he explained, ‘after Skipper von Strada took command. There’s always a question, you see, about how strict skippers are going to be about that. We’d swung by Capital Gate in our first patrol. Just about everyone had all the jewellery they could cram on and pockets full of perfumes and cosmetics as they went off on shoreleave. You do have to pay duty on that kind of thing if it’s going to be sold on commercially. When the first shoreleave party came back, there wasn’t so much as a ring between the lot of them. The skipper looked them up and down and just said, ‘Must have been one heck of a poker game’, which has entered into Minnow legend, as you see.’ He grinned again as the crew hooted happily at this, ‘though it is in fact a very old joke in the Fleet, that. The fact that he made it defined our attitude to walk-through light smuggling, turned a blind eye to, so long as it’s within traditional bounds.

  ‘Heavy smuggling, that means getting serious quantities of uncustomed goods through. We’re talking cargo, there. Typically, a ship might buy cargo quantities of duty free goods at a station like Capital Gate and keep them off the manifest by stashing them somewhere outside the system. If they are on the manifest, you see, even as passing through a port of call, official records will be generated, and on certain goods, they may be required to pay duty on them as passing-cargo, anyway. So they stash the cargo somewhere to be picked up by something like a yacht. They’re not subject to Customs scrutiny in anything like the same way. Customs can’t possibly inspect them all, so if they’re clever about it, a yacht can pick up an uncustomed cargo and slip it groundside by various means, bypassing customs entirely. We’re talking, there, about small bulk high value items like uncut gems, high tech parts, expensive spices, and chemicals that are subject to high rates of import duty. Most spacers aren’t involved in ‘the heavy’ but it is something of a grey area because they certainly know a good deal about it and could tell Customs, or us, a lot more than they do.

  ‘But then, see, there’s dirty smuggling. That means drugs and weapons, which no respectable spacer will have anything to do with. Up until fourteen years ago, in fact, we had excellent cooperation from the spacer community on dirty smuggling, because the majority of them hate it just as much as we do and would always pass on tip offs to us even if they didn’t want to talk to Customs. But we are still, in that, reaping the whirlwind of the Carolina incident. Has nobody mentioned that?’ He saw the blank, questioning look on the inspector’s face. ‘No, well, it isn’t something the Fleet is keen to talk about, generally,’ he conceded.

  ‘What happened, you see, that First Lord Attenor, First Lord Harangay’s predecessor, came to the office on a commitment to tackling the issue of ‘endemic’ spacer smuggling. After several years of not getting very far with that, he issued new policy, new regulations, which threw the spacer community into turmoil. It has always been understood entirely that if the Fleet brings over a gift box and comes aboard for a cuppa, that is on a purely friendly basis and does not constitute boarding for ‘permission to search’ purposes. If you see something like cargo crates which do not have a customs seal, it is customary to be tactfully unobservant.

  ‘The Fleet has always held that that is the only way to secure a positive working relationship with freighters in which they will tell us about dirty and at least some heavy smuggling, because without their cooperation, frankly, we do not have a chance. But First Lord Attenor got a ruling from the Senate that things observed during social visits were legally admissible as evidence. He set policy so that any officers seeing anything suspicious during visits were duty bound to question and record it, taking it further into full investigation if even the smallest evidence of uncustomed goods was uncovered. That regulation has now been changed, but even now, you will notice that many freighters won’t let us aboard. They’ll only accept the gift box at the airlock, just in case we open lockers and start nosing into their personal stuff.

  ‘Anyway, this obviously created a lot of resentment and hostility in the merchant community. Positions, as they say, were entrenched. At which First Lord Attenor stepped up the game with more policy again, trying to force spacers to turn informant by threatening to include them in conspiracy charges if it was found that they’d had prior knowledge of criminal activity but hadn’t reported it.

  ‘And that, you see, is where the Carolina came in. A young, inexperienced skipper received information from a freighter called the Carolina. They told him that he should look in a particular star system for a cargo drop, which is generally what spacers do know. It’s amazing how well informed they are on that. But they don’t, customarily, tell you how they know. It’s entirely understood that it’s to be treated as an anonymous tip-off, information received, no questions asked. But the skipper of the Indigo – a spectrum class gunboat – asked a lot of questions. And when the Carolina’s skipper and crew refused to answer them, he arrested them all.

  ‘The LPS took it to prosecution, too, on the basis, they said, that the Carolina’s skipper and crew obviously had detailed knowledge of the offence. Without satisfactory explanation as to why, their theory was that it was a case of thieves falling out. The Carolina’s crew’s explanation that they had heard about it being talked about in a bar was not believed. On the basis that there was a significant quantity of illegal weapons retrieved from the cache, they were all convicted of complicity in gun running. Only the fifteen year old first voyager got off on a defence of not having known anything about it. All the rest of the crew went to prison and the skipper got four years.’ He looked speakingly at the inspector.

  ‘You wouldn’t even have heard about it, I daresay. It happened out at Flancer and wouldn’t have even made the minor item news on Chartsey. But the damage it did in the spacer community was so immense, we’re still not through it yet.

  ‘First Lord Attenor was, in fact, obliged to resign over it. Though it was three years after the Carolina incident, there’s no question that that was direct cause and effect. As the scale and intensity of the damage that had been done to th
e relationship between the Fleet and merchant services became apparent, the Senate Sub-Committee passed a vote of no confidence in his leadership, forcing his resignation. That was clearly an embarrassment to the entire Fleet and triggered major political struggles within the Fleet, too, as progressive and conservative elements had different views about where we should take the Fleet from there.

  ‘First Lord Harangay obviously won out on that. Besides his commitment to putting a stop to corporate involvement in Admiralty affairs, he also established policies of damage repair with the merchant service. So we are now even more sensitive in our relationship with freighters, see, and are back to taking no notice of trivial things like a crate or two without a customs seal on it. So it would, believe me, need a great deal more than a suspicion that they’d picked up some uncustomed crates on their way out of Chartsey, for us to have the grounds to issue a search warrant.

  ‘And if you are detecting a certain lack of enthusiasm from the Fleet in doing Customs’ job for them, you would not be wrong. They do have their own ships, see, patrol ships for searching the areas around ports, and it is absolutely not our responsibility to be checking cargo and manifests on any regular or routine basis. We are only required to assist them operationally on intelligence of smuggling beyond the range of their patrols. All too often that’s just vague intel of smuggling drops ‘somewhere in the Pagolis’. Which is just, you know, like looking for a grain of salt in a warehouse full of sugar. Minnow is sent out on that one a lot. This is our ninth patrol out to the Pagolis in two years.’

  ‘Ah.’ Mako recalled the ironic cheer that had gone up at the skipper’s official confirmation that they were going to the Pagolis. ‘Whose decision is that, then?’ he enquired, wondering if it was something that Zeus’s captain had been in the habit of doing, getting rid of the corvette which was such an irritation to him.

  ‘Oh, it’s a combination of factors.’ Buzz said easily. ‘Captain Urquart was certainly keen to offer our services because it is what the Fleet calls a ‘weary’, a duty patrol which everyone knows really doesn’t stand a chance of achieving anything significant. Port Admiral Alban was also keen for us to be assigned because he is always under pressure from Customs. They resent it, you see, when their requests are fobbed off with slow, elderly, or low achieving ships. Since Minnow came top in our class, Port Admiral Alban likes to be able to assure them that they are getting the finest silverfish corvette in the Fleet.

  ‘First Lord Harangay also wants Minnow to be kept on the Chartsey station and has blocked efforts to give us assignments which would have sent us away for months. Minnow, you see, is not just doing the rehab scheme that has now moved us into irregular service. We are constantly upgrading the ship, which sending us on long assignment would stop. At the same time, though, we don’t want to be sitting in port because we need to work up crew and equipment to a state of high efficiency, so sending us out on Pagolis patrols ticks everybody’s boxes, really.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ Mako said. ‘But, forgive me if this is a really dumb civilian question, but I couldn’t help noticing that nobody even seems to be suggesting that Zeus might take the squadron out to do a search of the Pagolis.’

  ‘Yes, sorry, that is a really civilian question.’ Buzz apologised with a grin, as there was a ripple of mirth. ‘The home squadron does not leave port, Mr Ireson, other than for scheduled exercises in which another squadron will come in to relieve them. Individual squadron ships may, in fact, be reassigned. Eventually, Zeus will be relieved from duty by the arrival of another carrier, and will go on a tour of duty to the home squadron of another world. Carriers like that will work their way around the central worlds over many years. But the function of the home squadron, the only function of the home squadron, is to protect that world. So no, they do not go off on other patrols, leaving the world undefended. It is the attendant ships that are sent off on patrols and flights to other worlds. That means ships that are attached to the home squadron but not part of the committed planetary defence force.

  ‘What you’re thinking of there, I think, are task force squadrons. They may be sent anywhere they’re needed. But they, you see, are assigned on a priority basis, on urgency of need. A request for Customs for yet another routine search of an area which is impossible to search thoroughly even if we used half the ships in the Fleet, well, let’s just say that that would not rate as a high priority in anybody’s book but Customs’. So, they get us. We will, of course, do the best we can, but if you are detecting a certain lack of urgency about it, that’s why.’

  ‘Ah,’ Mako said, sensing that the Minnow’s sympathies, really, were with the freighters rather than with Customs. ‘People have told me that the Pagolis is almost impossible to search,’ he observed.

  ‘Yes, that’s why it is so popular as a cache, besides its convenient location.’ Buzz confirmed. ‘The stars are so densely packed there that you have to slow right down, and there are so many blind spots that you can miss a ship going right past you. And we are talking, here, about more than three hundred solar systems, each of which has thousands of bodies capable of being used as a cache – planets, moons, asteroids, any one of which can have a few cargo crates tucked away on them. Unless you know exactly where they are or they’re putting out a homing signal, you could search for months, even in just one system, without finding them. And while you are in that system, you can’t see what’s happening in any of the others. All we can do is scatter micro sensors about in the areas we feel are most likely to have shipping passing through. As we patrol we’ll pull up data from the sensors we’ve left there before, hoping for some kind of clue that might lead us to something.’

  Mako sat chatting with him for some time longer, and then, seeing that Buzz had other work he wanted to do, went to see Martins about doing the food hygiene course so that he could help in the galley. Martins smiled, showed him how to access the course, and said he would be pleased to assist him with the practical once he’d completed the theory section.

  Mako settled in the wardroom to have a look at the course and discovered that it was official Fleet training that would give him a certificate in food hygiene. The thought of that made him grin, as that would certainly make an interesting addition to his CV, but the course looked reassuringly civilian-friendly. It was clearly designed to be worked on by individuals studying in their own time, with interactive modules and a final theory test that you had to sit under exam conditions before progressing to the half day of practical training. Mako thought he’d just have a look at the first module, and was still working on it when Martins turned up to get the wardroom ready for dinner.

  The following morning, he got to go ship visiting. It was just turned six when Dan Tarrance woke him with a call. They were, the Sub informed him, running alongside a Freightline ship which had invited him to breakfast as part of a ship-visiting exchange.

  Mako got up, feeling excited at the prospect of getting off the corvette even for half an hour. The Freightline Venturer 24 was another container ship, similar in style to the Colestar Eleven but a great deal friendlier. They had a crew of thirty nine and eight passengers aboard, and exchanged eighteen of their crew and all their passengers for a party of twenty from the corvette.

  It was really interesting, Mako found, just to see aboard the freighter. It was bigger inside than he’d been expecting. No space was wasted with corridors, but the long slender design of the ship and their access ways through areas of tech meant that you could walk much further without needing to go up and down ladders, giving a much greater sense of space. The catering wasn’t up to much and there was no fresh coffee, but they made up for that in the warmth of their welcome.

  It was only a brief excursion, but as he went back aboard the corvette and settled back to his food hygiene course, Mako felt that he was climbing out of the Telmar Dip now and looking forward to the rest of the patrol. He had set himself a personal goal of trying to get through the course that day so that he could help with serving breakfast
next morning. Working solidly through the theory part of the course saw him going to the command deck shortly after lunch to take the test. There, he made the interesting discovery that ‘exam conditions’ in the Fleet did not involve putting him into quiet isolation.

  ‘We expect people to take tests, in the Fleet, amidst all the usual distractions of shipboard life.’ Martine Fishe explained, seeing that he was a little startled by that. ‘Because you will need to remember and apply the training in those conditions, after all. If you needed to be sitting quietly with time to think and no distractions in order to remember things like safety procedures, the Fleet does not consider that you’ve really got them down.’

  In fact, the test seemed remarkably easy. It was just a straightforward check of the basic knowledge he’d acquired from the study modules, much of which he felt he could have passed on common sense anyway. This, he realised, was something which even the most clueless passenger could master. Even so, he felt a glow of pride when he passed the test with flying colours, heading off then to do the practical training with CPO Martins.

  So, next morning saw him working in the galley, getting up early and serving breakfast. Busy and feeling useful, enjoying cheerful banter with the crew, he really felt that he was part of things now. Though he was, later in the day, also called upon to help out with his prison inspector’s hat on.