Karadon (Fourth Fleet Irregulars)

by S J MacDonald

  “We should have been told more about this,” he complained. “The Fleet never informs us properly about things even when we’re on joint operations.”

  Alex refrained from responding that the Fleet had learned the hard way that sharing too much information with Customs all too often meant that the operation collapsed because the people they were targeting found out about it. Instead he just asked the Customs officer how he liked his coffee.

  “Not too strong, double cream and three sweeteners,” said the captain.

  Alex provided it without comment and sat down with his own dark, cindar-spiced brew.

  “Do your ships need any supplies?” he enquired.

  Stefan Tenalt shook his head. Small as they were, and generally only used for very local patrols, Customs ships were in fact capable of making intersystem journeys and could stay out, fully crewed, for up to four months. This particular patrol had left Therik just a few days before Alex had arrived there with the Minnow. Alex knew, though, that they had resupplied here at Karadon just three weeks ago.

  “We were about to start heading back to Therik,” the captain said. “We’d noticed a big drop in traffic on the Karadon-Therik route and then we met up with a yacht that gave us a garbled account of what you’re doing here. They told us that you’re using this mysterious new tech to search for drugs, and even that you’re supposed to have blown up the Demella Enterprise.”

  “We did, yes,” Alex confirmed. “It was in a shocking state. We’ve got the skipper and three of the crew in our brig – the other two were released without charge. They were just kids who’d only been aboard a few days.”

  The Captain shook his head. Even if someone had only been working on the ship for half an hour, he’d still have arrested them. Theoretically, at least. In the eight years he’d been patrolling this sector, his squadron had only boarded and searched nineteen vessels, and of those, arrested only four. Three of those had been yachts with small quantities of drugs aboard. The one freighter seized had been arrested only on forensic evidence of residue left from their rapid destruction of a crate as the Customs shuttles approached. Perhaps it was because it was such a rare event for them that Customs made a point of arresting everyone aboard a ship, making no distinction between the obviously guilty and the self-evidently innocent. Stefan Tenalt would have said that it was not up to them to make that judgement, but a matter for the Prosecution Service and the courts. Conscious of the fact that von Strada’s approach had seized ten times more drugs in a week than he’d managed in eight years, however, he kept that opinion to himself.

  “Well, I’ll have to take your word for it that you’ve got authorisation to issue these amnesties,” he said. “And we will, of course, leave at once.”

  “Thank you,” Alex said. “And if you could please do so without giving any statements to the media…” As the Captain looked indignant again, Alex went on, “We are controlling information being given to the media very tightly. If you leave without making any comment to them at all we can work that into a mystery that will add to the tension on the station. So if you could please leave without explanation, as suddenly as you arrived, that would be very helpful.”

  The captain nodded slowly.

  “So it is just a show, then,” he surmised. “A big performance you’re putting on.”

  Alex thought about his crew and the way they’d worked to get this ship out of spacedocks and out here, operational, in an achievement that had even impressed Terrible Tennet. He thought about all the hours they’d spent in training, the dedication of the search teams and the wholehearted commitment of everyone aboard. He thought about the brilliant teams who’d cracked Karadon’s computers. He remembered the sight of their Delta shuttle spinning away from the Demella Enterprise with a trail of explosions.

  “Something like that,” he said.

  “I thought as much,” Captain Tenalt said, with some satisfaction at that. He’d found it hard to believe that the Fleet would have allowed a unit like the Fourth to exist for real. The Fleet was so very respectable, and the Fourth was anything but. Like Tom Sutherland and many others, Captain Tenalt believed that the Fleet had created the Fourth as a spin unit, deliberately making them as controversial and intimidating as they could get away with in order to give them an edge in just this kind of operation. Also like Tom Sutherland had before he’d come aboard the ship himself, Stefan Tenalt believed that the Fourth was actually just another perfectly ordinary Fleet ship. “You knew about the Might of Teranor before you even left port, didn’t you?” he asked.

  He was not the first person to suspect that, either. The Minnow and the container ship had actually left Chartsey within an hour of each other. You didn’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to regard that as something more than a coincidence. Inspector Mako Ireson had even mentioned in court that Commander Burroughs had drawn his attention to the Might of Teranor as the Minnow was completing its own preparations for launch, telling him about the ship’s route and destinations. The Fourth’s claim that they had had no knowledge at the time of any drugs cache or any involvement of the Might of Teranor in drug running was not believed by anyone.

  “And that business with the Lucinde,” Captain Tenalt had a derisory note in his voice, now, feeling that he’d uncovered the truth about the Fourth, “that was just so obviously set up.”

  Alex took a drink of his coffee.

  “I’m not at liberty to discuss the source of our information on the Might of Teranor seizure,” he said. “I can, however, tell you that the arrest of the Lucinde happened exactly as we reported it when we arrived at Therik. As far as we were concerned it was a perfectly routine passing encounter. Our new computer officer was holding the nightwatch. When we passed the Lucinde he made a routine call asking if they needed any assistance and offering the usual giftbox. He didn’t think anything of it when they answered “Don’t shoot, we surrender” because we have, frankly, all got used to that kind of humour from freighters since the Teranor seizure. Nobody thought it was anything but a joke, as evidenced by the fact that our watch officer sent over a gift box of some salad stuff and cakes, which one of our petty officers and a crewman took over by themselves.

  “Even when the Lucinde’s crew met them at the airlock with their hands in the air asking them not to shoot and saying that they’d show them where the drugs were, it took our crew a while to realise that they were serious. Once that was realised, of course, the watch officer woke me up, we came to alert and sent a proper boarding party over. But that is the truth, Captain. It was no kind of set up, just their own guilty consciences and fear at the sight of us coming up on them in the night with the same signal we’d sent the Teranor before we boarded it.”

  “Oh.” Captain Tenalt couldn’t help but feel that that was cheating, somehow. There was something not quite honourable in conning people with this scam. Then he thought about the crates of drugs in the Heron’s store, and conceded, “Well, if it works, I suppose, scaring people may be regarded as an acceptable strategy.”

  Alex did not even attempt to convince him that nobody had ever intended the Fourth to be any kind of bogey-man unit. He’d given up trying to get people to understand that, and it just wasn’t important enough for him to even try to convince the Customs officer. All that mattered was that he’d managed to get his cooperation, however ungracious and grudging. He was now working through that part of the Public Relations Module that had advised rewarding cooperation with a pleasant social manner and positive relationship building. It was beyond him to smile and joke with someone he disliked as much as he did Captain Tenalt, but he was at least managing to have a coffee with him and maintain a superficially social conversation.

  Inwardly, he was still seething. Captain Tenalt had not only come barging in here against orders, challenging Alex and demanding answers to questions he had no right to ask, but he’d even threatened to actively work against him, sabotaging his mission. The presence of those ships was already a complication that woul
d take a good deal of effort to resolve. Chokran Dayfield and the remaining members of the Karadon board would certainly have been woken up by now to be told that Customs ships had come into port. The media would be on that already by now, too, and as calls began buzzing ship to ship, the spacers would be wanting to know what was going on. Even if they got them out of the system right now, damage had already been done.

  The only thing Alex could do was to try to turn that around and use it to his advantage. So he did just that.

  “Best of luck with it,” Stefan Tenalt said, gruffly, shaking hands with him again once they’d finished their coffee.

  “Safe journey,” said Alex, politely, and nodded to Arie McKenna who’d come when called to see their visitor off the ship.

  As soon as she’d led him away, Alex went back to the command deck himself, answering Sam Barlow’s concerned look with a nod of reassurance.

  “They’re leaving,” he told him, and saw relief on the Lt’s face. “Captain Tenalt wanted to know what we’re up to, giving out indemnities.”

  Sam’s expression changed from relief to incredulity.

  “I hope you kicked his backside, sir!” He said, a feeling echoed in the faces and sounds of agreement from the command deck crew.

  “I was quite tempted,” Alex admitted, breaking into a little grin at that. “But I handled it as a PR exercise instead. Scoring a point, incidentally, on my microsteps target.”

  Sam and the nightwatch crew laughed at that. Alex’s use of the microsteps programme was one of the things that had infuriated Third Lord Admiral Jennar even before they’d become the Fourth. It was actually a standard Fleet method for supporting crew with problems, setting tiny achievable targets on the way to an ultimate goal. It was a “special measures” scheme, though, not intended to be used across the board. Alex had got permission to use it as a ship-wide policy after finding that he had more than fifty bullocks sent to the Minnow on special recommendation transfers. The thing that had really had Admiral Jennar and other diehard Old School traditionalists bursting their buttons, however, had been Alex’s decision not just to apply the scheme to all members of his crew, but to officers. He even had a microsteps target himself. The First Lord had suggested pretty strongly that he work on his media handling and public relations skills, and Alex made no secret of the fact that he was doing so. It was, he said, important to lead by example.

  “Even so, sir,” Sam observed, still amazed by the Customs officer busting in on their mission, “it’s totally out of order for them to come crashing our ops.” Suspicion came onto his face. “Is it possible that this Tenalt might be in with the drugs gang?”

  Alex regarded him tolerantly. Sam Barlow had handled a difficult situation with professionalism and grace. He’d had to come in as the new computer officer, stepping into Dan Tarrance’s shoes when he and everyone else knew that he wasn’t anywhere near as talented as his predecessor. Then his predecessor had come back to the ship as a consultant, not only much more able than Sam himself but much more popular with the crew, too. A lesser man than Sam might have felt undermined and got bossy in order to assert himself. Sam had just asked Dan to teach him what he could, handling the situation with confident good humour. He did, however, have a tendency to suspect convoluted conspiracy behind any coincidence or unusual incident. Alex had found that quite useful, as whatever Sam suspected was sure to be what the conspiracy theorists leapt to believing, too.

  “No,” he said. “It’s just a territorial thing. As far as he’s concerned, remember, we’re the ones muscling in on his stamping ground, and it doesn’t sit easily with a man like him to feel he’s being left out of the loop. Anyway, they’re going.” He nodded towards a screen that showed the Customs ships already signalling their intention to depart. Calls were flashing at them from the station, the media ships and from many of the other ships in port, but the Captain was as good as his word, at least, in departing without making any statements. “Return their salute,” Alex reminded the watch officer. He didn’t want any souring of the fragile relationship he’d achieved, there, and Customs would have every right to consider it an insult if their salute was not returned.

  “Oh – yes, sorry, sir,” Sam hastened to flash the answering courtesy as the Customs ships rose out of orbit. As he did so, Arie McKenna came on to the command deck and joined them at the table. Their own comms were already going berserk with all the calls coming in. The two media ships were lifting out of orbit, too, obviously intending to pursue the Customs patrol ships at least for a while, harassing them for a response.

  Alex watched this with some concern. He wouldn’t put it past Captain Tenalt to make some kind of statement to them once they were clear of the system. There were the other two Customs skippers to consider, too. They’d obviously want to know what had happened, why the order had been given to depart when they’d been in the system for less than a quarter of an hour. Incautious signals between them might be picked up by the media ships.

  As he watched, though, Alex saw that all three ships were accelerating fast, clearly intending to power up faster than the media ships could go and leave them behind.

  “Good man,” Alex said, giving credit where it was due, though inside he also added “and good riddance.” He looked at Sam as the Customs ships vanished off long range scopes. “Issue an all-ships,” he told him. “Tell them that Customs came to offer their assistance, which I declined so they’ve now returned to their patrol. The official line is that that was amicable and that I’ve now gone back to bed, nothing to be concerned about, okay?”

  “Sir,” Sam acknowledged, and having collected his thoughts, assumed a calm, mildly amused, reassuring manner and made that call.

  While he was doing so, Alex turned to Arie McKenna.

  “Is your mate on the Lexus calling you?” he asked.

  Arie gave him an amazed look. There were strong links between the Fleet and Merchant Service, with many ex-Fleet serving aboard freighters and freighter-born kids coming to serve in the Fleet, too. Many of the Heron’s officers and crew knew spacers amongst the horde of shipping at Karadon. Alex had given permission for private calls in off-duty time. He knew that every member of his crew understood what was at stake here, and trusted them.

  “Er…” Arie glanced at her wristcom and was surprised again, “Yes, sir!” She looked at him as if wondering whether the skipper had some strange power of extra-sensory perception.

  In fact it was not difficult to work out. The spacers had discovered very fast that they got no response from the Heron unless they were calling them on something official. The only exceptions were private calls between friends. Knowing someone who was mates with a member of the Heron’s crew was the only way to get inside information from the frigate. With something like this going down, everyone who was known to have a mate on the Heron would have been woken up by now and told to call them.

  “Good,” Alex said. “Give it five minutes, then return that call, all right? Tell them that you saw Captain Tenalt aboard, and off the ship again. You can tell them that I was furious at him coming into port against orders and that I put a rocket up his backside. Make a joke of it but make it clear he had no right to be here and I sent him off with his tail between his legs, understood?”

  “Yes sir!” Arie had no issue with being asked to disseminate information that way, even if she’d been asked to lie to her friend about what had happened. The image of Annabella Tokford lying dead in the street had been burned into her consciousness. Somewhere in the League, right now, a kid just like her would be taking a pretty rainbow-coloured capsule someone gave them at a party. It was instantly addictive from the first hit. Unless you were one of the very few who got treatment and broke free of it, the average life expectancy from that first hit was under two years. Arie would go a lot further than lying to a friend to save even one person from that. As it was, she’d seen the almighty umbrage with which Captain Tenalt had come aboard and his subdued manner as he left. However the skippe
r had achieved that, he certainly had sent him packing. “May I make the call in my quarters, sir?” Arie asked, and explained, “Tissa – my friend – would be surprised if I was calling her from the command deck.”

  Alex nodded. “I would like to see the call afterwards, though,” he said.

  “Yes sir.” Arie acknowledged, and at the skipper’s nod, went off looking purposeful.

  Sam, by then, had finished reassuring the freighter crews that there was nothing to worry about, and had called up TNN’s coverage, grinning as he saw that his “all ships” call was already going out on air. A journalist had managed to catch footage of Chokran Dayfield leaving his quarters, too. As he made his way from his apartment to the nearest g-porter, the Customs ships had just arrived.

  For the first time in days, Chokran Dayfield looked positive and energised, a light of sudden hope in his face. The Customs patrol was a regular visitor to Karadon. Captain Tenalt was a familiar face, a known quantity. They would be able to do business with him. Chokran Dayfield also believed that the Captain should outrank von Strada. If that was the case, they could get out of this nightmare and start getting things back to normal.

  By now, he would have seen the Customs ships departing. Even if he had too much self control to howl with anguish, he would certainly want to. The media were already mobbing as close to the Karadon boardroom as they were allowed, demanding a statement.

  They did not have to wait for long, though it was not Chokran Dayfield who came out to talk to them. This was no formal press-call at the media room, just Durban Jorgensen striding out of the boardroom, spitting mad and using such language that TNN’s automatic bleep machine cut in.

  “The bleep!” he raged. “That was blatantly deliberate! The bleep are working this so we never get any more than three hours sleep! Sleep deprivation is a violation of basic bleep human rights! It says so in the bleep Treaty of Canelon! This is an absolute bleep outrage and ISiS Corps will not bleep stand for it!”