by Peter Nealen
“So,” Rehenek said bitterly, “we failed.”
“Not yet,” Maruks said grimly, his mag boots clumping on the deck as he advanced to the edge of the conference table. “We certainly suffered a setback, but not failure.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Centurion Soon believes that the Challenger might have disabled the enemy ship’s power system before they could wipe their computer’s memory.”
Rehenek’s eyes lit up at that. He glanced at Horvaset, who looked hopeful. “You have the memory cells?” he asked eagerly.
“We do,” Soon replied. “Brother Granzow was quite thorough.”
“Before we start celebrating,” Scalas put in dryly, “it should be mentioned that the memory was encoded. Even Brother Granzow can’t make out how to crack it. Until we figure that out, it may as well be gibberish.”
Rehenek waved almost dismissively, rubbing his hands together. “Details, my friends,” he said. “Just having the drives themselves is a major coup, and makes this operation far more successful than I’d hoped.”
“What of Ktatra?” Maruks asked. He had set his helmet just above the surface of the table, where it floated, motionless, as he folded his arms.
“Neutralized, of course,” Rehenek said. “It was almost too easy. Far easier than I would have expected from our first visit. The pirates weren’t ready to mount any kind of coordinated defense, and were far more concerned with fleeing than fighting. And we’re pretty sure that the ships that did fight were robotic, which made it all the easier.” He suddenly flashed a triumphant grin. “Which is how we got our greatest prize.” He touched a key and spoke in Eastern Satevic.
A hatch at the far side of the room irised open. Two Valdekan soldiers in full green-and-black battlesuits, their KVS-174 powerguns held muzzle-high, clumped in, secured to the deck by mag boots, dragging a diminutive figure between them.
The pegeth who called herself the Boss was considerably less composed than she had been in her inner sanctum. Her fur was matted and ruffled, her eyes were sunken, and her ears were flicking nervously as she scanned the room. She twitched almost spasmodically when she looked at the Caractacan Brothers. She recognized that armor, and knew what it meant.
But she didn’t let on, not at first. “Please,” she whimpered, “I don’t know who you think I am, but there’s been a terrible mistake. I don’t know what’s going on! I’m not a criminal or one of your enemies! I’ve got nothing to do with whoever you were after on that station! I was just passing through!”
Rehenek glanced at Scalas with a smile, his arms folded. Scalas, for his part, just shook his head in disgust. The lie was awfully transparent, especially as he recognized the vicious little killer from her voice and markings alone.
“I’m sure you’re right,” Rehenek said. “We’re looking for a different pegeth kingpin. You just got captured by mistake because all pegeth look the same to humans, right?”
She flinched. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” she whined. She looked desperately around the room, noticeably avoiding looking directly at any of the Caractacans, as if she was afraid that the Brothers of the most relentless and dedicated military brotherhood in that part of the galaxy might be able to tell she was lying.
Scalas could, of course. Because apparently all humans looked alike to the Boss; otherwise she would have realized that Rehenek had been standing right in front of her only a few dozen hours before.
Maruks, however, wasn’t as certain. “Centurion?” he asked. “You were on Ktatra.”
“I was,” Scalas said, staring coldly at the Boss. “It’s her. No doubt about it. She probably hopes we forgot about the mounted head of a gordok on her wall, too.”
Her eyes suddenly focused on him, though she couldn’t have possibly recognized him; he and the men of First Squad had worn helmets the entire time they’d been around her.
“Tell me, ‘Boss,’” Rehenek put in, as she twitched to stare at him in turn. “Did Coref survive? He was a bit of a brute, but he seemed competent enough. I didn’t see him among the prisoners.”
“Who?” She was still trying to play her game through.
“Enough,” Scalas said, striding forward, his boots clumping loudly on the deck. “You know who we are?”
She seemed to shrink, which was a good trick for a being already as diminutive as a pegeth. She said nothing for a moment. “Yes.”
“Say it,” he growled.
“You are Caractacan Brotherhood,” she said, her voice low.
“And you know what that means.” It was not a question.
“Yes,” she replied, still not looking at him. She could expect justice, no more than that. The Caractacan Brotherhood was not known for being soft on pirates and marauders. Just, but not soft. She would not be executed out of hand nor tortured. But she would be tried and, if enough evidence was presented—which would include witnesses to her boasting about slavery, murder, and piracy—then she would be executed.
“No more lies then,” he said. “I was there in your back room, right next to him.” He pointed to Rehenek. “We know who you are. We know your markings, we know your voice, and, I presume, General-Regent Rehenek’s men dragged you off a ship that certainly wasn’t a simple passenger yacht.”
He’d seen pirates turn up the bluster even more, or simply get hard as the façade of helpless victim dropped. But not this pegeth. She seemed to shrink down even more as he spoke, her tiny eyes still focused on the deck just in front of his armored boots.
“It takes a particular kind of fool to think that anyone would believe that a helpless passerby would be found in or around Ktatra,” he said grimly. “Do not take us for fools.”
“Please,” she all but whispered. “I’ll tell you anything. Give you anything. I ran Ktatra, but I was never foolish enough to keep all my wealth here. I have stashes on a dozen worlds.” She looked up at Rehenek, her ears almost flat to her head, holding out her shackled hands, pleading. “I’ll give you all of it, every ounce, every credit, every bit of information. You’re trying to build an army, trying to wage a war! You can use it, all of it! It will make you almost unstoppable! Any world you want to conquer, there’s enough there to finance a campaign for years! Just…just don’t turn me over to them!” She pointed to the Caractacans.
“Tempting,” Rehenek said. There was a strange undertone in his voice, like he was seriously considering taking her up on her offer. “Very tempting indeed. I do need all the resources I can get. The war to come is even bigger than you can imagine.”
Scalas carefully kept himself from turning to glance at Rehenek. He knew the game being played. He just wasn’t sure if Rehenek was playing it, or playing a different game.
Rehenek might have declared his fast friendship, and there was certainly a common bond there. They had fought together, faced death side by side to clear the way for the Pride to get off Valdek. They had spent hours afterward aboard and in space, getting the Pride of Valdek back in repair to cross the interstellar gulfs, and had planned and talked on the way to their brief, risky reconnaissance of the Sparat system.
But much of that time had simply reminded him just what kind of stakes Rehenek was playing for, and highlighted the vein of reckless desperation and equally reckless hate that ran through the man. That combination of desperation and hatred could lead him to cross lines that shouldn’t be crossed.
But that was a discussion for another time. Certainly not in front of a captured pirate kingpin.
“But right now, what I need most is information,” Rehenek said, his voice going cold. “Tell me what I want to know, and I might put in a word for you with the Caractacan Brothers.” He smiled ferally. “After all, Ktatra has been their target for a long time. I wouldn’t want to rob them of their prize in its fullness.” The smile faded, his pale eyes turning to ice. “Try to lie to me again, and I won’t turn you over to them. I’ll keep you for the Fortunians.”
If a pegeth could blanch, that one would have. The Fortunians had developed a reputa
tion after a pirate fleet of mixed yeheri and humans had tried to raid one of their outer colonies. The fleet had been torn apart, and the survivors had been executed. But they didn’t die slowly, and the records of their demise had been sent to their homeworlds by courier missile, as well as every other major world that might have been a transit hub for the galactic underworld. It hadn’t been pretty.
No pirate fleet had dared enter Fortunian space since then.
“What do you want to know?” the Boss asked, in a very small voice.
“Everything you can tell me about the Sparatans,” Rehenek said coldly. He touched another key, and an image of the Unity cruiser, still docked inside Ktatra’s ring. “The ones who came in this ship.”
“They kept to themselves,” she said evasively. “They came, they paid their respects and their fee, and then they went about their business. They were hiring mercenaries, just like you. They got plenty of takers too. They were paying enough.”
“And you didn’t learn anything else about them?” Rehenek didn’t sound convinced. Horvaset, standing at his elbow, looked equally skeptical.
“Hard to believe,” Maruks said. “The de facto ruler of a pirate den like Ktatra…you had to have information networks to rival entire planetary governments. There’s no way you could maintain your grip otherwise.”
The pegeth didn’t look at him. She said something inaudible.
“I didn’t quite catch that,” Rehenek said. “Do I need to remind you of the cost of lying to me again?”
“They had good security,” she said.
Scalas watched her through narrowed eyes. “If you think that lying and withholding information is going to somehow give you leverage,” he said flatly, “you are sorely mistaken.”
Costigan snorted. “You’d think we hadn’t seen a thousand of her kind before. Desperate for any angle to hold off the final consequences of their actions, begging, pleading, never mind what they’d done to other people who’d begged and pleaded, those who had the chance at all.”
“This is a waste of time, sir,” Soon said, turning to Maruks. “Once we get the Unity’s memory cells decoded, we should have the intel that we need. And I doubt we can trust anything this particular pirate tells us either. She’s already demonstrated that she’s going to lie and dissemble as much as she can. I say we package her for transport back to the Sector Keep and concentrate on getting into those cells.”
“Wait!” the pegeth squeaked. It was a startling sound, given the generally fluid and urbane tones she’d used so far, even under duress. “You have memory cells to decode? I know just the one! He was on my ship! I know they captured him! He’s wanted for information theft, security breaches, and network fraud in ten systems! If anyone can get into those cells in short order, he can.” She stared at Rehenek, still unwilling to look at the stony faces of the Caractacan Centurions. “Please, won’t that be worth something?”
Rehenek just watched her for a long moment. Horvaset leaned in close and whispered something in his ear, and he nodded briefly, then looked at Maruks. “What do you think, Legate Maruks?”
“An outlaw coder could help,” Maruks acknowledged. “Brother Granzow is, admittedly, having some difficulty in trying to break the encryption.”
Rehenek nodded, then looked at the two soldiers who had brought the pegeth in. “Take her back down to the cells and have her point out her outlaw coder. Bring them both back up here. We have some work for him. Make it clear that he might earn some leniency that way.”
The outlaw coder was an ekuz. Small for his race, he was somewhat sickly looking. All three eyes were set in a pained squint, as if he wasn’t used to the light aboard the Pride of Valdek, and his intermediate limbs and his upper arms kept writhing and twisting together nervously. He really didn’t look happy to have been pointed out.
“I shouldn’t be lumped in with these pirates,” he whined. His Trade Cant was fluent and without the usual buzzing ekuz accent. “I never did anything violent. I have rights. It’s not fair that I’m on the run in the first place; information should be freed.”
“Then you should have no trouble with freeing some more information, then,” Maruks rumbled. The ekuz towered over the heavy-worlder Brother Legate, but he flinched back at the sight of the Caractacan Brotherhood armor. Just like the pegeth, he knew what it meant. “We have encoded memory cells that need to be decrypted.”
“For how much?” the outlaw coder blurted out. Scalas glanced at Costigan, and saw a similarly bemused look on his friend’s face.
Bold, isn’t he?
“For the preservation of your miserable hide,” Rehenek ground out. “I’m sure some of the worlds you stole secrets from would be quite interested in getting you turned over. I’m equally sure that some of them are rather less than liberal when it comes to punishing spies.”
“Were you a slave, coder?” Maruks asked mildly.
The ekuz blinked at him. “No.”
“Then you were here, on Ktatra, by your own free will,” Maruks continued.
“It’s a free galaxy,” the outlaw coder replied. “I can go where I want. It doesn’t make me a pirate.”
“And yet, you were doing business with pirates, weren’t you?” Maruks asked, raising his eyebrows a little. “Perhaps selling information that might lead to lucrative raids? Offering to obtain information that would identify and target certain people the pirates might want dead?”
Ekuz didn’t sweat, but the young coder’s tongue flicked out nervously, and his hand-wringing increased in its frenetic complexity. “You don’t have any proof.”
“That statement alone is practically an admission of guilt,” Maruks replied, his voice getting low and dangerous. “I’m sure that we can find something, particularly on the tablet that the boarders confiscated from you. We have some halfway decent coders, ourselves.”
Now the ekuz was visibly getting close to panic. His eyes kept flicking from weapon to weapon around the room. Clearly, he was far more comfortable around computers and information systems, and this wasn’t going quite as he’d imagined.
“They’d have to be as good as me to get into anything,” he said, trying a different tack. He suddenly seemed to remember who he was, and gained some confidence. “And if you want my help, then they must not be as good as me.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Maruks allowed. “But you’re forgetting something. Even if we can’t crack your tablet, that pegeth you were captured with claimed that you’re wanted. And she’s desperate to give up anything and anyone that might give her a chance to save herself. She’s facing a very short life, given what she’s done. I’m sure it wouldn’t take much to get her to identify you, along with whatever systems have bounties out on you. Of course, the Brotherhood does not collect bounties; the Code forbids us to pursue ‘pecuniary reward.’ But justice done is its own reward, is it not?”
The ekuz seemed to want to fold in on himself. “You’re Caractacans,” he said weakly. “You’re going to turn me in whatever I do.”
Maruks nodded gravely. “Justice does demand it. You have committed crimes, and you have to answer for them. However, if you help us, we might turn you over to those who are least likely to punish you more harshly. We might even urge them to some leniency, should you take steps to atone for what you’ve done by helping us.”
The ekuz kept wringing his hands as he looked around the room. Rehenek was watching him like a predator watching a small, frightened prey animal. The Caractacans were stern, but impassive.
“Shall we go get the pegeth?” Rehenek asked. “See what she can tell us about him?”
The coder slumped, his hands going still and falling limp at his sides. “No,” he said. “Let me see the memory cells. If it can be cracked, I’ll crack it.” He looked like he was about to collapse.
“A wise decision,” Maruks said. “And it will have bearing on your fate, I promise you.” He turned to Scalas. “Call Brother Granzow over. There is a great deal of work to be done.”
/> Chapter Fourteen
Scalas “stood” on the Pride of Valdek’s observation deck. He had shed his armor, and now wore his undress tunic and breeches, his sidearm belted at his side. His mag boots kept him fixed to the deck beneath him. He held a bulb of Clerean coffee in his hand as he gazed at the scene outside.
The infant star blazed in the distance, though its young, white-hot fury was dimmed down to a warm yellow by a combination of the rings of dust in the accretion disc still surrounding it and the window’s own polarization.
The accretion disc itself formed a massive wall to his right. The Pride of Valdek was oriented with its long axis along the ecliptic, which meant that “up” for Scalas was toward the edge of the thick ring of dust and rock. Starlight, sunlight, and the ephemeral blue-and-green glow of the nebula lit the disc eerily.
It sometimes surprised people to find observation decks on starships, with actual windows instead of viewscreens or holos. There were designers, particularly of warships, who continually tried to eschew external viewports of any kind, citing structural weaknesses in the hull. But those weaknesses never ended up being more important than the need for most sapients to be able to see the universe unaided, to stand in the light of the sun and stars, rather than shut up inside a tin can and reduced to staring at a screen.
Scalas sipped his coffee. He wasn’t alone on the observation deck; with the ekuz coder hard at work trying to crack the Unity’s memory cells, there were quite a few combat personnel aboard the fleet who had little to do. After the fights in the Regone system and here around Ktatra, most of the Brothers were taking advantage of the down time.
It felt like the first time in quite a while that he’d been able to simply be alone and think. He had, of course, seen to his Century, making sure that the squad sergeants had accounted for all their men and gear, and that his men were squared away and ready for the next action. Father Corinus had said Mass and heard Confessions as needed. But now, he was finally able to simply be at rest, if only for a little while.