Gants snorted and shook his head but couldn’t quite hide the broad smile trying to break free on his face. That is until he remembered that the suspect may have just managed to get away.
He leaned over and barged into the team’s general push using his command override code. “This is taking too long,” he said with determination. “Technician McCriker, what are the odds that your device failed to neutralize the Senior Chief and, assuming he got away, what are his most likely egress points? I don’t want this man to get away because we were too busy fumbling around the access hatch to set up a proper perimeter!”
“Larry that,” said the Team Leader keeping McCriker at her job and detailing the other two members of his quad to each head to the two closest egress points as suggested by McCriker.
After saying that, Gants felt the urge to kick himself and detailed two more teams to join team three in searching for and detaining the chief and then sent Senior Chief Belfort’s bio-data over to Station Security and the customs and immigration check points for anyone attempting to leave the station with an arrest on sight notice.
“Hatch opening now,” said the Technician.
“Back away!” ordered Team Leader Three leveling his stunner at the hatch.
The image fritzed out once again as the team leader leaned forward and although it was clear the Team Leader was trying to report something all that came over the line was hashed up words and bits of static.
“Can we clean that up any? Maybe have Criker put in a booster signal?” Gants asked.
“We can have her try?” the tech with him said skeptically, “but it would be better if we could just get her to turn off the signal jammer at its source.”
Half a minute later, the jamming cut out and they got a good signal back.
“I’ve shut down the Senior Chief’s portable jammer on my own initiative,” reported the Team Three Technician. “I realize that in doing so I may have damaged key evidence in the Chief’s prosecution, however I felt that-”
“Enough of that,” Gants commanded, once again able to see through the team leader’s helmet-cam. After all, he couldn’t very well blame her for doing exactly what he’d already tried and failed to order her to do anyway. That would be the height of hypocrisy.
The Team Leader leaned forward and he could now see that McCriker’s stun grenade had worked without a hitch. Sprawled out, boots toward the door, in an ungainly heap lay Senior Chief Belfort.
“Looks like the Senior Chief collapsed within the maintenance hatch,” reported the Team Leader now that contact was reestablished, “he should wake up in another ten to twenty minutes.”
“Take the Chief into custody and escort him to the brig,” instructed Gants glad that he wouldn’t have to report a job half done and a man escaped to the Admiral. It was fortunate that the Armory guards he’d placed outside the personnel department on the off-chance that Chang or his confederates tried to run had flagged Chief Belfort as a suspicious character. It was even more fortunate that he’d followed up on their hunch and had a quad standing by while they tracked down the chief using the bead that the self-same pair of guards had placed on the Chief when he was going through their checkpoint.
Gants supposed it could be argued, in light of how the Chief tried running away as soon as someone came to scoop him up, that they should have held him in custody just on the basis of that suspicion. After all, if they were willing to go so far as to put an electronic bell on the man why didn’t they just scoop him up in the first place?
However, Gants disagreed. Before the Chief had run they’d possessed nothing but gut feeling and some minor supposition but now that he’d tried to flee from authority they could put the screws to him. Hopefully Belfort would be the key to unsealing Senior Lieutenant Chang’s reluctant jaw; it would be disappointing to find that the man had ‘just’ been involved in smuggling, drugs or illegal pornography on the side and bolted after seeing security all over the place arresting people, including his boss, but only time would tell.
****************************************************
Morgan Belfort groaned, his head aching like he’d just woke up from an all-night bender or hit with a livestock stun-prod and then he jolted upright in his bed realizing he had in fact been hit with a stunner. Security had lobbed a stun grenade just when he was about to make good his escape.
He gritted his teeth. He’d hoped to buffalo them into letting him make good his escape with a little crazy talk, and for a while it had seemed to work. Then the trigger-happy fools had hit him in the leg and he knew he had to get out of there fast. He’d made it as far as the access tunnel when they’d grenaded his ass and, now, here he was.
He lifted an arm to scratch his nose when his hand stopped abruptly, and he realized he had a set of magnetic cuffs keeping him tied to the bed.
Then, realizing he was awake, they came and hauled him off to an interrogation room where he was once again magnetized to the interview table and stuck there in his backless hospital gown with the cool-to-the-point-of-being-cold air-conditioning blowing up his backside.
A youngish Lieutenant strode into the room, looked him up and down, and then shook his head.
The Senior Chief immediately bridled. “I want a lawyer; I have rights!” Morgan Belfort demanded, shaking his magnetized wrists for emphasis.
“I think that would be an excellent idea,” said the Lieutenant with a nod.
“I’m going to sue you six ways from Sunday,” he blustered angrily.
“Yes, you are certainly going to need legal representation,” the Lieutenant agreed. “In fact, Fleet Legal has instructed me to ask if you have an updated will? Do you have such a will, Senior Chief?”
Morgan Belfort felt a sudden chill, and it had nothing to do with the air vent situated directly behind his chair.
“Nothing to say, Senior Chief Belfort?” Gants prompted. “Fleet Legal has instructed me to ask if you have a name of a private lawyer or legal firm, or if you intend to make use of fleet-assigned counsel?”
Morgan Belfort pressed his lips tightly together and stared at the Armory Lieutenant.
“Do you have a private firm you would like us to contact or not, Senior Chief?” prompted the Lieutenant.
“Hmph!” said Chief Belfort.
“Alright then,” the Armory Lieutenant said, pulling out a data slate and starting to tap away. After a minute, he put away his slate, “Now how about we stop pretending and get to business, Morgan? I can call you Morgan yes…or do you prefer Belfort?”
“You can’t trick me; I refuse to put my fate into the hands of some public defender you’re paying for!” Morgan Belfort snapped.
“I’m sorry we misled you, Senior Chief,” the Armory Lieutenant said earnestly, “but you aren’t currently facing an inquest and a trial—you’re facing the airlock. Hiring a lawyer for you was a courtesy in order that you could settle your estate onto any heirs or elderly parents you might have.”
Morgan Belfort’s eyes bulged. “That’s a lie! You can’t do that to me—I have rights,” he snapped, his voice sounding shaky with a mixture of anger and… fear. Then he rallied, “What’s the charge!”
“Charges, plural, Senior Chief,” the lieutenant, with a name tag Gants on it said, “starting with destruction of private property, resisting arrest, espionage, attempted espionage, desertion in the face of the enemy, and maybe even mutiny. Who knows? The day is young.”
“What enemy? We’re not at war.” The Senior Chief said firmly, “don’t try to buffalo me, lad. I’ve been in one navy or another for the better part of fifteen years. You can’t kid a kidder. There’s no way any of those charges will stick except the private property one and the arrest thing and those are hardly spacing offenses. Dishonorable discharge at absolute worst. Like I said: I have rights here!”
Lieutenant Gants brought out a satchel and placed it on the interview table. Reaching inside, he began pulling out objects. “Item one: false identity papers,” he said, puttin
g it on the table in front of the Senior Chief.
“Having a fake ID may be illegal but it’s hardly mutiny!” declared the Senior Chief.
“What I don’t get is why a senior spacer like yourself would resist arrest and attempt to flee the station within minutes of his boss being arrested for a crime Lieutenant Chang swears up and down he did not commit,” Gants said, looking at him steadily. “It also makes a man wonder just what exactly he’ll find when his tech team breaks the decidedly non-military encryption, or at least non-MSP encryption, on your tablet and in your workspace.”
Morgan Belfort was a man who knew when he’d been dealt a hand full of garbage and the other guy was pulling for an inside straight. In normal circumstances he’d fold and try to keep his losses limited, but with being tossed out an airlock on the table it was time to see if he could bluff or, if that wasn’t possible, fold with style. Either way, he was on a time limit. He had to cut a deal before their forensic specialists had enough time to backtrack him.
After all, he wasn’t incompetent; he'd worked hard to cover his tracks but he wouldn’t consider himself an electronic wizard.
“Look, you can talk to me or you can explain everything to the Admiral in person,” Lieutenant Gants said with an earnest expression.
“You do the best impression of a ‘good cop’ that I’ve seen in a long time, son,” Morgan Belfort said bitterly.
“Good cop?” the Lieutenant said brow wrinkling. “I’m just telling you the beloved Saint’s honest truth. You’d prefer me to the Little Admiral any day of the week.”
“The Little Admiral?” Chief Belfort drew himself back with surprise and then realized that it wasn’t that much of a surprise after all.
“The man himself—and, believe you me, one look from him would be more than enough to turn your knees to water,” Lieutenant Gants assured.
“He deals with droids and those gorilla people,” Morgan Belfort muttered and then shot the Lieutenant a sharp look.
“He’s interrogated them too, and if he can get an uplift to talk well…I wouldn’t give you much more credit than an ape man,” Gants shrugged.
Morgan Belfort shuddered and then remembered his life was on the line. They can only kill me once, he thought as his spine stiffened.
“Tall tales and the boogeyman in the scrub brush won’t scare me. I want a deal,” he said quickly.
“A deal? For what…your attempted mutiny?” the Lieutenant asked, looking incredibly stupid.
Morgan Belfort flushed. “I’m not a mutineer,” he exclaimed, “I want immunity!”
“Why do you want an immunity deal if you’re not guilty? What are you hiding?” Gants asked, his face turning much more serious and less stupid looking by the second.
“Listen, lad, there are a lot of reasons an innocent man might not want everyone under the sun to know his business,” the Senior Chief said, speaking quickly.
Gants' face hardened. “Look,” he said flatly, “you can either speak to me or wait until we break into your computer files and then you get to talk to the Little Admiral. That’s the only deal you can expect.”
Morgan Belfort was torn.
“Look let’s start with Lieutenant Chang's place in all this business and go from there,” Gants said.
“Listen Chang can’t give you all the details you want, and going through my computer’s not going to tell you everything. Get me an immunity deal, or at least take the airlock off the table, and I can show you where all the bodies are buried,” said the Senior Chief. “I’m not a criminal like Chang but, as a senior chief, I have a way of knowing more than I should.” He threw Chang under the bus, even though the other man was innocent, without so much as a qualm.
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” Gants said, standing up.
“Look, just relay it to the Admiral. I’m a small fish in a very big pond here,” Belfort said desperately, and then his eyes widened as he remembered something, “and you can tell him I know of a plot within the fleet. There’s people that don’t like the way he’s been cozying up to the machines and the monkey people. I can name names—you tell him that!”
Chapter 37: Conspiracy in the Lower Decks
“Well I think we can all agree that we’ve been more than patient,” Malcolm Sagittarius said a hard tone entering his voice for the first time before smoothing out, “but first I’d like to thank all of our new members for joining us. I realize that this is new to some of you but all of you are aware of the problem and hopefully realize that we have to do something about it before we’re all killed.”
“We’ve got machines and monkey boys running around everywhere, PO. We’ve got to do something about it,” Bee Bee said angrily.
“Remember you’re a petty officer yourself now, Bee Bee,” Malcolm said with a smile at his well timed support before turning to look at the rest of the men and women here. This time they were all meeting in a dark mess hall on one of the damaged cruisers still waiting for its turn in the repair yard.
“Darn tooting!” the gunnery chief said loudly.
“Does anyone disagree that we’ve been more than patient yet despite all the time we’ve given him the Vice Admiral does not seem ready in any way to throw over his droid lackeys and bring back to us a machine free spine?” Malcolm asked sweeping everyone in the crowd with his eyes.
He silently made a note when the senior petty officer with the formerly dripping nose looked down and away from him.
“We have to do something. But what?” asked a new man, a hard eyed junior lieutenant of middling years who’d joined both the fleet and its anti-machine conspiracy late.
“As I see it there are only three choices. We convince Vice Admiral Montagne to do what he should have always done from the beginning,” Malcolm said.
“Impossible,” the lieutenant shook his head, “the chain of command and most of the officers of this fleet won’t agree and we’re likely to be thrown into the brig if we try anything more than just asking.”
“Our second option is to force the situation. Wait until our ships are nearby the droids in Tracto and if enough of us are on the gun deck we could take over enough of the broadside to destroy the droid ships while their shields are down,” Malcolm said.
“That’s mutiny and we’d all hang after the Admiral got his hands on us,” replied the Lieutenant shaking his head and seeming to draw back, “you said there was a third option.”
“If Vice Admiral Montagne won’t do his job, he won’t listen to reason and will space the whole lot of us if we try to take matters into our own hands, then there’s only one thing left that we can do,” Malcolm said simply.
“And just what is that?” demanded the over-sized gunnery chief, “because as far as I can tell everything’s just been taken off the table.”
“No. All we have to do is make sure someone else is put in command of this fleet. Someone who will do the job and do it right,” said Malcolm.
“You mean kill the veteran’s precious Little Admiral,” the Lieutenant mocked, “another mutiny and one doomed to fail. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but most of the Lancers are Tracto-ans and they’d tear us to pieces within minutes if we so much as touched a hair on top of his head.”
Malcolm smiled confidently.
“Not all Tracto-ans. I know any number of them who don’t much care for the Admiral. But who said we have to kill the man?” he asked rolling his eyes, “who would take command of the fleet if he fell sick for instance.”
“I’m not sure…,” the Lieutenant hesitated, “one of the Commodore’s perhaps.”
“Who’s to say what such a man would do if thrust into temporary command,” asked Malcolm and looking around to gauge his audience and not seeing a lot more hesitation than he would have liked he added, “I’m not saying we get rid of the Vice Admiral I’m merely suggesting we ensure the droids are killed. Vice Admiral Montagne seems to have done a decent enough job stopping threats to this sector. The Imperial Reclamation Fleet did a lot more da
mage than I for one am comfortable with but the pirates are gone and we have a Border Alliance now.”
“I still don’t see how we could get one of the Commodore’s to go after the droids if the Little Admiral’s down in sickbay with the flux,” snorted one of the original cadre, the elderly junior petty officer who appeared from his uniform to have been busted back down to technician status.
“They might if it looked like the droids were the ones who had attacked us first. Or better yet had attacked the Admiral,” Malcolm mocked.
There was a long pause of silence and then rumblings of approval.
“You want to frame the droids,” the Lieutenant said with surprise and faint sound of admiration.
Malcolm shrugged.
“We all know they’re going to do something like this sooner or later anyway. I’m not suggesting we actually hurt the Vice Admiral,” Malcolm said with a mocking smile, “we just need to prod the people at the top into doing what they all should have done in the first place. Destroy the droids.”
“This is still technically mutiny, let’s make no bones about that,” said the Lieutenant, “and I’m not sure I’m willing to go that far… yet.”
“This isn’t mutiny against the Vice Admiral or the chain of command,” Malcolm hastened to assure them all, “we’re not mutineers; we’re anti-machine patriots. And before our loyalty to any one man, it is our duty to defend all of humanity from the machine plague. If we can figure out a way to convince Montagne to get rid of the droids and eventually the uplifts, even if all he does is exile them beyond the Rim, then I wholeheartedly support that. But if talk isn’t enough I say we need to take action. For ourselves and for our people. Man not Machine isn’t just a slogan they are words to live by.”
Heads slowly nodded.
“Taking action against the Admiral,” the Lieutenant shook his head, “I still don’t know how we could even get close enough to so much as slip a laxative into his coffee. Let alone convince him of a droid attack.”
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