Golliwog was fascinated. Someone had lost an entire battleship. If a battleship could disappear, maybe he could too, whispered a traitor thought. “Stolen?” he said.
Spinks shrugged. Yee sat down, tapping the table with a light pen, then glared hard at Golliwog. He knew this wasn’t about him, so he just stared back.
“If someone has her,” Yee said slowly, “and they were refitting her with materiel from any kind of cash or traded market, we’d know. You couldn’t hide that much movement of mil-spec equipment and parts. Even the black market leaves traces. So, deep in the back offices of Naval Oversight, we track correlations on several trends. Ship disappearances and excess yard capacity are two of those trends. Lost ships have lost cargoes, and the missing hulls themselves can be stripped for parts. Yard capacity could mean refits under way, possibly in bits and pieces.” Her pen cracked against the tabletop. “There’s a lot of excess yard capacity in Halfsummer. There’s a historical overage of shipping losses in the Front Royal sector in general. And just lately, one of the ships on the loss list seems to have made a reappearance here.” She waved the shattered barrel of the light pen at the hologram. “Her boat is currently being very publicly pursued, but not overhauled, by the Naval Reserves. Simultaneously drawing attention to the boat in question and emphasizing the Navy’s role. As well as our apparent ineffectiveness.”
Yee grinned. “We don’t like to look bad.”
“No, ma’am,” said Golliwog. He wondered who the poor bastards were on that boat, and if they knew how much trouble they were in.
‡
Yee and Spinks spent the next forty minutes going through an apparently endless round of minutiae regarding ship movements, ratios of parts and tool tonnage to shipping tonnage maintained, and other logistical detail. They seemed to be tapping Halfsummer’s nöosphere for local records, at a deeper level of detail than whatever edited summaries found their way into Naval Intelligence archives elsewhere in the Empire.
An ensign sidled through the briefing room hatch, saluted in a state of near-terminal nervousness. “Captain’s compliments, ma’am, and there’s a fast boat ready.”
“Has the engineering crew stripped our hull codes and transponders?”
“Ma’am, yes ma’am.”
Yee glanced at Spinks. “Keep at it, Jan. Tell me what I need to know when I check in. Golliwog, you’ve got five minutes to be dressed and ready, civvies and class three armament, boat deck. Go.”
Golliwog went.
‡
The boat deck was big, cold and empty. Golliwog could see his breath fogging. There was a massive hatch in the floor, and an overhead crane system folded up against the ceiling. The whole space was a great white agglomeration of machinery, workstations, and lockers, whispering with an echoing hush. It was confusing to the eye, too uniform in color and complex in form to be easily processed, except for the recognizable boats clamped into cradles around the margins of the boat deck – two cutters, a yawl and a runabout. One cradle was empty, and a slim, black boat sat on delicate runners atop the hatch.
He studied her. Golliwog didn’t recognize the hull type. Admittedly, identifying ships and boats by external observation was a rare skill – not often did a person get a good, clear view of the outside of a ship under way, and stationside you mostly saw hull curves or individual nacelles rather than entire shape.
This was a strange one, though. She was black, with no visible markings. The reaction thrusters and drive pods had a strange profile, to reduce the range at which they could be detected, he presumed. She bulged to the aft, which implied an oversized power plant. Fast, stealthy and undergunned, or perhaps completely unarmed.
He was the boat’s weapon system, of course.
Class three armament was only gear that would pass a civilian security scan. No power packs, no obvious blades. That left him with breakable plastics in his grooming kit, wire stiffeners in the lapels and boots of his shipsuit, and a number of useful cords woven into the seams. Still, over a dozen distinct weapons, plus his barehanded skills and his well-trained ingenuity.
In a way, Golliwog had always preferred working without energy weapons or kinetics. They were effective but graceless. Class three was personal.
The civvies went with the weapons profile. There was no hiding that he was large, and dangerous. So Golliwog went with a ballistic cloth shipsuit in a formal cut, with a carbon-leather skidracing jacket. With his bald head and height, it made him look like the dockside thug in any of a thousand virteo adventures.
No one truly threatening bothered to look this threatening. That was the theory, at least. Golliwog was unconvinced of its effectiveness. He’d never been on a civilian dock, not in his life. It would be a new experience.
Could a bione hide on a civilian dock?
He waited a while for Yee, almost fifteen minutes. Golliwog had made the deadline, it was up to her to set the next move.
I am a weapon, he thought. I await my trigger.
When she came, she was bright to the point of absurd. Yee had traded her uniform for a swirling, smooth fabric of a dozen or more colors, and a matching headdress. She looked like a walking explosion, rendered in textiles.
“Ma’am,” said Golliwog.
“The less said the better,” Yee growled. A hatch on the black boat folded open. “Get in. You’re driving.”
He got in. He drove.
‡
Menard: Halfsummer Solar Space
“Jenny’s Little Pearl is running for the asteroid belt, Chor Episcopos.”
Menard looked up from his contemplation of a data dump out of the Halfsummer nöosphere. “Wasn’t she doing that before?”
“Yes.” McNally grinned. “Looks like our Naval friend, Petrograd, told him the good news, then backed off to see what happens next. We’re not getting direct transmissions yet, but the information wavefront is close enough to adduce this from observation.”
“I think I know who Alma is. There’s a Public Safety watch commander in Gryphon Landing by that name. She’s got her fingers all over this. Pearl made a big mess bugging out dirtside. There’s been something approximating an abortive coup going on down there. The Imperial Resident has declared martial law.”
McNally snorted. “Over a boat launching?”
“Black Flag’s involved.” Just saying it gave him the chills. If the xenics were the hidden, maybe-real terror out there in the Deep Dark, the Black Flag were the all-too-real terror that sometimes came screaming into the light, guns blazing, fighting against rational order.
“I see. We’re chasing xenics, not terrorists, right, sir?”
“The Black Flag is no friend of the Church either, my son.”
“They’re hardly xenics, though.”
“Someone would have noticed.” Right? Menard sighed. Analyzing this sort of thing was his entire life’s work, and it still sometimes gave him a headache in short order. “How are we set to intercept Pearl?”
“Not before she makes the belt,” said McNally unhappily. “I’d much rather overhaul in open space.”
“And there’s never such a bunch of libertines and free-thinkers in any solar system as your average belter. They’re about as likely to listen to that Edict of ours as they are to sprout reaction jets and float away.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You think much about insurance, Ken?”
“Insurance, sir?”
“On shipping. Somewhere at the bottom of the current dustup here on Halfsummer there seems to be an insurance scam. Something that might well show up on Sister Pelias’ Kenilworth-Marsden diagrams. I’m trying to connect insurance scams to xenic activity.”
McNally chewed that over. Menard watched as the Lieutenant’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down a while. Finally: “Why in the universe would xenics want to run an insurance scam?”
“If I could answer that, I might have a piece of the truth.”
“With respect, Chor Episcopos, you need more sleep.”
; “The angel’s moved back into my cabin, Lieutenant. I think it wants me awake and thinking.”
“I’ll put on more coffee then, sir.”
Menard bowed his head in thanks, then while he was there decided to pray a while for wisdom.
Why had the angel focused on the missing ship?
‡
McNally and Kewitt tucked into a pair of steaks while Menard continued to work. He’d prayed long enough it felt like a nap, thankfully off his knees, though Menard experienced a vague muttering of guilt over that. There was sense of elusive thought in the air that he wanted to pin down before resting for real. The smell of food was bothering his stomach a little, especially the vile tangy sauce that Kewitt seemed compelled to squirt all over his meat.
“Did you know,” said Menard, trying a fact on for size, “that they have a blesséd huge shipyard in the belt here? For refitting ore trains and comet tugs, supposedly, but this market analysis from the University of Southport says it will take two generations to recoup capitalization, and will almost certainly be obsolete before that point.”
Kewitt paused between bites of gristly protein. “Big comets, Your Grace?”
“I am not My Grace,” Menard answered mildly. “You may call me Chor Episcopos if you wish to be formal, Chief.”
“He knows that.” McNally favored Kewitt with a sidelong glare. “Been listening to too many rocks. What do you make of it, sir?”
“I don’t make anything of it yet.” Menard considered nuking up a dinner for himself. “I just find it interesting.”
“Whose money?” asked Kewitt through another bite of steak.
Menard flicked a few screens along his dataslate. “Belt consortium. Small investors, big dreams.”
“Making a bid for independence,” said McNally. “Slip a few gunboats in the build line, buy off any inspectors or reporters that happen by. This system isn’t armed worth a da– Excuse me, Chor Episcopos. This is an ungunned system, that antique the Naval Reserve has flying around out there notwithstanding. They’re building hulls.”
“What about the Black Flag?” asked Menard, feeling a sick drop in his gut.
“Not likely,” McNally stated flatly. “Anarchists running an investment consortium? Seems odd to me.”
Kewitt again: “Embeddeds.”
A number of things slid into place in Menard’s head in that moment. He wasn’t sure what, or how, but he had that prickling feeling that came when an idea was materializing. Along with the bone chill. Am I close, Lord? “Embeddeds...”
McNally glanced from his CPO to the Chor Episcopos and back again. “Embeddeds?”
Menard waved him off. Think, think. The Embedded Hypothesis was the least credible of the non-lunatic theories about xenics. In fact, a lot of people considered it the reverse, the most credible of the lunatic theories.
But Embeddeds would care about an insurance scam. And Embeddeds might have some reason to build a shipyard.
“Chor Episcopos,” said McNally. “I’m sorry, sir, but this may affect my ship. What’s an Embedded?”
“It’s an extreme form of Internalism. Not academically significant, nor much in fashion among serious thinkers of my generation.” Menard laughed. “I strongly doubt it myself, but the Embedded Hypothesis might account for more of the facts than any other xenic theory. Though truth be told, I find it more likely the Black Flag is behind all this.”
“Extreme Internalism? Like my rockships, but more so?”
Kewitt nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“He’s right, as far as it goes.” Menard stood, found his way to the galley section tucked behind the massive coffee machine and began looking for a steak of his own. He called out over his shoulder: “Basically, the idea is that the xenics are among us, but indistinguishable from human beings. They might even be in positions of authority and trust, guiding our affairs to their own ends. Not just moving among our culture, but sitting at our desks, wearing our clothes. Possibly giving our orders.”
McNally snorted. “Respectfully sir, that’s ridiculous. Too many medical checks, for one.”
“Precisely. Consider this: we have hundreds of worlds’ worth of parallel evolution to analyze. There’s only so many morphologies to go around. Goodness, there’s only so many biochemistries to go around, at least in an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere with a carbon-based molecular ecology. Even so, there’s never been a genetic structure close enough to Earth-normal to fool even the most casual analysis. No Embedded xenic would ever make it through any role more complicated than farming on a newly-opened world. And that only seen from a distance, probably.”
“So where’s the non-lunatic part begin?”
Menard set his steak in the cooker, punched a few buttons, then turned to lean on the corner of the big brass coffee machine. “Well, Ken, there isn’t a non-lunatic part. Unless you’re willing to believe in mimics or doppelgangers or some kind of brain-eating virus. For which there has never been any evidence.”
“Skipper keeps a rock watch,” said Kewitt with a smile.
“Lots of people believe in lots of things,” McNally acknowledged, “but that one’s just silly on the face of it.”
“I agree, Lieutenant. But still, I’d like to talk to Ser Micah Albrecht over there in Jenny’s Little Pearl. He set off a nest of something. If nothing else, there’s a lot of money unaccounted for in this system. Someone built that shipyard for some reason.” He paused. “Tell me, Lieutenant, can you get me to Ser Albrecht’s destination any faster?”
“Yes,” said McNally. “I could stuff you into a fast packet and shoot you off. That would violate my orders to protect and secure you, and probably contravene your own instructions as well. You’d be completely vulnerable in transit, and St. Gaatha hours behind you once you arrived. And you wouldn’t enjoy the trip one bit, I assure you.”
“I’ll have the angel. I don’t think it would let me go alone even if I wanted to.”
McNally chewed the last of his steak. “There is that.”
‡
Albrecht: Halfsummer Solar Space, The Necklace
Ignoring the burning pain in his left wrist – the bandage and med-nano goop didn’t seem to be coping very well so far with newt saliva or whatever had gotten into him – Albrecht nuked up four kilos of that horrible chicken fried rice from the galley. There didn’t seem to be any suitable containers, so he tore a cushion off the number three crew station in the bridge and piled the steaming mess into the cover. “Boat, is the newt at the fore or aft end of the passage?”
“It is currently at the aft end.”
“Moving around or what?”
“It is currently stationary.”
Albrecht had flooded the passage with a decimeter’s depth of water a few hours earlier. It seemed to be the kindest thing to do, since the newt was an amphibian and he wasn’t trying to kill it at the moment.
“Cycle the forward hatch to that passage on my say-so. Don’t leave it open.” Albrecht didn’t want to find out the hard way how fast the damned thing could move. Steaming mess of food in the upholstery in his hand, Albrecht stood just outside the entrance to the portside passage. “Three, two, one, go!” The hatch slid open with a hiss, and Albrecht dumped the steaming rice over the coaming onto the floor beyond. “Close it already!” he shouted as a hundred kilos of enraged newt scuttled down the twenty-meter passageway toward him.
The thump echoed through the bulkhead.
He slid into the command station and called up a camera view of the newt’s passageway. It was investigating the rice. “Best I can do for you, buddy,” Albrecht told the image, then set the main screen back to tracking his trackers.
Petrograd still trailed him, keeping about a quarter light-second of separation. The new bogie, which his boat’s systems wanted to call St. Gaatha, would overhaul him a few hours after he hit The Necklace. Albrecht had laid in a course for Shorty’s Surprise, a medium-sized port inside the Necklace. He wondered how lost he could get in there.
Pearl also helpfully informed him of a new arrival to Halfsummer, something military and uninterested in advertising its identity that had a forty-one percent probability of making Shorty’s Surprise within eight hours of his own arrival.
“Where the hell are all these people coming from?”
While he was looking at the pitifully thin data on the new bogie, he noticed he had mail as well.
‡
To: Micah Albrecht/Jenny’s Little Pearl/In Transit
Fr: Lt. Alma Gorova/Public Safety/Gryphon Landing/Halfsummer
Re: Insurance Fraud
Ser Albrecht –
I would take it as a great personal favor if, in the time before one or another of your enemies finally succeeds in killing you and destroying the boat you have commandeered, you might take a few moments and write me a note outlining what you have learned about Jenny’s Diamond Bright and such fraud issues as you may have acquired first-hand knowledge of. While we are both clear on your attitudes toward law enforcement in particular and authority in general, your information may prove invaluable toward saving the lives of other spacers not so atavistically inclined as yourself. Consider it a public service.
Remain in health, so long as you are able.
– Lt. Gorova
‡
Such a humorist the watch commander was. Albrecht cursed under his breath for a while, offered up a vain prayer, then wrote out an explanation of his experiences to that point. All he wanted to do was leave – he didn’t give a damn about the Black Flag, insurance, the Navy or anything else. He just wanted out.
He made that very clear in his note, then stored it on a hotkey to squirt back dirtside in case things got terminally interesting before he made port at Shorty’s Surprise.