Haze, page 27
“I’m not surprised. The Police Guard’s understaffed, too. I made a point of checking.”
“Well, the Repositories are practically a sacred place. No one can believe anyone would attack them. Even the Hoppers have archives there.”
“We’d better start believing it now. I’m going to borrow security personnel from the Chaonia and the Cotta for your planetside bodyguards. The Fleet will pay for their billet.”
“Thank you. Good god, I need bodyguards?”
“Not a pleasant thought, but let’s take no chances. There’s been too much sabotage and murder so far to assume you’ll be safe. I’m going to send Lieutenant Santreeza down with bodyguards too. My understanding is she has some sort of research she needs to do.”
“She does. We were discussing it earlier.”
“Good. I’ll let you know when you can go planetside. It should be soon.”
The Mansa Musa is not the only ship heading toward the Repositories. A private yacht came through the shunt ahead of it. Thanks to the shunt packet of legal subpoenas that Willox brought with him, Devit now has access to a good many records and transmits from the dockmaster’s office. Devit and Santreeza are still lingering in the galley when he receives a notification that the Lokiki has berthed down at the far end of the merchanter module.
The name strikes Devit as familiar. He concentrates briefly and brings up the memory. The Lokiki was the yacht berthed at Roon Docks. He sends a quick message to Evans, warning her that trouble might be disembarking at any moment.
“Hey, Jorja. Can you send video from the surveillance Eyes to my PL? The ones on a particular berth.”
“Easy.” She pauses to put in her earjack. “What’s the berth number?”
“Twenty-four M. I could use a notify whenever someone comes out of their sky tunnel too.”
“Sai.”
Some whispered words, a few clicks from her PL, and she smiles. “There you go.”
“Thanks. I was hoping … maybe we’ll get a chance to find somewhere a little more private.”
“Would it be safe?”
“Probably not. I—” He pauses, listening. Someone is coming fast down the corridor.
Dan starts to walk in, then hesitates in the doorway. “Oh hey, Pete, I don’t mean to interrupt.”
“It’s sai. Santreeza’s just giving me access to some surveillance data.” Dan sits down next to him. “Important meeting?”
“Sure was. They want me to find that stargate, and that’s going to be one hell of a job. The more I think about it, the harder it looks. Shit, I hope I can do it. We’ll be taking this ship, but the Chaonia’s coming too. The big guns.”
“If anyone can, you can.”
“That’s what the captain kind of said. Jeez.”
When it comes to piloting skills, Devit has never seen Dan anything less than overconfident. Seeing him so uncertain now brings home just how difficult the search is going to be.
“Ah come on, Pilot,” Santreeza says. “We’ll make sure you’ve got plenty of blue bars to see you through.”
Dan tries to smile and fails. Devit’s about to say something reassuring when his PL pings. He switches on the video. Two people are coming out of the Lokiki’s sky tunnel, the Mouse, as he thinks of her, and a man with dark hair. Both are wearing shabby clothes, but if they’re trying to look poor, the man’s made a big mistake by wearing a fancy blue and maroon neck scarf. She’s carrying her usual utility bag.
Dan leans over to take a look. “Him again?”
“You’ve seen him?”
“Yeah, he tried to hook up with me on Roon Dock. I turned him down.”
“Damn good thing you did. Here, let me notify Evans. She’ll know how to alert the Police Guard.” Devit shoves his chair back and gets up. “Let’s hope Willox has the right transmit saved, too.”
“The what?” Santreeza says.
“A subpoena for the police to execute. So they can pretend to look for contraband in that bag she’s carrying.”
“Well, if he doesn’t, I can get you one. Don’t ask me how.”
The captain’s voice comes crackling over the intraship comm. “Brennan, get up here! You have the bridge. If it looks like the dock is going to blow, break berth and get out of here.”
“Damn her!” Devit snaps. “She’s going off ship. I’d better go with her.”
On the way, Devit stops at the weapons locker and grabs something more efficient than a mere pulse gun. All of his functions are screaming “Crisis!”
As soon as she received Devit’s message, Evans contacted the police. By the time she makes them understand how urgent the situation is, Mata and Wang have rushed in and taken their stations.
The elevator disgorges Dan a moment or two later. “Devit’s on the way, ma’am. He’s arming. Santreeza’s hacking the dock security vids.”
On the bridge comm screen a view of the dock module snaps on just as he finishes. The elevator brings Santreeza up next.
“Good,” Evans says. “I’m heading out.”
As she hurries down the sky tunnel, she checks her pulse gun: fully charged. Two Police Guards are waiting at the outer airlock—both Human, both male. They introduce themselves as Y’moto and Sten.
“Did you get my transmits?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Sten says. “We’ve got more personnel on the job, too.”
“Good. My security chief’s on his way.”
She is telling them the little they know about the Mouse when Devit jogs out of the tunnel and joins them.
He acknowledges the Guardsmen with a nod. “They were heading toward the Shops module last I saw.”
“We got the vid you sent, Chief.” Sten taps his earjack. “We’ve got a tracker on them. Let’s go.”
Sten takes the lead as they jog down the long dock toward the open Shops module. As soon as they reach it, the emergency door behind them comes down to cut the suspects off from their yacht. No sirens wail, and the door slides into place smoothly and silently. Sten gestures for the stop.
“Two officers are on the far side of this module. They’re waiting, right out in the open, where that pair can see them. We’re hoping they’ll turn around and try to get back here. The other officers will follow.”
The ploy works.
“Intel coming in,” Sten says. “Here they come. Heading toward the berths.”
Evans puts herself and her function cluster on alert. She needs to pick up any signal from that utility bag as soon as possible.
“If she reaches for her bag,” Devit says to the officers, “we need to stop her. She could be triggering a device.”
“Got it. Here they come.”
Evans can just see the Mouse and her male companion walking fast through the scatter of shoppers in the module. She brings up her functions, focuses “search,” and picks up a familiar signal. Her “find” function reaches out and follows it back to its source.
“Device in the bag,” Evans says. “I’ve just turned it off.”
Mouse stops walking and grabs at her bag.
The police officers break into a run and head for her.
“Get your hands up, ma’am! Police search!”
The siren starts wailing. More officers are racing down from the far end. As they come, they shout at the civilians to either clear the module or take cover. Evans focuses on the device and finds the box function she’s looking for. Mouse slips her hand inside the bag just as Evans orders the device to perform a complete lockdown. She can see Mouse’s lips moving but can hear nothing in the general din. The woman’s face, however, radiates panic so clearly that Evans can assume she’s an amateur terrorist.
The man standing next to her has more self-control. He pulls something metal and narrow out of his shirt. Evans has just time enough to register that it’s a weapon before Devit grabs her with one hand and pulls her to one side. In the other hand he’s carrying a needle gun.
A wasp streaks by, or so it seems. The gunman’s chest explodes in a gush of blood, a swarm of flesh gobbets, and shreds of charred cloth. Mouse starts screaming, a high-pitched shriek over and over, as the force of the shot sprays blood onto her arm and face. For one ghastly moment the mangled corpse’s legs hold it upright. It pitches backward onto the floor just as the reinforcement police reach the scene.
One officer grabs the Mouse’s arms from behind. Y’moto snatches the bag and snaps the clip fastener off the strap. He grabs the bag and pulls it away. The Mouse’s screams turn to sobs. The signal stays dead. Evans lets out her breath in a long sigh of relief.
“Thank you, Devit.”
“Welcome, ma’am.”
Devit presses the safety lock on the needle gun, as calmly as if they were on a practice range. For a brief moment, Evans feels afraid of him, that he’d be so calm after killing a sapient in such a ghastly way. She herself is fighting the urge to vomit. She forces herself to focus on the present and turns to Officer Sten. “In that bag is a metal box that looks harmless. It isn’t. Tell your lab techs not to fool around with it until we’ve found the explosives it was meant to activate.”
“Yes, ma’am.” In the general uproar of sirens and panic, Sten claps a hand over his earjack to listen. “Message incoming. Huh, why didn’t they just sign a confession and save us the trouble? Ma’am, the Lokiki’s broken berth. She’s heading out.”
The vidscreen image splits. One half stays on the dock with Evans; the other shows the Lokiki edging away from its abandoned berth.
Dan gets up from his bridge station to catch Wang’s attention. “Get ready to follow them.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Hey, Dan!” Lod swivels his chair around. “We don’t know if they’re armed, but I bet they are.”
“We’re not going to confront them. We’re going to follow at a safe distance. I’m betting they’re running for that stargate. I want another track.”
“Got it.” Wang turns back to her station. “Activating thruster prelims now.”
“Bringing guns online just in case.”
“PrimeOne, put a trace lock on that ship,” Santreeza says.
On the screen, the Lokiki’s turning in place to bring its fancy streamlined nose pointing starward. It travels slowly as it opens a safe distance between itself and the docks.
“Setting up our exit now.” Dan is operating through his earjack. He has no time to meld. “Orbit pattern is—oh Lord Jessy crap—they’re heading straight out!”
The yacht fires its thrusters full power. In a flood of bluish plasma it leaps forward, straight forward, scorning the long spiral out of the gravity well. The dock shakes as the shock wave hits, then slowly calms.
“We’re not going to catch them,” Wang says. “We can’t fire our thrusters this close. Our level of power can’t take us straight out at that speed anyway. By the time we finish orbit exit, they’ll be out of the well. We don’t have even half the power they’ve gotta have.”
“Can they really pull this off?” Santreeza says.
“Sure looks like it. Of course, I’m only speaking as the engineer.”
Santreeza winces.
Onscreen the Lokiki’s image is growing rapidly smaller against the background of stars and the deep dark of space.
“You’re right, Wang,” Dan says. “No one’s arguing with you.”
Wang makes a small snorting noise and returns to her command screen.
“We’re staying at Go Ready until we get an all clear,” Dan says. “If Evans says the Mouse came here to activate some kind of bomb, then that’s why Mouse is here.”
“Varg!” Lod says. “It could be anywhere in the Repositories. They’re huge.”
“Sure are. Especially if the perps went planetside.”
“I doubt that,” Santreeza says. “You’d better be somebody very important if you want to hit dirt. I looked it up.”
“Anyone who owns a yacht like Lokiki is going to be important enough,” Dan says.
“True. I’ll—what in hell is that?”
On the vidscreen a ship is gliding into view, the bulbous nose first, then the long cylindrical body and finally the fan-shaped thruster unit at the end. Slowly, majestically, it turns its enormous gray nose, dotted with black gun turrets, toward the spacedock. As it glides forward to berth, its image fills the screen.
“That has to be the Mansa,” Dan says. “Holy shit!”
TWELVE
Evans has a headache. For the past solstandard hour she has been sitting in the small stuffy office of Captain Kaz Trem, CO of the Repository Police Guard Unit Seven, that is, the segment of the Guard assigned to Dock Seven, where the Mary is berthed and the terrorists were apprehended. Even though Evans knows that the police have to follow proper procedures, even though she believes wholeheartedly in proper procedures, she is furious.
“You have no right to take my security officer into custody,” she says for the third time. “He is under Fleet jurisdiction. He was following standing orders to protect my life.”
Kaz Trem’s left ear is twitching with nerves. The right ear has drooped flat. “Yes, ma’am, I know, ma’am. As soon as I can get in contact with the commissioner, we’ll straighten this out. His meeting is running over the scheduled time.”
“And I suppose you can’t start the search for sabotage devices until—”
“We have been over this already.”
“You could at least interrogate the real criminal. That woman who carried the signal device.”
“We’re trying. She refuses to answer, refuses to give her name. She’s so hysterical she can barely talk at all.”
Evans crosses her arms over her chest and leans back in the uncomfortable soyplast chair. Kaz Trem keeps pinging the site currently displayed on the office viewscreen. The words “Headquarters of the Offplanet Repository Commissioner” on a blue background have stayed the same for the past thirty-four solstandard minutes. How about an emergency access? Evans is about to suggest this out loud when her own inner transmit function alerts her to a message from Santreeza.
The Mansa has berthed. Captain Engji-Bonna asks if you need official assistance.
Damn right I do. Tell her to hurry.
Kaz Trem begins speaking on the intradock comm in Yarf, the Kar-Li main language. Evans can understand a few words, including the reassuring “general alert.” General search. Who can? Of course! Evans sees an idea, then a cluster of ideas, still tangled, of something that might just work.
“I’ve contacted every chief of police on every spacedock,” Trem says. “We have the authority to tell all sapients in our jurisdictions that we’re in an emergency. I simply cannot order a general evacuation to planetside.”
“I do appreciate your difficulty, but this is outrageous. We have got to start a search for IEDs and the signal devices ASAP.”
“We’re just very short on officers and deputies. Normally we don’t have this kind of violence on the dock array.”
“Yes, yes, I know. But we don’t know how many of the signal devices exist. There could be others on this dock and maybe other docks. The situation is time-critical.”
Kaz Trem is about to answer when voices out in the corridor start shouting, “No, ma’am, please, wait, you can’t go in there.” The door swings open, and Captain Engji-Bonna strides in, accompanied by two Fleet Marines. Evans salutes, and the Leptic woman returns it.
“Enid, thank god!” Evans says. “Good to see you.”
Bonna waves her crest. “Good to see you, too, Tana.” She turns to Kaz Trem. “I’m the designated captain-commander for the defense and recon force of the four Fleet ships currently here at dock. I’ve been informed we have a problem concerning the questionable detention of a Fleet warrant officer. When is your planned release time?”
“I have to wait for the commissioner to contact me.” Kaz Trem pauses to wipe her face on the back of one hand. Her pale-tan facial fur has started to shed. “The heart of this problem? The Repositories depend on political neutrality. We have to treat all sapients the same. The Rim Council’s not the only political entity on the shunt system. If I give your Fleetsman a special privilege, and the word gets out, the Hoppers in particular are going to object.”
“There are legal exceptions. The Fleet has exemptions when it’s offering military aid in defense of an installation.”
“Well, yes, but the commissioner—”
“Will, I’m sure, understand that. Now, if you insist on keeping CWO Devit in custody, we will simply withdraw all our defending vessels.” Bonna glances at Evans. “We can tow the Cotta if we have to.”
Kaz Trem wipes the shed fur she’s gathered onto her uniform’s black tunic. “Leaving us defenseless?”
“It’s the only way to put you in compliance with your own rules.”
Evans has a cold moment of wondering if Bonna really does have the authority she claims. What the hell. We can worry about that later.
Kaz Trem shuts her eyes and her lips move, perhaps in prayer to some deity. She opens them again, glances at the two heavily armed Marines, and clicks on the intrastation comm. “Bring Chief Devit to my office.” She turns to Evans. “We need to hold that weapon as evidence. I trust that’s sai with you?”
“Oh yes,” Evans says. “We have several more onboard should we need them.”
Kaz Trem returns to the comm. “Put the release forms up onscreen. His superior officer will need to sign off on the terms.”
“Excellent!” Evans says. “Now, about this search—”
“It’s not been done?” Bonna interrupts.
“Not yet. They’re short of personnel.”
“There are 200 Fleet Marines onboard.” Bonna turns to Kaz Trem. “All highly trained. I’ll give the order for them to deploy on dock, and we’ll get things started.”
“But the commissioner—”
“Will doubtless prefer our search to having the dock blown to pieces and hundreds of sapients killed. If he doesn’t,” Bonna pauses for effect, “too varg bad. The safety of Fleet personnel and Fleet ships is at stake. I have the authority to intervene.”
