His Majesty's Starship (35 page)

Windsor, Richard George Henry Louis Albert. Born Manchester, England, Europe, 03/04/2088. Married Serena Barbara Lovegrove-Phillipson 19/11/11. Children: James William Charles Arthur George (14/10/16); Louise Maria Amanda (22/02/18); Lauren Wanda Caroline (07/03/22). Declared King by Parliament of reconstituted United Kingdom, 05/06/19. Formal separation from wife: 16/09/31. Killed 24/05/49 in explosion on board
Sharman
. Probable cause of death: shock due to sudden depressurisation + asphyxiation.

Samad Loonat put the aide down and looked across the desk at Leroux.

“Good of you to include the boat, too,” he said. “I’ll really miss it.”

Leroux drummed his fingers on the desk. “You aren’t being helpful, Commander.”

“Well, what do you want? This-” Loonat thumped the aide “-seems to contain all the pertinent details. In fact, it contains a lot more than we could tell you.”

“The point is, Commander, we know hardly anything. What you’ve just seen is the sum total of our investigation into a possible act of at least sabotage, at worst high treason.”

“And we can help?”

“Perhaps. You were in radio contact with
Sharman
-”

“Wrong.
Sharman
was in radio contact with us. Automatic, handled entirely by the systems.
Ark Royal
will have logged it all, just like the systems on UK-1 did. Captain Gilmore will happily give you access to the ship’s log, if you ask. So ask! And let us go.”

Leroux looked at him and the wheels turned in his mind. The prince had said to let them go (was he still the prince? Leroux was reasonably certain he wouldn’t be king until he was crowned, but constitutional protocol had never struck him as important) if they hadn’t seen anything. Leroux conceded they had broken every record in getting the late king to UK-1, just in case some miracle could save him. But they had been in hold N17, and a large part of Leroux’s time recently had been spent making sure that That Did Not Happen, and this was the second time the two of them had gotten involved in affairs – indeed, aspects of the same affair – Leroux would rather they had not. And they had gained entry, in Leroux’s opinion, by singularly underhand methods.

But the question was, had they seen anything? Short of asking “did you see anything in hold N17?” he didn’t know how to find out.

“It’s procedure, Commander,” he said, trying to sound convincing and knowing he wasn’t. “Standard in even the most routine enquiries, and this is a very unroutine one. There’ve been murders on board before – muggings, crimes of passion – but this is different and we have to handle it carefully. There might have been something, some tiny detail so routine to you that you wouldn’t notice-”

“Oh, go round up the usual suspects.” Loonat sat back with his arms folded, gazing into the distance. Leroux had a feeling his cooperative period was over.

“There are no suspects and there were no witnesses, just you lot,” he said. He stood up. “I may want to talk to you two again.”

“Fine,” said Loonat, also standing. “We’ll be on
Ark Royal
.”

“No, I’ll have to ask you to remain on UK-1 for the moment.”

“Remain?” Loonat looked at him in surprise. “We’re still on watch.”

“I expect they’ll get by without you. Just remain. You have quarters on UK-1, don’t you?”

“Well, yes, but-”

“Then stay there. Good day.”

*

Peter still lived in shared quarters so Samad invited him back to the Loonat-Dereshev apartment in ‘C’ wheel – closer and more congenial. Their aides were still on
Ark Royal
; they had to stop off at a public terminal so Samad could send instructions ahead to the apartment to shut down storage mode and purge itself of preserving gas. While that was happening he contacted the ship and told them about Leroux. Gilmore was furious but powerless to help. More practically, Hannah said she would send over their uniforms and aides. Then they headed off to the apartment.

Samad came out of the kitchen with two coffees to find Peter browsing through the apartment’s wall terminal. “Having fun?” he said.

Peter half looked up, absorbed in the display. “Mind if I use this?”

“Feel free.” Samad put the coffee down next to him. “What are you doing?”

“One of the meteor lasers shot at
Sharman
. No witnesses, Mr Leroux said.”

“And?”

“He was wrong ...” Peter said. His voice trailed off and Samad recognised the signs: Peter had just found an interesting problem to tackle in the virtual world and the real world didn’t exist for him anymore.

“Access denied,” said the terminal. Peter looked up again.

“Where do you keep your override codes?”

“My what?” Samad would have laughed in other circumstances. “I’m just an engineer.”

Peter pulled a face. “Oh, yes. In that case I need my aide.”

“Well, it might be here by now. Would you like me to get it?”

“If you could,” Peter said seriously. “I’ll lay some groundwork here until you get back.”

“You want-” Samad said, amazed, but Peter was already absorbed again. “Sure. I’ll just mosey on down and pick our things up, hey?”

“Uh-huh ...” Peter murmured; a polite social cue to show he had heard someone say something, and that was all the attention he was giving it.

“It’s not as if there was any kind of disparity in our ranks, after all, is it?”

“Uh-huh ...”

“Do you have irony on Mars?”

No answer. Samad swigged his coffee down and left.

*

R.V. Krishnamurthy stepped onto the floor of
Shivaji
’s boat bay and ignored the honour guard of twenty NVN who promptly snapped to attention. He bore down on Secretary Ranjitsinhji like a bird of prey.

“We will speak in my stateroom,” he said, “now.”

Five minutes later, he said, “You blithering incompetent, Subhas.” The door was shut and two NVN stood on guard outside. “You inept dolt. You unqualified ass. What the hell went wrong?”

Ranjitsinhji barely blinked under the tirade. Krishnamurthy thought of his calm facade as a hologram, like those erected over badly worn statues to show them as they had once been: surely, under the false image, the man must be withering.

“My agent made a mistake,” he said.

“A mistake? A mistake? I wanted the prince killed and your agent assassinated his father! A head of state! Never do that, Subhas. Never, ever, ever. Heads of state are blackmailed, disgraced, overthrown, struck down by their own people with a secure force behind them. But to strike one down from outside ... madness! The enemy binds together in sympathy, everyone remembers the victim’s good points and none of his bad and, worst of all, the guard around the new head of state is tripled. To strike at James Windsor now will be nigh on impossible. Well?”

Ranjitsinhji bowed his head. “Excellency, my agent was possessed of a very literal frame of mind. He heard
Sharman
’s pilot refer to ‘His Highness’ and, knowing this to be the correct designation for Prince James, assumed the target to be on board.”

Krishnamurthy frowned. “You have actually managed to communicate with your agent since the attack?”

“No, Excellency, but we have a duplicate on board with us. The same data was fed to him and that was the conclusion he drew. He was surprised to learn that not all humans are aware of the correct forms of address for royalty.”

“You’ve got a dupli-... Your agent is an AI?”

“He was, Excellency.” Ranjitsinhji let a small, proud smile slip out. “Ostensibly a specialist in air conditioning. An entirely harmless model was introduced quite legally to UK-1 eight years ago, and since then it has gradually been upgraded, bit by bit. Its primary purpose was always the gathering of intelligence but it was ideally placed for this venture, too.”

Krishnamurthy had to be graceful. “That, Subhas, is almost – I say, almost – brilliant. A shame that its brilliance is entirely negated by your ghastly blunder.” Ranjitsinhji, who had been on the verge of letting his small smile of pride grow larger, flinched at the abrupt change of tone. Krishnamurthy was pleased to see it. His junior had bungled catastrophically and could not, in the course of this interview, be allowed to forget it. “What do you mean, was?” he added, as Ranjitsinhji’s interesting choice of tense came back to him.

“Naturally, it was ordered to self-destruct after the job was done, Excellency.”

“A most convenient form of assassin,” Krishnamurthy conceded with a nod. “Now you are going to tell me it was our only AI on board UK-1, are you not?”

“I am, Excellency,” said Ranjitsinhji, and Krishnamurthy could see the man was wondering how he knew.
Because it’s so consistent, Subhas. Because I know that once you have a good idea you want to implement it at once, confident that just because it is a good idea it needs no form of support or backup or redundancy. You don’t do things by halves, you do them by ones, which is just as bad.

“So,” Krishnamurthy said, “we had an undetectable assassin, ideally placed to strike the designated target; we gave him a suicide pill and a gun with one shot, and he missed and took the pill anyway. Useless, Subhas. Absolutely useless. Why didn’t you have your AI rewrite itself, say? Or rewrite another, to make it look like the other was the perpetrator? You just don’t think ahead, Subhas. All your eggs were in one basket. Never do that! Never again.”

At the word “again’, a subtle form of relief almost slipped out from beneath Ranjitsinhji’s mask. Ranjitsinhji now knew that this wasn’t the end of his career: if he could last out this audience, he would be back in what passed for Krishnamurthy’s favour.

“I shall apply myself personally to tidying up your mess, Subhas,” Krishnamurthy said. “Await further orders, and now leave me.”

Ranjitsinhji bowed his head again and put his hands together. “I thank you for your clemency in the face of my inexcusable ineptitude, Excellency,” he said.

“Go away.”

Amazingly, Ranjitsinhji continued to hold his ground. “Excellency, for my further elucidation, and although I am aware your plans are on a plane of complexity I can never hope to achieve in this lifetime, I must still ask one question.”

Intrigued, Krishnamurthy said, “go on.”

“The intended target was Prince James and yet, regardless of the fact that no head of state, as you have said, should be removed by outside elements, all logic indicates that if anyone should have been assassinated, it would have been in the best interests of the Confederation for that person to be King Richard. I have tried and tried, but I simply cannot see how the death of Prince James could have been advantageous to us.”

Krishnamurthy drew himself up. He could have sacked Ranjitsinhji there and then for blatant insubordination. But, sadly, it was necessary to explain things to the man. He had succeeded, against all the odds. He had won the bid for the Roving, and all the old fools back in Delhi would suddenly spot that Krishnamurthy was now incredibly powerful and would want some of that power for themselves. Krishnamurthy could not afford to have enemies in his own camp. He needed more than Ranjitsinhji’s obedience – he needed the man’s understanding and acceptance.

“You might have noticed we have to share our new-found power, Subhas,” he said, “and who would you rather share it with? A man with no heir, past middle age, and a wife and daughters who don’t want to know him? Or a man not yet at middle age, with a secure power base, all his life ahead of him and the reputation amongst his peers of the man who secured the deal for the Roving?”

He could see the coin dropping.

“That will be all, Subhas,” Krishnamurthy said. “Now, make yourself useful by monitoring as many of UK-1’s systems as you can. Use any method as long as it’s discreet. I want to know how much they know, how much they suspect and what they intend to do about it. I want to know everything. We will, we must retrieve something from this wreckage. Something, anything. Start now.”

- 25 -

25 May 2149

Midshipman Gilmore had heard of the Great Black Hole of UK-1 – the area in ‘N’ wheel so comprehensively classified that any information about it just got swallowed up. And now he was in there.

The king was dead, but life went on and the black armbands were the only concession to the feeling on board UK-1. Joel arrived at work for the start of his shift, as normal, only to discover that his work didn’t exist anymore. All the displays leading to his portion of flight control were dead, the connections severed. His work detail was instead sent down to the Great Black Hole where they were met outside a compartment by the Head of Security himself.

Mr Leroux stood with his back to the door marked. “You’re here at the request of Superluminary,” he said, prompting a delighted buzz of confirmed speculation from the middies. Everyone knew what was down here but no one was supposed to know. “And you all know damn well what’s it about,” Leroux added. “There’s some scut work they need doing. What you’re about to see is top secret.” The sour expression that the satirists loved so much was even sourer at the prospect of his beloved secrets becoming known to a wider audience. “You all work in a classified area anyway, so we’re minimising the spread of restricted information by bringing you here. Stepping through that door will be taken as acquiescence to the Security Act. You may leave now if you wish.”

Joel thought of how he had happily blabbed about his work to his father in the Captain’s Club, and cringed inside. His father was the great Captain Gilmore whose exploits were already the stuff of legend, so surely that was okay ... but Joel decided he would keep quiet about this.

And then they were inside. It was a large compartment and unhappy-looking Superluminary staff stood around a large cube, twice the height of an adult. Thick, high voltage power leads lay around it, all recently disconnected. Like Joel’s displays at work, all the instruments around the room were dead.

They were handed over to the mercy of the senior Super-el present. “The entire interior of this module is to be dismantled,” she said. “Floors, ceilings, partitions, bulkheads, everything.”

Joel looked around, taking in the cube and the size of the room, estimating the amount of work. It was going to be a long, hard day.