Mission Zero (Fourth Fleet Irregulars) (32 page)

In fact, it was so smooth that if he’d had his eyes closed, he would not have been able to tell that they were doing anything extraordinary.  There was only one moment when a blue-white bolt spat out of one of their guns.  Later, they would show him on records, slowed down immensely, the dirty ice of a cometary nucleus, some 2.3 km across, looming up ahead of them.  Dan Tarrance took it out with a single perfectly placed shot.  The high-powered laser bolt vaporised it instantly, scattering the gas so far and wide that the impact on their hull was not even detectable to those aboard. 

At the time, Mako was far more concerned by the fact that they appeared to be diving straight into the star.  Even when they swung into orbit around it, they seemed terrifyingly close to it.  It dwarfed them.  All the sensors on that side of the ship were just blinded anyway by heat and light, but they seemed to be so close to it that Mako felt a solar flare might engulf them at any moment.

They were whipping around the star at a terrifying rate, too.  For reasons incomprehensible to Mako, once they were established in their orbit they actually speeded up, accelerating to L10 and whipping around the star once every 1.8 seconds.  It was not the slightest bit reassuring, either, to hear the skipper give orders for the ship to go into a slow spin, rotating three hundred and sixty degrees every eighteen seconds, so that they span around once during the course of ten orbits.  Just looking at visuals made him feel dizzy even
before
they started spinning.

‘Here.’  Buzz saw his bewilderment and took the time to show him what they were doing.  ‘You’re better looking at heatscan, really.’  He put a simplified model of the system on screen for Mako and pointed out to him the little point of light that represented the ship.  It looked much calmer on that scale, the little point of light zipping round and round the star.  ‘We’re in a clear zone, here,’ Buzz explained.  ‘Between the star and the first band of planetismals.  We still have to look out, of course, for planetismals, meteors and comets that may be knocked into star-dive paths, but we will have ample time to either dodge or take them out.  We have, as you see, a very detailed view of the system from here, and can track objects down to a metre across right out to the edge of the gaseous zone.   

‘This is the container.  We get clear view on it, with this orbit, for 0.4 seconds of each rotation, so we’ll be able to see if a shuttle comes into the system and approaches it.  But it is very unlikely that they will be able to see us, because our heatscan signature is masked by the star being right behind us.  We’re
just
within the circle starship scopes lay over stars, you see, in the blind spot.  So unless they suspect we’re here and make an active search, they won’t see us.  We’re rotating every ten orbits to distribute the heat evenly around our hull.  We’re well within safety tolerance, don’t worry about that, but it isn’t kind to a ship to roast one side and freeze the other.  It has a tendency to make them creak, so by rotating as we are, we maintain even hull temperature.’

Mako looked at him a little anxiously.  ‘It
is
safe, though?’

Buzz looked compassionately at him, though he couldn’t help but grin, too.  ‘Do you seriously think that the skipper would have done it if it wasn’t?’ he queried.  ‘Or that I and the other officers would have allowed it if he was putting the ship at risk?’

‘Well, no, not really,’ Mako admitted.  ‘But it’s just, you know, not really understanding what’s going on, and we do seem
very
close.  Someone said something about hull temperatures of more than eight hundred degrees too, which doesn’t sound good.’

Buzz chuckled.  ‘Warship hulls can take twelve thousand degrees, easily,’ he assured him.  ‘That’s why we’re so heavy, for our size.  Something like a container freighter is
massively
bigger than a warship of the same mass and engine power, because it has a different kind of hull entirely.  Freighters like that have what’s called a ‘skin’ hull, a thin coating of duralloy over layers of allusteel and insulating material.  Warships, on the other hand, are triple hulled with very heavy duralloy layers interspersed with insulation and forcefield tech.  I’m not allowed to tell you exactly how thick our hulls are because that is something that the Fleet does keep classified, but I can tell you that the publicly acknowledged resilience of this class of starship is twelve thousand degrees of heat.  In reality, we could take a lot more.  So eight hundred?  Honestly, not something you need to worry about.  In a few minutes, when we’ve completed full diagnostics, the skipper will give orders to stand down from stations and we’ll all be able to get out of our suits, everything back to normal.’

He was right about that, though the skipper also gave orders for the ship to go to full watch protocols.  Mako was quite pleased to find himself clued up enough to make sense of that without anyone needing to explain it to him.  It meant that they would no longer be working on the Minnow’s usual system that had half the watch crew on call so that they could do other training, but would have full watch on duty all the time.

He had learned a lot more by the time he’d had coffee and toast on the mess deck.  The crew were buzzing with this now and very keen to enlighten him.  Though it did, admittedly, take some time for Mako to get his head around the fact that they were liable to find themselves stymied by Fleet regulations, here.

‘The rules on this are
absolute
,’ Ali Barfield told him, with complete agreement from everyone around him.  ‘The skipper is not allowed to send more than a third of the ship’s company on boarding operations, right?’

Mako looked startled.  ‘I thought that was just for shoreleave,’ he admitted, and was told rapidly from many directions that no, it was for anything.  While the ship was superlight, no more than a third of the crew were allowed to be away at any given time, and that included boarding parties and even rescue missions.

‘Tell him about the Empress of Flancer,’ a crewman prompted, and Ali obligingly did so.

‘The Empress of Flancer is one of those ‘awful warning’ things they make all of us learn about,’ he informed the inspector,  ‘and drill into officers and skippers, especially.  It was about twenty years ago… nineteen,’ he corrected, with an acknowledging look to a better-informed shipmate who’d murmured the information.  ‘The Empress of Flancer was a liner, see.  Old, under-crewed and
very
sloppy.  They were in the habit of launching without shutting down all systems outside the passenger pod because it took so long to get them all up and running again and passengers complained at not being able to go to their cabins. 

‘So they were playing the odds with that and one day their luck ran out.  Their systems took a massive power surge with explosions and fires breaking out all over the ship.  Luckily for them the Panther was just heading into port and responded to their distress signal.  That’s a frigate,’ he added, for the civilian.  ‘Crew complement of 184.  Under Fleet regs, they were only allowed to send sixty one people to assist the Empress, including four specified officers.  In fact, they sent more than a hundred, including seven of their nine officers.  One of them was the engineer, who is never supposed to go on off-ship operations at all.  They managed to save the Empress and got the passengers off in a controlled evacuation.  None of the Fleet personnel were injured.  It was entirely acknowledged that by their actions, they had saved more than six hundred lives. 

‘So, did they get medals?  No, they did not.  The skipper, exec and engineer were court martialled and dismissed the Fleet.  All the other officers and petty officers involved had ‘no further promotion’ bars put on their files and all the ratings got official censures on their records.  Pulling it off, you see, is
never
accepted by the Fleet as an excuse for busting the rules. 

‘And you have to understand why, okay?  It’s not because they’re inhumane or unfeeling.  It’s because a warship always has to prioritise their primary purpose, to protect our worlds.  To put it bluntly, if an enemy knows that the sight of a liner in distress will cause you to send half your crew away on rescue ops, how easy would it be for them to engineer just that situation, effectively disabling your ship before they attack?  A warship must always have sufficient officers and crew aboard to fight the ship.  So while it was humanitarian and heroic of them to go to the aid of the liner, their doing so left a planet without the protection they’re entitled to, see?’

‘And it’s no good,’ another crewman put in, flourishing a piece of toast, ‘saying, oh, but the Marfikians aren’t going to attack our worlds, because they could, you know, at any time.  So we
always
have to be ready – every day, every hour, every minute, alert to that as a real possibility.’

‘But if they hadn’t responded as they did, would people have died?’  Mako asked.

‘Possibly,’ said Ali, with a little shrug.  ‘But you can’t play that ‘the end justifies the means’ defence, see, not in the Big Three.  Those are the three regs which no skipper is allowed to violate on any justification.  They are, one, that you never, ever, take your ship within detonation range of a dephasing ship.  Two, you never take your ship into a forbidden zone, not even if you can see the ship in distress just across the border of it.  And three, you never under any circumstances send so many of your officers and crew away that your ship is effectively disabled and unable to fight. 

‘Any skipper who breaks one of those knows that, even if they pull it off, they are going down.  Any officers who support them in it have to know they’re going down with them, too.  Don’t worry, though.  That isn’t going to happen here.  The skipper is rock solid on command protocols, so whatever we do will have to be within those rules, see?’

Mako did see.  It made him uncomfortable to think that a Fleet ship would hold off from providing help to a ship in distress, but he did see that it was necessary for them to maintain their own ability to fight if need be.  This meant that any boarding party could only consist of the Exec, supported by the Sub and up to twenty eight members of the crew.

‘And that’s not enough to take control of a container ship?’  Mako queried, which made them laugh.

‘Well, it depends, doesn’t it?’  Ali observed.  ‘If they’re surrendering, compliant, lined up by the airlock with their hands up, then sure.  If, on the other hand, they would prefer
not
to spend the next twenty years in prison and are prepared to make a fight of it, and if they’ve got weapons on board…’ he rocked his hand back and forth and grimaced expressively.  ‘I wouldn’t fancy those odds, myself,’ he admitted, frankly.  ‘Would you?’

Mako thought about the container ship he’d been aboard, how big it had been inside, and how massive the hatches had been.  He thought about heavily armed, desperate drug runners who knew every centimetre of that ship, and what lengths they might go in trying to escape the law.

‘No,’ he admitted.  ‘But what kind of people are we talking about, here?  Who’s
behind
something this huge?’

The words ‘drug lords’ came from several directions and, over a rather confusing few minutes, Mako had a rapid education in the realities of the situation on Dortmell. 

He’d known, naturally, that Dortmell was the source of many illegal drugs that found their way onto the streets of other League worlds.  Pharmaceutical manufacturing was, after all, their major industry and legitimate export.  It was entirely possible that the drugs they had found had been manufactured and sold by Pharmand legally, as DPC was used as an ingredient in some prescription drugs.  This particular shipment might well have been bought by ‘shipping agents’ and manifested at Dortmell as if being sold to drugs manufacturers on other worlds.  The reality, clearly, was that it had been brought here and cached, to be taken on and sold to drug dealers who would process it into street drugs. 

‘And the people behind that,’ Ali told him, ‘are the drug lords on Dortmell.  They are down and dirty, serious gangsters.  Corruption is rife at every level on Dortmell.  Where bribery won’t work, they don’t hesitate to use intimidation or even murder.  It says it all, I think, that they have a saying there – if something is obviously doomed, they say it has the life expectancy of an honest cop. 

‘That goes ditto and double for Customs.  Customs on Dortmell are so bent, they’re legendary.  They’ll let you take anything through if you drop a few bucks in their hand and only kick up if they feel that they’re not getting their fair cut.  There’s no will at government level to do anything about that, either.  Frankly, the rival political parties there are far more interested in scoring cheap points off one another than doing anything about the mess their world is in.  Drugs, vice, corruption, extortion, they’re all being run by these underworld gangs who are effectively controlling the planet.

It will almost certainly be one of them behind this shipment of drugs.  Whether anyone at Pharmand was in on it would be hard to say and probably impossible to prove, but it’s almost certainly a shipment being sent by one of the drug lords there to a major customer.  It will have been brought here from Dortmell, possibly by two or even more ships, shunting it about to cover their trail.’

‘And now another ship will pick it up and take it to Chartsey?’  Mako queried.  ‘But how can they get away with that?  Aren’t containers inspected?’

‘On a random spot-check basis, yes,’ said Hali, as people looked pityingly at him.  ‘But even one container ship comes in with more than a thousand containers.  Several container ships arrive at Chartsey every day,
and
cargo hauls, not to mention all the crate-freighters coming and going every day too.  You’d need an enormous staff and facilities to inspect even a fraction of them, which Customs doesn’t have.  The ship that takes this in will, for sure, have perfectly genuine manifest paperwork for a container of virtually identical properties, say of tetracitrine or cindar, which is what we thought it was at first.  It will pass automated inspection, see, which is just a mass-scanner being put on the outside of the container to confirm that its contents match what is described on the manifest.  Then, once it gets past Customs, it can just be loaded onto airtrucks and taken off to some warehouse or other.’