Mission Zero (Fourth Fleet Irregulars) (41 page)

He wasn’t really afraid of that, any more than he was afraid that his food was drugged or that the crew were going to abuse him or any of the other allegations he made several times a day.  What he was doing, very obviously, was laying down the basis for his lawyers to attempt to get the charges against him dismissed on grounds of misconduct on the part of the Minnow’s crew.  If he could lay the basis for a very large compensation claim into the bargain, so much the better.

He did not take the news well, anyway, that he was going to have to stay aboard Minnow for the rest of the trip. 

‘I’ll go mad in here,’ he said, with wholly unconvincing hammed up melodrama as he appealed to Mako.  ‘For pity’s sake, don’t let them do this to me.’

Mako felt like he needed a shower as they left the airlock.  The Teranor’s skipper had a ripe body odour, which reasserted itself even after showering.  Any time spent in the airlock cell with him was unpleasant.  Psychologically, too, his greasy, whining personality made you feel in need of a citrus scrub after being in conversation with him.  There were times when Mako almost preferred the cold menace of Rikado Marsh to the desperate squirming of the contemptible Marlon Steppard.

Almost.  His daily encounters with Rikado Marsh always left him feeling unnerved.  The gunman had made no statement at all.  He was, superficially at least, compliant and smoothly courteous but he had the eyes of a snake and watched constantly, waiting any opportunity to strike.

They hadn’t given him any such opportunity.  Mako’s advice and assistance had ensured that he was never able to become a threat to anyone on the ship.  His presence was a constant, disturbing influence, though, like a smell you couldn’t quite track down or ignore.  He merely nodded when informed that he would be remaining aboard the corvette until they got back to Chartsey.  Even so, Mako was glad to get back out of the cell.  Even ten centimetres of solid duralloy hatch, locked eight ways, did not make him feel really safe from Rikado Marsh.

Four more weeks of this, he thought, and did sigh a little inwardly as he walked away.  It was going to be tough, and the arrival would be no relief either but would plunge them into an even more demanding maelstrom of media hysteria, official procedures, statements and hearings for the legal case as well as making his report about the rehab scheme.  Nothing about the next few months was going to be easy.  He did not, however, regret it.  If he could help in any way to bring these traffickers in death and misery to justice, that would be effort well spent.  He would be home with his family soon, too.  Just another four weeks, he told himself.  Just another four weeks.

____________________

Chapter Fifteen

Four weeks later, Minnow glided up into assigned parking orbit at Chartsey.  The two sleek gunboats flanked the Might of Teranor as it followed the corvette into port.  Beyond it, hundreds of media and sightseeing ships were being held back by System Defence Force fighters.  Customs and Excise ships were flitting about like over-excited fireflies.  Incoming signals were overwhelming the Minnow’s comm systems.  A shuttle was already on its way bringing First Lord Dix Harangay out to the ship to welcome them home.  Alex von Strada was keeping it together on the command deck, handling all the frantic demands for his attention with his usual calm control.

In the midst of it all, Mako Ireson, still laughing with adrenalin backwash from the deceleration run, called his family.

‘Hi, I’m back!’  he told them, with a rush of joy at seeing that his son and daughter were there with his wife, all of them shrieking with delight at the sight of him.  They were at one of the Fleet’s bases waiting to see him.  He could not just get off the ship and go home.  Quite apart from anything else, there were security procedures to go through in which he would have to hand back the comp they’d lent him and allow them to scan his files for classified content.  Home, he knew, would not be a very restful place right now, what with the media pack and demonstrators liable to mob the apartment block.  They were going to have to stay in a safe house at the Fleet moon base for a while.  His family would be there, though, and that was all that mattered.

‘Are you okay, Dad?’  Arcus was forgetting to be cool for once, all his usual irritating frivolity abandoned in his emotion at seeing his father again.  Pia was crying, asking the same question at the same time,

‘Are you really all right?’

Inda was laughing, though suspiciously bright eyed herself as she told him, ‘
Good
to see you.’  Then she asked, immediately, ‘How long will it be till you get here?’

‘About ten minutes,’ Mako said, and felt a strange combination of thrill and regret as he said it.  Of course, of
course
he wanted nothing more right now than to race to the arms of his family, to laugh and cry and hug and talk.  His work here was done.  Even now, Customs and Excise were boarding the freighter in a joint operation with the police.  Soon the Minnow would hand over their own prisoners, the container of drugs and other evidence.

That would not be the end of it, of course.  There would be the trial and his report and endless publicity.  Mako’s life was never going to be the same again.  That was not the reason for the twinge of regret he felt at the prospect of leaving this ship, though.  He had tried to enter the Minnow’s world in order to understand them better and develop a relationship but at some point, without him even noticing, it had
become
his world.  He would miss these people who’d become his friends, and he would miss the thrill of being out there adventuring in space.  At some point in the past three months, he had become a spacer.  It was going to be hard to go back to working in an office with people who bickered over stationery allocations and just had no idea how wild life was beyond their traffic-filled skies.  

They had told him on the Minnow that he would always be welcome to visit and that they would certainly see him again, but it would not be the same.  It was the end of his adventure.  But looking at his wife and kids, he knew he couldn’t stay, not for one more minute than he had to. 

‘I will be
right
there,’ he promised, and beamed at them.  ‘Oh!’  He said, ‘I have got
so
much to tell you!’

____________________

Epilogue

First Lord Dix Harangay sat back from reading the report which had been occupying him for the past half an hour and got up, walking automatically over to the window. 

It was quiet out there today, he noted.  There was what he had come to think of as ‘the usual’ media presence, but the demonstrators were over at the courthouse where the trial of the seventeen people charged in the Might of Teranor case was entering its third week. 

It had taken more than a month even to get all the statements and evidence straight, with a tangle of cross-accusations that had implicated, one way or another, everyone aboard the ship.  Technically, they were all in the frame under conspiracy law, since there wasn’t one of them who could truthfully claim that they had not known that the Teranor had sent a shuttle away to pick up a cargo.  The fact that they had thought it to be stolen or smuggled goods rather than drugs was not actually any defence under the law.

Practicalities, however, had prevailed, as the difficulties of prosecuting forty seven people, all at once, would have been a nightmare.  Alex von Strada had also put in a word for Cass Bridewell and others he believed to have been oblivious to the true nature of what was going on.  There had been rumours that the Prosecution Service, mindful of the grief he’d given the Admiralty over the Jace Higgs case, had immediately folded on those prosecutions rather than get into a fight with him.  Those rumours were unfounded, though Alex’s statement that he did not believe them to have been involved had certainly been taken into consideration.  Currently, the seventeen of them who had been prosecuted were all doing their best to put the blame on one another.  Expert opinion on that was that they were all going down for it, and the principals – the skipper, first mate, and Rikado Marsh – were likely to be going down for fifteen to twenty years.

That was not, however, what was on the First Lord’s mind as he stood looking thoughtfully out of the window.  The decision had already been made to assign Minnow to Therik, once their part in the court case was over.  Customs and Excise had put in an impassioned plea at governmental level to have the Minnow assigned to patrol around ISiS Karadon.  The Senate had their own reasons for wanting law and order issues around Karadon to be dealt with and had recognised Alex von Strada as someone who certainly was not afraid to make powerful enemies.  Even the League President had suggested that Alex von Strada might be the right man to clean up the nest of pirates and smugglers operating out of the most infamous station in League space.  So that was already agreed, with Minnow being reassigned to Therik as the nearest world to the Karadon station.

Alex von Strada himself had accepted the orders with a little betrayal of relief.  He knew that it was very likely to kick off at Therik too, if people there believed what they’d seen on the news coming out from Chartsey.  It was a very different kind of world, though, uncrowded, green and tranquil, so liable to be calmer.  Either way, Alex would be glad to see the back of Chartsey.  It was not a world he’d ever really liked, a world that held nothing for him now but painful memories.

Things were, however, going to be rather more complicated than either Alex or Dix had anticipated.  The document Dix had just finished reading was the official report and recommendations being made by the LPA to the Senate’s Fleet Sub Committee.  It could not have been more glowing in its praise of the microsteps programme and the excellent pastoral care provided aboard Minnow.  It recommended that the Fleet extend the scheme, suggesting that the Fleet sent people to the Fourth Fleet Irregulars in any circumstance where that was a viable alternative to sending them to the army prison on Cestus.

It was with the next paragraph, however, that the LPA was going to electrify the Sub Committee.  If Dix knew anything at all about politics, they would grab and run with this, forcing it through regardless of whatever arguments he might try against it. 

We see no reason
, the report stated,
why this excellent scheme could not be extended to include suitably qualified civilians paroled from prison and joining the Fourth Irregulars on a rehabilitation basis.

Dix let his mind roam over the implications of that, along with the stack of ‘special recommendations’ already pouring in from skippers and port admirals across the League.  They were not only wanting to send Alex von Strada their bullocks, now.  They were making cases – strong, determined cases – for some means by which they could send him their high flyers too.  It was clear there was going to have to be some kind of scheme where skippers could send their high flyers on secondment to the Fourth and be assured of getting their crew back with all the benefits of that training and experience.  And now the LPA wanted to start sending him civilians as well.

They were, the First Lord decided, going to need a bigger ship.

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