Prison Planet (THE RIM CONFEDERACY Book 3) (16 page)

“It has come to my attention that you’re still drinking, Captain—when you were charged with the duty to give up the bottle during your station here on Halberd. Comments, Captain?” he said matter-of-factly.

Tanner stared down at his polished boots that peered out of the cuffs of his uniform pants and noted that the stewards had done a great job as he could almost see his face in them from here. He nodded to the admiral and cleared his throat.

“Sir, yes, Sir. That is my proposed course of action here, but, Sir, sometime in the next year. I have been told by Admiral McQueen that he wants that to happen, and as such, my posting here on Halberd is to accomplish that. And I am trying, Sir,” he said, but even he knew it was a hollow excuse.

“Bullshit, Captain. You were out on the town with crew when you’d only been on the planet a few hours. Since then you’ve been seen visiting the bars and nightclubs out in Andros often. You still consume way too much alcohol to use the excuse that you’re trying anything, Captain. Don’t make me laugh ...” Higgins said as he shook his head and pointed a finger at Tanner.

Tanner squirmed a bit. He knew he really had little to say, yet he also knew he had to try to assuage the admiral somehow.

“Sir, I’ve been somewhat under a lot of stress over the past couple of years what with the Pirates and then the Sleeper ship missions that I’d have to remind you I was able to quell on behalf of the RIM Navy. And, Sir, there are other issues too ... so if I find it still needed to have a few, then what’s the harm? Sir?” he finished a bit lamely.

The admiral stared at him and then pointed that same forefinger at Tanner.

“Bullshit, again, Captain. The Pirate incident was, what, more than a year ago, and the Ikarians are nicely settled over on Throth, compliments of the Baroness. So what any of that has to do with your need of self-medication is beyond me—and beyond Admiral McQueen as well. And other issues? Who doesn’t have them? Yet we all don’t dive into the bottle daily, Captain. And neither will you. Got it, Captain?” he finished off and waved away anything else Tanner would have added as he obviously thought this meeting was over.

Tanner left the administration conference room and moved with haste back to the
Marwick
, figuring if he hurried back to quarters, he would have an hour or so to work up some liquid courage before he had to report over to the
Sterling
for what he believed would be his second dressing-down of the day. As he rode up the escalator, he smiled to himself. He still had months and months before the deadline, and that would mean much more Black Scotch—starting with a new bottle in a minute or so, and he smiled again.

#

“On Hope, we had the same issue once and that was a doozy,” Muri said to no one special in the group around the monitors in the Power Plant control room. Large space as it was, it was chock full of control stations with their accompanying monitors, banks of switches, control levers, and a whole wall full of piping diagrammatic charts too.

On that major centered diagrammatic, there was an issue where a red caution icon was flashing over an out tube that came from far below in the volcano. Control techies who had never seen this kind of a notice before didn't know what to do, and under SOP, they had called maintenance. As soon as they saw the issues, they called for the emergency support team of which Muri was the newest member.

“Remind me who you are?” the head of the Power Plant maintenance team said as he looked down at the much shorter Hopian, which for a citizen of Thrones was easy as that race was all tall and heavy-set. Muri looked up at him and cocked her red-haired head over to one side, peering up more than a foot to see the much taller man.

“Muri Ankara, of Hope. Here for the next few years, but back on Hope on my island, I was the head of our own Power Plant tech. Same model as here, the older CANDU-088, and like always, similar problems happen to similar models. Sir,” she said, not knowing if the title was necessary but willing to try it nonetheless.

The Thronian smiled down at her.

“The sir is nice but not needed in this case, Muri, and I’d like to—“

A new klaxon brayed and the ceiling lights in the room flashed twice.

“Kill that klaxon, please?” the maintenance head said, half-turning to the row of seated control room technicians behind them.

Moments later, the klaxon stopped cold and the lights didn’t pulse anymore.

“As you were saying, Muri,” he said.

“On Hope, as here, I’d imagine as we all know, the probe is set to fluctuate with the top level of magma—we added 160 feet of envelope to ours there. When the levels vary, that envelope kept the probe well within the hot zone and the force field carried out its job of allowing the probe to get the superheated water up to the plant with no ill effects.

“But,” she added in detail, “sometimes even that 160-foot envelope wasn’t enough, so every so often, we’d face an issue with that fluctuation—and we learned that an increase of at least fifteen percent in the variance should cause an extra amount of envelope to be added automatically. Simply put, if the magma grew by sixteen percent or more, we doubled the size of the envelope. Any further sixteen percent increase once again doubled the envelope, which worked for us. Gave us all some breathing room, I’d say ... that doubling of the envelope as needed,” she finished off and noted a few of the heads around her were nodding in assent.

The head of maintenance stared at her for a moment and then turned to the control room technician row behind him.

"This ever happened before?" he asked.

"No, Sir," the head techie answered, "our magma does not fluctuate more than two or three percent in a year, for over, what, thirty years now, right, lads?" he asked, and all the techies in their lab coats behind him nodded in response.

The head of maintenance looked back up at the diagrammatic wondering if this was a one-off or if there could be more fluctuations coming, and he turned back to look again at the techies.

He stared at them all for a moment and then said, “So, you heard her. Can we do this?”

He waited as more heads back there nodded too.

“Okay, then I hereby order that the fluctuation settings be similar—let’s say, any increase of twenty percent will automatically make the probe levels add—what’s our envelope?” he said, questioning the techs.

“We use 100 feet only as the volcano is so, so stable, Sir,” one of the techs in a white coat said as he half-stood and then sat down again quickly.

“Okay, then maintenance order for today—mark it as priority Alpha Number One—is that the envelope gets doubled as of right now to 200 feet. That our new automatic doubling of same goes to twenty percent, and if there is ever another twenty-plus percent increase, that it doubles again as needed. Got that?” he said to the head tech, who was quickly digitizing that order onto his tablet and then swinging the unit over to the Thronian, who simply added his thumbprint to the security screen, and the job was done.

As the groups headed back down the long control room to the entrance to go their separate ways, he looked at the guard captain beside him on the walk.

“Captain Terrance, exactly what is that convict Muri in here for?” he said with a degree of interest.

“Sir,” she said, “I’m only aware that she has five years here, but not more than that,” she said, attempting to give a small degree of privacy between the convicts under her command. The issue that had sent Muri to Halberd was one with Power Plant issues, which might be significant to some, but not to her. A convict was a convict until they left Halberd—end of story.

#

Nusayr applied more polish to his polishing cloth and went back to slow circular swipes along the fender of the yellow pod he was finishing as the last one of the day. He was alone now, and the rest of his detailing team had moved off to gather up the used goods and equipment to return to the Pod Plant quartermaster stores to show nothing had been taken or destroyed by their crew.

Turning the cloth over, he wondered where this pod would be going and which planet would be its new owner. Olbia didn’t even have a space elevator, so it’d not end up there, and found himself thinking about the last time he was on his home world more than a year ago now.

He remembered being summoned out to the Olbia landing port to meet the Caliph who was coming down to see him. The large indigo shuttle had swooped down to its assigned landing pad at the Olbia landing port and settled onto its landing struts with ease. It had made great time from the Caliph’s ship, the
CN Roc
, which was up in low orbit. The simple fact the Sharia had decided not to land but to shuttle down was a sign. But a sign of what? Nusayr thought.

He shrugged and went out to meet the leader of the Caliphate realm and stood waiting as the shuttle door opened up a few feet away. As it opened, he smiled at the ranks of the Caliphate guards, who stood just inside the door, and waited for the landing door to swing completely out of the way.

The guards filed out and instead of moving off to one side, they surrounded him and stood awaiting something further. Nusayr waited too and was not disappointed as a moment later a Ramat Colonel appeared in the newly opened shuttle port and looked directly at Nusayr. His face was solemn with no smile. He even looked a bit nervous, but he spoke in even tones, almost in a monotone.

“Nusayr al-Rashid, leader of the Council of Nine, you are commanded to appear before the Caliph in that you and the Council are hereby to be charged with the crime of sedition. You may now acknowledge your guilt and confess at this point. Due to your familial relationship to the Caliph, I have been ordered to offer up this one chance. How do you respond?” the colonel said.

Nusayr was taken aback, but showed nothing on his face. Instead, a few seconds later, he smiled at the colonel and simply said, “I have nothing to confess, Colonel.”

The Ramat guards closest to him moved forward and quickly applied their Needler guns to his back and sides at the same time. He shook as he began to fall but was then held up by more of them. Moving quickly, they shackled his wrists and then hustled him into the shuttle. As the door slid in place, the engines lit, and they jumped up and left the surface. As the shuttle yawed to port, it tilted backward and then accelerated quickly up and toward outer space. A minute or two later, the blue darkened as the shuttle still climbed and then slowly turned black as the CN Roc could be seen coming up in the distance. The shuttle spun in a large starboard circle and came about as the Roc’s landing port force field dropped, and the shuttle entered the bay and eased inside the ship to come to a halt as it landed.

The Ramat hustled the shackled Nusayr out of the shuttle, and they marched him across the landing bay and into the Roc, a full destroyer with huge Perseus engines. It took more than a full ten minutes for this squad of Ramat secret policemen to manhandle and muscle their charge up to Deck Fifty and the ship’s ready room, where they deposited their charge into a chair.

The Caliph sat in the only other chair in the room, and the look on his cousin’s face, was the darkest Nusayr had ever seen. Dressed in his usual blue robe and shawl, an ajrak colored with fields of brown and indigo blue diamonds among the design, and his brown soft boots, the Caliph spoke after a minute.

“You are a fool, Nusayr,” the Caliph said, his voice loud and filling the room.

Nusayr shrugged and sat without speaking.

“You and the rest of the Council have been overtly conducting seditious acts aimed at creating insurrection against our established order. How do you plead?” the Caliph said flatly. He tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair as he leaned forward to get a real answer.

Nusayr sat for a moment and then finally spoke.

“Exactly how did I—did we—do that, Caliph?” he said quietly.

“You had your own Ramat forces put down the student protest—which we know you instigated in the first place, and they did so with abandon. They killed some of your own students, and they injured hundreds more. Did you not do this, Nusayr?” he finished his initial charge and leaned back to await verification of this charge.

“I did not, Caliph,” was his answer.

“Then by working in the background with promises of better subsidies and tax breaks, you got the Farmers Guilds to strike their normal foodstuff exports, and that was on a global scale. You and some of your Council members did that too, did you not?” That question was emphasized with a pointed finger and a raised eyebrow.

“We did not, Caliph,” was the answer once more.

“Then with your party Whip in charge, behind the scenes, the Council of Nine encouraged the quick development of that bill to begin talks on secession from the Caliphate, and that was rammed through the third reading quicker than any other bill in history. Do you also deny that as well?” Sharia added and sat back in disgust.

“I do again say we had nothing to do with this—in fact, the record shows that we fought to keep that bill from ever reaching the floor to no avail!” Nusayr said, his voice as flat as the Caliph’s tone. He held his hand out palm up toward his cousin and spoke plainly.

“Sharia, I—we did nothing. This is all based on what one can easily see is the basic inability of the Olbia citizens to accept our rule ... They want their freedom, Sharia, that is plain to see,” he said as he stared at his Caliph.

Sharia looked away and then shook his head.

“Will never happen, Nusayr. You and the Council will face trial on Neria for your crimes. We have assembled all the witnesses we need; we have purged your own Ramat terrorists; your student organizers, your Farmers Guild compatriots, and your Parliamentary sycophants have all been quite willing to come forward with their stories of your manipulations. You will be found guilty, Nusayr, and you will be sent to Halberd for your crimes—you and the rest of the Council.”

He rose and the Ramat secret policemen re-entered the ready room to gather up the prisoner and march him down many decks to the ship’s brig. Nusayr noted that the rest of the Council was already there, and he sat with the same sad look on his face and shook his head when Razin asked if they should talk about this. Instead, the nine of them sat and kept silent for the trip to Neria. He would one day handle the Caliph himself. One day ...