Chapter 3
When the Lieutenant had left, I pondered on the list of ships and on his last comment. "One odd thing though: all the human officers are Vilani."
The ships ranged from the flagship, an 800 ton Vargr Frigate of Jump four, three gravities acceleration and eight weapon turrets; to the two 200 ton Avian class Far Traders of two Jump two, two gravities and two weapon turrets. In between was an eclectic selection.
They were not all imperial made either, the third largest was also Vargr made, a Corsair; between it and the flagship was a human-made Corsair, the Avenger class. It was a quite new design and had supposedly been designed for trade prospecting. With two Jump twos and being fully aerodyne it had a range and versatility outstanding in its size class. One piece of data I already had was that the flagship was often seen in company with a 400 ton Gazelle class escort. Indeed this pair had defeated a convoy with escort, leaving a patrol cruiser crippled beyond repair with only two survivors from its crew. These Flayers were bold devils. The rest of the fleet comprised:
A Star class Armoured Merchant 300tons J3M1 three hardpoints.
A type P Corsair 400tons J2M3 four hardpoints.
And two Vargr merchant ships whose specifications were not fully known.
They were thumbing their collective nose at the Imperial Government, and it was my responsibility to stop them. The base was the key, find that and without the security it provided for rest and repair the pirates could be hunted down and destroyed.
My thoughts were interrupted by the entrance of Krystal DuVallier my gopher, oh sorry, personal organisational expediter. She was a native Denebian, part of the highport employment quota the Deneb government insisted on. Krystal was a distant relative of a high muck-a-muck in the government's bureaucracy; just an ordinary case of nepotism.
Krystal was a tall, leggy, er pneumatic blond; with about the intelligence of a pet cat. The eyes may have been open but nobody was home. Poor girl, she was about as much use to me as an extra foot. So that's what I used her for, to run errands for me; as she could go where I, (with my shattered immune system courtesy of my last scout mission) could not. She was dressed in the height of Denebian fashion and the depths of taste.
"I've brought the data from your newt Mr. Beecher." Said Krystal
"Her name is Bwephulp, Ms. DuVallier, and she's a Bwap, not a newt!" I replied. I hated the casual racism of so many of the native Denebians. Good grief, Bwaps are the second most common race in the Imperium after Humaniti. Of course, being a species of natural bureaucrats doesn't endear them to most people, but that's no excuse for racism. Oh well, at least Krystal didn't call Bwephulp a towelhead.
After sending Krystal off on another errand, I headed back to my office; my medication would be wearing off soon.
Leaning back in my office chair I reviewed the data Bwephulp had sent me. She could compile, tabulate, integrate and display data better than anyone I had ever come across, but she could no more draw a conclusion than fly. With the addition of the naval data Lt. Igadushta had brought, this was the sum total of everything the Imperium knew about the Flayer Pirates. The answer had to be in there. Didn't it?
Bwephulp had suggested that she take two pirate ships as exemplars and charted their courses of destruction. She was trying to see if any thing could be learnt by tracking those ships backwards in a space-time matrix; to see if both ships may have started from a common point. However I looked at the data, they did not. One thing did stand out though, both ships courses seem to be coming from the Rift. The Rift?
The Rift. According to the AAB encyclopaedia, a rift is 'a region of very low stellar density'; in other words there aren't many stars there. Which means almost no systems, no planets, no gas-giants and no way of refuelling your ship if your navigation slips up and you end up in it. The Rift here is properly called the Great Rift, as it's far too wide for even the highest jump rated ship to cross and cuts across a huge swath of charted space. For all spacefarers stars mean places where you can hope to find help and succour if things go wrong. The blackness of the Great Rift meant only a cold, lonely death.
I typed out a query for the computer, give me all reports from a year before the pirate menace started until now, from four parsecs of the 'edge of the rift' as defined on standard mapping charts. I included my security clearance to mean all reports. The Office of Calendar Compliance has very wide-ranging powers if we choose to call on them, and this was one of those times.
Taking the data-crystal back to my quarters I started the tedious task of going through all the reports. I was looking for something not right, offbeat, wacky. Bwephulp couldn't help me with this, for her, wacky would be a mistake in the wording of a 48 page form.
oOoOo
I glanced at the clock, it was 03:19 hrs; I had been searching for 10 hours straight and found nothing helpful. Plenty of strange stuff; like the pilot who had over-ridden the computer and the warnings that he had not activated the manoeuvre drive, before retracting his ship's landing struts causing it to crash onto the landing bay floor. Strange but not wacky, just ordinary human stupidity. Or a crewman's momentary inattention that had allowed a male pandithon to get out of a ship's cargo bay before the animal transporter had arrived. Unfortunately the logo on a cargo container stacked in the bay awaiting loading, looked sufficiently similar to the pattern on male pandithons' crests to send the escaped animal into a mating fight. That was weird, but not helpfully so.
A name on a report caught my eye, Indira Jones, another ex-scout. I remembered her from my time in the service, far more interested in vanished civilisations than extant ones. Made some cash after she mustered out and spends her time searching for ruins and things. Indira as an ex-scout, still on the reserve list, had sent in a routine report of anomalous recent activity which 'looked to be evidence of field repairs to a starship' on a world that wasn't on the standard charts!
Chapter 4
Feverishly I brought up the secure database index and searched for all references to the co-ordinates in Indira's report. It took awhile as the data was in the 'historical-inactive' archive, rarely consulted and stored in obsolescent data banks. How had Mad Indira got access to this highly classified info that I'd never even heard of? Wait a minute, didn't she win an Imperial Science Prize for her work on the Ancients? Yes, that must be it. Ah, here are the files.
They were old, very old. They dated back to the second century after the founding of the Vilani Imperium, almost five thousand years ago.
The files came from the log of a Vilani scout mapping mission. They were searching for brown dwarfs¹ in the hope that they might lead to a jump-route back through the Great Rift. The expedition found two brown dwarfs; the one that Indira had investigated and one other. Further investigations had showed that neither of the worlds facilitated venturing deeper into the rift. The Vilani had classified both worlds shinigemkasdish; roughly 'world of no value whose existence must be concealed'. The Vilani kept the existence of brown dwarfs from the general population in order to control where they went; the current Imperium kept the positions of most brown dwarfs secret for the same reason.
The pirate base had to be one of those two systems and they were only a few parsecs from Deneb! The cheek of those devils. I turned to the vid-comm.
"Bwephulp, get me a meeting with Flag Lt. Igadushta immediately!" her face, skin shining with moisture and eyes blinking rapidly appeared on the screen.
"You realise that his mood will be less than optimal at this hour, Mr. Beecher" she replied, seemingly with no loss of efficiency from her recent awakening.
"I find I can face that eventuality with equanimity, Bwephulp" I cleared the comm screen and called up the vehicle pool,
"This is Beecher. Have a gig readied for me at once" I only half heard the affirmative reply as I was busy donning my light duty space suit. It would protect me for a while in the unlikely event the gig lost pressure, and it would also keep my non-immune system away from people without being too cumbersome.
oOoOo
I used the trip to marshal my thoughts into some kind of order and to relax a bit. My gig's computer was following the course laid out for it by Orbital Traffic Control and I needed to do nothing, although I checked the instruments from time to time. This gave me the opportunity of looking down at Deneb, onto the night side. The land-masses were outlined and partially filled with light and there were dots of light here and there in the oceans marking the position of floating and ship cities. Five billion people sure make a lot of light! The part of the moon I could see was in daylight phase now and I couldn't see the cities on its surface but I knew they were there, housing some of the one billion Denebians who lived elsewhere in the system than the main planet.
As I circled Deneb I came over the day side and saw the planet in all its beautiful colours; the blue ocean and the white clouds, the tans and greens of the land and, just visible, the brilliant white of the planet's north polar ice cap. A shining reflection from ahead of me announced my approach to the orbital naval base where Lt. Igadushta was waiting for me. I didn't know his duty cycle but I rather hoped he'd been asleep when Bwephulp's call came in.
oOoOo
"You expect me to go to the Admiral with this?" Lt. Igadushta almost shouted.
"Yes," I replied sounding calmer than I felt.
"All you have is conjecture and coincidence." The Lieutenant sneered.
"Together with logical deduction and evidence, albeit circumstantial." This buffoon was starting to get on my nerves.
"The Imperial Navy isn't about to deploy fleet assets on the wild conjectures of a civilian" Lt. Igadushta's voice dripped scorn.
"That isn't your call to make, Lieutenant"
"Do you realise who you're talking to? I am a member of the Imperial Nobility!" The Lieutenant's voice had raised in pitch as well as volume.
Only just nobility, I thought. An 'honourable' doesn't really carry much weight.
"Do you realise who you are . . ." I stopped. He probably didn't. There was no point in arguing further. I went towards the door and opened it. There were quite a few people in the corridor, not surprising on such an important base as Arbellatra Naval Station. I caught sight of a high ranking marine NCO.
"Gunny." He stiffened instinctively at the tone of my voice. "I am James Beecher of the Office of Calendar Compliance. My respects to Admiral Chang, and I request a meeting at his earliest convenience." The Gunny almost saluted, indeed he might have done if I hadn't still been wearing my light duty space suit and he went off at a jog. I turned back to Lt. Igadushta who was still seated at the table. His mouth was open in outraged disbelief giving him the look of a stuffed fish.
Shortly thereafter Admiral Chang's deeply lined face appeared on the room's viewscreen.
"Please come up Mr. Beecher. I am in my day-cabin." Said the Admiral.
"Yes sir." I replied. Turning to Igadushta I said "Come on Lieutenant, you might learn something."
Igadushta was silent as we rode the transit tube to Admiral Chang's quarters. The Admiral had a somewhat unusual background I recalled. Although his father had been a decorated naval captain and had been knighted, he had not been raised to the hereditary nobility. As a youngster Admiral Chang had had to work his way up without noble influence on his side. His star had risen as one of the supporters of Duke Norris, as he then was, when Norris had relieved Grand Admiral Santanocheev of his command and started winning the Fifth Frontier War.
Admiral Chang was waiting for us as his marine guard opened the door. The Admiral returned Lt. Igadushta's salute and then held out his hand to me.
"James" he said with the ghost of a smile "it's been awhile."
"It has Admiral" I replied shaking his hand. "Sorry about the suit."
"I heard about that. A tough last mission, I understand." Admiral Chang went back to his desk. "Come in, both of you."
"I didn't know you knew Mr. Beecher, Admiral" Was that a note of disapproval in Igadushta's voice?
"Beecher was chief pilot in the scout squadron assigned to my staff during the Fifth Frontier War, Lieutenant." Said Admiral Chang.
Igadushta turned to me.
"Why didn't you tell me that you knew when I was explaining jump travel to you!"
"You were having so much fun I didn't want to disturb you." The Lieutenant's face turned a shade of red that clashed delightfully with his uniform.
"Now James" the Admiral was all business. "Tell me what you've discovered."
¹A/N A brown dwarf is a 'failed star' not quite massive enough to start nuclear fusion. They are difficult to detect. They do produce heat however by gravitational contraction.
'Mad Indira' was a character of mine whom Simon could not resist putting in as a cameo role. I had a habit of pre-empting written adventures by working out what was going on about half a book ahead of when the players were supposed to get some idea. It drove Simon as Games Master half demented until he got used to it. Ah the heady days of courtship....
