Valiant Dust

17

Socotra, Gadira II

An hour before dawn, Sikander slipped back to his own room, leaving a delectably nude Ranya sleeping in her luxurious sheets. He’d just drifted off to sleep again in his own bed when the chirp of his comm unit on the nightstand interrupted him.

A little groggy, he sat up and keyed the audio-only icon. “Lieutenant North,” he answered.

“Mr. North, this is Ensign Girard. Sorry to disturb you, sir, but I think I’ve found something interesting.”

Sikander rubbed his eyes, trying to bring his attention back to his ship and the mission. In the last few hours he hadn’t thought about Hector once. Good thing he didn’t call a couple of hours ago, he decided. “Go ahead, Mr. Girard.”

“Sir, I’ve been doing some traffic analysis of Gadira’s shipping, and trying to correlate it with Caidist attacks across the planet. I think I’ve identified a ship engaged in smuggling arms to the rebels. She’s just made atmospheric entry, heading for the port facilities at Meknez.”

“Traffic analysis? Isn’t that something for Mr. Randall and the Operations Department?”

“Well, yes sir, it is.” Sikander could hear the apologetic note in Girard’s voice over the audio link and imagined the shy Aquilan turning red. “I got the idea after I started developing a target list of rebel strongholds and noting which ones seemed to be stockpiling advanced arms. Mr. Randall and his intelligence specialists are focused on direct observation, looking for where the weapons are and examining shipping as it enters the system. I started wondering when the weapons that were already here actually arrived, so I built and ran a set of traffic sims and compared them to rebel activity.” Girard hesitated a moment. “I didn’t even think I would find anything, but I guess I got interested in the puzzle of setting up the programs.”

“You have a very useful hobby, Mr. Girard,” said Sikander. “And your initiative is commendable, too. What have you found out?”

“Sir, there is a ninety-three percent chance that the vessel currently landing in Meknez delivered two shipments of offworld arms to Caidist rebels in the last two months. She’s a Cygnan-registered independent freighter named Oristani Caravan. What should we do, sir?”

“Intercepting illegal arms shipments is one of the reasons we’re here. Go find Mr. Randall or Mr. Chatburn immediately, and let them know what you’ve found out.” Sikander thought it over for a moment; some officers might think that Michael Girard was trying to show them up by doing their job for them, although anyone who knew the ensign well would understand that he simply didn’t have the sort of competitiveness to do something like that. It was, however, possible that Randall or Chatburn might not take him seriously. “I will call the captain, and advise her of your suspicions.”

“Thank you, sir. I’ll organize my information and take it to the XO.”

“Good work, Mr. Girard,” Sikander told him. “This might be the opportunity we’ve been looking for to change the trajectory of events in this system. North, out.”

He glanced across the beach at Ranya’s bungalow. Lanterns glowed softly in the predawn gloom, and a chorus of birds and insects beginning to rouse themselves for the day filled the air. The last thing in the world he wanted to do was leave; a day of hiking or swimming in Ranya’s company, perhaps followed by another nighttime visit to her bedchamber, struck him as an excellent plan. Unfortunately it seemed that Michael Girard’s curiosity might have brought his sojourn with the amira to an early end. I hope she understands, he thought. If she believed that he was looking for a way to slip away from her after the night they’d shared …

He sighed, and keyed his comm unit again as he got out of bed to get dressed. “Hector, this is Lieutenant North. Put me through to the captain, please.”

* * *

Two hours later, Sikander found himself at the controls of a Royal Guard combat flyer above the dark waters of Gadira’s Bitter Sea, fifteen hundred kilometers west of Socotra. It was still dark here, although a pearly rose glow hovered on the eastern horizon. Sunrise was not far off in this part of the world. He checked the nav system of the flyer, and switched off the autopilot. The flyer bounced softly in the air as he settled his hands on the control yoke. The city of Meknez was thirty kilometers distant, only a couple of minutes away at his current speed. “Tell everyone to strap in, Darvesh,” he said. “We’re getting pretty close.”

“Yes, sir.” Darvesh Reza sat in the middle bench of the flyer’s small passenger area, along with three Gadiran Royal Guards. The Kashmiri soldier wore Navy battle dress, with a light helmet snugged over his pakul. A heavy mag pistol hung in a shoulder holster beneath his left arm, and a combat knife was strapped to his right thigh; Sikander wore the same uniform and weapons. Montréalais mag carbines for each of them were racked behind the pilot’s seat. They had borrowed the flyer and the carbines from the Royal Guard detachment at the small Socotra Island barracks, but the rest of the gear came from Darvesh’s luggage. The bodyguard kept his combat dress close at hand, even when the day’s plan called for a pleasure cruise and an overnight stay at a remote retreat.

The flyer’s comm unit beeped. “Flyer Socotra-Two, this is Shuttle Hector-Alpha. Confirm your ETA, over.” Sikander recognized the voice of Petty Officer Long, the shuttle pilot.

“Hector-Alpha, we can be skids-on-the-ground in two minutes, over,” Sikander replied.

There was a pause as Long checked his own approach. “Socotra-Two, roger that. Make your touchdown on the south side of the landing zone. We’re coming in from the northeast, and we’ll be skids-down at the same time, over.”

“Confirmed. See you on the ground. Socotra-Two out,” Sikander replied. He turned his attention to his flying. He’d been descending steadily for fifteen minutes, and the borrowed Gadiran flyer raced along only a few hundred meters above the moonlit swells of the Bitter Sea. The streetlights and traffic signals of the city of Meknez covered a vast, curving crescent of coastline ahead of him. Instead of palm-lined avenues like those he’d seen in the capital, old maglev rails crisscrossed Meknez, carrying massive ore trains from the strip mines out in the desert. The harbor district was crowded with ore carriers and transshipment facilities where spacegoing freighters could disgorge their containerized cargo and load gigantic hoppers full of the rare earths that had brought miners to these southern wastelands three hundred years ago. Bright work lights harshly illuminated the port facilities; the city’s industrial areas worked around the clock.

He glanced over at Captain Tarek Zakur, the officer in charge of the small squad of Royal Guards on board. As Sikander understood things, Zakur commanded Ranya’s security detail. As the ranking officer at Socotra, Zakur had decided to personally lead the Royal Guard force headed for the suspicious freighter, leaving the defense of the sultan’s island villa in the hands of his subordinates. “Any signs that we’re expected, Captain?” Sikander asked him.

The big Gadiran sat in the copilot’s seat. A mediocre pilot, he’d been happy to relinquish the flying to Sikander. Instead, he busied himself monitoring the local emergency channels and keeping an eye on the vid feed from Hector’s orbital observation. If he knew where Sikander had spent the night—and Sikander had to imagine that he did, or he wouldn’t have been much of a security chief—he gave no sign. “None as yet, Mr. North,” he answered in Montréalais-accented Anglic.

“I’m beginning to think Ranya was right,” Sikander said. He’d felt like a heel for asking the Socotra Island staff to wake her before dawn, and could only imagine what she must have thought. But as soon as he’d explained what Hector suspected about Oristani Caravan, she’d been quick to grasp the implications. Meknez hosted only a token Royal Guard presence; the city was under Bey Salem’s control, and most of the soldiers consisted of his own house troops. If arms were being smuggled through the port at Meknez, someone had already arranged for the local authorities to look the other way, and any attempt to alert the Meknez-based forces to search and seize Oristani Caravan’s cargo could tip off the very people they hoped to catch. Speed and secrecy were the order of the day, and that meant using Royal Guard forces available on Socotra—and the contingent of armed sailors from CSS Hector.

“In my experience, that is usually the case with the amira,” Zakur admitted. “Except, of course, when she thinks she doesn’t need to listen to me.”

Sikander smiled to himself, replaying the conversation in his mind. Ranya had insisted on coming along, a prospect that had absolutely horrified Captain Zakur. Only a threatened mass resignation by her guard detail had convinced her that her royal person had no business riding along on security raids. Even then Zakur had been careful to check the flyer’s storage compartments to make sure she hadn’t stowed away before he took off. “I was referring to the idea of keeping the local forces out of this,” he told Zakur.

The Gadiran kept his eyes on the vid feed, but nodded. “I am very much looking forward to my next conversation with Bey Salem,” he said. “If your intelligence is right, then his men are corrupt, complicit, or just staggeringly incompetent. I would like to know which it is.”

Sikander glanced at the countdown clock in the flyer’s head-up display. He was running a little ahead of schedule, so he cut his speed a bit and put the flyer into a gentle S-curve to kill a few seconds. It might also help to confuse any observers on the ground about the spot where he intended to land. The port was busy; in addition to the half-dozen spacegoing freighters that were currently loading or unloading in the harbor basin, a similar number of seagoing vessels not much smaller than their spacefaring cousins moored along the concrete piers. In the long centuries of Gadira’s isolation from the rest of human space, antiquated rail networks and surface shipping had served as the primary means of transporting goods across the planet. Heavy grav transports with induction drives slowly replaced the old ships and trains, but they could handle only a portion of Gadira’s shipping needs, and the planet’s infrastructure still featured facilities like the port at Meknez or the rail yards in other cities. For now, a good deal of Gadira’s merchant traffic still floated, and that would likely remain true for decades to come.

“Hector-Alpha on final,” said Long over the comm channel. “Ten seconds.”

“Socotra-Two on final,” Sikander confirmed, changing course one last time. He kept up the best speed he could manage safely, now passing by the looming cargo cranes that lined the dock. At the last instant he switched on the landing lights to get one good look at the supposedly empty stretch of parking lot where he intended to set down. Just past the building, he caught the flashing lights of Hector’s shuttle, touching down close by the Cygnan freighter. Sublieutenant Larkin and her party were responsible for securing Oristani Caravan.

The lot looked clear, so he quickly flared out, reduced power, and thumped his landing skids down on the concrete. “Touchdown!” he called out to the others on board.

Darvesh and the guards in the back threw open their sliding doors and bailed out of the flyer; Captain Zakur popped his own door and followed. Sikander paused for a moment to cut the flyer’s engine and power it down, then unbuckled and scrambled out of his seat. Darvesh waited for him with the last mag carbine; Sikander checked it quickly as the Gadirans hurried to the warehouse door. While Hector’s landing party stormed the freighter, Sikander’s small team had the job of seizing the warehouse and detaining anybody they found.

Sikander expected the Gadiran soldiers with him to burst through the door and storm the building, but they surprised him. Gathering by the warehouse door, they quietly tried the handle. It opened easily, and the four Royal Guards slipped inside. Darvesh and Sikander followed after them. Large cargo containers filled the warehouse interior, dimly lit by flickering overhead lights. The big containers formed narrow alleyways in the huge structure, providing the team with plenty of cover as they moved deeper. Open space in the center of the warehouse provided parking for ground transports with flatbed trailers, which could pull in to load or unload containers. At the moment, several transports were parked there with engines idling. A traversing crane mounted on rails suspended from the ceiling positioned a container onto the bed of one of the transports; Sikander heard the echoing calls of men shouting at one another, the high-pitched warning beep of the crane as it moved, and the low rumbling purr of the transports’ engines.

A man appeared at the head of the alley between containers. The fellow wore a jumpsuit and a hard hat, and looked like an ordinary port worker … except for the automag pistol slung over his shoulder. He wasn’t looking in their direction, and seemed to be involved in directing the crane’s movement.

Zakur glanced back at his soldiers and signaled with his hands. Two of the guards peeled off to slip down another gap between the cargo units. The captain waited fifteen seconds, then moved forward and broke into the open. “Freeze!” he shouted at the men working in the warehouse. “This is the sultan’s guard!” He continued in Jadeed-Arabi that Sikander couldn’t follow, but the intent seemed clear. Zakur covered the first man in sight with his carbine, and the fellow slowly raised his hands. The other soldiers pounced, finding targets of their own.

Sikander and Darvesh followed Zakur into the open. Darvesh covered someone to his right, so Sikander swung his carbine to the left, and found two very surprised-looking Gadirans staring back at him. It looked like close to a dozen smugglers in the room, but they’d been caught off-guard. For a long moment, no one moved or said anything. Zakur growled out a set of instructions and nodded at one of the workers; Sikander understood that they had been told to lay down their arms, slowly.

The man Zakur menaced scowled fiercely. He was a heavyset fellow, perhaps fifty years of age, with a thick gray-streaked beard. Glaring at the guard captain, he carefully unslung his weapon and started to lay it down. Then, from outside, a sudden burst of mag-weapon reports and the staccato popping of conventional gunfire broke out. A comm unit on one worker’s belt crackled aloud, carrying a rapid stream of Jadeed-Arabi—a warning or a call for help, Sikander guessed.

The insurgents in the warehouse panicked. The man in the blue hard hat suddenly raised his weapon at Zakur, but the Royal Guard captain did not hesitate. His mag carbine whined twice, hurling its lethal darts through the center of the older man’s chest. The fellow staggered back and collapsed, but in the blink of an eye, gunshots and screams filled the air. Insurgents lunged for their weapons or dove for cover; the outnumbered Royal Guards opened up on anyone holding a weapon.

Both of Sikander’s targets went for their guns at the same time. He hesitated for a critical instant, not sure who to shoot, before he slewed his barrel to one side and drilled a mag-carbine round just under the chin of the one on the left. The back of the man’s neck exploded in blood and bone; he crumpled nervelessly to the floor. The other man shot wildly in Sikander’s direction, and Sikander ducked back around the corner of the cargo unit. Slugs thudded into the container’s metal side, adding the clatter of their impact to the bedlam of the scene.

“Take some alive!” Zakur shouted in Standard Anglic for the benefit of the Aquilans. “We need intelligence!” Then the Gadiran captain cursed and spun to the ground, knocked off his feet by a slug that struck him in the shin.

Sikander crouched low, and quickly popped back around the corner of his cargo unit. The second man he’d been covering continued to spray bullets around the room while sidestepping toward the massive shape of the nearest ground transport, evidently moving toward cover. Sikander quickly sighted on him and pulled the trigger; the mag carbine jumped against his shoulder. He meant to knock the man down with a couple of shots in the legs, but instead he caught the fellow with a short burst right through the front pockets of his trousers, riddling his hip and pelvis. The insurgent collapsed, screaming in pain; Sikander hurried over to kick the man’s weapon away from him, then turned to look for another target.

Darvesh calmly shot down an insurgent who paused to switch magazines, then turned and crippled another with shots through knee and shoulder. Sikander fired a burst in the general direction of another fellow targeting Darvesh’s back; he missed, but the man ducked out of sight, and a moment later one of the other Royal Guards lobbed a stun grenade almost on top of the insurgent. The blast shook the warehouse and hurled the unfortunate rebel a good three meters in the air.

The fire slackened, replaced by the angry shouts of Zakur’s men and the moaning of the wounded. Sikander moved cautiously around the parked transports, looking for anyone who might be trying to keep out of sight. Then, the heavy transport beside him roared to life and surged forward.

“Sir! Look out!” Darvesh shouted from across the warehouse.

Sikander threw himself out of the transport’s path. He hit the floor hard and rolled, his mag carbine clattering across the floor, but he caught one good look at the cab as the vehicle passed. To his surprise, the driver was fair-skinned, lean, with sandy-colored hair and light eyes. I’ve seen that man before!

Mag-weapon shots erupted as Darvesh and the Gadiran Royal Guards opened fire, riddling the cab and motor compartment with shot after shot, but they failed to stop the massive transport. The driver plowed through the closed loading doors with a spectacular crash, hurling them into the parking lot beyond, and drove off into the night.

Sikander picked himself up off the floor, and recovered his carbine just as Darvesh hurried up to him. “Sir, are you hurt?” the valet asked.

“Just bruised.” Sikander glared after the transport, its taillights disappearing into the port. He keyed his communicator. “Long, are you listening? A transport just smashed its way out of the warehouse. Get airborne and stop it!”

“Sorry, sir, I can’t,” the shuttle pilot replied. “The shuttle took a rocket when the fighting started. It’s damaged, I’m not sure it can fly. I’m restarting the bird now.”

Sikander scowled. “Damn. All right, let me know when you can get in the air.”

“Did you get a good look at the driver, sir?” Darvesh asked.

“It was the Dremish consul. I don’t recall his name, but I met him on board Panther last week.” Sikander considered the implications of that for a moment, and decided he didn’t like them at all. He sighed and returned his attention to the warehouse. “What is our situation here?”

“One of the Gadiran guards is dead. Captain Zakur is wounded and needs attention, but I think he should be fine. There are six enemy fighters dead, and four others wounded.”

Sikander smiled. “I saw that one fellow you put on the ground. Nice shooting, Darvesh.”

The Kashmiri nodded gravely. “Thank you, sir, but I regret he is unconscious. We may have to bring him around before we can question him.”

“It looks like Captain Zakur’s men have this place well in hand. Let’s go see how Ms. Larkin did.” Sikander took a moment to get his bearings, waved at the Gadiran officer to let him know that they were leaving, and then headed out through the destroyed vehicular door. Circling around the outside of the warehouse, he and Darvesh came out onto the working area of the pier. The Cygnan space freighter towered over the pier on his left, and the sprawling warehouse stretched for a couple of hundred meters to his right. A cargo crane mounted on rails stood motionless between the ship and the building, a container hanging from its hoist. Hector’s shuttle was parked on the pier not far from the gangway leading to the ship.

They trotted over to the shuttle, where they found Petty Officer Long inspecting a blackened patch by the vertical stabilizer. Two more sailors worked in the open cockpit, running systems checks. “Are we going to need to call for a ride?” Sikander asked as he approached.

“Beats me, sir,” Long replied. “The control surface is chewed up and the damage knocked the flight-control systems off-line, but they’re rebooting. I think we’ll be okay for non-aerodynamic flight, but I want to perform some checks first.”

That made sense to Sikander. The shuttle’s powerful induction drive could get through a vacuum without any lift from its wing surfaces at all, and it had to be able to maneuver with or without atmosphere to push against. “Where is Ms. Larkin?”

“Cargo deck, sir.” The pilot nodded in the direction of the gangway. “She’s checking the freighter’s manifest.”

“Thanks, Long.” Sikander headed up the steeply sloping gangway to the freighter’s personnel hatch. On the quarterdeck he found four more of Hector’s sailors standing guard over two dozen of the freighter’s crew. Most sat on the deck, looking dejected or frightened. None of them appeared to be Gadiran, and Sikander wondered if Oristani Caravan’s deckhands and engineers had any idea that they’d been involved in arms smuggling; freighters didn’t normally open their cargo containers in transit unless something went wrong. He made a mental note to bring up the question of leniency for the freighter’s crew later on, and continued to the ship’s vast cargo deck.

At first glance, it looked a lot like the inside of the warehouse he’d just been in. The containers were racked and stacked in sets of revolving brackets affixed to the big cargo-handling rails in the curving overhead, rather like cartridges in an ancient revolver. The bigger freight carriers of the Coalition’s core worlds simply strapped their containers to the outside of the hull, and never actually entered atmosphere. However, ships servicing backwaters such as Gadira needed to be able to land and unload on the ground if there were no orbital facilities to use, and were designed to carry their cargo internally. Sikander and Darvesh found Larkin, Chief Trent, and half a dozen more armed sailors about halfway down the deck, rotating a container down for inspection.

Larkin glanced up, and saluted. “We’ve secured the ship, sir,” she reported. “Four casualties, one serious—Deckhand Gardner was shot, but the medics think they can stabilize him.”

Sikander returned her salute. “What happened?”

“We ran into some insurgents standing guard over the operation on the pier. They opened fire on us, and we took them out. The freighter’s crew offered no resistance, although the captain protested our boarding and search.”

“There were more insurgents in the warehouse,” Sikander told her. “We’d better set up a perimeter and keep our eyes open in case they have friends nearby.”

“Already done, sir. Most of our force is cordoning off the area.”

“Good work, Ms. Larkin.” Sikander turned his attention to the cargo container, which was now rotated down to their level. “What have you got here?”

“I suggested to the freighter’s captain that he’d better cooperate if he didn’t want his ship impounded here for a few months.” Larkin allowed herself a predatory grin. “He took me at my word, and pointed out the containers he thought might be ‘questionable.’ Most are already in the warehouse, but this one was the next to be off-loaded.”

Chief Trent punched an access code into the container’s door. It opened with a hiss of air pressure equalizing. The master-at-arms waited a moment, then pulled the door the rest of the way open, and let out a low whistle. “Sir, ma’am, you’ll want to take a look at this,” she said.

Sikander strolled over to look in the container’s open end. Inside, two insect-like shapes filled the cargo unit. A web of wire ropes secured to cleats on the container’s floor and ceiling locked them in place and plastic sheeting covered their bulky outlines, but it was clear that he was looking at a pair of heavily armed combat flyers secured for transport. “Well, well. It looks like the Caidists ordered something special this month,” he observed.

“But they don’t have any mechanized forces,” Larkin said.

“I suppose they intended to remedy that oversight, Ms. Larkin.” Sikander moved in, looking for identifying marks or registration numbers. “I wonder how many of these cargo units are full of combat vehicles?”

“Enough that someone is going to be really unhappy when they don’t show up,” Chief Trent said.

“Specifically, the Dremish consul,” said Sikander, thinking of his narrow escape from the heavy ground transport in the warehouse. “I saw him in the warehouse.” He considered the significance of their discovery here. If the Dremish were involved in shipping arms to the Caidists—and not just small arms or rockets, but weapon systems as large and expensive as combat flyers—then what was the troopship doing in orbit? Dremark certainly wouldn’t arm rebels its own soldiers might end up fighting, would it?

“The Dremish were here?” Larkin asked.

The name finally came to Sikander’s mind. “Bleindel, that was his name. We met the fellow on board Panther over dinner last week. Apparently he’s up to no good.” If this was all a Dremish operation … He needed to bring this to Captain Markham, and fast. “Let’s finish up here as quickly as we can, Ms. Larkin. There is a lot more going on here than we thought.”