The Shadow of Cincinnatus Page 8

  There was a tap on the hatch. He keyed a switch, opening it to reveal Cleo Pearlman. She was young, idealistic and very easy to seduce, much to his amusement. But she also had enough regard for security to keep her mouth shut, at least when it came to operational details. It would have been admirable if it hadn’t been so frustrating.

  “I heard we’re moving,” she said. The only benefit of living among the Outsiders was that they didn’t pay any attention to intimate affairs. There was no penalty for sleeping with any of them, male or female. “Are you ready?”

  “Getting there,” Uzi grunted. “But there’s still a lot of work to do.”

  Chapter Eight

  Martial Law. The imposition of control by a military force, imposed by authority of the Grand Senate or Federation Emergency Procedures. Military officers replace civilians at all levels, issuing orders; crime and dissent can be harshly punished.

  -The Federation Navy in Retrospect, 4199

  Athena, 4098

  “It looks bad,” Investigator Bonaventura said. “This could be the worst case of corruption since Admiral Stevenson was indicted on several hundred counts of molesting subordinates, gross incompetence and desertion in the face of the enemy.”

  Roman looked at the middle-aged woman in surprise. Admiral Stevenson had stayed in his post until Emperor Marius had assumed control of Earth and started to remove officers too loyal to the Grand Senate or too incompetent to be allowed to remain in their posts. Even then, he’d been determined to stay in command of his unit and only the detachment of a squadron of superdreadnaughts had convinced him to surrender his authority. That, and the fact – like Governor Barany – that no one would consider fighting for him. It was a minor miracle that none of his subordinates had considered mutiny before the coup.

  “It’s that bad?”

  “Yes, sir,” Bonaventura said. “It’s disastrous.”

  She stood and activated the wall display. “Governor Barany was taking bribes from just about everyone,” she said. “The local industries, for example, bribed him to cut their taxes down to the bare minimum, which weren’t even paid. This funded their rapid expansion, an expansion that was utterly uneven – and yet they maintained their production rates. We now know that most of their products were purchased by parties without the Federation-mandated end user certificates, including weapons, advanced sensor systems and every other form of starship component. The only things he didn’t seem to sell are full-sized starships.

  “It gets worse. He was apparently running a protection racket as well. Starship crews and corporations that paid up were allowed to run unmolested, while ships and crews that refused to pay – or were simply unable to pay – were targeted by pirates, once they were outside the system. I can’t even begin to estimate just how much damage this has done to the sector’s overall economy, commodore. There are quite a few planets in real danger of collapse because they’re not self-sufficient yet. Indeed, the governor was purposely delaying the shipments that would have allowed them to stand on their own two feet.”

  “Shit,” Roman said. He’d thought he’d seen bad officers – and he’d seen a great many purged, either by the war or Emperor Marius. Now, he understood why some of his former superiors had been so cynical. “And no one gave a damn?”

  “I think his patrons in the Grand Senate were receiving their full share of the proceeds,” Bonaventura said, darkly. “There was certainly no incentive to remove him, despite Admiral – ah, Emperor – Drake’s insistence that Barany was in bed with the pirates.”

  She paused, dramatically. “But there may be something even worse,” she warned. “There were recruiting officers operating here, too. Countless spacers and mercenaries have been lured away from the planet and taken...well, we don’t know where they went. But the local intelligence officers should have been tracking their movements and, instead, they dropped the ball. They could have gone anywhere.”

  Roman frowned. A year ago, it would have been assumed that Admiral Justinian or one of the other warlords had been recruiting as many mercenaries as he could. He’d always had a shortage of trained and experienced manpower, at least at first, and he’d been willing to pay through the nose for decent officers and men. But Justinian was dead, along with the rest of the treacherous bastards. Who would be recruiting them now?

  He looked up at the display, then back at Bonaventura. “There’s enough evidence to indict Barany?”

  “Oh, yes,” Bonaventura assured him. “There are at least seven separate counts of High Treason we could indict him for, all of which carry the death penalty.”

  “Have him interrogated, thoroughly, then have him sent back to Earth,” Roman said. As tempting as it was to have the governor hurled out the nearest airlock, Emperor Drake would want to deal with him personally. “What about the remains of his administration?”

  “We’ve suspended a number of people, but the vast majority may have had no idea of what was going on,” Bonaventura said. “However, it will take years to sort out the guilty from the innocent.”

  The Grand Senate would have killed the whole lot of them, Roman thought. Either to make it clear that treachery on such a scale would not be tolerated or to bury all tracks that might have led back to Earth.

  He pushed the thought to one side. “Have your people start working their way through the governor’s staff,” he ordered, instead. “The guilty can be shipped back to Earth too.”

  “Yes, sir,” Bonaventura said.

  Roman swung around to face Higgins, who looked uncomfortable in the briefing compartment. Roman didn’t blame him. Engineers were rarely invited to high-level staff meetings.

  “The alien ship,” he said. “What did you find?”

  “There’s little to add to my original report,” Higgins said. He took control of the display and put up an image of the alien vessel. “The ship was designed and built by aliens, but they very definitely used human technology. Advanced and adapted human technology. This was not put together by someone following rote instructions, sir. The builders understood what they were doing.”

  Elf leaned forward. “You’re sure it wasn’t built by humans to look alien?”

  “Every human ship, even ones designed more for beauty than for practicality, is built in a similar manner,” Higgins said. He seemed more comfortable, now he was talking about something he understood perfectly. “The Federation enforced standardization on every shipyard, even the ones that were sited within the old Colonial Alliance. This ship was not built in a standard human shipyard.

  “Besides, there are other odd points,” he continued. “The air mix is odd; humans could live there for extended periods, but there would eventually be health problems. Federation specifications insist that life support units be built to extreme standards; the designers of this ship, whoever they were, didn’t invest so much effort in maintaining the atmosphere. The internal tubes are badly shaped, by our standards. Anyone larger than a ten-year-old kid would have real problems using them, even in zero-gee. No, the ship was built by alien shipwrights. And that leaves us with a problem.”

  “I’d say,” Captain Heinz Lancelets said. Valiant’s CO didn’t look pleased. “What the hell was she doing here?”

  “I checked the records,” Bonaventura said. “She was, apparently, salvaged in the Rim and brought in to Athens by a local contractor. They were still bickering over the exact salvage fee when we arrived.”

  Roman shook his head in disbelief. The Federation Navy had a flat rate it paid for alien technology – and it was far from ungenerous. Any contractor who recovered an entire alien starship would be paid enough to buy a handful of human-built ships for himself, if he wished. And there shouldn’t have been any delay over purchase, either. Once the ship was verified as being alien, it would have been purchased at once.

  “The governor may have been stalling,” Elf said.

  “Someone certainly was,” Bonaventura agreed. “But there’s no evidence the governor even knew of the shi
p’s existence. All such matters should have been handled by the local sector officer...”

  “Who was never replaced, because of the war,” Roman finished. “And whoever was left behind might have had their own reasons to stall.”

  “Yes, sir,” Bonaventura said.

  Roman thought, rapidly. There had always been rumors of new alien races lurking beyond the Rim – and the starship’s presence proved that at least one undiscovered alien race definitely existed. And the simple fact that the starship’s existence hadn’t been reported to Earth, as far as they could tell, was worrying too. The aliens might already have managed to subvert the planet’s government. Perhaps they were the ones recruiting human mercenaries for their purposes. Hell, they already knew the aliens had collaborators. The existence of so much human-derived tech proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt.

  “This system should be defended,” he said, slowly. He didn’t aim the question at a specific officer, just tossed it out into the air. “But just how heavily defended is it, really?”

  It was Elf who answered. “Poorly,” she said. “I had a look at their reports and compared them against our sensor readings. Training and exercise cycles are way down, orbital fortresses are badly undermanned and the sector fleet is spread out over the sector. There was nothing larger than a heavy cruiser in this system until we arrived. The governor was more interested in plowing the sector’s funds into his bank accounts than seeing to his defenses.”

  “Corruption has proved a major problem there too,” Bonaventura added. “I have evidence that senior officers within the planetary defenses were involved in selling off pieces of military-grade hardware to civilians. Again, there were no real checks on who was actually buying the hardware.”

  Roman groaned. Pirates always lived on the margins, he knew; it was why their ships were in constant danger of falling apart at the seams. And, perhaps, why they were so brutal to their victims. But they wouldn’t have been able to operate at all if they hadn’t been supported by vested interests within the Federation itself. The planet that needed equipment without taxes or awkward questions being asked, the officer who wanted funds and was prepared to trade military hardware for money, the governor who wanted to run a protection racket...it was sickening.

  Like above, so below, he thought, bitterly. His parents had been killed by pirates, pirates who might have been armed and trained by corrupt officials within the Federation. It had seemed a random attack...but had it really been anything of the sort? Had someone benefited from the near-complete destruction of Isogloss, with Roman the only survivor? If someone could use a pirate attack as an excuse to seize an entire planet, why not an asteroid-mining field?

  But he wasn’t the scared little boy or junior cadet any longer, he told himself. He could look it up in the records, the records that had been seized before the Grand Senate could destroy them. All it would take was a query to Earth. No one would try to stop him finding the truth...

  ...And he was woolgathering. Angrily, he forced himself to concentrate on the here and now.

  “I’m going to declare martial law over the entire system,” he said, firmly. It was within his authority, but he’d hoped never to have to use it. He’d seen too many examples of martial law being abused by Federation authorities. “The formal announcement will be made in” – he glanced at the chronometer – “four hours. By then, I want Marines at every vital location within the system and our people in command of the orbital fortresses.”

  “Our crews will be stretched quite thin,” Bonaventura pointed out. “There are over twenty thousand men and women involved in crewing the fortresses alone.”

  “The Marines can supervise, if necessary,” Elf said. “And the fortresses are designed to operate on reduced manpower.”

  “I wouldn’t count on these fortresses being designed for anything of the sort,” Lancelets said, softly. “The governor wouldn’t have been able to keep so many people on the rolls if the stations could be operated with a skeleton crew.”

  Roman nodded. “Once the system is secure, we will start boosting the defenses as quickly as possible. I want to ensure we have a safe port, if necessary. Our plans to start aggressively patrolling within the sector will need to be put on hold, until we have a secure base. I will be contacting Emperor Marius directly, reporting the situation and requesting reinforcements.”

  Bonaventura gave him a sharp look. “You expect trouble?”

  “Yes,” Roman said, flatly. He nodded towards the image of the alien starship. “There’s at least one starfaring race out there, linked to human collaborators. What do they want?”

  “We could learn a great deal from them,” Higgins said. “They had some new approaches to issues...”

  Lancelets cut him off with a glower. “Learning from aliens? Are you insane?”

  The captain turned to face Roman. “Commodore,” he said, “I move that statement be struck from the record.”

  “Do it,” Roman said, after a moment. Even a hint of alien sympathies could destroy a career, no matter the actual context. The mere presence of an alien starship built with human technology would be alarming enough. “We must assume the worst.”

  He sighed, inwardly. It hadn’t been that long since he’d taken shore leave on an alien world, where he’d seen just how badly the aliens had been degraded under humanity’s jackboot. They’d rebelled later, he’d heard, and he didn’t blame them. The Federation might be hated and feared along the Rim, where Federation membership brought more oppression and exploitation than benefits, but aliens had the worst of it. They were, at best, nothing more than slaves. It was strikingly rare to encounter an alien away from its homeworld, outside a zoo.

  And who, a nasty little voice at the back of his mind muttered, could blame the new aliens for trying to defend themselves?

  “See to your duties,” he said, tartly. The voice had to be ignored, right now. There was too much to do, rebuilding the Federation, to worry about alien rights. Something could be done later, he was sure. “Dismissed!”

  Elf waited behind until the other officers had left the compartment. “Young Higgins will be in for some trouble,” she observed. “That was a very intemperate remark.”

  “His superiors will not be pleased,” Roman agreed. But Higgins was really too good an engineer to lose. “His career will survive.”

  “Chew him out personally,” Elf suggested. “No one else will say a word to him if you chew him out first.”

  Roman smiled weakly, remembering his first deployment on Enterprise. There had been a strict pattern for young officers who happened to screw up by the numbers. They’d be chewed out by their immediate superior, then the next-ranking officer, and then all the way up to the XO. But if the XO happened to be the first one to chew the young man out, no one else said a word.

  “I’ll see to it,” he said. “What do you make of the whole mess?”

  “A mess,” Elf said. “Nothing about this makes sense, Roman. That probably means there’s more than one party involved, perhaps working at cross-purposes.”

  “The governor and...the aliens?” Roman asked. “Or insurrectionists? Or...what?”

  “We may not find out for a while,” Elf said. She rose to her feet, then paced over to sit next to him. “And you were right. We must be prepared for the worst.”

  Roman sighed. His plan had been simple enough; the superdreadnaughts would remain at Athena, while his smaller units would be assigned to convoy protection. They would aggressively chase every contact they detected, ensuring that the pirates knew there was a new game in town. Any pirates they happened to capture would be interrogated, hopefully allowing ONI to track down their bases, which might lead to rogue colonies beyond the Rim. He’d even been planning to send out new survey missions, once he had a feel for the entire sector. They might have stumbled across an entire world of rebels and started the task of bringing them under the Federation’s authority.

  But the plan hadn’t survived contact with Governo
r Barany.

  “They bought vast amounts of military gear,” he mused. “Why would they want so much of it?”

  It was rare, vanishingly rare, to encounter a pirate ship larger than a light cruiser. The crewing requirements were staggeringly high, beyond the capabilities of any reasonable pirate organization. Besides, the larger the ship, the more complex its operations. Pirate crews were rarely capable of handling such a ship for long, even with automated systems to assist. The pirates seemed to be purchasing material they had no logical use for, save the mere pleasure of ownership. But add in an alien race using human-derived technology and one explanation suggested itself fairly quickly. The aliens, not the humans, wanted the technology.

  He outlined his thoughts and Elf nodded. “It makes sense,” she said. “If they’re trying to build up a fleet of their own, they’d need as many weapons and other pieces of hardware as they could get. And we already know they’re technologically ingenious.”

  “Higgins made that clear,” Roman said. Actually, his report had suggested the engineer was more than a little impressed with his alien counterparts. The report might have to be edited carefully before it was sent up the chain to Earth. Federation Navy HQ would be unlikely to take a calm view of it. “We definitely have to prepare for the worst.”

  Elf smiled, then rose to her feet and walked out of the compartment. Roman watched her go, then looked down at the reports on his datapad. There had been so much hardware flowing out of the system that he couldn’t help considering it a major threat, if it was gathered together in one place. And Governor Barany hadn’t helped. Even if he’d had no idea that aliens – and human collaborators – were active within his system, the sheer lack of oversight had allowed them to get their work done without interference. That would have to stop...