“Leave them alone,” I ordered finally. It wouldn’t be easy, but we’d manage somehow. “Have you got the bill of lading for the ship?”
“Muna is sorting it out now,” Peter said, accepting the change in subject. We were going to have to send the Julius Caesar back to Botany to pick up some additional supplies, along with a handful of other Legionnaires who might be useful here. “I think that Fleet will want to have a quick look at her before she leaves.”
“Muna or the ship?” I asked, without humour. Muna had been in the UNPF before it mutinied and became Fleet. She rarely spoke about her time on the starships, but it must have been something dramatic. Every time John Walker’s name was mentioned, she winced. “No, stupid question; they’ll want to inspect the ship.”
“Of course,” Peter said, dryly. “I don’t know why they want to bother, but if they insist…”
“Then we have no choice, but to comply,” I agreed. It struck me as rather pointless — Svergie had nothing worth the effort of smuggling off-planet, even if it had laws against it, which it didn’t — and I suspected that Captain Price-Jones was taking the opportunity to harass us a little. He’d heard the Communist broadcasts claiming to be an independent state and even though he hadn’t intervened, he couldn’t have been very happy about them, or the allegations concerning Fleet’s involvement with Svergie. “Let me know when they want to inspect the starship and then let them get on with it.”
“Yes, sir,” Peter said, spying Ed in the distance. “I think Ed wants a word with you.”
Ed saluted as he walked up to us and I returned the salute. “We’re about to start the first heavy exercise now,” he said, as we walked towards the testing ground. A hundred vehicles and three hundred men had deployed into a large and deserted area of the countryside for their first heavy exercise. It wasn’t quite live-fire — we had laser systems to count hits without risking harm to anyone — but people had been known to be injured or killed on such training grounds. “Do you wish to observe?”
I shook my head. “I can observe through the UAV units if I have to watch,” I said, seriously. I would have loved to watch, but I just didn’t have the time. Ed was luckier than he knew; he got to run a Company and a training exercise, while I was trapped between paperwork and Fleet’s demands. “Let me know if there’s something I should keep a particular eye on.”
“I will, and I’ll even write you a report afterwards,” Ed teased. He knew what I was feeling, all right. “Have a good time here, sir.”
My earpiece buzzed before I could frame a suitably insulting reply. “Sir, this is dispatch,” a voice said. “A Fleet shuttle is inbound and the officer onboard insists on seeing you personally.”
“Understood,” I said. I had a strong suspicion I already knew who was on that ship, but better safe than sorry. “Show him into my office when he arrives.”
Twenty minutes later, Commander (Fleet Intelligence) Daniel Webster was shown into my office. I didn’t waste time pretending to be busy; I stood up, shook his hand and invited him to sit on the sofa. He accepted a cup of local coffee — no UN-brand for him, clearly — and we chatted for five minutes about nothing. I knew, just from that alone, that it was going to be bad.
“The Captain was quite annoyed about the Communist broadcasts,” he explained, once he had run out of small talk. “I take it that there’s no need to worry that the Protocols were infringed?”
“No,” I said, firmly. Daniel — he had the same first name as Daniel Singh, I realised suddenly — looked doubtful. “The Communists lost the election, nor did they manage to use force of arms to overturn the results. The Fleet Protocols were not infringed as it was a purely local matter.”
“It is questionable how… local this entire affair is with you and your men mixed up in the middle of it,” Daniel commented, dryly. “The requests for recognition from the Communist Government, the… ah People’s Republic of Pitea were quite worrying. If it had turned into an interstellar incident, certain people would not have been best pleased.”
I understood the underlying message and nodded. “It shouldn’t be a problem,” I said, playing the guilty schoolboy. “It won’t happen again.”
“It shouldn’t have happened in the first place,” Daniel said. “Captain Price-Jones is unaware that we allowed you to use the ship’s orbital imaging systems to monitor the situation on the ground. If he were to discover the truth — and it doesn’t sit well with anyone on the ship who does know — the results would not be pleasant. At the very least, you’d be cut off from all further intelligence from us; at worst, you’d be ordered off-planet in such a way that it couldn’t be countermanded easily. The entire situation might well have been exposed to scrutiny.”
“It won’t happen again,” I repeated, angrily this time. I hadn’t expected the Communists to beg for help from Fleet, although Captain Price-Jones had refused to get involved. “Like I said, it was a purely local affair.”
“It may not stay that way,” Daniel said, as he calmed down a little. “The William Tell detected several unexplained wormhole signatures over the last three weeks. It’s possible that someone is smuggling stuff down onto the planet and that, of course, is a major concern for Fleet.”
“Or it could be just someone setting up base in the asteroids,” I countered. The only official arrival at Svergie had been a freighter acting as a pathfinder for an interstellar shipping line, wondering if it was worth the effort of adding Svergie to their list of destinations. I didn’t know for sure, but I suspected that they had decided against it and vanished back into more profitable shipping lanes. “Do you have any proof that someone managed an orbital insertion without being detected?”
“No,” Daniel said, “but that proves nothing. Fleet’s… sensors are good, but not that good.”
“True,” I agreed. I knew far less about space combat and tactics than I did about ground warfare, but I knew enough to understand his point. Given sufficient time and patience, a stealth shuttle could have landed when the William Tell was in the wrong position to observe it and catch them in the act. A landing pod would have been even easier, although the new arrival wouldn’t have been able to leave the planet afterwards. “We detected nothing, of course.”
“It could be just jumping at shadows,” Daniel agreed. “It’s not as if Svergie is a closed system where no one might want to come under any circumstances. It’s even possible that the wormholes belonged to freighters performing navigational checks before heading out again to their next destination. It’s just… worrying, and with the reports of the Freedom League taking an interest in this general area…”
I snorted. ‘This general area’ consisted of hundreds of light years and a couple of dozen inhabited planets. It was possible that the Freedom League might have their hand in events somewhere, but I doubted they’d work with the Communists. The Freedom League had been born in revolt against the United Nations and preferred to support democratic systems against the UN, or Fleet. They hadn’t stopped operating just because the UN had been broken and Fleet had taken its place.
“It could be nothing,” Daniel conceded. “However, there are more practical concerns on Svergie itself. What do you make of the local situation?”
I hesitated, and then decided to be truthful. “It’s unstable,” I said. “We beat the Communists hard enough to make anyone else think twice about starting a second insurrection, but we’re going to have to work to rebuild the damage and that it going to take time and resources the planet doesn’t have. It doesn’t help that the vast majority of the Council and the Acting President are Progressive, which leaves the other parties feeling left out and suspicious. The farmers will have to produce extra food over the coming year to feed the starving, which isn’t going to make the political situation any better. Overall… if we can last the next year or two we should have a fairly stable planet.”