“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.