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.”