Poor Man's Fight (8 page)

“What do you mean?” Andrea asked. “Is there anything you need?”

Yeoh shook her head. “What I really want right now is my own ship again,” she grimaced. “My own ship and some sort of a trail on these bastards. But it looks like I won’t get either one today.”

Andrea nodded. She felt silly for having asked. “We weren’t sure whether to follow through on the education speech today,” she said, feeling somewhat apologetic. “We received word just before the event began. Couldn’t decide if we should have canceled in light of this.”

“I’ve got twins,” Yeoh shrugged. “They get to take that stupid test in a couple years, too. Pirates don’t make all that go away.”

“No. No, I guess they don’t.”

The admiral’s eyes stayed fixed on the holo screens. “I owed fourteen thousand when I took mine and counted myself lucky. It ate up almost my whole salary during my first couple years at the Academy. Life there was so regimented I didn’t exactly have much else to spend money on, but even so I could only imagine what it’d be like if my situation were different.” She changed several holo displays with a gesture. “How about you?”

Andrea pursed her lips and looked away. “I, uh,” she faltered, “I didn’t actually owe anything when I was finished.”

Yeoh’s tight-lipped smile returned. “Of course,” the older woman chuckled. One of her officers caught her eye with a small wave. “You’ll have to excuse me, Andrea.”

“No, don’t let me keep you,” Andrea urged, stepping back quickly. She bumped into another officer, turned and found an empty chair next to Victor.

The holocom on his wrist beeped before either said anything. He eyed Andrea knowingly. “I’ve been waiting on this call.” He keyed an open channel on his holocom and pointedly didn’t enable video display. “Frank, how are—?”

“You sent him out there to call us out after everything we’ve done for you people?” broke in the bitter voice of Frank Andrews, NorthStar Corporation’s “advisor” to President Aguirre. “We boosted teacher benefits in Archangel because of you guys and we’re still catching hell for it in a dozen other systems.”

“Well,” Victor tried to interrupt, “maybe you should take better care of your teachers in those other—”

Frank would not be deterred. “We doubled enrollment in the Society of Scholars for you guys. We did the credit-matching payoff deal for your little navy. Do you know what that does to our profits?”

“Oh, bullshit, Frank!” Victor countered forcefully. “You guys did that because you wanted to keep up with Lai Wa when they agreed to the same deal! And those aren’t actual credits you’re spending. It’s all money you save because of capital expense breaks and tax loopholes we created for you. And by the way, thanks for the extra system patrols you agreed to provide. Fat lot of good they did for the people on the
Aphrodite
.”

“Son of a—! That was
our ship
! You want to know how many of our people were on board, asshole?”

From across the room, Admiral Yeoh caught Victor’s eye and gave a soft shake of her head. He caught her meaning. It was too late to take the comment back, though. Best to redirect.

“Look, Frank, you want to talk real education reform or concrete changes in patrol coverage, I’m all ears,” Victor said. “But if you’re just calling to bitch at me because the president called a spade a spade, I’ve got bigger priorities.” With that, he cut the line.

“Ought to be fun walking back from exchanges like that come election season,” Andrea frowned. She agreed with everything Victor said, but there was honesty and then there was pragmatism. One had far more value in politics than the other.

“Yeah, well,” Victor sighed, smugly happy with himself, “we’ve got a plan for that, too.”

“You going to handle Lai Wa and CDC’s guys the same way?”

“Lai Wa’s rep is nicer to me,” Victor shrugged. “She won’t be calling for another hour, at least, until she gets direction from her bosses. And the CDC guy doesn’t get aggressive.”

“What’s the CDC guy’s name?”

“If I could remember that, I’d probably remember what his stupid company’s initials stand for.”

The entry hatch to the transport opened. President Aguirre walked in with several other staffers and cabinet members. The day’s original plans had been ruined by the incident with
Aphrodite
; several officials who had been along for the president’s “education day” trips were now mostly superfluous. Others had to be called in. Aguirre’s intelligence minister and foreign minister weren’t normally a big part of domestic policy events, yet here they were, right beside the minister of finance.

Everyone rose as the president entered. “How are we doing?” he asked. He was already removing his jacket before he sat down in his customary chair.

“If I could have just a moment more, Mr. President?” Admiral Yeoh asked, conferring with another officer in one corner.

“Sure, sure,” Aguirre nodded. He accepted the glass of water handed to him by one of his aides as he looked to Victor and Andrea. “You handled the press conference during the speech?”

“Immediately after, sir,” Andrea nodded. “I gave as much detail as we had to give.”

“She might’ve thrown some punches at the same people you slapped today while she was at it,” added Victor.

“Excellent. What about you?”

“Already got the earful from Frank Andrews,” Victor shrugged. “I told him to go to hell without, you know, actually saying, ‘Go to hell.’”

“You’d better not. If anyone gets to tell that man to go to hell, it had better be me.”

“Due respect, sir, you’ve talked to him three times at most.”

“Yes, but he’s symbolic of NorthStar and I’m the symbolic head of state.” The engines of the president’s transport gave their first soft rumble. The cabin shook only slightly and only for a moment, but enough to demonstrate that they were airborne. Aguirre saw Admiral Yeoh waiting with a patient expression on her face. “Please, Admiral, whenever you’re ready.”

“We have 641 survivors,” she began, “all of them crew. Not a single passenger among them. Apparently, the pirates separated them out for a recruitment pitch. About a dozen took the pirates up on the offer. The rest were shoved into the lifeboats.”

“That many? In two lifeboats?” asked David Kiribati, head of Archangel’s Intelligence Service.

Admiral Yeoh nodded. “The pirates had the crew tear out most of the seating units and then packed everyone in, standing room only. Someone took the priciest bits from the engines and nav systems on the lifeboats before setting them adrift, too. They waited for hours before they were found. Two of the crew didn’t survive the ordeal.

“It’s worth noting that most senior officers are still missing. A number of junior officers witnessed the captain’s murder. We don’t have the first officer or the chief engineer. The ship’s doctor is also missing. I’m told the chief navigator may not survive due to severe injuries.

“We know that
Aphrodite
didn’t put up a fight,” she continued, calling up a three-dimensional image of the ship in front of her. “We believe she had armament and armor enough to have made that a genuine option, but the captain didn’t take it.”

“You think it was an inside job?” Aguirre frowned suspiciously.

“I wouldn’t go that far, sir,” Yeoh replied. “The decision to resist or surrender was entirely the captain’s call. Civilian captains have to quickly weigh the prospects of resistance to pirate attacks. Failed resistance generally leads to much greater violence toward a captured crew and passengers than they face if they surrender quickly. From the sound of things, the captain didn’t think he could fight off the pirates.”

“But you said that his ship was well-armed?”

“As you know, we suspect NorthStar skirts Union arms limits with many of their ships. It’s in your intelligence briefings. We believe
Aphrodite
is one that could be converted to military use with relative ease, but we don’t have proof. As it stands, her weapons are more of a deterrent than anything else. The ship might hold up in a serious fight, but the crew would’ve been another matter. I suspect that was on the captain’s mind when he decided to surrender.”

“I see. Why would they go to that effort to spare the crew?” Aguirre asked.

“I’m merely speculating,” mused Kiribati, “but as the admiral said, these pirates made a recruiting pitch. It’s been done before. A lot of pirate organizations pride themselves on an ideology of personal freedom. You’re not exactly making a free choice if the recruiting pitch is ‘join or die,’ so… they may have simply wanted to avoid being seen as hypocrites.”

Aguirre snorted derisively. “That’s a lovely thought. I’m sorry, Admiral. Please go on.”

“
Aphrodite
had a passenger listing of 2,744 passengers. As of our last count from
Resolute
, we have found 896 bodies floating in space. That leaves us looking for 1,938 more.”

“Jesus Christ,” Aguirre blinked. “We’ve got everyone we can spare out there looking right now, don’t we?”

“Yes sir, we’re already doing that,” Yeoh nodded. “There’s more, sir.” Aguirre grunted, but waved for her to continue. “A significant number of the passengers are highly-placed medical professionals, most if not all under contract with NorthStar,” she said. “They were on their way to a vacation/conference on Michael. We believe they were kept as hostages.”

“NorthStar will pay the ransom,” Kiribati scowled. “I’ll be able to confirm that in a day or two through some sources, but they’re probably negotiating it right now.”

“Already? We’re still sorting out what the hell happened out there, and NorthStar is already talking to these bastards?”

“So much for not negotiating with hostage-takers,” Victor put in.

Kiribati just shrugged. “NorthStar has a whole insurance wing for this. It’s cost effective.”

“I imagine they’ll find a way to pass the costs onto us,” Victor mused.

“Probably,” put in Abdul Shadid, Aguirre’s finance minister. “They’ll likely scale back their exposure on this end of space, nudge up interest rates and fees on everything here to make up for the losses, and claim that risk like this justifies it.”

“And then they’ll leave those price hikes in place even after the expenses are covered,” Aguirre fumed.

“No real surprises there, sir,” Shadid shrugged. “If they do it quickly enough, we can use it to our advantage to obfuscate a little bit more of our own budget shifts,” he added, glancing meaningfully at Andrea, “but that’s a short-term disguise. In the long term it will obviously be a squeeze.”

“The clock’s about to run out on that game soon,” Aguirre grumbled ominously. He looked up at Yeoh again. “How did they nab the liner, anyway?”

“Most of the freighters and the like that are hit by pirates simply don’t see them coming in time and can’t run away fast enough once they do,” Yeoh explained. “In this case, though, the pirates apparently put up a good disguise as a derelict ship. Legally,
Aphrodite
was obligated to go investigate. By the time she recognized the danger it was too late. She couldn’t get away.

“From what the survivors and the lifeboat sensors gathered before the pirates jumped away, this was done with a single ship. She’s most likely a second-generation Centurion-class destroyer, which makes her old but easily upgraded. The construction fundamentals on those ships were excellent. She could be a hundred years old and would still stand up well to the destroyers we have today.”

“How do pirates get a ship like that?”

Yeoh shrugged. “I could come up with plausible explanations all day long. She could have been part of any number of system navies or corporate security forces. She could’ve been purchased as surplus last year or maybe her crew mutinied decades ago. But someone has put in enough money to modernize her.”

“So what are our prospects for running these bastards down?”

“At the moment, not good,” Yeoh admitted. “They could be operating out of the other side of Union space, or even the far side of Krokinthian territory for all we know.”

Aguirre turned his attention to Kiribati, wordlessly repeating his question. The spymaster also shrugged. “We’ll try to follow up on the ransom transaction and hostage handover, but I don’t know how far that’ll get us. NorthStar will play it very tight because they won’t want to jeopardize their ability to cut such deals in the future. If
Aphrodite
turns up on the surplus market, we’ll have a lead, but that could be months down the road.

“Our best bet is to keep our eyes and ears open and hope that one or more of the crew does something stupid with his share of the loot or gets too drunk and brags too much in the right place.”

“Aren’t you the one who’s saying that the galaxy is too big to watch everywhere at once?” Aguirre snorted. He tapped the table lightly. “Is that it for the bad news?” Yeoh and Kiribati glanced at one another. Aguirre groaned again. “What?”

“The Kingdom of Hashem—“ Kiribati began.

“Oh, Christ…”

“—has lodged demands through diplomatic and military channels that Archangel enhance security facing the Hashemite frontier. They asked whether or not we plan to provide compensation for their subjects lost amid the passengers of the
Aphrodite
, which, given that her point of origin was in Hashemite space, made up a considerable portion of those missing and dead.”