The silver fleet the com.., p.114
The Silver Fleet: The Complete Series, page 114
The fact that that was likely to place them all in harm’s way in very short order hardly seemed to matter. What mattered was doing what was right, and Faulkner was a master of that.
*
They were holding Farnese in a room at the other end of the ship. It was as far away from the crew quarters as it was possible to get. The interrogation was to take place in a specially constructed cell, the walls of which had been constructed of one-way diamond glass. It was a room within a room, allowing the senior investigating officers outside to monitor everything that was going on while those inside remained oblivious.
Meyer was in custody but had refused to speak with anyone. Not that that had surprised Faulkner. It was the sensible thing to do and, for all his shortcomings as a senior officer, you could never accuse Meyer of doing anything rashly. Everything about him was slow and considered, clearly a style of leadership which had met with approval back at the Admiralty.
What did surprise Faulkner was the fact that Farnese had agreed to be interviewed. Although he did insist that he should only be questioned by an officer of the same rank or higher, which meant Faulkner. He was the only person who fitted the bill.
Secretly, he was glad of the opportunity to get away from the bridge. He’d been impressed by Schwartz from the start and felt that she was doing an excellent job of running things, which was just as well. While Faulkner had been cleared for duty, Sands had stipulated that his time on the bridge be limited to two-hour time slots, the assumption being that he’d spend the rest of his time resting. But things hadn’t worked out like that.
Faulkner had been met at the entrance to the restricted area by Lieutenant Vance, part of the legal team aboard Renheim. She had briefed him about how it might be best to approach the interrogation – particularly areas which she felt it prudent to avoid. He was to avoid making Farnese any promises, for example, regarding either his short-term care or how he might be prosecuted at a later date.
All he could do was listen and hope that Farnese might be willing to open up to him. He had strong reasons to believe that this wouldn’t be the case. Farnese had access to some fairly incendiary information and Faulkner expected him to use this as a bargaining tool leading up to his trial. He certainly didn’t expect Farnese to give him anything for free.
They watched through the mirrored glass as Farnese entered the room under armed guard. Faulkner barely recognised him. The blonde locks were gone, replaced by a brutal buzz cut and he was dressed in bright orange overalls which stripped him of all authority. It looked to Faulkner as though Commander Farnese wasn’t going to be cut out for prison life.
Farnese was shackled around the waist and the officer in charge had him secured to the chair he was sitting in. Then he was bound to the table by his wrists and ankles. It was only once the officer was satisfied that he went to take up his position against the back wall.
Vance held the door open so Faulkner could get his wheelchair inside. It was she who ran the first part of the session, alerting Farnese to the fact that everything was being recorded and would be admissible as evidence at any subsequent hearings. Then she briefed him on his rights as an officer of the Confederation Navy.
At that point, she stopped talking and very deliberately packed her tablet away.
The two men sat regarding one another.
Farnese was still coming to terms with the realities of his incarceration. Every now and then he would forget himself and try to cross his legs or make to gesture with his hands. Each time he found himself pulled up short. He was so tightly manacled that even scratching his nose was a challenge.
“What a pair we are,” Faulkner said, eventually. “Both the products of the Admiralty’s officer training program and look at us.”
Farnese inclined his head. “You do have a point, captain. Although my legs worked perfectly fine, last time I looked.”
Faulkner let the jibe wash over him. “But isn’t that the irony, here? I can go wherever I like, though I’m not physically able, while you – well, you’re stuck in here. Truth is though, we’ve both brought this on ourselves.”
“Of course, I forget,” Farnese lifted his hands, intending to take in all of his surroundings but was brought up short by his restraints. “You’d know all about confinement.”
Faulkner puffed out his cheeks as he considered this. “I suppose. Yes and no.”
“What do you mean? It’s a prison. You know what that’s like.”
“I’m not so sure that I do. When I was taken prisoner that was a conscience decision on my part. I surrendered. There’s a difference.”
“The way I heard it, you didn’t have much of a choice. If you’d refused to turn yourself in, they’d have destroyed your ship and everyone on board.”
“Still. I did have a choice and that’s the main thing. But who’s been making your choices lately? Was it you, or perhaps it was Captain Meyer?”
Farnese opened his mouth to say something but then caught sight of Lieutenant Vance. He looked round to see the guard standing directly behind him. Then he sat forward and fixed Faulkner with a glare.
“Meyer’s an idiot, and you know it. But I have to say, I was mighty impressed by the way you handled him when you had us over for dinner. You treated him with total respect, even though he was in the process of running away from the enemy.”
Faulkner held out his own wrists, regarding them as if he were manacled also.
“After a few years in prison, you learn not to judge people. It’s a waste of valuable energy. You can only respond to the situation you find yourself in at the time. You and Captain Meyer were my guests and, as such, were to be treated accordingly.”
“You gave us the benefit of the doubt?”
“If you want to put it like that, then – yes – I suppose.”
“Would you be happy to extend me the same privilege?”
“I seem to remember that you’re the one who tried to have me killed.”
Farnese laughed. “For that, captain, I feel I must apologise. Not for trying to have you killed, though. It’s just that I should have done it myself. I owed you that much.”
“Oh,” Faulkner smirked. “And you think you’d have had more luck?”
“I wouldn’t have underestimated you like he did. Though I’m still struggling to work out where you got that gun.”
Faulkner turned to look at Lieutenant Vance.
“Unfortunately, I am subject to some of the same legal restraints that you are. Suffice to say, that it was given to me for safeguarding by the child of someone who had previously served under me. It was a tradition at the Academy at one time. When you graduated, your family would present you with a vintage service revolver. Most were simple replicas but this one was the real deal.”
“Thing that old, you were lucky it didn’t blow up in your face,” Farnese said.
“I disagree. A classic mechanism like that. Long as you look after it, it’ll be good for a couple of hundred years. But enough about that - what about you? You still haven’t explained why it was you wanted me killed. Doesn’t make any sense.”
Farnese steepled his fingers together. It was one of the few things his restraints allowed him to do.
“It’s stupid really. It was all to do with that wine.” Faulkner looked at him blankly. Farnese continued. “The wine that Meyer gave you that night you had us over for dinner.”
“I’m sorry,” Faulkner gripped the arms of his chair. “You proposed to have me killed over a bottle of wine. Why on earth would you do that?”
“It was all Meyer’s doing. His ham-fisted way of alerting you to what was going on. That bottle represented a physical link between Meyer and myself and the company that’s been bankrolling this whole enterprise.”
Faulkner was aware that Vance was sitting forward in her chair, keen not to miss any of this.
“Van Dyne Industries,” Farnese continued. “There, I’ve said it now. They’re the ones behind all of this. Money’s no object as far as they’re concerned.”
“Van Dyne?” Faulkner mulled the name over in his head. “They’re the armaments people, aren’t they?”
“That’s right. They have a valuable asset down on the surface of Tigris and they wanted us to retrieve it. The only problem was that the people we were supposed to liaise with were killed in the first Da’al attack.”
“So, why was it that you and Meyer were heading away from Tigris when I ran into you?”
“With the arrival of the Da’al, we were forced to re-group. The plan was always for us to return to Tigris but we needed a Plan B.”
Suddenly, everything started to fall into place for Faulkner.
“Which was why you never had any intention of engaging with the Da’al. You didn’t want to jeopardise your real objective which had been Tigris all along. I see that now. But that still doesn’t explain the wine.”
“I couldn’t take the chance that you hadn’t read the label. Hadn’t put two and two together.”
“That wine came from the Van Dyne vineyards. It’s not commercially available which makes it extremely sought after by wine experts. It’s usually given to key Van Dyne staff members as a way of marking significant milestone achievements: mergers, retirements, that sort of things. It was given to Captain Meyer as a way of welcoming him into the fold. But Meyer didn’t want any part of it. “Which was why he gave it to you. I can only think that he was trying to tip you off in some way. It’s the only tangible link between him and Van Dyne Industries. Everything else he might do, the company had plausible deniability.”
Faulkner shook his head. “But that bottle’s gone. Destroyed. Along with everything else on-board the Mantis.”
“True. But I couldn’t take the risk that you hadn’t worked out the connection previously.”
“So what is it that Van Dyne wants so badly that it’s willing to compromise a Confederation vessel? Must be pretty special.”
“They were putting a lot of time and effort into developing some new, game-changing technology. They could see that a war between the Confederation and the Yakutians was imminent and they wanted to profit from that. But then they started hearing reports about some alien star ship that had crashed on Tigris. A ship with its own range of highly sophisticated weaponry – something they’d be quick to exploit. And that’s when they first approached me. They wanted me to find a way of retrieving it. To bring it back to Earth Prime.”
Faulkner sat back, intrigued and slightly appalled. “So, why are you telling me all this?”
“I don’t know. Guilt, I suppose. Plus, I’ve got nothing else to lose.”
“Really? You think that - because of your failure here – your former employers might decide to turn on you?”
For the first time since they met, Farnese’s persona slipped. It lasted less than a second but Faulkner saw it in his eyes. The fear which lay behind Farnese’s outward display of bravado.
“These aren’t the sort of people who deal with disappointment very well. Really, it’s only a matter of time before I’m found hanging in my cell.”
Faulkner looked at Vance who merely raised an eyebrow.
“Before I go, can you help me with one last thing?” Faulkner said. “How were they intending to get this crashed ship up off the planet’s surface? It’s not like the Renheim has any specialist lifting equipment on-board, is it?”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. Those details have all been taken care of. In fact, your Commander Webster has taken an active hand in arranging it.”
“Webster? Alex Webster’s involved in all this?”
“No, not in the way you think. We duped him into helping transfer our most important asset down to the planet’s surface. He thought he was following admiralty orders, and in a way, he was. Van Dyne’s influence really does reach that far. And, in so doing, he’s all but guaranteed the success of this particular mission. You were right about us not engaging with the Da’al. The company were adamant that the Renheim had to make that rendezvous with Tigris. They needed us to ensure that this new tech gets back to Earth Prime, and I for one still wouldn’t bet against them achieving that.”
Faulkner suddenly felt very tired. Was there no end to all this subterfuge? Just when he seemed to be close to resolving things, he uncovered another level of deception. It was, quite frankly, exhausting.
“And what exactly is this ‘important asset?’” Faulkner probed. “The one that you tricked Webster into helping you with. Some sort of secret weapon? Some new technology? What?”
“Oh, that? That’s easy. This asset of theirs is one man. And a very resourceful one at that. Someone in whom the board has an absolute trust. A completely ruthless individual. Let’s nothing get in his way. Man by the name of Nash.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Webster used his data pad to find the precise location he was looking for. He’d got one of Kekkonen’s staff to calculate a safe landing area on the ice after all that had happened when the Motar had tried to land.
Seemed that it wasn’t such a good idea to bring down a sixty-ton craft like that without a reinforced landing pad. He looked over at the thing now, squatting on the ice with its peculiar, raked T-design and couldn’t believe that it had ever been intended to operate in atmosphere. The bottom section was bowed like a traditional sailing ship which meant that its under carriage had to bear the weight of the whole craft. Plus, it had no landing gear as such so that if the pilot had tried to land it on a traditional runway there was every chance it would have just tipped over.
As it was, they had been fortunate that the ice directly under it had fractured in the way that it had, introducing a sufficient amount of ‘give’ to the proceedings. The only problem was that the safety of every inch of the ice was now open to question, so they had to think carefully about where the shuttle was supposed to land.
He was just starting to look for the smoke grenades hidden away in his backpack when he was distracted by the sound of a grav-bike approaching across the ice. There were twelve of these things roaring all over the place, courtesy of these Motar people but he had so far resisted the urge to try his luck on one himself. The rider was coming from the direction of the crashed ship which had been transformed in the last twenty-four hours.
Grav-bikes weren’t the only new additions to the camp’s assets provided by these interlopers. They’d also delivered twelve tons of scaffolding along with all the equipment to put it together so that the ghost ship now had six fifty-metre-tall towers surrounding it. Each tower supported a bundle of up to thirty smart cables.
Previously, Webster had struggled to visualise how they were going to make this whole lifting operation work but now, although he still had serious doubts about the practicalities, he thought he had a much better grasp of what was going on.
One person who had entertained no such doubts was Nash, the very person who was now racing towards him over the ice.
Webster waited for Nash to secure the bike and remove his helmet before he spoke.
“What do you think?” he asked, pointing upwards.
Nash squinted up at the thick pall of cloud which hung overhead.
“I’ve seen them operate in worse. At least now they’ve got a stable platform to operate from.”
Webster nodded. For some reason, he couldn’t bring himself to compliment Nash for getting the superstructure erected in such a short amount of time. He didn’t know whether that was down to some kind of professional jealousy or because he was inherently wary of anything Nash became involved in. Nash had naturally assumed control once the Motar arrived, even telling the roughnecks where he wanted the materials to go. And what had particularly irked Webster was that they hadn’t for one moment seen fit to question his authority.
Webster could feel his control of the situation slipping away but couldn’t think what to do about it.
Nash, on the other hand appeared super confident about everything that he was doing. It was as though he’d been preparing for just such an incident as this for most of his adult life.
“You think it’ll go ahead, then?” Webster asked. “As planned?”
“Can’t see why not. You must have flown through worse than this yourself.”
Webster squinted at the sky. “That’s where you’re wrong. I’m strictly a fair-weather pilot. Plus, I’ve got more sense than to even think about bringing some three-hundred-and-fifty-ton behemoth down into atmosphere. I mean, I know they do this kind of thing all the time – still doesn’t make it a good idea.”
He pointed over at the Motar. “Look at this thing over here. Weighs a fraction of that and handles like a badly --- washing machine. I still can’t work out if that kid who was flying it was a madman or a genius.”
“Yeah, well I guess we’ll see,” Nash pulled a kerchief up over his mouth. “Anyway, what are you doing all the way out here? They’re not due for another couple of hours.”
Webster held up one of the smoke grenades.
“Oh, this? No, this isn’t for that. It’s the shuttle. They’re supposed to be here, right about…” he turned to the northeast, shielding his eyes. “Right about now.”
As if on cue, the shuttle appeared, still someway off in the distance, hugging the terrain.
“Anything I should know about?” Nash said.
Nash didn’t like to be kept out of the loop on anything.
“Just a precautionary measure. Kekkonen’s comms people picked up some activity over that way and I wanted Markham to go over and check it out.”
“You think, maybe the Da’al left some of their folks behind?”
“I was more concerned about another option. Don’t you think it’s strange how this Da’al ship – what are we calling it now?”
“Heimdall,” Nash said. “Norse mythology. Some kind of servant of the Gods.”
“Yeah, well, whatever. Don’t you think it’s strange how they’ve left us alone? No orbital bombardment. No ground assault, nothing.”
“They can’t afford to damage this ship of theirs. And besides, they tried a ground assault once before, and look how far that got them.”
