Three

 

Five days later – on the Halifax space dock

The sign on the compartment door read “Philemon Baxter – Contract Security and Investigations.” Baxter enjoyed the title. His years in Navy Intelligence had left him with plenty of contacts – many of them in low places – to conduct such a business.

Baxter enjoyed his spacious office on the prestigious D ring of the Halifax space dock, two levels down from the offices and piers of the Confederate Navy, on the highest of the station’s privately owned levels. He enjoyed his state-of-the-art equipment and communications accounts, which included access to the station’s hyperphone transmitter. He was even authorized to send and receive code-key encrypted transmissions, like the one that flashed a prompt on his computer screen late one afternoon, just as he was thinking about an after-work martini at the Seven Gables lounge a level down.

His assistant, Edward Fox, looked up from his smaller desk across the office as the chime sounded. “That the message?”

“Yeah,” Baxter said. “From that modified proxy we had following the Orlando.”

He quickly decrypted the message, and watched the video stream for a few moments, fast-forwarding to the scene he wanted.

“Yeah,” Baxter grinned. “They boarded it – damn stupid pirates, anyway. Fox, call the Navy – tell them we have information on a plague ship, and that it’s probably bound here for Halifax. Give them the Shade Tree’s description and nav-beacon code.”

“Boss, they’re supposed to rendezvous here with the Cape Fortune to turn over two-thirds of the shipment.”

“They won’t make it into the dock. As soon as they drop out of subspace, the Navy will be all over them. Send that message.”

“Right away, Boss,” Fox said.

“If the Shade Tree gets here, they’ll slap a seal on it, and lock down the crew in quarantine. You got the enviro-suits, right?”

“You bet, Boss. Level IV enviro-suits – we could wade through a hip-deep culture of Bayer’s Plague and not catch as much as a sniffle.”

“Good. Half of a load of diamonds is sure better than a three-way split, eh?”

“Roger that, Boss. What about the Cape Fortune?”

“They’ll be here in port today or tomorrow. When they get in, brief their captain in on what’s going on, tell him to stay put.”

***

The Shade Tree

Jean Barrett woke up coughing.

Not just an ordinary, morning, clearing the throat cough, but a racking, agonizing cough that left spots of blood on the napkin she grabbed to hold over her mouth.

“Shit.” Reaching up from her bunk, she tapped a code on her cabin’s comm panel. “Gomp,” she called.

“Here, Cap’n.”

“How you feeling?”

“Like shit,” Gomp replied. “Coughing like hell. McNeal, too. Nobody else so far.”

“Great. Just great.” Barrett lapsed into another spate of coughing. “Less than a day out of Halifax, too.”

“Cap’n,” Gomp’s voice came back, “McNeal’s here with me. He’s got an idea.”

“Anything’s better than nothing,” Barrett said. “If we head on to Halifax, the Navy will quarantine us and burn the ship out. That’s the good news; they may just blow us out of space at first sight.”

“Captain,” the young voice of Tim McNeal came over the speaker, “I know that Caliban is in the other direction from Halifax, but my cousin, she runs a research lab there, on an island called Homer in the Capital Archipelago. She’s been working on viral diseases – judging from the last message I got from my Mom, she’s working on something that might help us.”

“Bayer’s Plague is aerosol transmitted,” Gomp pointed out. “It’s already too late to quarantine the three of us with symptoms; we’ll have to decon the whole ship.”

“It’s not the ship I’m worried about,” Barrett snapped. “We can decon the ship, but we have to be alive to do it.”

“Only chance we’ve got,” Gomp repeated.

“Very well. You two, stay where you are.” She stabbed the contact, and punched the code for the Bridge.

“Bridge, Exec speaking.”

“Indira,” Barrett said, “Gomp, McNeal and I, we’re all symptomatic.”

“Oh. Oh, no.”

“You should see it from my side. I’m staying in my cabin; might as well keep it as contained as possible. Pass orders to Helm, make course for Caliban, all ahead emergency. Haul ass, Indira.”

“Right away, Captain.” On the Bridge, Indira Krishnavarna shuddered in barely suppressed terror as she passed the Captain’s orders on. “Four days,” she informed the Captain, “Unless we burn our drive out first. Four days at emergency drive, that’s pushing it, Captain.”

“If we don’t get there in six days or less,” Barrett said, “We’re all dead anyway. Count your blessings, Indira – not all that long ago, it would have taken six months. Hell, when I first had this ship built, it would have taken three weeks. Be glad I had the drive upgraded.”

Under the deck, the rumble of the Gellar drive swelled to a dull roar. “On our way, Captain,” Krishnavarna confirmed, “Ahead emergency full, on course for Caliban.”

“Good work,” Barrett replied. “You’re in charge, Indira. We’re looking for a research lab on an island called Homer in the Capital Archipelago. McNeal’s cousin works there. You get us there, Indira. No matter what happens to me, you get this ship to Caliban.”

“I will, Captain.”

“We’ll have to sneak in. Assume the Navy will be looking for us. You know what to do.”

Jean Barrett switched off the comm panel and collapsed on her bunk. She felt her forehead; hot, sweating. The plague or the stress? Does it matter?

I’ll know in six days. Or less.

She looked up, painfully, at a knock on her cabin door. “Who is it?” she called. “What do you want?”

“It’s Doctor Dodd,” the voice of the ship’s physician came back. “I’ve been down and looked at Gomp and McNeal – I need to check you too, Captain.”

“You shouldn’t.”

“I have to. I have to keep you alive until we get where we’re going,” the doctor called back.

“All right.” The Captain tapped the contact that unlocked her cabin door, allowing the doctor in.

Janice Dodd had only been with the Shade Tree six months. The ship’s medical bay was her first job following her internship and residency at St. Elysius Hospital in the port city of San Diego, Earth. She was young, tall, thin, and almost angular, with close-clopped blonde hair and piercing green eyes.

Today, she wore a white lab coat over her gray coveralls – usual for her – and a white polymer dust mask over her face, which was not.

“Coughing, are you?” Barrett nodded; the doctor was looking pointedly at the bloodstained napkin.

Dodd bent over the Captain, examining her eyes carefully. “Headache?” she asked.

“You have no idea.”

“Typical.” Dodd took a small whirling device from her lab coat pocket, placed it on Barrett’s forehead. “Heartbeat’s strong. Blood pressure a tad high, but that’s understandable. Temp 39.2 – that’s a nasty fever.”

“And therefore what?”

“Therefore, Captain,” Dodd said as she straightened, “You’ve got the classic early presentation of Avalonian hemorrhagic fever, better known as Bayer’s Plague.” She picked the whirling, blinking diagnostic reader off the Captain’s head, looked at it. “Your white cell count is off the chart, too. Just like Gomp and McNeal.”

“Anyone else yet?”

“Nothing definite so far,” the doctor replied, her eyes downcast. “But you may as well figure there will be. I’ve had some people complaining of headaches – Summer Harding from third watch was in earlier complaining about a cough.”

Barrett closed her eyes. “Did McNeal tell you about his cousin?”

“He did. I’ve actually read a bit about her work – she’s working on a way to develop a hunter-killer antivirus, one that will specifically destroy an invading organism.” She hesitated, and then went on: “Captain, I’ve got to be honest with you – I wouldn’t hold out too much hope. From what I’ve read, Katrin McNeal’s work is just in the exploratory stage.”

“Have you a better idea, Doctor? We’re all dead unless this researcher can pull something out – any hope is better than none.”

“I understand, Captain. I just want you to know the odds.”

Barrett smiled a ghastly, pale, fevered smile. “Long odds,” she said. “That’s nothing new for this ship. Get back to Medical, Doc – bound to be people looking for you.”

***

The Grugell frigate K-110

It was not a glorious posting, but glory was in short supply in these post-war years for the Grugell – along with everything else. It happened that diamonds figured strongly in the fabrication of the Grugell’s standard star drive, and it also happened that the small, low-gravity worlds on the outside of the Galactic arm that the Grugell found comfortable were also low in mineral resources. That had been one of the reasons that the Grugell had gone to war those several years ago, and that was why Group Commander Kestakrickell IV was here now, at a designated coordinate-set in deep space on one of the frigates of his command group, waiting for a contact from the Confederate renegade who had been surreptitiously selling them power metals and diamonds for the last half of a Grugell year.

He looked up from his high, polished desk in the cabin he had commandeered as an office as the frigate’s commander, Chiksteskattitk II, walked in and saluted.

“Group Commander,” he said, “We have a most interesting message from a Confederate contact on Halifax.”

“Not the mining camp renegade? Who is this?” The Group Commander took the message pad, studied it. “Baxter? Who is he?”

“Intelligence has a dossier on him, Group Commander. He served in the war as an Intelligence operative in the Confederate Navy; now he runs a private information-gathering agency on their fleet dock at the Confederate planet Halifax.”

“This is an interesting proposition,” Kestakrickell said as he read through the message. “A shipment of diamonds at one-half price, in gold. No doubt the same routine shipment the renegade Bolin told us how to find.”

“The one that failed to arrive where we were told to expect it.”

“The same, sir. It is reasonable to expect that Baxter somehow intercepted the Orlando and seized the shipment. Now, he offers it to us at half the normal price.”

“The Emperor will be pleased,” Chiksteskattik pointed out. The gold was, after all, the Emperor’s. So were the ships; so were the officers and crew of those ships.

“I wonder how this Baxter got control of that diamond shipment.”

“I can not see how that matters to us, Group Commander.”

“It always matters, Chiksteskattik,” Kestakrickell chided his junior officer. “It always matters. Anything that could possibly affect our routine flow of diamonds and metals from the renegade mining station matters. He has obviously seized one of our shipments from that renegade Bolin. Where else do you suppose this Baxter would find a diamond shipment? He even knows the usual quantity and delivery locations,” he said, pointing at the message pad.

“You suspect a trap, Group Commander?”

“I suspect something,” Kestakrickell agreed. “I always suspect, Commander. I always suspect.” He sat silently for a moment, thinking.

“Make signal to Baxter,” he said at last. “Tell him we agree.”

“By your command.”

“Let us see,” Kestakrickell said, “what this Baxter is up to.”

***

Halifax

“What do you mean, overdue?” Philemon Baxter barked the words at his aide.

“I mean, they’re overdue, Boss,” Edward Fox said. “Navy thinks they may have gone somewhere else.”

“Where? Do they have any idea?”

“No. The Shade Tree’s Captain, Barrett, she’s got some ties on Forest and Tarbos. But nobody’s got a track on her.”

“And no time to get a hyperphone message anywhere,” Baxter complained. “Damn it all, they’ve got my diamonds on board, and they’re heading who knows where. What happens if they all die with the ship bound someplace, and we never find out what happened?”

“That reminds me, Boss,” Fox went on, piling worse on top of bad, “we did get an encrypted signal from that Grugell Group Commander. He agreed to the transfer on that moon out along the frontier, just as you asked.”

“Complications. I should have waited to contact them until I had the diamonds.”

“Too late to worry about that now, Boss.”

Baxter sat thinking for a moment. “All right,” he said at last. “Get on the hyperphone to our contact in Adamstown, tell him what happened; he’ll have to cover it with his boss somehow. Ships do disappear from time to time, after all. Next, send messages to our people on Tarbos and Forest. Tell them to watch for the Shade Tree.”

“Right away, Boss.”

“One more thing – send a message to the Cape Fortune. Tell her Captain be ready to jump to wherever the Shade Tree has gone, at short notice. If we do find those pirates, we may have to send him after them.”

“They’re on Pier Nine on F ring,” Fox said. “I’ll go down there now.”

“You still got that contact in Navy intel, up on A ring?”

“Always.”

“Get going up there after you talk to Bond. See if the Navy has any idea. You’d think they would be tracking a suspected plague ship; find out.”

Fox nodded and left the office in a hurry.

 

 

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