Chapter Thirteen
“Sorry ma’am, the band has already left,” said Jocilyn in a terse voice.
“I’m not here to see the band,” replied Jeanette, equally tersely. “I have an appointment to see Ordovus.”
“Oh, you must be Captain McCracker.”
“Call me Jeanette.”
Jocilyn led Jeanette through a few corridors into what had yesterday been the green room for the band. There was mild pandemonium as workers struggled back and forth pulling down the stage and lighting systems and packing it all away, ready for its trip to another show.
“Mr. Cleverly, this is Captain Jeanette.”
“Ah, hello Captain. Glad to see that you didn’t send a second. Captains that take a personal interest are so rare these days.”
“Excuse me?” said Jeanette.
“We’ll have everything packed down and ready to be picked up in about another hour. It may look like a giant mess now, but it all gets packed rather quickly. It’s setting up that takes a long time and-”
“Mr. Cleverly!” interrupted Jeanette. “I’m not here to transport anything. I’m here because Valerie Opatz was kidnapped.”
Being very frazzled and having had precious little sleep, it took Ordovus a moment to process what Jeanette had said. It then took him a moment longer to realize why the name sounded vaguely familiar and yet one more moment after that to make the final connection.
“Oh! This is bad, we must inform Ryder at once!”
“Is the band still here?”
“No, but they had long delays getting departure clearance. Something about exporting prohibited substances or some such nonsense. They’re still on the way out to the jump point. Come, come.”
Ordovus led the way amongst the myriad of frantic workers and into a side corridor. They took an elevator up to the communications level of the hotel. A guard at the door recognized Ordovus and waved them in.
“Hello Mr. Celverly, I wasn’t expecting to see you again,” said Gus. He was the Head Communications Officer for the hotel.
“I need to contact the Radman before they get out of range.”
“Certainly, just a moment.” Gus’ fingers flew across his console as he located the right channels to connect to the distant ship and then secured a private, encrypted line. “Open or closed?”
“Open please, these people need to talk as well,” replied Ordovus, gesturing to Jeanette. She looked around and wondered if she counted as three people since she represented both Valerie and the kidnappers. She assumed that he was just getting his pronouns mixed up due to tiredness.
“This is Balga Station Hotel Polyakov calling Radman.”
“This is Radman, copy you Balga Station.”
“I have Ordovus Cleverly waiting to speak to you.”
“Put him through.”
Gus nodded to Ordovus.
"Hey Gosi, sorry, no time for idle chat – can you get Ryder on the comm? It’s rather urgent.”
“Sure thing, just a moment.” There was an interminable silence for a moment and then Ryder’s voice came over the comm, bleary and a little sluggish.
“Yeah?”
“Ryder, this Ordovus. I have with me Captain Jeanette of the Heart of Stone.”
“Heart of Stone?” said Ryder almost instantly snapping to attention. “What happened to Valerie?”
“She was kidnapped Mr. Opatz. I was given a ransom demand for ten million and a location to take the money to.”
“Pay it!” said Ryder. “I’ll pay it out of my own funds, just get my daughter back.”
“The Heart of Stone is no ship to go chasing after these people, but I’ve spoken to a legal team here and her recovery is covered by the Victims of Crime Fund. But we needed to get authorization from … from you in order to proceed.” Jeanette had been about to say ‘next of kin’ but that would give Ryder the impression that Valerie was already dead, and she had no way of knowing that.
“Yes! Authorize, yes! Go, go, go!” said Ryder.
“Don’t worry Ryder, I’ll get the best people on this. I already know the remainder of your tour schedule so I’ll keep you posted on how things develop. You just focus on the show and let us worry about Valerie.”
Ordovus gave a few more instructions and then ended the call.
Selinin was quietly munching on some local fruit of some type when a data disc landed on the table in front of him. Looking up, he saw Georgi standing next to him, looking extraordinarily pleased with himself.
“What’s that?” asked Selinin as Georgi dropped into a seat next to him.
“That, my dear friend, is the exact course and heading of the Immonen.”
“Great, so what?”
“The Immonen was one of the ships that launched the day that Judge Jordi Leshem disappeared, and in all probability was carrying both Jordi and Asoye, plus the Narjus.”
Selinin looked incredulously at Georgi. “How on earth did you manage to get that? No, more to the point, how is that useful?”
“The Immonen launched as The Swift, but she was an old decommissioned ship called the Immonen that had been patched up. After her first jump, she sent back a tighbeam message saying that there had been a problem with the PD Rods and they would need to fix it before they could jump again. The message took seven months to reach here, but arrived with the signature of the Immonen, not the Swift. Since there was no record of the Immonen having departed and since there were no follow up messages requesting help, the message was filed away.”
“So they made the first jump with a dodgy old ship and then got stuck out there? What if they tried a second jump and scattered themselves over half the galaxy?”
“Oh, Selimnin, always the pessimist. Look, we have her last reported course and heading. All we need to do is extrapolate that out to compensate for a hundred years or so of coasting and she’ll be right there, waiting for us to pick her up.”
“Do you have any idea how much a search like that would cost? Even if she only deviated by half of a percent, the sheer volume of space that would need searching is enormous.”
At this Georgi smiled even wider and spread his arms wide. “This, my beloved friend is where providence has smiled down upon us. The good ship New Dawn is currently sitting in orbit. Why is this important? Because the New Dawn has been fitted, at great expense, with a whole load of very nice, very new survey and mapping equipment. “How does this help us? The group that was financing the trip lost their backer and now this lovely ship that is dressed up and ready to dance has no partner to dance with. This couldn’t have worked out better if we’d planned it!”
Selinin thought this over. Searching through a large volume of space for a missing space ship was extremely hard, nigh on impossible for a standard ship. But a ship that was specifically set up for mapping local space would be able to assess huge swaths in very short order. Even if the Immonen had deviated severely from its original course, the speed would have remained somewhat constant and she’d be sitting on a fairly thin plane.
“And since the ship is all set to go, all we have to do is pay for the fuel and we can take her anywhere we want. Even better if we want to go somewhere that not too many people have gone before, which as it turns out, we do.”
“Tell me again why we’re just sitting here?” asked Selinin.
“Oh yes indeedy, this is most pleasing,” said Pauli. He was standing over three largish boxes that contained his optical equipment. “We have been waiting for these for quite some time.”
“No problems,” said Papo. “All you need to do is thumb here and we’ll be all settled.”
“Patience, patience,” said Pauli. “First we must be checking the contents of the boxes.”
Eagerly, Pauli started opening the seals on the boxes. All of them opened easily and Pauli spent a few moments looking over the contents. He was a professor and a bit of an eccentric one at that. There were some very interesting features on Elli, far below them that couldn’t really be studied on the ground. With this new equipment, he’d be able to observe it to his hearts content from orbit. He shut the boxes and clapped his hands together eagerly.
“Oh, yesyesyes, this is very exciting.”
Papo pointed at the tablet he was holding. Pauli thumbed the tablet and then practically skipped away to get a loader to move the boxes for him.
“Quite the character, isn’t he?” said Powell.
“As long as we get paid, he can be fruitier than a nut cake for all I care,” said Papo. “This puts us well ahead for the quarter, but the downside is that now that we’re here, we don’t have a load. We may end up traveling empty on the next run.”
Powell gave a deep, depressed sigh. Transport was fine most of the time, but every so often they would reach a destination to find that there was no load that they could take. Balga was good because it was always busy and even if they had to wait a day or two, there was always something that needed moving. Kuparinen on the other hand, was a little backwater place that had very little traffic.
They didn’t even have a company rep stationed here, which meant that he’d have to organize his own load. And that was always a pain. He preferred to let Isacus handle things like that, but he was currently feeling ill and was laid up on his bunk. Well, there were worse places to be. At least it hadn’t been a delivery to a military base. Here there was always the chance that something interesting would come up.
“So why does it look like that?” asked Guiora. He was standing at one of the large windows along one wall of this bar. Kuparinen was one of the few stations that had gone to the trouble of installing exterior windows to give the visitors a view. It was also the only one that probably shouldn’t have bothered.
“You don’t know the history of Elli?” asked Deva. About half the crew of the Celiker was currently lounging around the bar whilst the captain settled their previous delivery. “I thought everyone knew about it.”
“Only people who have been here know about it. Guiora wasn’t with us the last time we came out this way,” said Jed.
“Ah, yes,” said Deva.
“Oh, let me tell this story,” said Kyomori. “I never get to tell the good ones.”
“Go for you life,” replied Deva. “If you consider this sad tale to one of the good ones.”
“You know how PD Rods work, right?” asked Kyomori.
“Basically, yeah,” replied Guiora/
“Okay, so the stuff they make them out of wasn’t always available. Originally they used to use Kelven’s Compound but you could only jump a few light years and they never lasted too long. Well, when they found Elli, it wasn’t that great a planet but it had a whole heap of Gronon, which could be refined into Chauvin which they found to be a much better material to make PD Rods out of. Jumps of dozens of light years were easy.”
“Yeah, and?”
“And? What do you mean ‘and’? That’s the whole point.”
“Sorry Kyo, pretend you’re talking to someone who isn’t a tactical genius,” injected Deva.
“Oh, right. Well, think of it this way. You have this one planet with a whole load of Gronon, which everybody wants. The planet gets turned into one giant mine and they rip up every last scrap of it. It was pretty much sought after by every single ship building company in the galaxy.”
“So it’s the mines that make it look like that?” asked Guiora, gesturing out the window.
“Mines? Oh no, the whole place was mined out a long time ago. Once the supply ran out, they had to look for other things and not long after that New Jakarta brought out those new PD Rods that were even better than the ones made of Gronon. It was the planetary bombing that made it look like that.”
“Why would anyone bomb an exhausted mine site?” asked Guioro in bewilderment.
“You forgot part of the story,” said Deva.
“What part?”
“The part about Elli being turned into a penal colony, the colony becoming a pirate base and House Vigneaux bombing the whole lot back to the stone age.”
“Ah, that would explain it.”
“Oh yeah, I forgot about that bit,” said Kyomori.
“That’s why we don’t let you tell the good stories,” said Deva. Everyone had a good laugh, and Kyomori sat in the sofa with her arms crossed and sulked.
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