The Phoenix Conspiracy (30 page)

“He died saving my life.”

“Ah. Well then, I’ll see what I can
do.”

"Thanks." Calvin closed the comm and
left his office.

Chapter 19

When he entered the bridge, Calvin
took the command position from Summers.

“Yesterday I gave some of you intel
assignments and now I want updates,” he said.

"I have to remind you," said Summers,
"that our mission is to assist in finding and capturing the
Harbinger and anything else, including a detailed investigation of
what Raidan's been trying to do, is off-mission."

If Calvin didn't know better
he'd almost think Summers was in on it at some level, that she
didn't want Raidan's true motives known. After all, it seemed like
if there
were
a
conspiracy, the Fleet had to be compromised to some degree. How
hard would it be to buy off one more officer, plant her on the
pursuing ship, and encourage her to disrupt his investigation?
Curtail his efforts and keep an eye on him. It was only
logical.

But he saw through Summers enough to
know she was a hardened duty zealot, which meant she had too much
integrity to be bought off or coerced. If she were someone's tool,
which Calvin thought likely, she wasn't even aware of
it.

"Investigation is what we do here in
Intel Wing," said Calvin. "And every scrap of information we can
get our hands on will get us that much closer to finding and
capturing Raidan. If we know what his motives are then we can
predict his behavior." Calvin was mostly speaking hot air. The more
he learned, the less he wanted to trap Raidan. And he still had a
commitment to the Royal Family—or, at least, to Kalila Akira—not to
bring Raidan in, for now.

Summers' eyes narrowed; she saw
through his thin layer of excuses and he knew it. But he didn’t
really care.

"Thank you, Commander, for your
pointless reminder." He cleared his throat and avoided making
eye-contact with her. “About those intel assignments, I'll give you
a few minutes to collect your notes and organize your thoughts if
you need them. When you're ready, let me know."

"I'm ready," said Miles.

"OK good," said Calvin. "Now, your
task was to look into Tristan and find out everything you
can."

"Yeah, and I got nothing."

"OK that's not so good."

"I did my best. I searched
every database, the network, everything. Tristan as a general
search pulled up too many results, but tagging the name with lycan,
werewolf, remorii,
anything
else pulled up too few. I couldn't get anything
from the rotham either. They gave me some police files from Aros
Five, but nothing stood out. My guess: Tristan lied to you. Either
that or the Rotham already whitewashed the files. Without more
information to go on, I'm at a dead end. I'm sorry,
Cal."

Calvin nodded. "Okay," he said. He
wasn't too surprised. Tristan still was as big a mystery as
anything else. "What about the Remus System? How are the remorii
getting off it?"

"I'm not sure. Once the
Empire cracked down on Remus they surrounded the system with mines
and left everyone there. No trials, no investigations, no
sentences. Anyone still alive was just left there. Their fate is
listed as
unknown, presumed dead.
Remus has even been removed from most starcharts;
the whole area is flagged as a hazardous Do-Not-Fly-Zone. How any
of the remorii escaped is beyond our Intel Wing files. And unless
we find someone who was there, I don't think we’ll ever
know."

"OK," said Calvin. "Anyone else ready?
What about you, Shen? Find out anything useful about the ships
Raidan destroyed?"

"Yes," said Shen. "But my impression
is that, instead of being classified, a lot of the info publicly
available about these ships is just fiction. They're all owned by
the same company, a corporation that operates across Rotham and
Imperial space called..." he stared at his computer and read what
was certainly a very butchered pronunciation. "Yut'hama'za... it's
a mishmash of the Rotham words for Service and Excellence. It's a
pretty small freight company that hasn't attracted much attention.
Supposedly they've operated for about ten years and have delivered
ten thousand shipments from Rotham space to Imperial space, but the
earliest shipment I could actually verify was only a few months
ago. The simple explanation is that, if the deliveries were to some
of the smaller colonies, like in The Corridor or along The Rim,
they might not keep data on shipments for more than a few
months.

“But I couldn't get anyone to give me
a specific list of places these shipments went or what they were.
Just a figure from customs that agreed the company had exported
about eleven thousand convoys of cargo. At an estimated worth of 87
billion q. The company doesn't export anything from the Empire, it
just brings in imports. All of its buyers are wholesale
distributors that are privately owned."

"So who was buying the cargo Raidan
destroyed?"

"Kemmer Associated Goods,
they—"

“Tell me everything you found out
about them,” said Calvin. The Roscos had mentioned Yanal Kemmer
only moments ago. The tycoon who'd given Raidan a fortune on
Aleator.

“Kemmer Associated Goods was started
by the Kemmer family almost a hundred years ago but, recently, they
sold the company to MXR at a loss."

Calvin raised an eyebrow. "How much of
a loss?"

"About two-thirds of the stock's
value. Still an enormous fortune, but less than they could have
gotten, especially since the company was making strong profits. I
couldn't find any kind of public statement from them explaining why
they sold. All I know is that the whole family sold out and then
spread their new fortunes into all kinds of new, random
investments. Real estate, car factories, environmentally-friendly
technology, medical research, charity. They just kind of went their
separate ways. Most people on the nets think there was some kind of
family dispute and they couldn't keep it together so they sold out
while the going was good."

"When did they give up control of the
company?"

"It's not clear how long the sale was
in the works, the negotiations were private. Probably to keep the
shareholders from speculating. But the sale was officialized a
seven standard months ago."

"Is someone named Yanal Kemmer part of
that family?"

"Yes, he's one of the heirs to the
family fortune, along with his siblings. He's a Capital World
resident in his mid-fifties and has a considerable estate even
though his parents still control the majority of the family's
holdings."

So, provided the Roscos' information
was correct, Yanal Kemmer was both connected to Raidan—for giving
him money—and connected to the convoy Rotham destroyed—because his
family's company was, supposedly, buying whatever it
carried—although the company was no longer under his family's
control. Perhaps he was bribing Raidan to destroy the convoy to
make the company look bad. But Calvin didn't like that explanation.
If this whole conspiracy was about an eccentric billionaire bribing
an insane captain to seek revenge against a corporation who may
have strong-armed him into selling his shares prematurely... Calvin
would be extremely disappointed. It also wouldn’t go very far to
explain why that was allegedly for “the good of the
Empire.”

No, that wasn’t it. The fact
that the Fleet had become this
involved
, and Raidan continued to
strike against Rotham ships, all of which were heavily armored,
suggested this went much deeper than some kind of corporate
vendetta. Especially since there were better ways to hurt MXR than
to punch Associated Goods in the nose. But he couldn't dismiss the
idea of a corporate sabotage completely. People do strange things
when money like this is involved.

"Find out what you can about MXR,"
said Calvin.

"One step ahead of you; I've been
digging into these guys for the last few hours. Officially, they're
in the energy business. They're a human-run corporation that
operates its main headquarters and plants on Capital World but owns
considerable real estate in The Corridor, including a plant on
Praxis. The shares are not available publicly and the company is
owned by Brinton Martel, the fourth richest person in the galaxy,
and second richest man in the Empire. His estate rivals that of the
Akira Family, not counting government property under the Royal
Family's control."

"Martel…” said Calvin. "As in the
Martel House on Capital World?" One of two rival families who'd
tried to wrestle away the throne from the Akiras over the past
several decades.

"Yes, he's from that House. But his
sons are the ones making a raucous on Capital World. Brinton's
divorced himself from politics and lives a relatively humble life
in a small mansion in the Thetican System."

"Which is," said Calvin, making what
he thought to be an important observation, "not far from the
DMZ."

"Exactly," Shen wagged a finger. "The
System is a blue-bleeding Imperial system with a better than
average defense force, sorta like Praxis, but at the end of the day
we can't ignore the proximity. Anything that close to the Rotham
border... who knows what kind of alien influence there
is?"

"You think Brinton Martel, one of the
richest men in the galaxy, is being paid off by the Rotham
government to be a spy or an agent or something?" asked Sarah, she
seemed skeptical. Calvin wondered if his and Shen's inference had
gone too far.

"There are ways of motivating people
that don't involve money," said Shen. "They could have threatened
him, or maybe they pay him in information or exotic
luxuries."

"Or maybe they just have some leverage
on him, a secret he doesn't want found out," said
Calvin.

"This is a waste of time," said
Summers. "We should be fulfilling our mission and chasing down
Raidan, not sitting here accusing one of the Empire's richest
citizens of treason. Not only is there no motive, means, nor
opportunity, there's no crime. The case you lieutenants are making
is the weakest I've ever heard."

"No crime that we know of yet," Calvin
hated to admit it, but she was right. They were getting ahead of
themselves. "What we have here is a long thin chain that ties
Martel to Yanal Kemmer to Raidan, however loosely. Any connections
we can find, no matter how weak, must be investigated."

"This whole operation
isn't
about
investigating Raidan," Summers looked supremely
annoyed. "His guilt was proven in a military court already. Our job
is to hunt him down and, if possible, take him out. Nothing else."
There was more she wanted to say, he could tell, but she held
back.

"If we can find out all of Raidan's
contacts and friends, we can be there waiting. He'd have nowhere to
go. No friends to turn to. Then the Fleet could get him." It was a
flimsy excuse to continue what he really wanted to do, which was
investigate Raidan, not capture him.

Summers didn't buy it. "That's not
practical and it'll take too long. This ship is faster than the
Harbinger and we have every resource to track it down and
coordinate a strike against it with the Fifth Fleet. Those are our
orders. That's what we have to do."

Calvin wasn't sure what to
say. Part of him wanted to retort, if nothing else to assert he
still had command of
his
ship. But, on the other hand, he didn't want to
encourage Summers to take up her grievances with the Fleet any more
than she already had—the extent of which Calvin could only guess
at. Somehow the Fleet had its hooks in Intel Wing, and orders from
them were much harder to ignore than from the Fleet or from some
snippy Executive Officer. He changed the subject.

"The Harbinger was several hours ahead
of us leaving Brimm but arrived at Iota less than an hour before we
did. I know the Nighthawk is faster, but not that much faster. Once
again the Harbinger experienced an unusual delay. This happened
before when the Harbinger reached Aleator much later than
anticipated. Thoughts?"

"Yeah I've been giving a little
thought to that," said Miles. "I wonder if it's not a tactical
delay. Choose arrival times that are hard to predict, keep the
element of surprise, something like that."

"Good thinking," said Calvin. "When I
talked to Captain Anderson earlier, it was her opinion that the
Harbinger showed up when it did because that’s when the Rotham
ships were scheduled to leave. But it was risky, if he gave us too
much time we could have had the whole Fifth Fleet waiting for him.
The Harbinger is powerful but not that powerful. The Andromeda
alone could handle probably it."

"Now don't start that with me," said
Miles. "I already argued this point with Sarah earlier; the
Harbinger would win that battle."

"If the Harbinger were the
better fighting ship," said Sarah, "
it
would be the flagship."

"There are other considerations," said
Miles animatedly. "The Andromeda is a luxury-liner meant for
pampering dignitaries. The Harbinger is a real warship meant to
watch the DMZ. The Andromeda has more fighters and missile
launchers, I'll give you that, but the Harbinger has more mounted
guns, better mass drivers. And let's not forget the Type X
shielding on the Harbinger, it has a customizable repeating
pattern, it's impossible to predict and penetrate via modulation.
The Andromeda is running a double layer of Type VIII; sure it
technically can absorb more force but there are ways around it if
you know what you're doing and you have a little
information."