Her Brother's Keeper - eARC (31 page)

Every muscle in Catherine’s body tensed, and she found her hand moving toward the compact pulse laser concealed beneath her flight jacket. She was of a mind to just shoot this son of a bitch, and damn the consequences.

Corbin raised a hand apologetically. “Such things are strictly prohibited, of course, and are punishable by death. They aren’t as common as many would believe, but occur often enough to sully the reputation of the glorious People’s Combined Collective. I want to assure you that I’m not here to demand a bribe or sexual favors from you, Captain.” He looked out the office’s small window, as if to ensure that his subordinate wasn’t snooping. “Between you and me,” he said conspiratorially, “I’m not actually a customs officer. I’m with Internal Security.”

Catherine’s heart dropped into her stomach. Internal Security was notorious across civilized space. They were the ones who rooted out all threats to the Combine, real or imagined, and killed or imprisoned anyone they deemed traitorous with impunity. She couldn’t have found a worse person to be having this conversation with. “I see,” she said, eyes narrowing. “As I said, I’m merely passing through. I’m not interested in the domestic politics of the Combine in the least. I just want to be on my way.”

“That’s what they all say,” Corbin said coolly. “However, I’m not interested in any contraband you may be attempting to get through the far transit point. I’m interested in your destination.”

“Zanzibar? What of it?”

“There are rumors about Zanzibar. Internal Security flatly denies any such thing is possible, but sometimes people just…vanish. Sometimes they go to Zanzibar and never return. There are whispers amongst disloyal malcontents that there is sanctuary there. Those with traitorous hearts, guilty of thought-crimes, they say, can escape there and be beyond the reach of Internal Security.”

Catherine genuinely had no idea what the man was on about. “I’ve never been to Zanzibar before, Mr. Corbin, nor have I been through Combine space. I don’t know anything about any of this.”

“Of course you don’t. Few do. The idea that there is any place beyond the reach of Internal Security is almost a thought-crime in itself. Doctrine dictates that the greater good of the collective will always prevail, and those who selfishly wish to pursue their own ends without regard for the needs of the collective will always fail.”

“It must be an awful burden,” Catherine spat, “trying to keep your thoughts in order so as not to commit one of these thought-crimes.”

Corbin smiled. His eyes were dark and cold. “That’s the beauty of it, Captain. We are all guilty of thought-crimes. The Proles perhaps not so much; they are a dull lot, by design. But those of us with all of our faculties have all committed crimes of thought at one time or another. It’s unavoidable, human nature.”

Bewildered, Catherine took off her cap and ran her fingers through her hair. “This is a fascinating discussion, Mr. Corbin, but I wish you would come to your point.”

Still smiling, Corbin continued, “When human nature is a crime, all men are criminals. When all men are criminals, the State has power over them as would a warden over his inmates. That is the true doctrine of the Combine, whether they would admit it or not.”

Catherine said nothing for a moment. This could easily be a trap, and attempt to snare her into saying something that would give him an excuse to confiscate her ship and put her on trial. “Again, Mr. Corbin, this is fascinating, but it has nothing to do with me.”

“But it does,” Corbin insisted. He tapped his handheld a couple of times, and presented the screen to Catherine. It was a standard customs inspection form. “I will allow you to proceed. On the far end of the system, closer to Transit Point Beta, is a commercial space platform. There you can purchase reaction mass and supplies as needed, before proceeding through the transit point and out of our space.”

“Well, thank you,” Catherine said, confused. She outstretched one arm to tap the screen, which would sign the document, but Corbin pulled the handheld away.

“There is one other thing you must pick up from that station,” he said. The image on the screen disappeared, replaced by that of a plain young woman in a blue coverall. “This woman is a traitor, guilty of numerous crimes of thought, possession of banned literature, and trafficking in disruptive lies. If you wish to leave this system, you will do exactly as I tell you.”

“I’m not going to kill this woman for you, Corbin,” Catherine said coldly. “You bastards can bloody well do your own damned dirty work. I’m a businesswoman, not an assassin.”

“You are not in a position to negotiate, Captain Blackwood, but you assume too much. You will take this woman on board your ship and you will bring her to Zanzibar.”

“Why in God’s name would I do that?” Catherine barked. “So you can accuse me of smuggling defectors and confiscate my ship? So I can be part of some elaborate sting operation? To hell with that, and to hell with you, Corbin. I’ve had enough of this.”

Before Catherine could leave, Corbin softened his tone, almost to a plea. “Please, Captain, you misunderstand. This woman? Her name is Lana. She’s my daughter.”

Catherine took a deep breath, and found herself once again pinching the bridge of her nose between her finger and thumb.
It can never just be simple, can it?

* * *

The Orlov System, though populous, wasn’t especially big by most standards. It only contained five planets: Orlov itself, two gas giants, an uninhabitable rock with marginal atmosphere, and a tiny ball of ice furthest out. The locations of transit points, however, had nothing to do with the size of a solar system. Even a comparatively “small” system could take a long time to cross. It took the
Andromeda
over a hundred hours of flight time to match trajectories and rendezvous with the commercial platform. It gave Catherine plenty of time to ponder her next move.

Corbin-17741 was blackmailing the
Andromeda
into absconding with his daughter, a young woman named Lana-90890. She had been a low-ranking officer in the Combine’s government-owned merchant fleet, and had helped smuggle refugees to Zanzibar in past. Her role in the matter was small, but simply not reporting the crime was considered an equally grave offense. This didn’t bother her father too much. He claimed that he, too, was involved in the smuggling operation. Catherine didn’t know if she believed that. He may have just been telling her that to make himself more sympathetic, and there was still the chance this whole thing was some kind of needlessly elaborate ruse.

That didn’t make any sense, though. An officer of Internal Security doesn’t need flimsy pretexts to confiscate property and incarcerate persons. According to everything Catherine had read, there was very little they couldn’t do in the name of state security, and they answered only to their own hierarchy. That left the possibility that Corbin was being sincere, and really just wanted to get his daughter out of the reach of the Combine before she ended up in a concentration camp.

“She doesn’t know that I’m aware of her activities,” Corbin had warned Catherine. “She and I are not on good terms. I never talk about what I do, but she figured it out, and she hates me for it. She’s hated me for years, ever since they took her mother away. There was nothing I could do.” He left a recorded message for his daughter, and told Catherine to tie her up and
drag
her onto the
Andromeda
if necessary. He had already gotten her reassigned to manning a commercial platform, trying to keep her out of trouble, but she just wasn’t very good at covering her tracks. Internal Security would track her down eventually, Corbin insisted, and he’d been waiting for a ship en route to Zanzibar.

There were other places he could have sent her, he said, but Zanzibar was the only place where he knew she’d survive. A lifetime subjected to the Combine does not prepare you to live with the rest of humanity. He could send her to the Concordiat, but feared that they’d interrogate her and lock her away. He could send her to an independent system like the Llewellyn Freehold, but what was she going to do there, with no money, no job, no family, no support whatsoever?

So for months, Corbin had been working on a scheme to get his daughter to Zanzibar. He’d been deliberately hindering Internal Security’s investigation of the supposed Combine refugee sanctuary there, which was easy enough because the central authorities, in their hubris, didn’t want to believe such a refuge was possible. Meanwhile, he pulled some strings to make sure his daughter was reassigned to one of the commercial platforms. It was considered a dead-end job. The platforms were manned only because of bureaucratic inertia. They didn’t actually require a human operator, and people assigned there were usually forgotten about, only rotated home for a few months out of Orlov’s long year, and left to wither away. She had been alone on that platform for many weeks by that point. Several ships had passed through, going to Zanzibar, but none had arrived at such a fortuitous time as the
Andromeda.

One would think that Lana would be more than willing to run off on any ship that would take her. Corbin had warned that this may not be the case. Her first impulse, he said, would be to think it was some kind of sting operation conducted by Internal Security, just as Catherine had. Even after she saw her father’s video, she might think it to be an elaborate loyalty test. Internal Security had such a cruel reputation that few put such mind games past them. Once Catherine had Lana secured, Corbin insisted that he would see to it that the
Andromeda
would make it through the transit point, regardless whatever else happened.

Catherine didn’t like that “regardless whatever else happened” part. She very much didn’t like the idea of having to fight her way through God-knows-how-many Combine ships and defense platforms. Orlov’s Star was the most militarized solar system in all of inhabited space, by all accounts, and one ship couldn’t tangle with that and prevail. Despite her misgivings, however, Catherine didn’t have much choice. If she refused Corbin’s request, he could, with a single call, have her ship tracked down and destroyed before it ever made the transit point. So despite her misgivings, despite her quiet anger at being blackmailed, she went ahead with the plan to get this Lana on board her ship by any means necessary. She didn’t tell the crew about the situation, save for her officers and Marcus Winchester. There was no sense stressing the rest of the crew out over it. There was nothing they could do, and they were already on edge just from having to travel through Combine Space.

The commercial platform was a large, branching structure, capable of docking and servicing up to four ships at once. Among its list of purported services were hull maintenance, reaction mass refueling, supplies of helium-3, deuterium, boron, and lithium (depending on the needs of your ship’s reactor), bulk rations for purchase, “luxurious” zero-g showers, and a gift shop/snack bar. At the station’s core was a cluster of huge hydrogen tanks, each a sphere fifty meters in diameter. In the middle of the tanks, amongst a mess of solar panels, radiators, and communications equipment, was a group of small cylinders that made up the habitat module for the station’s sole occupant. There were no rotating sections on the commercial platform; the unfortunate attendant got to spend her entire time on duty in freefall. The habitat module was larger than just a tiny living quarters. The platform advertised having a “state of the art” medical bay, wherein for a nominal (exorbitant) fee, a sick or injured spacer could be treated by an autodoc. (For the kind of money they were asking, Catherine thought, they could at least offer a human doctor.)

Taking advantage of the platform’s services was the pretext Catherine would use to go aboard. Once there, she would attempt to talk Lana into going with her. If that didn’t work, Mazer Broadbent would hit her with a stunner and drag her back to the
Andromeda.
Timing was critical in this operation; it would take hours to get the ship loaded up and ready to depart, and they weren’t going to make the final leg of the journey without those supplies. Grabbing Lana would have to be the last thing they did before departing, and even then, they’d have to be very fast. Everything in Combine space was monitored. Catherine didn’t know how on the ball their security forces actually were when it came to something like responding to an abduction, and Corbin had promised to run interference somehow, but she didn’t want to take any more chances than necessary. There were no other ships docked at the platform, but there was at least one military patrol ship close enough to pursue the
Andromeda
as she dashed for the transit point. One unknown ship was en route to the space platform and would arrive soon. Catherine’s window was rapidly closing.

Once the ship was coupled to the space station, Catherine made her way up to the docking bay, Corbin’s message on her handheld and a compact pulse laser concealed beneath her flight jacket. Marcus Winchester and Mazer Broadbent were with her, both discreetly armed, just in case. The trio floated up through the docking umbilical, pausing at the far end to let the station’s airlock cycle. The main compartment of the station was the gift shop and snack bar. Vending machines of every sort were fastened to every surface, signs flashing and screens promising good deals. A hologram of the same pretty Combine woman who had welcomed them to the system was projected in the center, prattling on about the glory and achievements of the People’s Combined Collective. Signs in six languages pointed visitors to latrines, showers, and the medical bay. One door was marked “authorized personnel only.” That, Catherine surmised, had to be where Lana was.

Getting through the sealed hatch would be a problem. Wade Bishop had volunteered to rig up another shaped charge for the purpose, but Corbin had provided for that. Uploaded to Catherine’s handheld was a set of Internal Security access codes that he said would get her through any door, grant her access to any system, everything. The trick was, the handheld would have to be plugged into the stations’ computer directly. The codes were designed to not work if broadcast via radio.