Episode 17. Part 2
Summer’s Gift
20:15 hrs, local time
We drive back to the ship and take care to park it outside the Gift, to keep it from becoming Potemkin’s property. Rick shows up with the Marshal soon after. Before we let him aboard and get to business, Christian asks for the Marshal’s badge number and his name. Christian hops on the Cortex and verifies it’s genuine. Yup.
Di Lan Juen. Badge #: 28540. Pleased to meet ya.
Christian gives the Di Lan his badge back and apologizes, saying that we can’t be too careful, considering how much trouble we’ve gone through lately.
Di Lan: For people as paranoid as you, you seem to get into a lot of trouble.
Christian: We’re paranoid because we keep getting into trouble.
Di Lan: So how long before he comes to take the ship.
Christian: We have til dawn.
Di Lan: That’s probably not true. He’s going to come earlier.
Christian: We know. I’m sure he will, because he still wants revenge for his brother.
Di Lan: Possibly.
Christian: Who, by the way, we did not kill.
Di Lan: (handwaves) I’m not here investigating that.
So what is Di Lan here for? He tells us.
Di Lan: We know that he’s involved in smuggling and other illicit activities, but the reason I’m involved, at the Federal level, is that we suspect he’s involved in kidnapping. (A beat) Slave trading.
Bernadette is an active center for slavers and their business, despite the planet’s proximity to the central Core and the civilizing influence found there. So long as there is a need for terraforming and bodies are available to carry it out, there will be a trade in finding humans to put on the ground to do the terraforming. Their consent is merely a formality and in the case of the slavers, ignored.
Di Lan has cause to believe that Potemkin is involved in the slave trade, he just lacks the hard evidence he needs to support his case.
Well, if proof of illegal activity is all the man needs…..Arden excuses himself and goes to the safe in med bay, retrieves a Chempliance round and hands it over to Di Lan, saying he has no idea what it is but it was found in the safe when we took possession.
Mind, Blue Sun won’t thank us for turning over evidence of their own nefarious schemes. If word of the Chempliance gets out and more importantly, any of the more coercive variants spun off from it, Blue Sun is going to come gunning for us.
Gee, thanks, Arden.
The Marshal takes the round and slips it in his pocket.
Di Lan: Okay. I’ll have it checked out.
Christian: What do you need from us?
Di Lan: First off, do you know anything about his slave ring?
Slavery specifically? No. Extortion involving passengers and their passage? Yes. Then again, we have no way of knowing if the passengers we’d carried initially to Jiang Yin were ever intended to reach their destination, and there is the false registry board we’d found to make everything look dirty. We are sure that one Potemkin murdered Jamison Fairweather and the other murdered the ship’s pilot and stevedore. And then there’s the introduction of a weapons-grade bacteria on our ship, with intent to kill. We show Di Lan the message Potemkin left for Arden. Di Lan asks for a copy of it and states that while it can’t be used as evidence, it can help with the investigation. We also give him the contact info for Sho-Je Downs, so he can track down what happened during decon.
In short, we hand the man everything we can that came from or points to Potemkin. Then we ask him again, what does he need?
Di Lan: At present, I don’t think I have enough evidence to raid his facilities—I could, but I don’t think any evidence I’d get could be admissible unless there are people literally in there right now being held captive or something. Unless I had reason to believe that was the case, I’m not going to go in and risk …
He gestures to the air, palm up: everything
So Potemkin’s threats to us aren’t going to further the case? And as far as getting evidence, it’s not like we’re in a position to take on cargo for Potemkin and then using it to incriminate him. However, the information we have given him is useful and it will take a couple of days to get sent to the proper authortities.
We turn over Ivan Potemkin’s log books, and the two sets of financial books for the business end of things. Beyond those, and the fake registry board, we’ve got nothing left on hand to give the law man. Di Lan gives us some advice: Leave the ship. Let Potemkin take it, instead of our lives. He doesn’t have the resources to protect us, it would be best if we left the ship. Nika says he might not have the bodies to afford us protection, but as long as we stay inside the ship, we can manage. The ship itself is considerable cover if Potemkin actually comes gunning for us.
Nika: But I don’t want to go to jail if I kill that fucker. Di Lan: (placidly) If he shoots at you first, Of course it would be self-defense. But I think you’ll find he won’t come himself. Nika: Even if his guys come, technically, he’s extorting us. It’s our ship. We have the legal paperwork to prove it. He stole the ship. We have the paperwork to prove that. So if his guys start to board this ship, you can believe we’re gonna start shootin’. Di Lan: Well, you do what you need to do. If you need my help….
He hands Nika his card.
Di Lan: If you find any more damning evidence—this is good. Good stuff. It can be part of a bigger case, but at present I have bigger fish to fry. I would suggest that you don’t endanger yourself, that you remove yourself from the area, wait for the law to take care of this. We’ll get him. What you’ve given me will definitely help build the case against him. If we have to go the back-door route and get him on tax evasion, possession of stolen property, that’s fine. I was hoping to get him on a bigger crime…
Arden: We can let him kill one of us.
Di Lan: Murder would be a local matter.
Di Lan is a Federal-level law enforcer, not a cop, and murders aren’t his gig.
Christian asks Di Lan if Potemkin has any other ships to his fleet and it turns out that no, he doesn’t. Ahhh. So that’s why Potemkin has a hard on for ours—we cost him dearly when we absconded with his stolen ship. Christian realizes that Potemkin’s a businessman and he’s eager to get our ship back so quickly—we’re to be out by dawn—because he’s already got cargo lined up to put in it. Which means we can find evidence on his property or in his possession of illegal cargo activity and THAT should be good enough to nail him to the wall.
Di Lan cautions us not to get involved in the investigation, but to cut our losses, leave the ship and find gainful employment somewhere else. Let the professionals handle this. The one thing we have in our favor is Potemkin’s not exactly popular and people are easily convinced to switch sides. So Di Lan isn’t worried for his safety if he’s seen leaving our ship. And so saying, he leaves.
And the airlock door is hardly closed behind him when we jump down Arden’s neck and demand he tell us what the hell he was thinking, turning over the Chempliance round over to Di Lan, when doing so would implicate us in a terrorist act on Osiris. Arden admits it was the only thing he could think of that could get Potemkin in a lot of trouble in a hurry.
Christian hops on the Cortex and checks to see if any cargo is lined up for our ship already. Nothing is listed under the MakeMake, but under Summer’s Gift we see we’ve 50 tons of cargo space available for anything going to New Hall. Looks like Potemkin’s got 200 tons worth of cargo space he’s already spoken for aboard our ship. What’s he planning to haul, and where?
We review our options:
- We leave.
- We go to Potemkin’s yard and try to find incriminating evidence.
- We stay aboard our ship and risk injury and death courtesy of the goons Potemkin sends over.
Rina and Nika vote to leave. Arden and Rick vote to stay and figure a way out of this mess. Christian is the tie-breaker and he’s not sure which way to go. Nika decides we do a combination of 1 and 2: we pack up everything we consider valuable and pile into the car and drive somewhere away from the ship. Then at 3AM, we make a run over to Potemkin’s shipping yard to do some snooping around. If we can find incriminating evidence, we can turn it in to Di Lan Juen and sent Potemkin away for good.
What if Potemkin confesses? Can we inject him with the Chempliance we have on board? If the man spills his guts to the police, then Di Lan has his case sewn up. However, we don’t know the proper strength of the dose. We have no idea how strong a dose it took to render Mike incapable of resisting orders. If we inject Potemkin with too little or too much, the results may not be all that salutary. We may end up killing him.
We decide to risk it and Rick fills one of his trank darts with Chempliance. Then we pack up our precious and haul out to the car, and drive off. We park the car a couple of blocks away, and cover the rest of the distance on foot. We arrive at Potemkin’s yard, and look it over—spotting the barbed wire topping the fence and the locked chain holding the gate closed. Nothing weird leaps out at us.
The yard has three rows of containers, stacked two high here and there, separated by two main aisles and the space between the containers themselves within the rows. Arden picks the lock on the gate chain open. We loosen the chain enough to let us slip between the gate’s doors.
Rina takes point and Rick takes rear guard. The rest string out in the middle and we draw even with the first of the containers. While Rina’s looking over the locks, Arden spots something at the far end of the row, beyond the last of the containers toward the front of the yard. Two glowing red dots, hovering about a foot or two off the ground. Arden points them out to the rest of the group and we take a quick look.
Rina: Fur-coated razors?
Meaning: guard dogs.
Christian: Watch-bots?
Nika: Just please don’t tell me they’re rifle sights.
She looks through her own sniper scope. The dots don’t resolve into anything more concrete. Nika sends everyone to the next row of containers, the better to work both sides of the aisle and get our snooping done quickly. When we move, the dots move forward and as the round the corner of the containers we see they are LEDs attached to the collars of two guard dogs.
Two fur-coated razors, coming right up.
