2952-06-26 – Tales from the Service: The Courier’s Departure
Departure clearance, unsurprisingly, took only moments to acquire once Ris Bleier and his hand-picked team were aboard ship. He disliked Howard Helios Hughes from the moment he stepped aboard, but the ship was, unfortunately, ideal for his purpose – fast, anonymous, and unlikely to be associated with a government bureau in any Confederated port on the Sagittarius Frontier. The fact that commandeering it also kept its skipper from selling any secrets a second time was of course critical as well.
Captain Bermudez, of course, took Ris’s obvious distaste as a personal victory. The more he scowled at the dented paneling, the scuffed, stained deck plating, and the signs of shoddy repair work evident in almost every compartment, the more smug she became. She offered no tour, so Rahat Kuriega, an engineer Ris had picked up from his own cutter’s maintenance crew, led Ris and the other two ASWA men around the vessel with the help of its decade-old registration schematics. This proved mercifully short – on one end was the cockpit, with two chairs facing an arc of outdated control interfaces, and on the other was a closet-sized engine-room. Between these, filling a flattened tube, one could find three cabins, a decrepit lounge, a food-fab, and a filthy sanitary compartment, all accessed from a single fifteen-meter strip of corridor. The small cargo compartments, though capable of being pressurized, were not attached to the pressurized crew space.
Brianne Giffard, a pilot normally in charge of the ASWA courtesy shuttles, was at the controls when Hughes took off. Ris, standing behind her, did his best to ignore the presence of Captain Bermudez in the copilot’s chair, arms crossed over her chest. Clearing the mad tangle of docks and cranes that was the outer works of The Sprawl proved no trouble for Giffard, and soon, their course was laid in, and the ship was on automatic guidance.
As soon as the pilot’s hands fell from the controls, Bermudez cleared her throat. “Thanks for not smashing my ship.” She stood and stretched her arms. “I’ll be in my cabin.”
Ris met Giffard’s eyes as the skipper of the commandeered vessel flounced out of the cockpit. He knew what the pilot was thinking – they could have just as easily gone after this rumor of a crippled or derelict Reacher ship in his cutter, or in one of the less obtrusive courtesy shuttles. Why the trouble of using this unkempt ship and its unwilling owner?
Ris was, however, not in the business of explaining his decisions to his subordinates. He merely shrugged and left to see to his own berth. Of the two cabins not claimed by Bermudez, he had elected for the smaller one, leaving the larger to his trio of subordinates. How two men and one woman elected to divide that space was, of course, not his business; he had no intention of ever entering their cabin.
Ris’s cabin, barely large enough for his bags to fit between the bunk and opposite wall, proved as uninspiring as when he’d first seen it. The dingy metal walls lacked even a viewpanel to break up their monotony. A chronometer glowed from the center of a corner desk no more than half a meter across, providing the only illumination until Kuriega came by to replace the overhead light-panels.
Ris, however, refused to let these drab conditions bring down his mood. All he really needed was a place to sleep, and some solitude to catch up on a backlog of low-priority Welfare Officer reports from the outlying stations; this cabin would serve well enough for a few days.
Before he opened any of his bags, though, Ris stripped the bunk down to its rectangular polyfoam block mattress, rolled everything up, and kicked it into the corridor. He would not be trusting Bermudez’s laundry under any circumstances. One of the bags contained a set of smart-fabric bedclothes that would fit to any size of bunk, and he soon had these laid out and constricting themselves around the mattress.
A knock on the door-frame drew Ris’s attention, and when he turned he saw Art Lund, one of his department’s most experienced linguists, standing over the pile of cloth. “I’m pretty sure you’d have more space in the big cabin if you swapped with Giffard, Director.”
“This is acceptable.” Ris shrugged. “This expedition is not a vacation.”
“Oh, aye.” Lund arched one eyebrow. “Which is why I’m wondering what makes a regional bureau director take up field work. You could have sent someone else.”
Ris smiled. Sometimes, to someone with so long a service record as Lund, he might reveal his purposes, but this was not the time. “I could have, Art. But I did not.”
“Fair enough.” Lund held up his hands. “I guess the promise of Reachers cuts to even the coldest bureaucratic heart, eh?” He turned to leave. “Want me to take care of this trip hazard?”
“I would appreciate it.” Ris gestured to the bundle. “Find somewhere to store them. Perhaps on the other side of the airlock, just to be safe.”
The fact that a bureau chief like Bleier would personally see to such an errand perhaps should have tipped off his subordinates that what they were doing had a real chance of being very, very important, but it seems that none of the four people who accompanied him on this voyage had any inkling this might be the case. This, despite all of them knowing, in general, what they were looking for – a wrecked or possibly very badly damaged Racher ship, as opposed to an empty shell like the ones we have described encounters with on previous occasions.
The importance of locating such a tragic scene, in Sagittarius no less, seems to have been lost upon most of the people attempting it, at least until they had it in front of their eyes.
