The manifest in Kneale’s hands quantified the unusual number of passengers embarking from Carnatica Port on this voyage. Kneale looked down on the foreshortened figures even now sauntering up the gangplank. His face was still, but his mind frowned.
He didn’t have to wonder whether some of the passengers were potential hijackers. He had to determine which ones were the danger.
The door of the hydraulic elevator—chosen by the Trident design team because it could be locally maintained while lift/drop shafts could not—gasped open. Kneale turned, reflexively dimming the holographic manifest to hide it from observation.
The commander expected to see office workers coming up to the garden for a break—though at midday, he hadn’t expected to be interrupted. Alternatively, it might have been a Trident officer, bringing Kneale a message that no one trusted to put on a link from the starliner or the data bank below.
The intruders were two passengers from the Empress of Earth—Wade and Belgeddes, whom Kneale recognized only because it was his job to recognize all First Class passengers. He assumed they were lost, or—
“Ah, there you are, friend,” said the tall one, Wade. “I see you’re like me—always out in the open air if I can be.”
“They told us we’d find you here,” said his plump companion Belgeddes, wiping his bald scalp with a handkerchief. “Mind you, I’d just as soon you stayed indoors where the temperature’s at a civilized level. If God had meant us to swelter, he wouldn’t have given us climate control.”
“Ah, do you gentlemen . . . ?” Kneale began curiously.
“Have business with Commander Hiram Kneale, the First Officer, Staff Side?” Wade continued crisply. “Afraid we do, friend. It’s about the passengers, you see. The ones we’re taking on here, and no few of those who boarded at the past two or three dockings.”
“Dickie’s been secret service, you see, laddie,” Belgeddes added. He chuckled. “Maybe a dozen secret services, one place and another. To a feller like me, people are just people; but Dickie here spots the wrong ‘uns as if he reads their minds.”
Kneale began, “Precisely what is it that you’re concerned—”
An intra-system freighter lifted off with an increasing roar which overwhelmed the end of the commander’s carefully phrased question. Tellichery had a very considerable off-planet trade carried on its own hulls, though most of it was concentrated on asteroid and gas mining in the local system. Tellichery was building interstellar transports, though. One day the planet might rival Grantholm and Nevasa in self-born interstellar trade—
Assuming Grantholm and Nevasa, or either one of them, survived the present conflict as a significant force in the human universe.
“Your starship’s a valuable property, Commander,” Wade said as the sound of the freighter diminished to a background rumble. “Militarily valuable, I mean. There’s some on Nevasa who’d look at her as a war-winning asset.”
“You could pack a division aboard her,” Belgeddes said. “More than a division. Why, you loaded five thousand troops on a little Ivanhoe Line puddle-jumper on La Prieta, didn’t you, Dickie?”
“That was only to orbit and down again,” Wade said, dusting his right collar tab with his fingertips. He made a moue of dismissal but caught Kneale’s eye as he added, “A Trojan Horse sort of business, you know. Not much to it. The government was scarcely able to organize a fire drill, much less react to a rebel brigade seizing the capital.”
“Not a lot of heavy equipment on that little jaunt either,” Belgeddes said as though he were making a critical distinction. “Still, Dickie understands this sort of business, don’t you see.”
The spaceship’s hammering motors had disturbed winged creatures from the fringes of the reservation. They rose sluggishly into the air, some of them carrying burdens.
The native winged vertebrates depended on down-insulated skin for lift rather than feathers, but they had toothless beaks and filled the same econiches as the Terran birds which they so closely resembled. These had two-meter wingspans, and they ate carrion.
Tellichery had been settled by a broad cross-section from southern India including Parsecs, Zoroastrians of Persian descent. These latter had continued their practice of putting the bodies of their dead on high towers. Tellichery’s “birds” were more than willing to complete the disposal of the remains, as vultures had done for the Parsecs’ ancestors on Earth.