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Chapter Forty
"Damn, I hate this kind of shit," Captain Duan Binyan muttered as the Jessyk Combine's armed freighter Maria
"Why they pay us the big money," A
He kept his eyes on the maneuvering plot as the freighter's velocity dropped steadily. So far, so good, he thought. And at least they'd been able to grease a few useful palms at this stop. Maria
Unfortunately, when you commanded one of Jessyk's "special units" and Ms. Isabel Bardasano personally explained that your mission was Priority One, you nodded, saluted, and went off and did whatever it was she'd requested. Quickly and well.
He'd made his rendezvous with the local Jessyk cargo agent a full light-year short of the Split System and precisely on time, despite having been diverted to drop off that load of technicians in Monica. No one had told him what that was all about, but he was used to that. He had his suspicions, anyway, and he'd been rather amused by the technicians' uneasy expressions when they discovered what their accommodations aboard Maria
Still, only Maria
No one had told him specifically that he was delivering weapons to the FAK, but it didn't take a hyper-physicist to figure it out. He didn't have a clue why he was, other than the fact that Isabel Bardasano thought it was a Good Idea. Given Bardasano's reputation, that was more than enough for Duan Binyan.
But there was obviously only one group on Kornati who could possibly require the better part of four thousand tons of small arms, unpowered body armor, encrypted communicators, -stealthed counter-grav surveillance sats and drones, and military-grade explosives. And given the local authorities' ugly attitude, Duan Binyan didn't even want to think about what would happen to anyone caught ru
Of course, he thought glumly, they can't kill us any deader than the frigging Manties would if they caught us with a special consignment. They've made that clear enough.
"Are there any Manty transponders out there?" he asked, prompted by unpleasant thoughts of the Royal Manticoran Navy.
Zeno Egervary, Maria
"Nothing. Not even a merchie."
"Good," Duan muttered, and slouched a bit more comfortably in his command chair.
Even without a special consignment aboard, Maria
Fortunately, Maria
She was also armed, although no one in his right mind-and certainly not Duan Binyan-would ever confuse her with a warship. She didn't make any effort to pretend she wasn't armed, although her official papers significantly understated the power of the two lasers she mounted in each broadside and her engineering log always showed that at least one of them was down for lack of spare parts. The Verge could be a dangerous place, and probably ten or fifteen percent of the merchies which plied it were armed, after a fashion, at least. The "inoperable" broadside mount was simply part of Maria
All in all, Maria
"We're coming up on the outer orbital beacon," De Chabrol a
"Go ahead and insert us."
"Okay," De Chabrol acknowledged, and Duan chuckled. His ship might be armed, but no one would ever mistake her bridge routine for something a man-of-war would have tolerated for an instant!
Agnes Nordbrandt sat in the passenger seat of the battered freight copter as it whirred noisily through the night. Counter-grav air lorries would have been more efficient, and they were common enough on Kornati these days that she probably could have rented one or two without arousing suspicion. But helicopters were cheaper, and so ubiquitous no one could possibly stop all of them for random searches.
This particular helicopter was operating under a perfectly legitimate transponder, although the freight company which owned it wasn't aware of tonight's trip. The pilot, whose mother had been hospitalized for the last eight T-years, was one of the freight company's senior pilots... and also a member of Drazen Divkovic's FAK cell. He'd been with the company for twelve T-years, and part of his arrangement with his employer was that he could use company vehicles to moonlight to supplement the regular salary which somehow had to pay for his mother's hospitalization as well as feed his own wife and children.
Knowing all of that, unfortunately, didn't make Nordbrandt noticeably happier.
The problem was the helicopter's maximum cargo capacity of only twenty-five tons. She had five more, similar helicopters, although two of them couldn't be used long, since they'd been stolen for this operation. Still, even with all six of them, she could transport only a hundred and fifty tons in a single flight. Which meant it would require twenty-six round trips by all six to move her arriving bounty of destruction.
In some ways, that wasn't entirely bad. She'd made arrangements to spread the weapons between several dispersed locations, and that would've required her to break the entire consignment down into smaller increments, anyway. But it was going to take at least a couple of days to move everything, and that much exposure was dangerous.
She didn't like coming out into the open this way herself, either. Not out of any sense of cowardice, although she was honest enough to admit she was afraid on a personal level, but because if the graybacks managed to capture or kill her, the effect on the FAK would be devastating. Indeed, the fact that she'd supposedly been killed once would probably make the psychological effect even worse if she actually was arrested or killed. Yet she didn't have much choice, at least for this first stage of the delivery operation. She had to be on hand, had to be confident her arrangements were working, and had to be available to resolve any last-minute complications which reared their ugly heads.
She'd chosen the delivery site with care, because landing the shuttle was the most hazardous single element of the operation. "Firebrand" had assured her his agents would be well versed in clandestine deliveries, and that they'd be capable of flying a nape-of-the-earth course. She'd taken him at his word and selected a site in the rugged Komazec Hills. It was only three hundred kilometers from Karlovac, but the rough terrain provided plenty of concealed spots. And the hills were close enough to the capital that a cargo shuttle making dispersed deliveries to legitimate customers could duck into their valleys and ridgelines for cover against standard air traffic and police radars without arousing undue suspicion.
There was still a major degree of risk, and most of it was the fault of her own operations. What she thought of as her "I'm Back" strike in the capital lay almost seven T-weeks in the past, but the entire planet was still reeling from its effects. The thought gave her a great deal of satisfaction, but the wildly successful attacks had bloodied the graybacks' nose badly enough to ensure a high degree of alertness. The biggest danger was that some spaceport security officer would doublecheck the cargo shuttle's delivery manifests and discover that the legitimate businesses to which the shuttle was supposedly making direct deliveries weren't expecting anything of the sort. But Firebrand's contacts had managed to find a customs agent willing to look the other way for a price. He was the one who'd certify the shuttle's cargo as whatever i