Light the Dark Sky: First Voyages Book 2 by Tom Shepherd

Author:Tom Shepherd [Shepherd, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bookbag Press
Published: 2024-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Eighteen

Deck-20

Victoria Security Section

Detention Facility

Commander Svetkana Vdovina grunted at the picture on the bulkhead outside Victoria’s Detention Facility. A square rigged vessel crested a swell in heavy seas, two sails swollen like pregnant canvas curtains by stiff ocean winds.

Navies of yesteryear tapped these smallish warships for floating prisons, called brigs, and drew their name from the larger, twin-sailed brigantines.

Brigs ships were awful places. Dirty, overcrowded and rife with disease. Prisoners received no medical attention, so mortality rates soared. Brigs were little more than floating, rat-infested dungeons, somewhere you could actually lose fingers and toes in the night to vermin. Gone now. Too bad. Svetkana wished she had a starship version of them sailing nearby to swallow up two murderous agents of Terra’s mortal enemy.

That phony Richardo Alvarez wasn’t a surgeon but someone Russians called a golovorez, a butcher who slits throats for a living. And his treasonous human accomplice, Sailor Apprentice Yayuk Basuki, was nothing but shluha vokzal’naja, a train station whore.

Svetkana signed into the cell block and passed through a forcefield barrier which confirmed her DNA profile as Executive Officer of Victoria. With Aurelio Lupetti still on life support and mostly unconscious, Cdr. Vdovina had the right to call herself Captain, at least Acting Captain.

But Svetkana steadfastly refused to take her old friend’s place officially, even though she performed the duties as required of a ship’s commanding officer.

Lt. Kadek Nurcahya met the XO outside of the screening barrier. He still wore his weapons belt. Svetkana greeted him with a nod. She had ordered him to take a run at the Indonesian co-conspirator, Yayuk Basuki.

“How did you know Basuki was traitor?” the XO said.

“One of the conspirators spoke Jakarta dialect. Sailor Basuki alone speaks that language and has the skills to weaponize the cleaning droid. When I detained her after successfully passing the blood test, she did not ask why.”

Svetkana nodded. “Results of your interrogation?”

“I tried Jakarta dialect. Not a word in reply. So, I slipped into Basha Indonesia. Still nothing. I even switched to Terran, which she is required to speak as a crew member. She refused to speak no matter what language I threw at her.”

“She has right of silence as citizen of Commonwealth.” Svetkana pursed her lips. “Let us see if Russian XO speaking Terran-English can break through.”

They followed a Ship’s Policewoman down a short corridor past battleship gray cells with glowing, blue-white forcefield walls facing the accessway. Kadek told the XO he put phony Alvarez at the far end of the row and the human traitor Basuki in a cell near the entrance. Now they both wore classic prisoner orange jumpsuits, but they had no access to datacoms or ship’s MLC network.

The cellblock guard deactivated a shimmering hatch. Before they stepped through, Kadek unsnapped his weapons belt and handed it to the guard for safekeeping.

The cell was surprisingly roomy, like a studio apartment, with lighted panels overhead well beyond reach of a tall person. A writing table and two chairs, shower with sliding door and a sink for personal hygiene.

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