“May I ask what’s going on, ma’am?” I said.
“No,” Captain Thao said. She reached out to me with the memory card. “I need you to put this new destination into the navigation system. Let Han know when you’ve done it and the new destination is confirmed.”
I took the card. “It’ll take about a minute and a half,” I said.
“Fine,” Thao said. “Tell Han anyway.” She left without saying anything else. I looked over at Han. He was still working on his utterly neutral face.
* * *
“Mr. Daquin,” Secretary Ocampo said, as he opened the door to his stateroom and saw me standing on the other side of it. “This is unexpected. Come inside, please.” He stood aside to let me in.
I entered the stateroom, which was roughly twice the size of my own, which is to say, the size of two broom closets. A lot of the space was taken up by Ocampo’s luggage, which was, as Vera Briggs hinted, a lot for a month-long trip. But Ocampo struck me as a likely candidate for being a clotheshorse, so maybe that volume of luggage wasn’t unusual for him.
“I apologize for it being cramped,” Ocampo said.
“It’s bigger than my quarters,” I said.
“I would hope so!” Ocampo said, and then laughed. “No offense,” he said, afterwards.
“None taken,” I said.
“We’re fortunate Vera isn’t in here as well, we might not be able to move,” Ocampo said, and sat in the chair next to his very small table. “Now, let me guess why you’re here, Mr. Daquin. I’m guessing that sometime in the last few hours, your captain came to you with a new destination, is that correct?”
“It might be,” I said.
“Might be indeed,” Ocampo replied. “And this new destination is secret, and now I strongly suspect that you and the rest of the Chandler crew are having a merry little time speculating about where this destination is, why we might be going there, and why your captain is following an order that no one should have been able to give her. Is that about right?”
“That’s about the size of it, yes.”
“And I bet you were volunteered by the rest of the crew to come see me about it, because you and I shared a boat ride over to the Chandler.”
“No, sir,” I said. “You’re right that the crew is talking about it. But none of them put me up to this. I came on my own.”
“That’s either initiative or stupidity, Mr. Daquin.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Maybe a little of both.”
“That’s equally possible, sir.”
Ocampo laughed. “You understand that if I can’t tell your captain where we’re going, I’m not going to be able to tell you.”
“I understand that,” I said. “I’m not here about the ‘what,’ sir. I’m here about the ‘why.’”
“The why,” Ocampo said.
“Yes,” I said. “As in why the number two person in all of the Colonial Union State Department is pretending to go on vacation to an arctic mountain range and using a cargo ship to get there, instead of just taking a State Department ship with a formal diplomatic mission on it to wherever and whomever he is meeting and negotiating with.”
“Well,” Ocampo said, after a moment. “And here I thought I was being clever about it.”
“You were, sir,” I said. “But it looks different inside the ship than out of it.”
“Fair enough. Have a seat, Daquin,” Ocampo said, motioning to his bunk. I sat. “Let’s talk theoretical scenarios for a moment. Are you okay with that?”
“Sure,” I said.
“What do you know about how the Colonial Union is doing these days?”
“I know we’re not on very good terms with the Earth anymore.”
Ocampo snorted. “You’ve unintentionally made the understatement of the year. It’s more accurate to say the Earth hates the Colonial Union’s guts, thinks we are evil, and wants us all to die. They blame us for the destruction of Earth Station, which was their major egress into space. They think we did it.”
“And we didn’t.”
“No, of course not. But many of the ships used in the attack were pirated from the Colonial Union. You’ve heard about that, at least? Cargo ships like this one being captured and turned into attack vehicles?”
I nodded. This was one of the more wild rumors out there—that pirates, or someone posing as pirates, would take and board ships, but instead of the cargo, they were after the ships themselves. They would use the ships to attack targets in the Colonial Union and in the Conclave, a big political union of alien races.
I thought it was wild because it didn’t make much sense. Not that the ships were taken; I knew that was true. Everyone in space knows someone whose ship was lost. But it didn’t make sense to use cargo ships as attack platforms. There were easier ways to strike both the Colonial Union and the Conclave.
But now Ocampo was telling me that part wasn’t just a rumor. That these things were happening. One more reason, I guess, to be glad to be doing a trade run safely inside the Colonial Union’s borders.