The Regulator

Chapter 1.7 Part one

Leaving Louie behind on an unsecure ship was not something Haas had ever had to do before, and as dawn approached on her first full day on Ierus, the thought of walking away and leaving him alone began to bother her much more than she was prepared for. Even though he was only the Abilene's AI, and didn't have the complex programming that was required for a true emotional connection, Louie was a second partner of sorts, and had proved to be an agreeable companion, especially on those quiet nights when Sato was snoring in her bunk and there was nothing to look at but the blank brown surface of the HD blinds.

Of course, Louie didn't really understand that sentiment when she articulated it, between hurried mouthfuls of breakfast cereal, so Haas fell back on logic to convince him to go portable. Leaving him in the wreckage of the Abilene would put his OS at risk of falling in to unfriendly hands. For some of the Admiralty brass that would be an even greater screw up than losing Ambassador Sewati, and even though there was every chance someone at HQ had turned against her, had used her family's connection to facilitate a murder, Haas was still a Regulator. She had no intention of gifting the denizens of the Lazaretto with a prize as big as a captured Admiralty AI.

"I need you to download to my data pad, Louie," she said. "Any protocols concerned with flight operations you can ditch, but I'll need you for everything else. We'll wipe the Abilene's core before we leave."

"Commander, if we destroy the ship's core, the Abilene will be incapable of leaving Ierus again. Only the Hadari Peacekeepers can cross the border, but the atmosphere on their ships is incompatible with your physiology. You will be stranded here."

Haas took a moment to let Louie's objection sink in, gazing up through the jagged rent in the Abilene's hull to the first fingers of dawn, stretching out across the sky. Through the gauzy protection of the camo nets the weak light of the Pavonis b appeared muddy and dull. She hadn't experienced a sun rise in almost two years, but those she could recall seemed far more spectacular than this. Could she adjust to such a graveyard of a planet if there was no other choice? Space travel had shaped her entire life. She'd been raised among the stars. There would be a way off Ierus, there had to be, even without the Abilene. She still had friends in the Admiralty. There was Lucy, Commodore Phiri. Not everyone would believe the evidence that she'd been forced to leave in Sewati's quarters and on his body. Someone had cloned her biometric data, and there were only a few people with that kind of access. Whoever had passed that information to Cherkin and Alvizo, the pool of suspects would be small, and they would have left a digital trail somewhere. She just had to find someone willing to look, and someone who could help her track down Sewati's friend, the archaeologist Agashe Sett. Haas had a feeling she may hold the key to how all this had started. Until then, perhaps even after that, she was stuck where she was, and on her own.

Haas bit back a sudden welling of tears. Her cereal had turned to dust in her mouth.

"We have killers to catch, Louie," she tried to sound defiant, but was stung by the fear in her own voice. "And we can't do that sitting here. No-one will come looking for me, hell they may already think I'm dead, and that means whoever set this up will get away with it," she threw her cereal bowl in to the galley sink. "We're not going to let that happen, understood?"

"Yes, Commander," Louie was all business.

With the external battery pack still powering her arm a shower was out of the question, so Haas returned to the cargo hold to get ready for departure. While she tugged on her boots and packed her jacket and the last of Sato's health food bars in her rucksack, Louie gave her a run down of what to expect.

The Admiralty's records of who exactly lived on Ierus were incomplete. What Louie did know was that the natives were unlikely to be of much assistance. They had never developed space travel or long distance communications of the kind required to get a message through to Admiralty HQ. Fortunately, Ierus had once been home to a significant Circinian population, attracted by the mineral wealth of the Pavonian system. Although many of them had pulled out when the Pavonovirus erupted, there was every reason to believe some had stayed behind. The Circinian homeworld was also none too friendly to those who took against the ruling Gosheven family, a fact Haas knew only too well. Many Circinian dissidents had taken shelter in the Pavonian system, both before and after the plague had broken out.

Then of course there were the Lazaretto's infamous criminal bands, but given that Haas had probably arrested a good few of them during her career she planned to give them a wide berth. Shipwrecked or not, she wasn't going to seek help from a bunch of pirates and drug smugglers, especially when many of them felt they had every reason to put a bullet between her eyes.

Finally, there were the Hadari Peackeepers who patrolled the Lazaretto border and organised regular aid convoys between the quarantined worlds. As Louie had already pointed out, they would be unable to pick her up. As methane breathers they were immune to the Pavonovirus, but the atmosphere on their ships would be instantly lethal for her. However, they did have interstellar communications, and Haas might be able to persuade them to send a message to Commodore Phiri, assuming she could get their attention. As dictated by Admiralty protocol she may also be able to get the Abilene's fight data transmitted back to Make Make, although that would mean removing the Abilene's flight data chip and taking it with her.

Louie objected vigorously to that idea, citing several regulations about tampering with Admiralty hardware that would put her in some very hot water with Internal Affairs, but Haas had stood her ground. Not only was she in hot water anyway, but the Abilene was dead, and sometimes you had to bend a small rule to comply with a bigger one. Besides she also wanted to get a sneak peak at the data before she sent it. There was no way she was leaving it behind, or handing over the best evidence she had of their flight on the Laurentic without getting a proper look at it first.

Louie remained unconvinced and it wasn't until she pulled up the access hatch in the cargo bay floor and retrieved the flight data recorder from its slot in the Abilene's central memory core that Louie finally gave up arguing with her, and downloaded himself on to her data pad, maintaining his dignity in the face of defeat by insisting he had to be present now, to guarantee a chain of custody for the little silver disc. Haas let him have the final word, clipping the disc in to the optional memory slot on her data pad. That way Louie could keep his beady electronic eye on it, and swear up and down to the thugs in Internal Affairs, should they ever make it back to Make Make, that it had never left his sight.

When it came to actually making it to civilisation and rescue, the Abilene's data on Ierus and its geography was just as out of date as the information they had for its population. Louie placed their landing site within half a day's walk of Badr City, the capital of Ui'Tann, the northernmost continent on Ierus, but that was about all he could tell her. The Hadari Peacekeepers had designated drop off points for their consignments of aid and the nearest one to Badr City was a day's drive away. If the city was populated the Hadari records gave no clue as to how many people were there and who they were.

The statements of the smugglers and pirates who made a living in the Lazaretto also proved to be of little help. Those the Regulators had captured in the past had proved surprisingly loyal to their paymasters, preferring to spend longer as residents in an Admiralty penal community, than give away any useful information about their activities inside the Lazaretto.

As a result, even though Louie could provide her with a route to Badr City, one that would take her about seven hours to walk, he couldn't guarantee who they might meet on the way and who would be there when they arrived. Pirate cities, where everyone had outstanding warrants, and violence was as ordinary as getting dressed in the morning, were nothing new to Haas, but combine that with a population which had been devastated by disease, and the prospect of navigating Badr City alone did not fill her with enthusiasm for the trip. She was more at home in space than she was on the ground, and the survival skills her father had taught her were distinctly rusty, but getting out of the Lazaretto, a slim possibility at best, was entirely reliant on her finding some way of contacting Admiralty HQ, and that wasn't going to happen if she stayed with the Abilene.

"It's Badr City or bust, Louie," she pointed out, pulling on her father's old coat. "At least you get a free ride in to town."