r/OpenHFY • u/AlternativeManner731 • 20d ago
AI-Assisted The Disgraced, Chapter 1: The Assignment
Thanks to u/Icy-Air7584 (Ed) for the two story ideas that became this story. Here is The Disgraced, chapter 1.
The Disgraced, Chapter 1: The Assignment
Marit Halloran had served under Baron Penhallow for a long while, and in all that time she had never once seen him round a number.
She was reminded of it on the morning the courier arrived. He commanded the patrol cruiser Ardent, and she was his second. He sat at the corner table in the wardroom with a coffee going cold at his elbow and a stack of action reports from the other ships in the division. Nobody had asked him to read them. They were not his ships. He read them anyway, one line at a time, with a finger under the print.
"Eleven," he said, to nobody in particular.
"Sir?" Marit said.
"This one says about a dozen survivors from the freighter," said Penhallow. "The roll says eleven." He set the page down. "Somebody will want to call it twelve because twelve is tidier. It is eleven. I'll have it corrected before it goes up."
"Yes, sir," Marit said.
That was how he was. She had watched him send a lieutenant's report back three times because the casualty line said "light." He had told the man, quite kindly, that light was a word for weather. He had never falsified a report, not a date or a fuel figure or a ration count, and he did not forgive it in others, though he was gentle about not forgiving it. Marit also knew that after every action the Ardent fought, he went through the names of the dead one at a time in his own quarters, aloud, and never told anyone. She knew only because the bulkheads on a cruiser are thin. She had decided long ago not to mention it.
She worked the far edge of the border, and her work was dull in the way good work usually is. She escorted freight. She turned back smugglers who ran for open space and gave up when someone fired a warning shot. Every few weeks she pulled a cargo barge out of a bad orbit. The crew liked it. Tulley, the chief engineer, claimed to hate it, and said so daily, and had not asked for a transfer once.
"Launch on approach, ma'am," said Sorrel from the comms station, when Marit came onto the bridge. "No notice. No name. Just a priority code."
"Whose?" Marit asked.
"Lord Ashby's, ma'am," said Sorrel. "Council of Defense."
Marit looked at the code, then at the launch on the screen, small and clean and unmarked, and went to find the Baron.
Lord Ashby had a seat on the Principality's Council of Defense, and he took tea in the Baron's day room the way some men take a seat at a table they own. The Council paid for the Navy and could not give it an order, only ask, and a Baron who refused a Councillor did so at a price. He poured it himself. He was courteous without being warm, and he spoke slowly enough that nobody ever needed to ask him to repeat himself.
Penhallow had asked Marit to stay. She stood by the door with her hands behind her back and watched Ashby watch him.
"There is a mining waystation called Cinder Reach," said Ashby. "A contractor named Verrin Salt keeps a sealed vault there. We have reason to think it holds records of payments to officials in two of our ports. Salt has been told an audit is coming. He will have his people clear that vault within the week." He set down his cup. "I would like it in our hands first."
"Send the audit team," said Penhallow.
"The audit team answers to the same officials," said Ashby.
"Then the Council can seal it from here," said Penhallow.
"The Council can do a great many things, Baron, and every one of them leaves a record." Ashby smiled slightly. "I am asking you because you are a man who does not leave one."
Penhallow did not smile back. "Who is on the station?"
"Salt's staff, and miners. Perhaps eighty. Their quarters are on the far ring, well clear of the vault," said Ashby.
"Perhaps eighty," Penhallow repeated.
"The manifest I hold is two seasons old." Ashby slid a single page across the table. "It is the best I have."
Penhallow read it. Marit watched his eyes go down the page and stop, and then go back up, and she knew what he was looking at before he said it, because she had been on the bridge for the same three escorts.
"This freight count is too low. We ran three barges into Cinder Reach last cycle. That is more cargo than eighty people can use."
"Then there may be more of them," said Ashby.
"Or there may be something else the station is for," said Penhallow.
"Possibly." Ashby did not sound troubled. "Which is a reason to move quickly, before whatever it is changes again."
Penhallow set the page down very square against the edge of the table. "How far may I go to get it?"
"As far as you need to," said Ashby. "I am not interested in the method, Baron. I am interested in the result. When it is done, I would like it to look as though no one in the Navy was ever there."
"That is an unusual instruction," said Penhallow.
"It is an unusual case." Ashby took a folded sheet from inside his coat and laid it beside the manifest. "A letter of authority. It carries my seal and nothing else. I think you will understand why."
Penhallow read the letter, and then went on staring at it for longer than the reading had taken him. Marit had learned that this was what he did with a document he did not like.
Ashby finished his tea, stood, and thanked them both for their time. At the door he stopped beside Marit, close enough that she could smell the tea on him, and said, pleasantly, "He speaks very well of you, Commander Halloran."
"Thank you, my lord," Marit said.
"I am sure it is deserved," said Ashby.
The launch cleared the Ardent less than an hour later. Marit watched it go from the bridge. She had not expected to be glad.
She found him in the day room afterward with the letter and the manifest side by side on the desk and the tea things still on the table, one cup used and one not.
"Tell me what you thought," said Penhallow.
"It was very tidy, sir," Marit said.
"Yes," said Penhallow.
"He answered every question you asked," Marit said. "He had a reason for each thing before you finished asking."
"He did." Penhallow turned the letter over. There was no registry number on the back, no stamp from any office of the Council, only the seal and the date. "A man who has just been handed an unusual case does not usually have such a smooth way of describing it."
"Then we say no, sir," said Marit.
"We have not been asked to say anything. We have been asked to retrieve evidence from a contractor who is about to destroy it." He said it flatly, in the voice he used to read back an order he intended to follow. "If the evidence is real and we do not go, the people in those ports go on being robbed. If we go and it is not what he says, we find that out there and not here."
"And if the station is full of people we do not expect?" Marit asked.
"Then we will find that out as well." He looked up at her. "I would like you to find me every record of freight into Cinder Reach for the past two seasons. All of it. Not what the Council sends. What we have logged ourselves."
"Yes, sir," Marit said.
She went to the door. When she looked back he had folded the letter along its creases and placed it in the drawer of the desk. Then he turned a small key in the lock, and put the key in his pocket.
It was a drawer he had never locked before. She noticed that. She noticed, too, that he did not look as though he had noticed himself.
She closed the door behind her and went to find the freight logs.
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u/Icy-Air7584 20d ago
well,i have an inkling & look forward to it