Innes in Command
Copyright© 2026 by Lumpy
Chapter 15
Innes had just finished transmitting his preliminary report to Captain Barrett when the operations compartment door slid open and Commander Jun Hua stepped through. The station commander paused at the threshold, looking everything over, before crossing to where Innes sat at the primary console.
“Ensign Kingsford,” Jun Hua said. “I need a word with you. Privately, if you can spare the time.”
“Sure. Follow me,” Innes said, rising from his station. “Chief, you have the watch.”
Innes led him into the briefing room, closing the hatch behind them.
“What can I do for you, commander?”
“About an hour ago, a lawyer from House Gervais arrived and came straight to the station administrative offices. He had a list of, let’s call them requests, for us, including having my offices intervene with your detention of their merchant crew.”
Innes had expected them to apply political pressure, but he hadn’t expected it this quickly. He’d also thought they’d try to come at him again before trying to go around him to the station’s administration.
“I’m not sure you have jurisdiction to do that.”
“He presented arguments that supported that we do, characterizing all of this as a regulatory dispute between naval and commercial interests. He gave me a well-written brief on how I could exercise administrative authority to transfer the crew from your custody to station holding facilities.”
“Commander, I understand the political position this puts you in, but releasing crew members who transported military weapons into this region would undermine the security of the entire system. The mines we seized from the Pioneer Spirit represent a direct threat to shipping lanes and to this station. I cannot facilitate the release of individuals connected to that threat, regardless of which noble house employs their lawyers or what pressure they...”
Jun Hua raised a hand, and Innes stopped mid-sentence.
“You misunderstand the purpose of this conversation, Ensign. I did not come here to argue against their detention or to pressure you toward accommodation. I just wanted to make sure you know what’s happening. I told him that he’d need to go through the proper legal channels and that I couldn’t intervene on his behalf.”
Innes had been preparing himself for a drawn-out argument over the subject. Although he and Jun had gotten along well once Wexler left, the commander hadn’t been overly fond of the detachment from the start, so it was unexpected to find him suddenly on their side.
“May I ask why?” Innes said. “House Gervais has a fair amount of weight and can make your life here more difficult if they really want to.”
“They could, but those mines you seized were headed here, to my home. Well, not here, but somewhere in this system, making them a real threat to me and everyone else living here. I am responsible for all seven million people living on this station, along with the thousands of ships that come through here every year. I’m not lifting a finger to help anyone who puts my people at risk, and I don’t much care which noble house signs their paychecks.”
The bluntness of it surprised Innes, though perhaps it shouldn’t have. He had seen enough of Jun Hua over the past weeks to recognize that the man’s reserve concealed genuine conviction. Jun Hua had not risen to station commander by accident; he seemed to understand where his responsibilities lay.
But Innes had also seen enough politics to know that even people who had similar responsibilities often chose the thing that benefited them the most over those responsibilities.
“He was very crafty,” Jun Hua added. “He suggested that station administration might benefit from staying friendly with influential trading houses, hinted that cooperation could mean favorable treatment when we put in our next infrastructure request or budget allocation. I’ve been in this job long enough to recognize a bribe when I hear one, even if it’s not a bribe to me directly.”
“I’m glad you see it that way,” Innes said. “I know it creates problems for station administration that you didn’t ask for, and for that, I’m sorry.”
“It does, but you didn’t create the problems. The people who sent those mines through my space did. I came here to reassure you that we see eye to eye here, on this particular issue, at least. I won’t pretend the tensions between station authority and your naval presence have disappeared overnight, and I still have my jurisdictional issues, but on whether to help people who smuggled weapons into my system, there’s no daylight between us on that.”
Innes hadn’t needed that clarification, but he knew why Jun had given it. He understood that solidarity on this issue wasn’t the same as a permanent alliance. Jun had his own concerns, his own political calculations, and his own loyalties, which were not the same as those Innes had, and he would have to default to those.
It just so happened that his interests and the Navy’s converged on this specific point.
“One more thing. He mentioned that they had spoken to other commanders of this detachment, by which I got the strong feeling he meant your Lieutenant Wexler, and suggested the lieutenant would be coming back soon, and I would find my life would be much harder once he did. While the threat doesn’t bother me, he seemed quite confident that he could get the lieutenant to return, and I thought you should know that.”
Now, that was a concern. If Wexler came back, he would almost certainly begin creating bottlenecks in places where he, or at least his house, thought it could benefit them, as he had before.
If House Wexler and House Gervais came to some kind of agreement, then House Gervais could continue to supply whoever they were working with in this system.
Innes had a bad feeling that what Gervais was supplying was not intended for contingencies or long-term use. There were too many small things happening that suggested something was coming to a head.
If Wexler came back and started ignoring those signs, they could find themselves suddenly in a very bad spot.
“I appreciate the warning,” Innes said.
He just hoped it took more time for those two houses to come to terms on whatever they were cooking up.
“Chief, I need you in the briefing room,” Innes said as soon as Chief Pierce came into the operations room to start his evening shift, handing him a datapad without comment as they headed into the room.
“That is a complete analysis of the buoy we found that I had a friend work up for me. I was hoping I could get your thoughts on it.”
“I’d be happy to look it over. What did she find that our engineering friend missed?”
“I wouldn’t say Haratun missed anything. My friend does stellar data analysis and looks at things from a different point of view, and she was able to make some reasonable conclusions based on additional testing. The main thing being, this buoy was meant specifically to operate in this system. If you look at what she put in section three, you’ll see that the signal frequency was made to be very close to the background radiation in this system, specifically the radiation found around the asteroid belt, helping mask it. If it was used in another system, the difference would be greater. Of course, it’s possible it’s just a coincidence that this thing which was made to hide, sending out an intermittent signal that is deliberately limited in range, just by coincidence has a signal so close to the background radiation.”
“That would be a stretch,” Pierce said, reading the indicated section.
“That’s what I thought. Which also means it’s unlikely that the weapons were just being dropped off to someone on Hokkaido to be sold. At the very least, they were being sold to an end user there, if that was the end destination for the mines and the buoy.”
“You don’t think it was, though.”
“I don’t. If the buyer was on Hokkaido, then they knew where to find them and there would be no use for this buoy. And if the buoy was part of what was being sold to the end user on Hokkaido, then they had the mines and there was still no use for this buoy, since they already had the mines.”
“So what’s the alternative?”
“That the end buyer is in this system and intends to use them here, but they aren’t on Hokkaido, or any other port the Pioneer Spirit could easily get to, and the buoy isn’t part of that cargo. It’s part of the delivery system. They drop the mines at one location well out of the way, in a place that would be hard to find, and then the buoy is dropped at more accessible, predefined coordinates. Inside it is the information for where to find the mines.”
“If they could do all that, and the buoy goes to some kind of predefined spot, then why not just have a place to put the mines and not use all this nonsense with the buoy?”