Walken and the captain decided
to interrogate the XO and Mr. Ortega seperately. Helena and Jesus questioned
Karl on his disappearance from the harbour. He told them he was abducted at
gunpoint by Ortega/Mears, bundled into a pocket submersible and taken to the
undersea hab. On the way, Ortega/Mears had interrogated him about his mission –
and launched the nuke (purloined from the Tiberius)
at the Rocinante. When the hab was
ruptured, Karl took his injured captor to the sub and surfaced.
Meanwhile, Walken and James
talked to Ortega, who wasn’t being cooperative. The presence of cameras,
microphones and restraints prevented him even acknowledging he was anything
other than a 25 year old orphaned game fishing guide. Eventually, Walken
decided to release him into a cabin, with specific computer restrictions on surveillance.
Under these conditions, Mears
talked. The Tavara Massacre was a war crime – but not the kind the CLS thought.
Margaret’s troops had been infected with a genetically engineered virus
targeting purestrain Solomani; the plan had been for the POWs to spread the
contagion to the Solomani military, but David Utanbe had diagnosed it too
quickly and quarantined the 20,000 prisoners. Mears and the MI commander met.
Mears’ zampolit was keen to use the incident as propaganda to demoralise
Margaret’s forces. General Mears did not want to see good soldiers dishonoured,
even if they were the enemy. Margaret’s commander volunteered his men to take
their own lives, rather than wait for the virus to kill them slowly or allow
their treacherous superiors’ plan to succeed. Mears ordered the POW facility be
rigged with explosives and gave the enemy commander the detonator. The facility
exploded as Solomani forces left orbit.
Mears claimed he filed a full
report and that SolMil respected his desire to honour his betrayed opponents.
SolSec disagreed and ran a propaganda campaign, but with little evidence it
failed to make inroads. Mears retired shortly before the new government gained
power. In the turbulence which followed, various records of the Tavara Incident
were ‘lost’...and word reached him of a SolSec old guard smear campaign against
him and two ‘witnesses’ to his ‘crimes’. For years he ignored it, knowing that
the military had his back; but in 1134 more ‘witnesses’ were produced and his
military contacts started getting more difficult to reach. In 1137 old war
buddies started dying from ‘accidents’ and Mears decided to run. The new SolGov
couldn’t be trusted and the old SolSec had it in for him.
Walken and the crew were
inclined to believe Mears. Walken had always been suspicious of the Library
Service’s involvement in what should have been a military matter. And Karl’s
revealation that Isiah del Toro - an old associate with legacy SolSec
connections - had been blackmailing him to kill Mears when they found him
seemed to support the story. Mears claimed that the crews of the Tiberius and Baracus were Tukera Polity agents (the Polity was what used to be
Margaret’s Imperium) out to clean up the Tavara loose ends prior to a major
arms deal. David Utanbe had taken a sample of the Tavara virus and given it to
Mears when he’d visited Pajang. The vial was the general’s only proof of the
virus’ existance, and the Polity was more interested in it than him. It was
hidden in a locker at Umber Down, but the crew worried that Polity agents would
intercept them if they went for it. One of the reasons Mears chose Umber for
his retirement was its quarantine laws – if the virus escaped, it wouldn’t
spread any further.
While the crew chewed it over,
something tried to chew the ship. A 600m long Mali fish had attempted to bite the
Rocinante as it hovered metres above
the sea. Captain Franklin took the ship out of the water and into the
stratosphere until the monster fish released it and fell thousands of metres
back into the water. It was time to leave – but Umber’s governor had other
ideas. He was angry at the librarian’s high-handed intervention in his system
and angrier still at the nuclear detonation in his atmosphere. It took Karl and
some hasty regulation-quoting to prevent the ship being impounded pending a
lengthy investigation. Walken decided to take Mears to Arkiirkii, the subsector
capital as ordered...but allow General Scovin to apprehend Mears rather than
the CLS. Mears could live with that.
As the Rocinante headed for the Jump point, the Baracus emerged from the nearby asteroid belt on full intercept
burn and fired a missile. The captain changed course towards the Baracus while the XO tried to deceive it
by claiming he had taken control of the ship. They weren’t buying it. As
another missile was launched at them, Helena
decided to launch two of her own. The first incoming missile evaded ECM but
fell to a decoy. The second deployed four independent nuclear warheads. ECM
took care of one, but the decoy failed...of the three remaining warheads two
were taken out by point defence but the last hit, damaging the Rocinante’s
inertial dampers. The Baracus wasn’t
so fortunate: it only managed to destroy one of the eight incoming warheads –
the ship was vapourised. Neel called up to the bridge; the Jump drive had
initialised and he couldn’t power it down. The XO quickly recalculated the
astrogation profile and hoped...
...eight days later the ship
was still in Jumpspace. By the ninth day the crew was starting to worry.
Finally, on Day 13, the Rocinante
emerged from Jump – 800 parsecs rimward of Charted Space. On the very edge of
the galaxy’s spiral arm.
Journals 
