In gratitude for that silent support, the inspector put down the glass and laid his own hand atop his wife’s.
“I can’t let it stand, Mathilde. This is just so wrong… and it is half my fault and I am up to my neck in it.”
Mathilde, the wife, released her husband’s shoulder and walked around to sit at the chair facing him. “Do you want to tell me about it?” she asked.
Looking up, the inspector made a sudden, though difficult, decision. “I can’t. Your life is already in danger. It will be more endangered if you knew what I know. But I am thinking that maybe you should take the children to your parents; that, and stay there until I send for you.”
She nodded her understanding. In times past — when her husband was on the trail of a major criminal, drug runners especially — he had sent her out of the city, out of the country on one occasion, to keep her and their children from harm.
“That bad, eh?” she asked calmly, a policeman’s wife, not entirely unfamiliar with danger.
“Worse than I can tell you, esposita querida.”
“I’ll start to pack,” she agreed sadly, “but what are you going to do?”
“I think I need to go have a conversation with the gringos.”
It was well past midnight, the nightly rains having come and gone, when the inspector presented himself at the brow of the gringo cruiser asking for admittance. The deck officer, one of the ship’s genuinely young — as opposed to only apparently young — ensigns, didn’t really know what to do. A foreign national, claiming to be a member of the police force, wanting to board, would have been easy enough. After the ship’s captain had been arrested, presumably by the same police force as the man claimed to be from, the ensign was torn between shooting the man, making it a more formal occasion and calling a detail to keelhaul him, or — just maybe — calling the senior officer present afloat and letting him decide.
The ensign rather hoped the ship’s XO would decide on a keelhauling. Then again, with a GalPlas coated hull and, thus, no barnacles, the keelhauling would have lacked a certain something.
Daisy — her avatar, actually — beat the XO to the bridge rather handily. Why not; she was already there.
“I want my captain back,” were her first words. “I want my captain back now.”
The inspector was more than a little shocked to see a beautiful gringo woman standing on the bridge. He was even more shocked that he could, if only just, see through the woman. He remembered reading a report of a giantess accompanying the ships that had sailed forth to battle the aliens. A smaller version of the same thing? Who could say. But the world was full of undreamt of wonders — and horrors — these days.
“You are the ship, madam?” he asked.
Daisy nodded, seemingly agreeable for the moment. Yet the fire and fury in her holographic eyes suggested no such agreeability.
“I want my captain back,” she repeated.
At the time the XO climbed to the bridge. “Who are you?” he demanded of the Panamanian who claimed to be a policeman.
The inspector was about to answer, as he usually did, my name is unimportant. Then he looked at the XO’s eyes, almost as deadly looking as the hologram’s and decided to be open.
“I am Inspector Belisario Serasin and I am the man who arrested your captain.”
Without another question the XO turned to the ensign on watch and commanded, “Get me a detail of Marines. Armed Marines.”
“I’m not here to arrest anyone,” the inspector said, quickly. “In fact, with your help perhaps I might be able to free your commander.”
The assembly in CIC included both the inspector and Julio Diaz, this time, along with the XO of Salem and a couple of armed Marines dressed in MarCam.
The inspector explained, “I came here in person, rather than simply telephoning, because I have reason to believe that all telephone conversations are being monitored.”
“They certainly are,” Daisy confirmed. “Both Sally and I are doing so continuously, as a matter of course.”
“Not just by you,” the inspector insisted. “Someone else.”
“Daisy, dear, how many AIDs are there in Panama?” Dwyer asked.
“Myself and Sally, of course, Chaplain. Then there are four hundred and twenty-three in the remaining armored combat suits of First Battalion, Five-O-Eighth Infantry. The only other three are the Darhel Rinn Fain’s, the United States ambassador’s, and the one assigned to the president.”
“Are you certain?” the XO asked.
“Absolutely certain, sir,” Sally answered. “AIDs always know. There are several thousand Artificial Sentiences in the hands of the Posleen, of course, but those are different and far less capable. We can’t monitor the Posleen devices except in the most general way.”
The XO thought he heard a sniff of pride bordering on arrogance in the AID’s words.
“We don’t have enough Marines to force the prison?” the XO asked. “Not even with Salem’s jarheads?”
The commander of the Marine detachment aboard Salem was unenthusiastic and a little embarrassed. “My boys are good, sir. Your own are too. We could assault the prison and take it easily enough. What we can’t do is guarantee that the prisoners would survive. And the forty-four of us are not enough to overawe the guards into surrendering without a fight.”
“SOUTHCOM has control of a special forces battalion, doesn’t it?” the XO of Des Moines mused.
“They do,” Daisy answered. “But they’re scattered all over the place. It would take time to assemble them, time to plan, time to rehearse. And we may not have the time.”
In the narrow space between the tactical plotting table and a bank of radios the inspector paced. “It isn’t enough to just free them.”
“That’s all I care about,” the XO insisted.
“Oh, really?” the Panamanian asked. “Then why did you and the other ship go out to fight? Why did you take losses?”
“Well… to defend the Canal.”
“Exactly. Now ask yourself why your captains were arrested. Ask yourself why the best part of Panama’s leadership was arrested. Why were our heroes arrested?”
Without waiting for an answer from anyone the inspector provided his own. “All these arrests took place to ensure that the Canal would fall. The people who ordered them want the Canal to fall.”
“But…” the XO of Salem sounded confused. “But that’s your government. You say they want their own country overrun?”
“I think so,” answered the inspector. “Why, what could possibly motivate them, I do not know. It’s monstrous beyond imagining. But it is the only answer.”
“What are you getting at, Inspector?” Dwyer asked.
“The existing government has to go.”
Everyone in CIC went silent at that. It wasn’t that the United States, or the United States Navy, had no experience in overthrowing foreign governments. But it wasn’t something to be done lightly.
“I wonder what SOUTHCOM would say about that?” Daisy Mae’s pork chop asked aloud.
“They would report it, have you arrested, and generally interfere,” Daisy answered. “The commander has apparently had a talk with the ambassador since he couldn’t get through to the President. And, with the current arrangement, the ambassador has told him ‘hands off.’ ”
“We’re on our own then?” the pork chop asked. “Can’t even telephone or radio for aid?”
Lieutenant Diaz had been standing by, silently. “I can go for help,” he said. “There are those who owe this ship, and her captain, and who cannot be corrupted.”