Aneka Jansen 6: The Lowest Depths of Shame (26 page)

They waited. Even Ella seemed to be holding her breath as the computer checked through the various processors handling air and water on the station. If anywhere was processing carbon dioxide to any degree, it might indicate survivors…

‘Nothing,’ Cassandra said, her voice soft, almost a whisper. ‘The atmospheric processors have seen no rise in carbon dioxide anywhere on the station in the last ten days. No water has been requested anywhere in the same time frame. They’re all dead.’

There was a thud from somewhere back in the area of the lift shaft and Gwy’s voice sounded over the communicators at the same time. ‘I am detecting increased movement in the station’s core. Doppler shifts indicate several humanoid masses moving at walking pace. Some are accelerating downward under normal gravitational acceleration.’

‘Damn things are jumping down the lift shaft,’ Aneka said. She started back through the racks. ‘Cassandra, find a way to blow the airlocks. Ella, Al, blow away anything that comes past me.’

Two of the creatures, legs shattered by the fall, were crawling out of the lift as Aneka approached. She fired, spraying their brains across the floor, but there were guttural sounds coming from the shaft above.

Another one dropped through the open hatch. Either it had dropped from a lower floor or it had climbed because it was still walking until Aneka shot it. So long as they kept coming through in small numbers, they were not going to be a problem. She could shoot them as they dropped down and there would never be large numbers trying to get past her.

Then the doors on the lift to her right made a horrible grinding sound and began to separate. She fired, peppering the thin metal and the scraping stopped only to be replaced by more noise on her left and another chuck dropping through the hatch into the middle car.

‘Cassandra,’ Aneka called out. ‘Any time now would be good.’

‘Working on it.’

The middle chuck fell and Aneka peppered the left side door, but more of them were pulling on the right ones now. Aneka backed toward the gap in the racks as the right doors jerked open and four of the creatures fell out, almost getting trampled by the ones behind as they moved forward. Aneka switched to suppression fire, bursting rounds across the doors and spreading her fire out to discourage and disable. The latter worked, but the zombies were not very easy to discourage. Even with their legs cut out from under them they kept moving.

‘Almost there,’ Cassandra said.

Aneka was watching the ammo counters on her guns ticking down. She had, maybe, two more seconds before she had to reload. She fired a wide volley of needles into the swarm coming out of the left-hand lift and the counter read zero. She stepped back, holstering the pistol and shifting to precision fire with the other one.

‘Hold onto something!’ Cassandra yelled.

Grabbing the rack beside her, Aneka fired three or four more rounds and then the room became a maelstrom. Something smacked into the back of Aneka’s head and then skittered off toward the lift shafts. The chucks flailed at the empty air for a second, and then they were being sucked backward. Fairly soon they were clogging the hatches as the pressure tried to pull them through and failed.

Aneka wedged herself into the racks, bracing a shoulder and a foot to keep herself stable, and switched out the magazines in her pistols. The things were not going to survive forever in a vacuum, but they did not breathe and they were annoyingly hard to put down. As the rush of air subsided, half a dozen bodies fell to the floor of the lifts and Aneka went to work.

Norden Forest, New Earth.

A pinging noise sounded in the quiet of the tent and quiet turned to silence. The perimeter sensors had detected movement somewhere in the area. Winter and Sharissa picked up carbines and checked that the safeties were off. Janine slid her pistol from its holster. And then they waited.

Three minutes later something fell into the side of the tent and there was a muffled curse. ‘Gopi! Fucking camouflaged tents. Can’t see them until you fall on them…’

‘That,’ Janna said, ‘sounded very much like David Gilroy.’

‘Rescue party, reporting as requested,’ said a second voice.

‘And that was Bash,’ Sharissa supplied.

Winter was already unsealing the tent, but she went out with her carbine in the lead and only seemed to relax when she turned to see the two men standing beside the tent, which was more or less invisible even up close.

‘You weren’t detected coming down?’ Winter asked them.

‘We brought one of the transport drones,’ Bash replied. ‘If they can detect us through the cloaking shield on those things…’

‘No,’ Winter said. ‘They haven’t a hope. I still suggest you depart as quickly as possible.’

Bash nodded agreement. ‘We were told four passengers…’

‘I’m staying,’ Truelove said as she emerged from the tent. ‘So is Janine. Everyone else goes with you. You brought the extra equipment?’

‘Back at the pod. It’s about fifty metres north of here. Two lightweight grav cycles, neutrino beam comms unit, several rifles, explosives, combat armour… You going to war?’

‘Not exactly,’ Truelove replied, ‘but a girl likes to be prepared.’

Sapphira.

‘No survivors?’ Shaw asked. ‘None at all?’ They were sitting around one of the heaters again, but the general feeling of tension around the room was gone, except in that one small area.

‘We can’t be absolutely sure about Sapphira Vista,’ Ella said. ‘There could be a few, but it’s going to need a thorough ground search to find them, and you’d be going up against… well, a lot of chucks.’

‘You’d be better off making sure this continent is secure before you try going over there,’ Aneka said. ‘When we get back we’ll see if we can get some assistance for you. New Earth may not be much help, but Shadataga may be able to send some robots out. They can get your FTL connection back up and maybe set about clearing out Sapphira Vista.’

‘They’d do that?’ Shaw sounded a little surprised.

‘We won’t know until we ask, but I think they will. They’re… helpful, and good publicity is never a bad thing.’

The Representative nodded. ‘I still don’t understand how this has happened. I mean, I know
what
happened, I just can’t come to grips with why someone would do it. How could someone choose to destroy a planet’s population for… for profit?’

Aneka sighed. ‘It’s a distraction. I’m afraid you are all collateral damage designed to keep people… us from noticing something else they’re up to. What worries me more is that whatever that is, it’s probably worse.’

Part Six: The End of War

Shadataga, 1.3.531 FSC.

War and Winter stood before the display table in the operations room watching information streaming in from the probes in the Joval and Eshebbon systems. It was not entirely new data, due to the FTL lag, but it was as up to date as they were likely to get, and it was being displayed there mostly for the benefit of the others in the room who were not getting the same data streaming directly into their minds.

‘They’ve fortified the system,’ Drake said, his eyes on a tactical map of Eshebbon. ‘What’s that? A couple of cruisers, a dozen frigates?’

‘A battalion of troops on the surface,’ War supplied with a nod. ‘They know that we know, or suspect that we will find out, and they want to make it difficult for us to do anything about it.’

‘I don’t want to sound heartless,’ Bashford said, frowning at the displays, ‘but couldn’t you just… blow the whole thing up?’

‘That is an option,’ the AI replied, ‘but there is a complication. The military personnel are one thing, but they have prisoners on the surface. While the need to eliminate this virus is great, we should exhaust other options before we resort to extreme measures.’

‘What other options? We don’t have an army to send in there and if we did it would likely result in those prisoners being killed.’

Winter nodded slowly. ‘Yes. We’re down to one viable option which does not involve the mass slaughter of innocents. We have several days before they can begin manufacturing the virus in bulk. And another few days before they will be ready to ship it out. Hopefully Aneka will be back by then.’

‘You’re going to send Aneka in?’ Janna asked. ‘On her own against an entire naval fleet?!’

‘Gwy can slip in undetected,’ Winter replied.

‘But…’

‘And Aneka’s new body is equipped to handle considerably more stress than the old one. Yes, I’m going to ask her to go in, face off against a battalion of Marines, rescue the hostages, and destroy the production facility. Because she can do it.’

‘If they get back in time?’ Gillian said.

‘If they get back in time,’ Winter agreed.

Gwy, 7.3.531 FSC.

Aneka checked the flight data hanging in the air around her and nodded. In a few minutes they would be dropping out of warp and into orbit around Joval IV, and they would be effectively back where they started aside from having a little more information about the ends the conspiracy would go to to keep their plans marching on.

‘Let’s get the cloak up, Gwy,’ she said, more to say something than for a need to give the command.

‘Cloak engaged, Aneka. I am detecting no major changes in deployment of ships within the system. Everything seems to be as we left it.’

‘So whatever they wanted to keep us away from, it’s not visible.’

‘Apparently that is the case… I have detected one of the Shadataga probes in orbit over our destination. It is pulsing an identification signal which seems to indicate that we are supposed to notice it is there.’

Aneka frowned. ‘Why don’t I like the sound of that?’

‘I would imagine your extensive experience indicates that such a circumstance indicates a problem,’ Gwy replied in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘Should I acknowledge it when we drop out of warp?’

‘Yes. If there’s something wrong we want to know about it sooner rather than later.’

A minute later the warp drives cut out and twenty seconds after that they were getting a data feed from the probe. Aneka watched the information flowing through for a few seconds. Her face hardened.

‘Echo this up to the cabin,’ she said. ‘As soon as we’ve got everything, send a message saying we’re on our way and then get us out of here and bound for Eshebbon.’

‘Warp in approximately sixty-eight seconds,’ Gwy acknowledged, and Aneka dropped out of the flight environment, switching over to the wireless connection as she unplugged from the chair.

Ella was watching the walls of the cabin where the data from Shadataga was playing out. ‘This,’ she said, ‘is bad.’

‘I know,’ Aneka replied. ‘We’ll be on our way in a few seconds.’

‘If this is correct they’ll be starting production sometime today, Aneka.’

‘And it’s six days to Eshebbon. That’s still six days to get there and dismantle their operation. It should be enough.’

‘It better be.’

‘I… can’t believe they would do this?’ Cassandra said. ‘Even after Sapphira, I can’t believe they would contemplate genocide.’

Aneka sighed. ‘During the second of the big wars on Old Earth, before my time, but not that long before, the Nazis decided that various groups of people were “undesirable.” They started by gathering them up and putting them into ghettos and camps. But keeping them alive was a lot of effort so they started executing them. They used bullets at first, but that was expensive and the soldiers didn’t much like executing women and children, and it was slow. So they industrialised it. Huge gas chambers were built, furnaces to dispose of the bodies. Millions died. A lot of people view it as being aimed specifically at one group, the Jews, but they killed huge numbers of various ethnic groups. Just about anyone no one was going to worry too much about really. Whether they would have stopped at that if they had won the war is an open question, but when you believe in some sort of superior race it starts getting hard to decide when to quit… And they weren’t even gaining anything out of it. It was just ideology. Pierce and his people are going to be able to just walk in and take over any planet they want after this.’

‘It’s inhuman!’ Cassandra said, eyes wide.

‘No, unfortunately it’s not. Killing things we don’t understand, or like, is
very
Human. I thought it was un-Jenlay, but apparently I’m wrong.’

High Yorkbridge, New Earth, 8.3.531 FSC.

Pierce sat behind his desk in the FSA building, examining the reports coming through from Eshebbon with a smile on his face.

Fortification of the facility was, he deemed, sufficient to withstand an assault from outside the system. He had no evidence that anyone knew of what was happening there, but he also knew that his underlings had failed to capture Truelove and her cohorts, and there had been enough time for the data Part had stolen to reach other ears.

Someone had suggested that the AIs on Shadataga might mount a massive assault, or destroy the entire system. Pierce was absolutely convinced that would not happen. There were ‘innocent’ people on Eshebbon. The peace-loving AIs with their lofty goals would not kill the hostages. He was convinced of that.
He
had the stomach, the wits, to understand that there had to be losses to secure victory, but no one who wanted peace the way the AIs did would have the balls to destroy a system, no matter what they said.

Production of the virus had begun now. There was nothing left to stop the Committee’s work. There
would
be peace in the galaxy. Once there were no aliens around to get in the way, there would be peace.

Gwy.

‘This isn’t a plan,’ Ella stated flatly. ‘This is some bits of a plan and the hope that you can improvise the missing parts when you get into a heavily fortified facility without being spotted on the way in and…’

‘That’s the best kind of plan,’ Aneka interrupted. ‘Plans with a lot of detail get people thinking they have it all worked out. Complacency is your worst enemy.’

‘I think guns are your worst enemy,’ Cassandra said. She was siding with Ella, largely because neither of them would be going in with Aneka, but also because she liked her plans a little more filled out. ‘Can’t you at least take Al’s drone with you? For fire support?’