Aneka Jansen 6: The Lowest Depths of Shame (7 page)

LV-101 Argus.

There was a squadron of fighters moving east from one of the other cities. Norden noted it and identified them as targets for the Jenlay air-superiority units to deal with. They should not present a problem.

Reports from the ground indicated that the port’s gates would be breached in five minutes, thirty-two seconds with a fifteen-second variance. The Herosians were actually putting up less of a fight than expected. He packaged this observation and dropped it into the folder of reports which would be sent back to Shadataga when this was done with. If things continued to go well, he would add a personal note congratulating Miss Jansen on her plan. The element of surprise it presented had been the key, he decided: the Herosians would not have considered doing anything like this, and he did not think the Jenlay would either. That was why it was working so well.

He had met her once, Aneka Jansen, the woman who had freed them from the yoke of Manu Dei. It had been brief, but she had seemed far different from the tyrant she had removed, despite looking very like her. She had complimented him on his ability to think on a strategic level, claiming her own talents were tactical. He would really have to point out that her capabilities were clearly broader than she thought they were.

FNb Admiral Banfry.

‘All aircraft downed, Captain,’ Judy Leeforth announced.

‘Like shooting fish in a barrel,’ Ape Gibbons replied a little sourly. ‘Any sign of anything else in the region?’

‘Sensors are clean. Then again, we didn’t see them until they got airborne. There
might
be something else hiding.’

‘Begin running a high-resolution tactical scan. Might as well do something useful. If nothing else it’ll catalogue the surface damage the Herosians did.’

Leeforth’s fingers flicked across a keyboard, relaying instructions to the sensor operators. ‘After New Earth, I’d have thought you’d be happy this one was easy,’ she said.

‘When it’s done I’ll be happy. Easy makes me nervous. I keep wondering when the other shoe will drop.’

‘Not today, sir,’ Leeforth replied. She sounded very confident about it. ‘Your cabin tonight?’ she added, apparently as an afterthought.

‘Assuming you’re right,’ Ape said, ‘my cabin tonight.’

Lonar.

The gates were open and the Jenlay troops were marching in as though they had saved the day. Jared watched them file past, riding armoured transports and waving their laser rifles triumphantly. It was, he thought, a little pathetic.

He turned and spotted the reporter they had been told about talking to camera with the troops as a backdrop. Whatever the man was saying was inaudible, but Jared was conscious enough of Jenlay media to suspect that he was playing up the effort the Marines had made.

Continuing his sweep, he spotted a door opening in one of the nearby buildings. A woman with two children clutching at her skirt appeared, smiling as the troops filed past.
That
, Jared thought, should be what the idiot with the camera should be filming. These were the people they were here to liberate. They deserved to have their story told.

Still, the position was
not
secure, even if the Jenlay thought it was. Jared started across the road toward the open door intent on getting them back inside, and that was when the alert flicked through his implant from one of his teammates. He could not see the gunman on the wall, but he knew exactly where he was and where he was aiming. Jared bolted for the door, the woman’s smile turning toward surprise as the dark figure with the rifle bore down on her. She let out a yelp as he pushed her back, and then he grabbed the doorframe, bracing himself a fraction of a second before the grenade smashed into his back, bounced back, and exploded.

6.5.530 FSC.

Ella’s eyes flicked open at the touch of Aneka’s fingers. For an instant she had no idea where she was as the nightmare she had been lost in dragged at her mind. Then reality reasserted itself: she was on Shadataga, not Eshebbon, and there were no monsters at the door.

‘You okay?’ Aneka asked, concern in her voice.

‘Just a nightmare.’

Aneka nodded. ‘Well… we’ve had reports coming in from the drones for the last couple of hours.’

‘Why didn’t you wake me?!’ Ella squeaked, sitting up.

‘There wasn’t much point until we knew what was happening. It was pretty much a walk-in. Very few casualties on either side. What there were were almost entirely Herosian.’

‘Almost?’

‘People get hurt in battles, Ella.’

‘Yes… I know. Well, this is good, right? We got Lonar back without too much damage.’

‘Yes, this one was easy, and War and Winter say that Marchant has been just about deserted by the Herosians, so that one should be even easier, but Beryum… It was disputed, right? Whoever is holding it seems to have decided to keep holding it.’

‘Oh. How long before the fleet gets there?’

‘It’s a thirty-nine-day flight.’

‘More waiting?’

Aneka sighed. ‘I’m afraid so.’

BC-101 Hand of God.

The last of the Guardian team responsible for the drop into Lonar Starport came into Tasker’s office in a wheelchair. He was a fairly handsome young man, though his looks were marred by the heavy bruising around the left side of his face.

‘I wasn’t sure you’d include me in this, Captain,’ Jared said as his chair wheeled him toward her desk.

‘Oh? And why is that?’

‘Well, you said to come back in one piece and I’m a bit broken.’

Jared’s medical records passed across Tasker’s vision. Three broken ribs, compound fracture of the left femur, radial fracture of the right humerus… ‘How long before you’re up and about?’

‘Techs are saying five days in this chair and another five to ten on a support exoskeleton, but I’ll be fully functional before we get to Beryum.’

‘Well,’ Tasker said, placing a small, red cylinder on the desk in front of her, ‘I think you can be forgiven for getting yourself smashed up, seeing as you did save three civilian lives at the risk of your own. That should help with the pain. Class three, difficult to get, but well worth it…’ He was looking embarrassed and she stopped, frowning. ‘Problem?’

‘I, uh, I don’t use them, Captain. There was a problem with my port and I couldn’t, and I started noticing the world was actually better without, and…’

Tasker picked up the cyber-drug slug and dropped it into her desk drawer. Then she leaned back in her seat, steepling her fingers and narrowing her eyes at him.

‘You present me with a problem, Mister Warren,’ she said.

‘Sorry, Captain.’

‘At least it’s a pleasant problem and not the usual kind. All the reports from the mission indicated you performed well. Actually, above average for your squad. You saved three people’s lives. But the reward I had planned is not a reward. We’re recommending you for a medal, but that seems distinctly impersonal. Ten to fifteen days…’

‘Sorry?’

‘When you’re cleared for active duty, I want you to report to my quarters and we’ll see whether I can’t reward you some other way.’ She knew she had hit the nail on the head when his cheeks flushed. It was only fair: to the victor go the spoils, and he had been quite the victor down on Lonar. ‘Get lots of rest,’ she advised him. ‘You’ll need it.’

Lonar, 21.5.530 FSC.

Midshipman Barnes Dolan was of the opinion that the victors of the Second Battle of Lonar should not be tasked with clerical work, especially when it was making sure the bodies of the Herosians on ice in Lonar City’s hospital morgue were catalogued. It was something to do with the Federation Articles of War, and even if the Federation no longer really existed, his superiors had decided that the rules had to be followed. So here he was taking scans of Herosians, though they all looked the same as far as he was concerned, and checking for identification or, failing that, identifying marks.

Dolan was not sure how you could tell, but he had been assured he could put down ‘gender: male’ for all of them. Herosian women did not fight, and they were
highly
unlikely to have moved out to a contested world this soon after its capture. If they
had
they would have been shipped back home again when their technology started breaking. So, Dolan put down ‘male’ in the gender box for his current subject.

Actually, this one probably was. He was a beefy specimen, for a Herosian anyway, with a lot of heavy muscle in the upper body. Dolan wondered if that meant he got females, though from the little he knew of Herosian society, the fact that this one was here suggested not. He did have some neat jewellery: golden bands of metal were stretched around his biceps.

Dolan looked at them. Gold. It might not have helped this guy get the girls, but it might help Dolan to and it was certainly not helping anyone now…

The Midshipman shrugged and began easing one of the bands down the corpse’s arm. To the victors go the spoils, right?

Part Two: The Sound of Trumpets

Shadataga, 9.7.530 FSC.

‘There’s no way around it, they’re dug in like ticks.’ Aneka squeezed the bridge of her nose and then wondered why, given that her body did not
ever
suffer from fatigue. ‘The only way this is going to happen is hand-to-hand fighting through the mines.’

‘A narcotic gas pumped through the ventilation system…’ War began.

‘Would be an excellent solution,’ Winter interrupted, ‘if they had one. And they would need a lot of it, and even then there would be a need to go in to visually confirm that the Herosians were down.’ She sighed. ‘Aneka is right. There is no clever strategy which can solve this problem, and no technological solution we can bring to bear in time.’

‘Why has this place held out?’ Aneka asked. ‘Lonar was easy, Marchant was almost deserted. How come Beryum is being held onto?’

‘The clan which took it, the T’Shanthis, have gone through a bad patch in both politics and commerce. They were lucky to get the chance to take Beryum, and they have no intention of letting it slip from them. Of course, they don’t realise that more or less every clan out there is having a “bad hair day” at the moment.’

Aneka raised an eyebrow. ‘Bad hair day?’

‘I always felt it was a very descriptive phrase. You know it looks wrong, strands keep falling in your eyes and annoying you…’

‘My sister spent a lot of time studying Earth culture,’ War said. ‘Perhaps a little
too
much, but it was her purpose.’

‘I don’t hear you quoting…’ Aneka said.

‘Actually,’ War went on, ‘I was always rather fond of your Albert Einstein. “I know not what weapons the next war will be fought with, but the one after will be fought with sticks and stones.” Wrong, as it turned out, but only by degree.’

Aneka gave a cough. ‘So I guess we just get the probes to update the Argus on the latest Herosian deployment and hope for the best?’

‘Unfortunately, yes. At this distance it’ll take over a day for the message to get there. I’ll send the orders now.’

‘There is another matter I wanted your opinion on,’ Winter said, her brow furrowed. ‘Have you been reading the reports coming in from my New Earth avatars?’

‘Not all of them. You’ve got a super-computer to run on, I have to make do with less expansive equipment.’

‘I understood we made your breasts larger,’ War said, confused, and then added, ‘Sorry, I was distracted for a second,’ when she realised what they were talking about.

Aneka bit her lips.

Winter shook her head and went on. ‘There is a discrepancy in the media reports of both Lonar and Marchant compared to the data we have collected ourselves. Norden indicated approximately eleven hundred Herosian prisoners taken on Lonar. The number being reported from New Earth is closer to six hundred. There were no reporters with the fleet on Marchant, but the official news reports indicate that a battleship and three cruisers were destroyed retaking the planet.’

‘There were two frigates and a cargo ship!’

‘It seems someone is overplaying the resistance the Herosians are presenting. There was a disabled Gathor frigate at Marchant as well. That was taken aboard a transport vessel the Dokar forces brought along and has now left the system.’

‘Someone wants the tech. I guess they would… Do we know who “they” are?’

‘Currently, no. Someone in the Jenlay infrastructure. The Navy seems most likely.’

‘Huh. Well, if they’re trying to play up the Herosians as a current threat rather than a past one, Beryum is going to be a help.’

‘Unfortunately, it will.’

LV-101 Argus, 11.7.530 FSC.

‘Any clever plans for this one?’ Thackett had obviously seen enough of the data coming in through the Argus to know it was not going to be as easy as Beryum had been.

‘No, Rear Admiral,’ Norden replied. ‘Not unless an unforeseen opening presents itself. Their orbital forces are not especially strong, but they are well fortified in underground positions. Heavy bombardment will result in excessive civilian casualties. We need to secure orbital and air superiority, and then it’s a matter for the ground troops.’

‘Old fashioned war then. Let’s get on with it.’

Norden watched as ship deployment orders came through from the Admiral Goroy, the battleship Thackett was using as his command post. The attack pattern was conservative, but acceptable. Two squadrons were dispatched on a flanking posture, and the remainder would go in direct. Norden might have employed more aggressive tactics under the circumstances, but he could not especially fault the Rear Admiral; every commander had his preferred methodologies. Though…

The strategist shook his head and focussed on the task at hand. Thackett had lost a frigate going in early against a weaker force at Lonar. Perhaps he was simply learning from his mistakes.

Beryum.

Mizzy lay huddled in her blanket trying to warm herself up after washing with water that was barely above freezing. At least they had been given beds. They were metal-framed and the mattresses were thin, but they kept them off the ground. Deena had said it was probably to stop so many of them getting sick and there had been fewer people having to be taken out to the hospital in the last couple of weeks.