Battlecruiser Alamo: Not One Step Back (17 page)

 She kicked off at the rear of the bay and cursed; she’d misjudged the approach and was bouncing back off into the room. The wall had reverberated, and she could see it shaking – and that instantly made her suspicious, sending her kicking back down towards it. She tapped her hand on the metal, and heard an echo, and started to run her fingers down it.

 “Get over here,” she yelled to Carpenter; the science officer gratefully pushed herself over, leaving grubby hand marks on the wall, coming to rest just by her.

 “Found something?”

 “Feel around for a seam in this section.”

 The two of them ran their hands across the grimy walls, feeling with their fingers around the area, Orlova periodically tapping with her fist to work out how wide the space was. Finally, Carpenter got her fingers into a seam, and started to run her nails down one side while Orlova worked the other, eventually coming to a catch. The hidden door slid open, and Orlova drifted inside.

 She had been expecting some sort of sealed containers, or perhaps an empty room, but what she found was a series of consoles, and a ceiling festooned with cabling and equipment. There was a square scorch mark on the wall with dangling, torn wires leading to the primary console; being careful to keep well clear, she looked at the connectors.

 “What is this?” Carpenter asked, looking around, eyes wide.

 “Communications equipment. Really high-spec stuff, as well; some of this is more advanced than the kit we have on Alamo.” She gestured to the burned-out section. “I’d say that was the memory storage unit. Data can always be recovered – as long as the physical memory remains. This must have been taken out on that escape pod.”

 “What’s it for?”

 “High-speed data transfer.” She tapped a few commands into the console, then picked up her communicator. “Orlova to Alamo.”

 “Steele here. Go ahead.”

 “Any aspect changes on the scout, anything change on the exterior?”

 There was a slight delay, then she replied, “Nothing we can see from here.”

 “Patch me through to the duty communications technician, please.”

 Another wait, this time followed by a crackle. “Weitzman here.”

 “Spaceman, stand by for a transmission. I’m not sure what frequency, so you’ll have to track them all. The source will probably be somewhere on the underside of the scout as seen from Alamo, near the main cargo bay.”

 “Wait one, Sub-Lieutenant.” Orlova looked at the console, experimentally pressing a few buttons and seeing the responses. The configuration seemed standard, and the core systems memory was intact.

 “Ready over here,” her communicator said.

 “Right. Stand by.” She tapped a few buttons in the sequence she thought would work.

 “Wow,” Weitzman said. “Strong signal, almost exactly where you said.”

 “Data transfer potential?”

 “It’s just a test pattern, but…God, it’s four times ours. I want to take a look at that kit when I go off watch; might be worth getting a full evaluation of it.”

 “Probably a good idea. Orlova out.” She looked over at Carpenter, still hanging at the door.  “Well, I think we know what this ship was doing, now.”

 “We do?”

 “This ship wasn’t carrying cargo, and it wasn’t stealing it either. Oh, they probably carried enough to use as a cover, and I’m sure they’d have taken anything they could find that was high value. They were stealing information, and that actually makes a lot of sense.”

 “Information?”

 “Info-jacking happens all the time. My guess is that their boarding parties set up the other end of a high-speed remote datalink, and they grab anything of interest from the database. This set-up isn’t really configured for hacking, more information sorting; they’d probably have counted on the crew helping them at gunpoint.”

 “Wouldn’t that have been in the reports of the pirate activity we got?”

 “Now that is an interesting question, because it wasn’t...but to be honest, info-jacking is the only real way anyone ever made piracy pay anyway.”

 Carpenter frowned, “Didn’t Alamo do some during the war?”

 “That was denying critical supplies to the enemy as much as anything else, it wasn’t really worth storming and boarding, except to steal fuel.” Orlova looked behind the console, and gave a big smile. “I think we’ve found what we were looking for.”

 “What?”

 Being careful of her wounded arm, Orlova lowered her datapad behind the console and took a picture; the flash briefly shot through the room. Pulling it back out, she waved the image of the identification number at Carpenter, and started a data search.

 “An ID number?” Carpenter said. “Are you thinking…”

 “That we should be able to match that to the ship; this is the original hull here, and I think someone was a little careless. We haven’t found anything useful in the rest of the ship, but this is the only secret compartment we’ve found.” The datapad blinked, and Orlova read the display, “Hull Panel DQ-25291, listed as Eurasian Union Starship Orion. We’ve found it.”

 Carpenter had her own datapad out, “I’ll start a search of the files. Should we tell the Captain?”

 Glancing at her watch, Orlova shook her head, “He’s in the middle of a sleep cycle right now. This is important, but it isn’t really urgent.” She looked over at the equipment again. “I want to get that report on this equipment, as well. I should call over that evaluation team now.”

 “Got it. Listed as missing in space, 2134. More than thirty years ago.”

 “This equipment was installed within the last year. It certainly isn’t pre-war.”

 “There’s a crew list as well. Five officers, thirty-four crewmen. Twenty years old when it went missing, third ship of the line.”

 Looking up at the hull, Orlova replied, “This feels like an old ship.”

 “The last commander was Second Rank Captain Ivan Sulikov. Listed as missing, presumed dead.”

 Orlova jerked into life, “What was that?”

 “Ivan Sulikov. Heard of him?”

 “No, his status.”

 “Missing, presumed dead.”

 She took the datapad and read it herself, before looking up at Carpenter. “Take it from one who spent three whole days getting a deceased notation corrected, that isn’t right. After eight years they switch that to a legal declaration of death – marriages terminated, wills enacted, that sort of thing. If he went missing that long ago…check the rest.”

 “Captain Third Rank Serik Manov, listed as second-in-command, missing presumed dead. They’re all got the same notation.”

 “This isn’t a one-off error.”

 Frowning, Carpenter replied, “Couldn’t it be a clerical mistake?”

 “Are you suggesting that thirty-nine families would be perfectly happy to leave the estates all tied up indefinitely? Someone would have been bound to raise a protest, unless…

 “Unless?”

 “Unless they were still alive, and the families knew it.”

 “Are you saying that this is some sort of a United Nations plot? Using a ship thought lost thirty years ago?”

 “No, I’m not. This equipment is a lot more advanced than anything we’ve got out in the field, and unless our Intelligence people have been asleep, the UN doesn’t have anything like this either. Nor does the Republic. That leaves only one possibility. These pirates are working for the Cabal.”

 “Out here? I thought the Cabal was operating out at Jefferson.”

 Orlova sighed, “I’m afraid, very much afraid, that the extent of the Cabal is going to turn out to be a lot more than we had thought.” She paused, “Where was the ship lost, anyway?”

 “Second – and last, incidentally – Eurasian expedition out from Alpha Centauri, assigned to investigate mineral deposits at SIPS 1259-4336.”

 “Battered old red dwarf star.” She chuckled, “I think we’ve just given the Captain a starting point on his Cabal-hunting expedition.”

 “Do we wake him up now?”

 Orlova pulled her communicator out of her belt, “Yes, I think we’d better wake him up now.”

Chapter 16

 Breakfast was a rather odd way of describing the meal he was currently eating; he’d braved a noodle bar fairly close to the security office, not wanting to venture too far, but the result was not quite what Logan had hoped for. Whoever had prepared it had skimped on the sauce, and he was chasing a significant portion of his serving up towards one of the air vents. Suddenly the military cuisine on Alamo had an appeal to him, if for no other reason than that Alamo at least had gravity.

 While he reached up for the flying globule of noodles, he glanced down at his bowl and saw that most of the rest of it was escaping, and deciding to try and salvage the majority of the meal, he dived down to try and scoop it up – and then heard a crack fly past his ear, slamming into a flashing screen behind him which immediately shattered, sending a shower of safety glass flying at his shirt.

 Instantly, he turned, ducking and weaving in what he hoped was a random enough manner to throw off any shot; looking around, he saw a figure retreating from the scene, pushing through the crowd, but did not immediately pursue. These assassins were good; the odds of them using an ‘innocent’ decoy were excellent, and with a second glance, he saw the person he was looking for – at least, his eyes connected with hers, a flicker of panic in her eyes, and she dived off down the corridor, pushing herself through the gathering crowd to gain speed.

 Logan dived after her, yelling, “Station Security! Clear the way!” The pistol that slid into his hand was a more effective method of crowd control than his voice, and the mob hastily began to dive into shops and bars, clearing a path down the long, central corridor. He could see his target at the end, about to turn into one of the side tunnels, and thought about taking a shot for a moment, but decided to hold his fire; if at all possible, he wanted to take this one alive. The two gunmen he had captured before were proving totally uncooperative – perhaps this one might be more compliant. At the very least, he could use another bargaining chip.

 Grabbing a handrail, he nimbly twisted himself down the side passage, trying not to hit the wall and lose speed; his would-be assassin already had a good head-start on him, and there was no reason to provide her with a greater advantage. He could just see her ducking down another access point; evidently she not only knew the station well, but was also experienced with zero-gravity. All he’d managed so-far was a VR tour of the scenic fleshpots during the ride out from Mariner – it took time to learn all the shortcuts and hidden areas, time he had not yet had.

 All he could do was try and keep her in sight, and hope that she ran out of station before she got out of sight. Now they were in the underlevels, the large section originally designed for station expansion that had never been bothered with – and the home of the transient population who couldn’t afford to stay in the rented rooms above.

 No thought of using his pistol in this area; he dived past a group of children playing some sort of complicated game, and their parents looked up at him with fear in their eyes. A tall, gangling, black-bearded man, looked at him with empty eyes as he flew past, and a young man with only one-arm cheered him on. He could just see his target at the end of the corridor, and idly wondered for a second if any of this bothered her as much as it did him.

 He felt sure that she would double back soon, as he twisted his way through the crowded corridor. At the far end was the mothballed manufacturing complexes, all supposedly long sealed-off for want of profits to sustain them, but those would simply be large, empty rooms – unless, as seemed worryingly likely, someone had decided to use them for other purposes without bothering to tell anyone.

 It belatedly occurred to him that he could easily be drifting into a trap; it wasn’t as if he had much in the way of reinforcements in any case, and those he did have were now at the far end of the station, and furthermore, had no way of finding him if he went missing. He could fix that, at least; while he drifted down the corridor he reached down to the communicator at his belt and switched it on. Though he wasn’t exactly able to give a running commentary of his progress, it would at least alert someone that there was a problem.

 She reached the end of the corridor and turned, drawing her weapon and firing in a single, smooth shot; while Logan instinctively dived towards the wall, the bullet flying past, he managed to get a good look at her face – cold, blue eyes framed by a short haircut, a scar running across her forehead, testament to some previous battle. Behind him, he heard a child screaming, and he realized where that bullet had gone. Hiding behind a piece of cabling, he finally pulled for his communicator.

 “Logan to Boris. I’m at the far end of the station. Get down here with that medikit of yours; someone in the crowd’s been shot.”

 A series of coughs and grunts replied, “Wha?”

 “Damn it, get down here! A kid’s been shot.”

 “On my way.”

 He turned back, saw the woman moving through a side hatch, and finally realized what she was doing – that was one of the maintenance airlocks, and there would be plenty of spacesuits present. At least, there would be now, though he’d bet his month’s pay that she would spend the depressurization cycle doing as much damage to them as she could.

 His fists slammed on the airlock door, and he could see her donning a suit through the small observation window. A pair of dangling wires drifted lazily in space where the manual override should have been, and he felt something tugging at his arm.

 “My boy’s been shot!” a harsh, angry voice said – Logan recognized him as the father of the kids he’d seen floating in the corridor earlier.

 “I’ve got a medic on the way,” he replied, pulling loose. “Let me get the bitch who shot him.”

 The father looked at the airlock, then back up to Logan, his eyes filled with fire, “If he dies…”

 “He won’t. Here.” He passed a Republic credit card to him. “My medic will be here in a minute. If he can’t help him, take him up to one of the doctors on the upper level. On me.”