Dyson's Drop (20 page)

So he didn’t try. He went on gut feeling instead.

He turned left. Then left again after two hundred metres, then right, then left, then three more rights. His internal sense of direction gave him the pattern of moves. He was going in a wide open circle, but that wasn’t necessarily bad. The exit from the maze could just as easily be in the centre as on the periphery.

After a while, he noticed a pattern, if you could call it that.

Every so often, a right-hand turn came up that was one or two degrees off the perfect right angle of the other turns. By following these, he found occasional left turns off by double the discrepancy of the right hand ones. He had no idea what this meant but it was definitely a pattern.

He used it.

And came to a place he would never forget.

Elsewhere on Dyson’s Drop, and particularly in Kobol, the attacking squads encountered resistance but, all in all, nothing they could not handle. Pardy because Anneke (under the guise of Captain Heller) and her security squad had done their work well.

When Anneke’s vessel had been hit, she had struggled to get the craft down in one piece. The altitude controls had gone out and the main deflector fields, required to maintain flight, were collapsing with snowball effect. In under a minute the
Chastity
had the aerodynamics of a brick.

Anneke saw the docking bay rushing towards her.

She had one chance and one chance only to get her craft down. It needed all the brazen boldness she could muster.

Yosira had come forward into the cockpit, dragging Kuder from the co-pilot’s seat. She had taken his place, ignoring the blood sprayed across the seat and the controls.

‘What should I do?’ she asked. Anneke was impressed by her composure.

‘Re-calibrate the field harmonics. Red line them.’

‘What?’

‘You heard me. Push them into the red.’

‘They’ll blow out, we won’t have anything to cushion our landing ...’

Anneke was wrestling the controls, her new body soaked in sweat. The bay was coming up fast. There was no time to argue. just do it, Yosira.’

Yosira’s fingers flew over the control panel. Anneke heard the telltale high-pitched whine as the fields built dangerously towards overload. Over the noise, she heard Yosira gulp and mutter a prayer.

Anneke lined up the shuttle, flaring the body of the vessel slightly.

‘When I give the word,’ Anneke said rapidly, ‘push it over the edge.’

Yosira nodded. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing. You’re acting awful strange.’

‘Authority does that,’ Anneke said. This was one helluva time to see through her guise.

Then the ship moved above the bay, travelling too fast, with no more room to manoeuvre, to stop, to do anything but crash, killing them all.

‘Now,’ shouted Anneke.

Yosira rammed the field inductors to full strength. A terrible scream of abrading fields hit Anneke’s ears, then a weird silent explosion as the deflector fields mushroomed out beneath the ship, momentarily cushioning and slowing the craft dramatically both vertically and horizontally.

Then the field collapsed and the
Chastity
dropped, hitting the docking platform.

A mere seven-metre fall. Practically nothing.

The following silence was deafening. Anneke heard her heart beating in her chest, and thought she could hear Yosira’s as well. They exchanged looks.

‘Slick,’ said Yosira, nodding and licking her lips.

‘Very slick. I’ll ride with you any time, Captain.’ Then they both burst out laughing.

From the troop bay behind them came the usual groans and sarcastic remarks. ‘Call that a landing?’ and, nybody see my teeth?’

Anneke rallied them off the stricken ship and into the industrial complex they’d crashed outside of. They met no resistance, though Anneke had the impression they were being watched.

Becoming increasingly uneasy, Anneke hurried her squad through the corridors, their plan tattooed into their memories.

That’s when people started disappearing. One by one.

Her squad lost its points first, then its flanks, then its rear guard.

After forty-five minutes they were down to eight spooked men and women. Anneke explained what was happening. ‘They’re using unanchored portals to pick us off. Your buddies aren’t necessarily dead. Consider them POWs until we know differently.’

Coign, a man in his thirties, was visibly shaken.

Y\in’t there somethin’ we can do ‘bout it?’

Anneke paused for thought. Maybe there was.

‘It’s a long shot,’ she said. ‘Try scrambling your dampening fields. Overlap them, keep rotating them. It might upset whatever signal they’re using.’

‘I hate scrambling fields,’ Coign complained.

‘Makes my skin itch.’

‘Well, at least you’re someplace you can scratch it,’ said Yosira. This received a chuckle.

Anneke didn’t know if the scrambling had worked, or if the silent kidnappers had another agenda, but the disappearances ceased.

They made it to the target Hub without sighting a single enemy combatant. Anneke was aware how odd this was. Obviously, it was a big planet with many ships in orbit trying to overload the planetary shields, but even so ...

Black was reliving his childhood. And it was safe to say, nobody should ever have to live Black’s childhood even once, let alone twice.

It was the scene from the AI Hub on the Orbital Engineering Platform: his mother, his father, his baby sister and himself - as a six-year-old - were in a small room with the sound of bombardment outside. His father was saying he should go find out what was happening but Black knew what was going on.

Slavers had come to Zardof, a backwater mining planet circling a backwater star.

Suddenly, Black was inside the scene, in his own body as a child. He grabbed his father’s sleeve as he got up to leave the house. Just fetching some wood, son. We need food, too,’ his father said.

His father disentangled his son’s small hands, smiling as he did so. He ruffied the boy’s hair.

His mother put a hand on his arm, pulled him to her, and hugged him. Black, the older, real Black, was shocked at the touch. No, not at the
touch,
at the gesture itself, or what lay behind it. Love.

Strange, unbearable feelings made Black squirm. He felt as if he were suffocating from these old unfamiliar senses, from trying to stifle forgotten sentiments and push them back in a box.

He knew, without knowing how, that his adult self wasweepmg.

Then he was in a doctor’s office. Judging by the view from the window, he was on Lykis Integer with the doctor he had killed soon after retiring Agent Luton. The doctor who had had the temerity to suggest he was a sociopath.

Black relived this scenario, an event far closer to his present than the previous sequence, with odd misgivings, as if he had rediscovered guilt.

Then the whole scene lurched again and he was in a different place. He knew what it was at once. The future. Or one possible future.

The galaxy was in flames. And he, Black, was the grand arsonist.

He ‘awoke’ strapped down on a surgical table. Two men and two women, wearing surgical gowns, gazed down at him. Hi-tech medical devices hummed and pinged in the background.

The man closest to him smiled.

‘Welcome back, Maximus,’ he said.

‘Who are you?’ Black’s voice was a raspy croak.

‘I’m the doctor. Berski Kobol.’

Black registered the name. A descendant of the great inventor. ‘What have you done to me?’

‘Oh, we just performed some minor surgery. On your brain.’

Feeling a deep chill inside him, Black stared.

‘What do you mean?’

‘We put something in your brain.’ Black swallowed. ‘What?’

‘You could think of it as a tiny jump-gate. Nano scale.’

‘That’s not possible.’

‘Oh, I assure you it is.’

Black had to fight back panic. ‘Why?’

‘You will find out in due course.’

‘What does it do?’

‘You will discover this, Maximus, along with much else.’

‘When?’

‘When you need to.’

‘You sound like the frigging Envoy,’ Black said, struggling to get free.

‘The Envoy belongs to a caretaker species. His role is not unlike our own.’

‘Caretaker species? I don’t understand.’

‘They are caretakers of time.’

‘Time. You mean the future?’

‘That and much else. But in any case there are many futures, Maximus. You of all people should know that.’

‘The maze. What was it?’

‘You.’

And with that he was back in Government House, en route to the northwest corner, and not even a nanosecond had passed.

BROWN had won. At least, it looked that way. But Anneke wasn’t sure. Something was wrong, she could sense it. Brown hadn’t been the same since he’d come back from Government House. As if having won the battle for Dyson’s Drop, he had nevertheless lost. Anneke couldn’t work it out.

But she had problems of her own to deal with.

Exfoliation was one of them. This was the term used to describe the process by which a full metal jacket starts to revert, which meant her masquerade as Jinks Heller was coming to an end. Full metal jackets, being total conversions, are - ultimately - rejected more thoroughly by the body than normal renovations, which can be topped up from time to time. But the clock was ticking on this one.

And just when she was getting used to being a man.

They were still one week out from Kanto Kantoris, however. And Anneke did not know if she could hold it together that long.

The problem had arisen because they’d spent more time on Dyson’s Drop than she’d expected. Mopping-up operations had taken two weeks, as small pockets of resistance held out, despite the general call put out by the Dyson executive board. With an equanimity that Anneke found suspect, they had conceded all military and corporate terms of surrender and deeded control of Dyson Enterprises to Nathaniel Brown, CEO of Quesada.

And then there were other delays. The attack had shut down the galactic jump-gate system for three days. This was not only catastrophic, but an economic disaster. The insurance corporations were screaming and threatening to default on millions of claims.

Brown, with characteristic flourish, gave everybody one week’s free travel as compensation. This mollified most and the insurance people crept back to their lairs, sulking, grudgingly paying out on the most diehard claims.

But in all this time, Nathaniel Brown had barely left his cabin.

Anneke, as Heller, had had one briefing with him before he became a recluse. He started off by thanking her for her work. Nearby, almost hovering over him, was the Envoy, bristling with an odd energy.

‘You recovered your squad members, the ones teleported away?’ Brown asked almost at once.

Like he cares, thought Anneke. She nodded. ‘Yes, sir. They were being held as enemy combatants.’

‘They weren’t mistreated?’

‘No, sir.Just spooked, that’s all.’

Brown murmured under his breath what sounded suspiciously like, ‘I know the feeling,’ but Anneke wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly.

‘You know we’re shipping out again in a few days?’

‘Yes, sir. May I ask the destination?’

Brown shook his head. ‘That’s under wraps for now, Captain, but you’ll know soon enough. And I daresay we’ll be needing your skills once more.’

‘My pleasure, sir.’

‘That’ll be all.’ Anneke headed to the door, but Brown stopped her dead. ‘Oh, Captain, by the way, that was an impressive stunt you pulled. Not exactly in the book. Tell me. Where did you learn to use a collapsing deflector field as a shock absorber?’

‘My father, sir. He was an asteroid miner, near Aldebaran. Got into some tight situations in his time. I remembered him telling me this story once, how he blew out the fields by accident. Saved his life.’

‘And yours.’

‘Yes, sir. Mine and my squad’s.’

‘Thank you, Captain. You may go.’

That night, Anneke woke in excruciating pain, unable to move, barely able to breathe. She voice activated the light, and focused on the face of her bedside clock. Using an ancient meditation, she slowly brought the pain under control. When she eventually got up to fetch a glass of cool water she noted something odd.

When she checked, she was proved right. She was one centimetre taller than when she had gone to bed. The full metal jacket was exfoliating.

It would be slow at first. Tiny changes, almost imperceptible.

Then it would snowball. The pain would also increase. But she had pain inhibitors for that and would take a quick course of
neuronosis,
a neurological biochemical hypnosis.

But that wouldn’t stop the changes from escalating. She had about two weeks until she began losing chunks of body mass, started growing noticeably taller, and started producing breasts - the kind that stuck out on the body of a man. And she would be trapped on a spaceship with nowhere to flee ...

Great. Could it get any worse?

It could.

After their intense near-death experience in the cockpit of the
Chastiry,
Yosira had become even more romantically interested in Jinks Heller - saviour of the day.