Dyson's Drop (30 page)

‘They are using advanced stealth shielding. It has a RIM signature, but I have not seen it before.’

‘Well, touche for Anneke Longshadow. Have you deduced an attack pattern?’

‘They are locking directly onto the target ship and attaching explosive devices before pushing off again. Their shielding drops only for the few seconds when in contact with the ship about to be destroyed.’

Black raised an eyebrow. ‘You’re telling me you don’t know where they are in between shield drops?’

‘Correct.’

Black stared out at the star-flecked space and the armada he had amassed, two hundred ships in all. As he watched, twelve more ships flared like tiny supernovae then ceased to exist.

Then mayhem ensued.

Believing communications were down, the remaining captains, spooked by the silent conflagrations, let loose an awesome volley of undirected deadly fire. In no time, more than thirty ships had been hit by their allies. Several detonated spectacularly, with others lurching out of orbit like wounded whales, drifted down towards the planet and ultimate doom.

Black flicked on the general comm frequency for his ships. ‘Cease fire immediately!’ he snarled. The volleys subsided, though not immediately. Odd unsettling sounds started emanating from all frequencies, designed, no doubt, by RIM psychologists to unnerve the toughest warrior.

Psychological warfare, thought Black. Two can play at that.

‘When I give the word, I want the alpha shields up,’ Black told the Envoy. ‘Then we will flood the intervening space with an inverse magnetic field, map the results and run likeliest trajectories for the source of the attacks.’

The Envoy complied, passing the order.

‘Now!’ Alpha shields, instantly recognisable from their
n-space
discharges, enveloped every ship in the armada bar a dozen, which had sustained damage. Together, every shielded ship emitted the required magnetic field.

Instantly, thirty-six dots - two-man ships - appeared on the tactical overlay of the forward screen. ‘Target enemy vessels and fire!’

A barrage of high-energy pulses turned the empty space between the ships into a lattice of deadly beams. In quick succession, a dozen tiny plumes of fiery light blossomed in what appeared to be empty space.

A concerted cheering came from the linked armada communicator.

‘So much for Anneke Longshadow’s -’ Black stopped, sensing a faint vibration deep in the floor plating. He opened his mouth to speak.

Then the dreadnought lurched sideways and the lights went out.

Black flipped his infrared eyepiece and leapt out of his chair. ‘She’s here,’ he said to the Envoy. ‘On board.’ He snatched up a shield-generator belt, strapped it on, grabbed a vibroblade and a blaster and headed aft. Attached to the belt was a sensor interfacing with the ship’s spatial sweeps. Official crew showed up as green dots. Intruders as red.

There were no red dots.

Black’s internal sensors, the software he was born with and had honed through countless dangerous ventures, blared at him.

ANNEKE’s tiny craft, in stealth mode, had locked onto the underbelly of the dreadnought like a limpet mine. She had come alone, despite a battalion of volunteers, including Pagin who, being small, had insisted with a lopsided logic that he would be less detectable by Brown’s sensors.

Stifling a laugh, Anneke thanked him with as much adult sincerity as she could. She was relieved when Hugar came to her rescue, agreeing that Pagin, an orphan without ties, could accompany him in his attack pod.

‘You speak truly?’ Pagin asked, eyes wide. When Hugar nodded, Pagin let out an ear- splitting whoop, and then shut up just as quickly when Hugar frowned at him.

Anneke waited several long minutes. If she were to be detected, then this would be the time, though once locked to the hull she had, in a way, become part of the dreadnought and was theoretically invisible to its sensors.

The main attack would begin in ten minutes. By then she needed to be back on board and ready. When nothing had happened after five minutes she breathed out and checked her watch.

She deployed a landing track and moved the pod into gear, trundling it along upside down beneath the dreadnought, heading for its rear starboard torch tube. This tube, from which the chaotic field energies that drove the ship through space-time erupted, led directly into the bowels of the ship - just where she wanted to go. An unorthodox approach - not unlike inserting a suppository up an anal canal - it offered the best chance of her entering the ship without setting off alarms.

She reached the tube, retracted her landing gear, and with tiny steering jets, manoeuvred the pod into the throat of the torch and passed into darkness. Here,
n-space
radiation ratcheted up on the main sensor. Soon, the pod would grind to a halt, its unprotected AI core fried.

But it didn’t have to last long.

Of course, if Brown decided to move the ship or alter its altitude, she and the pod would cease to exist. High-energy
n-space
fields erupting down the tube in a raging vortex would unzip every electron and proton in her body, smashing them into their component quarks and consigning them to the tidal quantum foam that underlaid the universe.

Best not to think about having my electrons unzipped,
thought Anneke. She brought the pod to the end of the tube, deftly locked it to a wall, and pulled on the hood of her coherent-field suit.

That’s when it got tricky.

The pod did not have an airlock, so once she jammed open the hatch there was no way of refilling the pod with breathable atmosphere. The AI core was also close to burning out, which meant this was a one-way trip.

Opening the hatch, Anneke felt the air whoosh past as she climbed out. Not wasting time, she found a maintenance access hatch, fumbling for a few scary moments when the instruments she’d brought didn’t match the Old Empire fittings. Then she was inside, dogging the hatch closed, manually recycling the airlock she found at the end of the vacuum-filled access corridor on the other side.

She was on board the dreadnought with a few minutes to go and a kilometre and a half to cover on foot - using any of the ship’s transportation systems would alert the bridge.

Anneke ran a scan of her vicinity and broke into a run.

Shortly, having carried out her mission as best she could, she was flattened to the wall of a maintenance tunnel and breathing heavily.

She’s here,
Maxumus suddenly realised.
She’s here.

The Envoy followed a short distance behind

Black, who was hardly aware of the alien as he raced towards the stern of the dreadnought - the area of the ship most easily penetrated that contained the weapons bay, the section Anneke would be looking for.

That puzzled Black slightly. What was Kanto Kantoris to her? Why strive so hard to save a brutal, inhumane dictatorship that routinely sentenced innocent people to unspeakable deaths on the whim of its ruling ‘nobles’?

Rescue defenceless women and children, if you have to, get weepy over stray pets, but institutionalised mass murderers? Surely the woman was deranged.

Black dived into a drop tube, plunged aft at a hundred klicks an hour, and alighted four kilometres from where he had boarded the tube. He was in engineer country: power and weapons. And unless he was mistaken, Anneke was nearby.

Trouble was, her shielding was so cutting edge, the hi-tech sensors they’d stitched into the ancient systems of the dreadnought were not registering her. No blind spots showed up.

‘Maybe she is not here,’ said the Envoy.

Black looked at him oddly. The alien had built-in scanners. Was he getting no readings or was he lying? Black felt uneasy.

‘Why don’t you take the port?’ he said. ‘I’ll go starboard. We’ll flush her out. Concentrate the sensors on the weapons bay.’

‘As you wish,’ said the Envoy, becoming a blur of motion that vanished from the infrared scope Black peered through.

I wish he wouldn’t do that,
Black thought irritably, as he started down the main companionway leading to the starboard entrance of the weapons bay.

He hadn’t gone far when he heard a noise. Or sensed something. He wasn’t sure which. Either way, he kept still, listening with every fibre of his being. That’s when he felt it. A tiny shift of air, feather-light. So faint it would not have lifted one hair on his head.

It was Anneke Longshadow. Black’s skin prickled and sweat popped out on his brow and soaked the material under his arms. His body shot adrenaline, pushing up his pulse rate, forcing him to suck more oxygen.

Just ahead.

Then he saw her. Or it, an infrared blur, a heat signature. Still some way off and shimmeringly faint due to the dampeners Anneke had come equipped with. Indeed, he was surprised to get as much resolution as he did. Perhaps she too was pumped on adrenaline, increasing her heartbeat and raising her body’s temperature by a degree or two.

Mutual respect was beautiful but sweaty.

Black deployed every dampening field he had, cushioning sound, light, heat, ketones from his breath and body odour from the sweat glands in his armpits. Nearly invisible, he sought to close the gap with the blurry heat signature three hundred metres ahead.

Within a hundred metres, the signature disappeared. He stopped and listened, hearing a telltale scrape of metal, a pneumatic hiss, and then nothing. Okay. She’d climbed into a maintenance tunnel, which kept their air internal pressure and climate control separate to the ship’s.

Black hurried forward, flipping a filter down over his eyepiece, looking for residue heat, traces of sweat and distinctive body oils on the hatches he passed.

He stopped at a lateral hatch. It was where she’d gone m.

He placed a sensor - a mobile super-stethoscope on the hatch and scanned it. Vibrations indicated that Anneke was in the tunnel, moving rapidly away. Superimposed onto a 3-D image of the ship’s layout he could see that a bend lay between him and his target, which a murmur in the vibration feedback confirmed.

He opened the hatch and climbed in, sending a brief encrypted message to the Envoy first. Insurance.

Padding down the tunnel he reached the bend, hurried around it, and walked straight into Anneke’s boot as it connected with his jaw.

He fell backwards, adding deliberate momentum, then flipped over, grabbed a wall stanchion and yanked himself around the corner and out of direct view as the flash of a blaster filled the tunnel with eerie light and vaporised a hole in the wall opposite him. In thought rather than reflex, his own blaster came out. Then he waited.

She was just around the bend - probably flattened to the tunnel wall just as he was-gripping her blaster in a sweaty grip, just as he was. And waiting.

He who moves first, dies first.

Where had he heard that? From some RIM sensei? In his childhood? Except he’d never really had one of those. A childhood, that is.

‘We should stop meeting like this,’ he said.

‘I’m happy to terminate our relationship any time,’ came Anneke’s voice, breathy and very close.

‘I thought you just tried that.’

‘Perish the thought, Brown. I was just warming up. ‘

Black chuckled. ‘Soon you won’t have a sense of humour. You won’t have anything.’

‘Seems to me I’ve heard that before. And from you. ‘

‘So now what, Anneke? Bit of a standoff. Problem is, I have reinforcements on the way.’

‘Who says I don’t?’

Black frowned. Was this just banter? Or was there something to it? Had Anneke come on board with others? He doubted it. Her profile indicated she not only liked to work alone, she hated putting others at risk, or being dependent on them.

But there was a first time for everything.

Best to end this now. He sent a message to the Envoy, instructing him to head up the tunnel from the other side. An affirmative came back.

‘Calling for help?’ asked Anneke.

‘No, I was getting a recipe for roasted RIM agent. Any preferences for where you want to be shot?’

‘Seat’ma Minor would be nice.’

‘Funny. Oh, hark. Is that the Envoy I hear approaching?’

Silence. Black frowned and ran a quick scan. This close, no dampener fields would fool his scanners. His frown deepened.

According to the sensors, Anneke Longshadow was no longer in the tunnel. Impossibly, she had disappeared off the radar.

So he risked it.

In one fluid move, he hauled himself up on a wall stanchion and launched himself through the air, twisting over as he did so, keeping the blaster targeted on the spot where Anneke had been as he swung up and into the bend.

It was empty.

He landed unsteadily on his feet, grazing an arm against a shard on the wall, which he ignored as he stared at the floor.

Anneke’s field generator belt lay there.

He whisded softly in admiration. The girl had more tricks than a magicians’ convention. Without the generator belt, she had dropped back into the realm of normality. Black’s scanners were, like most anti-personnel systems, designed to hunt for the telltale leakages from sophisticated dampening fields.