Erebus (21 page)

“She’s rolling hard; means any lasers that are hitting her aren’t getting the chance to focus on any single spot,” Frampton murmured.

As I watched the avatars in the holotank,
Erebus
swung around, aiming straight at a collection of blinking lights, and, with a surge of her antimatter engine, accelerated toward them.

“What are they?” I asked.

Frampton squinted. “They’re the gate arrays. Clever.”

“Shit,” Vance muttered.

I cocked an eyebrow at Frampton.

“If he goes near them, no one is going to risk destroying them,” he said in answer to my unspoken question. “Lead time to establish a gateway is decades. They have to ship the other end to its destination star the slow way.”

Erebus’s
thrusters and engines fired in a complex sequence. She carried on evading as she spun end to end, slowing relative to the array of gates, which were floating between the Earth and moon. As she closed, the assault on
Erebus
slowed and then stopped.

It was timed perfectly.
Erebus
decelerated furiously as she slid toward the gateway, the thrust vectoring on the engine firing in a complicated fashion with lances of blue-hot flame, careful to avoid damaging the gates themselves.

“She’s—she’s not slowing down fast enough,” Frampton stuttered, his eyebrows crossed. “If they don’t…Oh, hell.”

Erebus
slid straight into one of the gateways. Her maneuver was spot-on; the huge ship had scored a perfect hole in one.

And then she vanished it a flash of light.

The room froze in silence for a few brief seconds. “He didn’t?” I breathed.

Frampton tuned out, the look of someone furiously accessing information setting across his face. He snapped out of it a moment later.

“He did,” Frampton said in disbelief and then looked at me. “He’s gone!”

“Gone where?” Vance demanded.

“It looks like...Shit,” Frampton whispered. “Sirius—he’s going to Sirius.”

“What…why?” I stuttered. It was not the most eloquent I’ve ever been in my life.

I grunted and shifted myself shakily in the white plastic hospital chair in Cheng’s room, keeping a firm grip on the bulb of water in my hands and keeping my foot wrapped around the chair leg so I wouldn’t float free. I was thoroughly pissed off. Not only had Frain and Drayton slipped through our fingers, but the zero gravity had meant I had barely been able to eat and sleep for the last two days. The only plus side was I had become very adept at getting myself around in the weightless conditions. Practice makes perfect.

They would be starting the process of spinning up Concorde soon, slowly at first to let all the debris floating around her cavernous interiors settle. Once the station was rotating again, the long process of reestablishing normality would begin.

I gave a hacking cough. My lungs were absolutely full of crap. The infirmary was full of people with respiratory problems, and it had taken hours to make sure everyone got breathing masks. No wonder most spacers were clean freaks. Although all the soil and rubbish in the air made breathing a chore, the air wasn’t exactly toxic—yet—but it made my lungs feel like they had when my school friends and I had tried cigarettes we had scored off the local drug dealer—a mistake I had chosen not to repeat, thankfully for my then future career choice.

“They’re still investigating,” I said. I wanted to keep him in the loop; it was the only thing I could think to do for him. “But the intrusion worm had been sent wirelessly into Concorde’s command and control system at—get this—1257 hours, when Frain was in our holding cell.”

“How?” Cheng coughed.

“It was a sophisticated e-warfare hack. It passed through Concorde’s firewalls like they didn’t exist. He got complete control of the system.”

Cheng didn’t respond at first. Man, but he was a sorry state: One arm snapped—he actually had dents in his chest from the blows that Frain had given him. His subdermal combat armor had taken a hell of a fender bending. But his neck was the real worry. The final kick Frain had given him had caused something the doctor called an atlanto-occipital dislocation—or more simply, an internal decapitation. His neck had been so badly broken, it had snapped in two.

Cheng opened up one eye and grimaced. I was told that he wasn’t in any pain, but he must have been frustrated not being able to move a single muscle below his chin, not to mention scared of what that would mean for his future. He would be dead right now except for his combat enhancements and the life-support machines he was hooked up to. They were doing everything they could to keep him alive—regulating his heartbeat, breathing for him, and doing what they could to repair the damage. His odds of ever regaining control of his body were roughly fifty percent. I didn’t like the odds.

All this, I thought as I looked at Cheng, was just that much more harm that Frain had caused on his rampage. That he was responsible for the Io attack, I knew. The whys still eluded me, but the questions played on my mind. If Frain had been a callous murderer, why wasn’t I dead right now along with a dozen JAS agents? He had only done Cheng such horrendous harm because the MSS agent was the only one who could truly stand in Frain’s way.

“
Erebus
?” he croaked.

I shook my head, then realized he couldn’t move his to see me. “We don’t know. He could have taken control of her the same way he did Concorde, but until we can get a systems forensic team onboard…” I let the sentence go unfinished. That wasn’t going to be happening any time soon.

Cheng gave a snorting grunt, his eyes open, staring at the ceiling.

Cerise’s face appeared on my HUD. “
Gagarin
is back. She’s inbound to dock now.”

“Thanks, Cerise,” I replied.

“Trent,” Cheng coughed, an odd hacking noise. “Layton. Have you decided?”

Floating in the zero-g of the clean, white room, I looked out of the window at the once beautiful vista of Concorde. In a way, it still was. The gentle upsweep of the habitat ring was now filled with strange clouds. Soil still floated around, and huge bubbles of water that were once lakes and streams stretched and shimmered. The light streaking through the debris created dusty beams. I realized I had come to a decision.

“I have.” I turned and looked at the equally shattered wreckage of Cheng. All of this ruin—Io, Concorde, Cheng, and Dev—had been caused by one man. Just what he was, I didn’t know. A criminal? A terrorist? A soldier? “I’m going.”

“Who would’ve thought,” Cheng croaked. “Layton Trent, space explorer.”

Yes indeed. That had been all we had been able to think and talk about for the last two days. Finally, authorization for a pursuit had come through—volunteers only. I had done a hell of a lot of soul-searching before putting my name down. Crossing Sol was one thing, following Frain to Sirius, quite another.

“We’ll find him, Zao.”

“Good. Wish I could come.” Cheng sighed then gave a slight cough. That twinkle appeared in his eye, the one he could switch on and off. I got the impression he had done it for my benefit. “Then maybe by the time you get back, I’ll be back in my dancing shoes. We can go out, paint the town red. Joke about all this.”

“You can count on it. I’ll see you in sixteen years. Maybe bring your kid along. He’ll be old enough by then.”

“My kid,” Cheng coughed. “I doubt I’ll have one now.”

I hadn’t liked what Cheng had done, but within his own moral structure, he felt he was doing the right thing. I couldn’t find the anger within me anymore for his actions or his little lie.

“I’ll be seeing you, Zao.”

Cheng closed his eyes, clearly exhausted. His breathing became regular as he drifted off to sleep.

***

Erebus
and
Gagarin
weren’t built off the same plans, but explorer ships tended to be much of a muchness—a long spine, a habitat ring somewhere near the back next to the A-drive. Like
Erebus
,
Gagarin
was modern enough to have an antimatter torch and a nano-fabricator.

We were lucky. When we had dispatched
Gagarin
to go look for
Magellan
, her flight plan had meant that she had dropped out of A-drive every couple of hours for up-to-date positioning fixes from the deep space arrays. She had been just over a day out when we recalled her. It was clear to us that
Magellan
was the lesser of our leads. We needed to get through the gate and fast, and the
Gagarin
was the only available ship in range. The
Magellan
would have to wait for another team.

“Captain,” I nodded at the unnecessarily prematurely balding man in front of me. I was eternally grateful to be off Concorde and aboard the spinning habitat ring of the sleek ship.

“Welcome aboard, ladies and gentlemen,” Captain Arkady Vasily said with a smile and a thick Russian accent. He seemed far friendlier than Tasker had. “Interesting times, no?”

“Only if you mean in the sense of the old Chinese curse,” Vance replied testily. She was as bruised as I was.

“Quite,” Captain Vasily said with a nod. “We have a solution
. We’re
heading straight to the Earth-moon system. As you can imagine, they are going—how do you say?—ballistic back there.”

Yeah, we had all had an ear-bashing over the last couple of days. Fortunately for us, the “keep them on the job” crowd had won out against the “string them up” faction. Just barely, though.

“The Interstellar List has been polled. We will be picking up an attachment of soldiers on our way through,” the captain said, dropping his smile. “We won’t be too tightly packed, though. I’m going to off-load all nonessential crew. They didn’t sign up for Sirius.”

My stomach gave a little nervous lurch as he said it. None of us had signed up for a sixteen-year round trip at the start of this—assuming we survived whatever the hell Frain could come up with on the other side. Some analytical part of me thought the only reason I was going along with it was because it hadn’t really settled in yet. Everything had moved so damned fast.

“While we’re picking them up, I think we have a few questions for Red Star. Don’t you, people?” Vance asked.

That was for damn sure.

“Ms. Hanley,” I nodded at the powerful woman in front of me.

Vance had introduced us all. We had set up
Gagarin’s
mess as a virtual conference room. We had some pointed questions for Kara Hanley, but that didn’t necessarily mean that we could afford to piss her off.

“Ladies and gentlemen, call me Kara, please. This is my head of legal, Grant Jonas,” she said in a flippant manner. To be fair to her, by all accounts, the CEO of Red Star was a very nice woman. She was a philanthropist and spent half of her Christmas Day spooning out dinners to orphans. The thought did occur to me, however, that she was one of the true powers of Earth. Each of the massive corporations, Red Star, Helios, and many others, held as much sway as a nation-state. She could quite easily click her fingers and I would find myself on welfare for the rest of my natural life.

“Kara,” Vance started, gazing at the middle-aged matriarch in front of her, “we have subjects we didn’t want to discuss over open link or conventional communications, hence the request for this holoconference once we got into Earth orbit and laser-link range.”

“I must admit, I have been waiting on your call,” Hanley said from her office. Behind her was the picturesque skyline of Montreal, dozens of miles-tall superscrapers visible, stretching into the red sunset-lit sky. It looked like a window in the hull of
Gagarin’s
mess. “I presume this meeting has something to do with Io?”

“Your presumption is correct,” Vance said, leaning back in her chair. “Let me cut to the chase. We know about your Eston Mons facility. We have a survivor from there.”

“Eston Mons? Remind me? We have a lot of facilities in Jupiter space,” she said. She was pumping us. I knew it, my colleagues knew it, and she knew that we knew it.

“Your
secret
facility on Io. The one where you found some kind of alien artifact,” I prompted. Then I couldn’t help myself. “Ring any bells?”

Her man Jonas gave a cough and leaned forward. Their side of the conference room froze.

“Oh…
that
facility,” she finally said a minute later, the conference unfreezing.

“Yes, that facility. That place is the reason why Io is currently smashed to smithereens and at least eighty-seven people who were on that rock are dead, not to mention many others caught in the EM radiation pulse from the explosion as
Magellan
hit. Whatever was going on there has a causal link to the emergency de-spin of Concorde and many related injuries of civilians and personnel aboard. Oh, and not to mention the incident at the gate arrays,” I said.

“The test firing of the space-defense network, you mean?” she asked with a wry grin. That was the cover-up line that had been issued. I didn’t know whether it would hold water; Sol is a leaky place. Thankfully, the Io Incident itself provided a decent cover story. After all, the public would want reassurance that Earth’s defenses would prevent anything similar happening there. The de-spin incident? That was just a malfunction that was being investigated as far as it had been put out to the public. Apparently the Linked command had been doing a hell of a lot of unprecedented vaulting from the Consensus.

“I’m sure Mr. Jonas here can remind you of your obligations under the Outer Space Treaty as amended in 2145,” I continued, gesturing to her unflappable sidekick before starting to quote from the legalese that I had set up and ready on my HUD. “Article VI is the relevant one. It states, ‘Parties to the Treaty shall bear international responsibility for national activities in outer or interstellar space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, whether such activities are carried on by governmental agencies or nongovernmental entities.’” I looked at Ms. Hanley. “That’s you, by the way. And for assuring that ‘national activities are carried out in conformity with the provisions set forth in the present Treaty,’ Subsection C continues, ‘any governmental agencies or nongovernmental entities bear a binding obligation to declare the finding of any life, signs of intelligence, or artifacts to the state parties of the treaty.’”