Aneka Jansen 7: Hope (13 page)

Turning a corner and finding herself looking at a half-dozen women, and one man, wearing barely anything at all suggested she had found the brothel. These employees were there to attract customers, and the man seemed to be quite keen to persuade Ella to spend her money, but they all seemed healthy. There was supposed to be a small clinic somewhere in the ring which handled the medical needs of the residents, presumably including treatments for the common STDs.

But Ella had decided to forgo the captain’s offer of money, aside from a few dollars to buy some drinks, so hiring the man in the gold shorts was out of the question. The local currency was the dollar and it came in the form of small, gold coins. Ella had been surprised to say the least: actual, genuine, physical money! They had found some coins from Aneka’s time when they found her and she had pointed out that the money was going to be no use to her. Plus the paper notes had been desiccated and crumbling, but the coins had been fine and were in a museum. Around Haven they still valued bits of metal, though Ella doubted the gold content of the coins: copper seemed like the dominant material.

So Ella gave the man an apologetic look and went off to find Nightside.

As far as she could tell, the club was the largest structure in the ring and had given its name to the shops and such around it. The décor ran to dark colours and had once been glossy, but years of abuse by the patrons and lack of upkeep gave it a more shabby appearance now. It was somewhere between a high-class nightclub and a downmarket, pirate dive. The patrons certainly seemed to be dressed in the same style as Ella. The staff, primarily women, favoured long skirts, low necklines, and uplift bras. With the amount of cleavage on display, Ella was glad, for the first time in years, that she had had her breasts enhanced.

‘What can I get you?’ The girl behind the bar was short, cute, blonde, a little vacant-looking, and possessed of almost inhumanly large breasts which were trying to crawl out of her tight blouse. ‘No, wait… rum, right?’

‘Actually, do you have a whiskey in stock? I’ve had a lot of rum recently.’

‘Oh, a girl with taste
and
a killer figure.’

Ella smiled and wondered whether that was being friendly with the customers or the start of a pick-up campaign.

‘I’m Naseena, by the way,’ the girl said as she delivered Ella’s drink. ‘You’re a new face.’

‘Just came in, on the Hope.’

‘Oh, one of Captain Kade’s crew. She comes in once in a while. Quite a woman. She’s freed… hundreds, maybe thousands, of Pinnacle slaves. Haven was nothing much before she came here with the Hope.’

‘She seems like a driven woman. Doesn’t like the Pinnacle much. We kind of see eye-to-eye on that point.’

‘She hates them. Pretty much everyone on Haven hates them, and the ones who don’t hate them loathe them instead. We’re all either refugees or freed slaves.’

Ella sipped her whiskey. It had about the same basic quality as paint stripper. ‘Refugees?’

‘The Pinnacle’s been expanding for a few decades, more and more aggressively. Lots of worlds have fallen to them. They must’ve grabbed you from somewhere
way
out of the way.’

‘Outside their normal sphere of operations, yes. But I’m stuck until I can find someone who can take me back. I have the navigation data they’d need, but it’s a long way…’

Naseena looked thoughtful for a second. ‘Your best bet is to book passage on something going out to Oberian. There are people who trade in and out of there and they have links to a lot of other worlds. Going to take money though.’

‘
That
I’m aware of. How much do I owe you?’

‘Three dollars for the whiskey. The information’s free if you’ve got a couple of hours to spend.’ Her head tilted a little and she gave Ella a questioning smile. So it was a pick-up strategy.

‘I… have some spare time.’ Well, she had given Ella the best route home…

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Ella had returned to the Hope a couple of hours before most of the crew. Naseena had got her money’s worth, Ella had got a good, if slightly short, night’s sleep, and there had seemed little point in exploring further. On arrival she had found Kade in a foul mood and Trin trying to calm her down, mostly by lying on cushions and drinking rum.

‘Their schedule’s moved up,’ Kade growled when Ella asked what was wrong. ‘I was hoping to get in, watch things for a while… When we hit a station we usually observe it for two days before going in. We’d been in the Ariadne system for three days doing some reconnaissance when we spotted your ship.’

‘Good tactical practice.’

‘Yes, but we’ll barely get to our target in time before they plan to move. We’ll have to wing it too much for my liking.’

‘But we’re still going?’

‘Oh yes. This is too important…’ She stopped pacing up and down her lounge. ‘Trin, get whoever’s on board and get started on the prep. As soon as anyone else gets back who’s fit to work, get them started. Ella, would you please start on the pre-flight checks? I know it’ll probably take you longer than Tebbot, but he’ll be late back and probably drunk. I want us out of here by oh-four-hundred tomorrow. Crew briefing at ten.’

Trin sprang to her feet from a lounging position as though thrust up by a spring. She snapped off a jaunty salute. ‘Aye aye, Captain!’

‘And pack that in or I’ll have your tail clapped in irons.’

The cat-girl pouted and started for the door. Her tail curled around her waist and she looked down at it. ‘It’s all right, she wouldn’t really. No, really, she’s not a mean old–’

‘Less of the old!’

Trin bolted for the door.

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‘All right,’ Kade called out. ‘I know half of you are nursing hangovers, but that’s your own stupid fault so
shut the fuck up
!’

The bellow produced several winces, and the desired overall effect. Silence, or a close imitation of it, fell across the gym where the crew had gathered to hear Kade’s plan. There were two tables left still bolted to the deck at one end, and she was stood atop one of them, looking pretty magnificent, and a little ticked off.

‘Okay, just before we set out on the last trip I got word that the Pinnacle were shipping a lot of munitions out to border station two-oh-six. Not a big thing, you might think, not worth the risk… Except that they’ve shipped about two hundred antimatter warheads out there.’ There was rumbling among the crew. Ella, stood off to one side near the front, glanced around and saw worried faces. ‘Two hundred, ten-megatonne antimatter warheads.’

‘Those are planetary bombardment ordnance, Boss,’ Lanyon said.

‘Oh yes. And why would they be shipping them there?’

‘Iyonvrie,’ Trin said. Ella glanced at her. Iyonvrie had been the world mentioned at the dinner party, and antimatter weapons had been mentioned along with it.

‘Oh yes. They’ve wanted Iyonvrie for years, but those strong force field generators they have make nukes useless, and they have a formidable naval presence. Antimatter bombs, on the other hand…’

‘So we go in and stop them,’ Trin stated, more as though it were a fact rather than a plan.

‘And get our hands on two hundred antimatter warheads,’ Lanyon added.

‘And then we buy big piles of dollars to sleep on,’ Trin added, grinning.

‘Sounds uncomfortable,’ Kade replied. ‘Also, this isn’t going to be a school outing to happy fun land. They are aiming to move the stuff in around thirteen days. That means we’ll have
hours
to get a feel for what we’re fighting, get in and take the station. You’re all going to be working hard for this one.’

‘Yeah, but the payoff…’ Lanyon said. ‘We sell a few of those in the right places and we’re all rich.
And
we’ll have armaments that’d take out a dreadnought.’

‘And that’s precisely the point. We pull this off and we not only end up with money, but we also end up with a way to
really
take the fight to the Pinnacle’s front door. Are we up for it?’

Ella had to cover her ears at the roar of support, but she was not feeling so good. Aneka had been spending months trying to keep weapons not even half as destructive as this out of the wrong hands, and here she was helping Kade sell strategic weaponry to who knew what kind of buyer. Of course, the bombs were already
in
the wrong hands…

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‘Shu taisu de yu ta ma du tahee hu buyeeboo!’ Ella yanked her hands away from the controls and slammed her head back against the acceleration couch. She had been running simulations for days trying to get the feel of the ship’s responses, and she was pretty sure she had, but she had also discovered that the Hope was hopeless at manoeuvring.

‘Sorry?’ Kade asked, sounding rather calmer than Ella felt.

‘This ship steers like a barge! Which is not what I said, but it’s true. What I said was a lot of swearing in Rimmic and I’m not going to translate. And–’

‘You do realise that you had absolutely no chance of getting through that simulation in one piece, right?’

‘What?’

‘That simulation just piles on extra attackers until it nails you. You either get hit with something too many times or you hit an asteroid. And asteroid fields are
never
that dense in reality. How long did you last in that one, Tebbot?’

The pilot tapped at one of his screens to check Ella’s results. ‘Uh, I managed another ninety-eight seconds. I think I got caught in crossfire from six cruisers. You only had five… You’re still good. If there’s two cruisers at two-oh-six we’ll be unlucky.’

‘Oh,’ Ella said. ‘Aneka did that to me once. She was training me for the Herosian op and she put me through Hell and then blew me up. In simulation obviously. And then she explained there was no way I could win and she’d cheated like a bitch to see how far I could take it.’

‘Herosian op?’ Tebbot asked.

‘Uh… long story. I was training for a hot exfiltration against a small fleet of high-speed frigates and a militarised asteroid.’

‘Solo?!’

‘Me and the ship’s AI, but Gwy is a special kind of ship. She was built specifically to carry out operations like that, with all the best tech they could cram into her. She can turn on one of your dollars. She’s got… a hundred times the thrust. Force screens, a cloaking system, weapons that can fire through pretty much any armour.
Our
best bet is our own cloak, surprise, and a lot of luck.’

‘An accurate assessment,’ Kade said. ‘Thankfully, luck seems to like me so we just need the surprise. Ella, you’ve been working like a dog since we left Haven. Take a break. Relax for a bit. You are as good as you’re going to get, and it’s quite good enough for what we have to do.’

Nodding, Ella pushed her screens aside and got up. ‘Okay. You’re right. I’ve been pushing myself too hard. I just have this aversion to dying a fiery death.’

‘I think we all have that,’ Tebbot commented as Ella headed for the door.

~~~

Ella walked out of the little bathroom cubicle at the side of her cabin, rubbing at her hair with a towel. She came to a sudden stop when she realised someone else was in the room with her.

‘I brought rum,’ Kade said, showing her a bottle of the dark liquid. ‘You need to unwind for a bit.’

‘Fair enough.’ Ella continued drying her hair.

‘I wasn’t expecting the scenic view, obviously, but I can’t say it’s unwelcome.’

Wrapping her hair in the towel, Ella dropped into the other seat in the room and poured herself a glass of rum. ‘Good, because I’m getting my clothes cleaned and they won’t be ready for another hour. Cheers.’ She slugged back half the glass, grimaced and then sank back into her seat to let the liquid burn its way down her throat.

‘You don’t exactly have a lot of modesty.’

‘Almost none. Jenlay society considers sex a recreational activity. Most of us are immune to most diseases, pregnancy is a voluntary option, and we were engineered to be pretty so we like showing our bodies off. Aneka thinks I take it to extremes at times, and I have been getting a little more… staid in the last few years, but still…’

‘Well, you’ve nothing to be ashamed of.’

Ella raised her glass. ‘Right back at you, Captain.’

Kade gave a low chuckle. ‘Amazons were engineered to be pretty too, and extremely feminine, hence the enormous mammaries. They’re a real pain at times.’

‘Aneka says the same.’

‘Are you okay with this mission?’ The sudden change of subject was a little jarring.

‘Uh… In what way?’

‘I got the impression you were a little uncertain about selling antimatter warheads.’

‘I’m… less than sanguine about that part of the deal, true. It won’t stop me going through with it. The Pinnacle having them is probably a worse option. When I was with them I overheard a conversation about Iyonvrie. They
are
planning an attack on it, and antimatter warheads were one of the suggested options.’

‘Iyonvrie is a beautiful planet. Humans, Felix, and an enclave of Tech-Specs all living in harmony. Kind of the exemplar for what a multi-racial society should be, and they built their technology up themselves. Cubby originally comes from there. It’s got wide, blue oceans, vast forests, gleaming cities… the whole utopian deal. The Pinnacle will reduce it to a spaceport landing site because what it also has is a lot of useful minerals and an environment they can settle in quickly and easily. AM bombs are nasty, but you don’t end up with much long-term radiation you have to clean up.’

‘And as long as I keep that in mind, I’m fine. I just feel a little like I’m being paid to hand guns over to babies.’

‘The ones we sell will go to people trying to defend themselves against the Pinnacle. People are afraid and they’ll pay for security. The money I can make doing this will let me run more rescue missions rather than struggling to feed the crew. It’s the answer to a prayer.’

Ella raised her glass again. Toasts were not a Jenlay habit, but she had spent too much time around Aneka and the Humans on Old Earth. ‘Here’s to answered prayers then.’

‘Amen,’ Kade agreed, knocking back her drink and then reaching for the bottle.