Aneka Jansen 7: Hope (19 page)

~~~

‘She came into the bar,’ Naseena groaned, ‘less than a week ago.’ The blonde was having a little trouble speaking since Aneka’s head was between her legs, tongue playing rather than working hard. ‘She… She was with Captain K-Kade’s crew. They put… put out… the day… day… Please!’

‘Go on,’ Aneka said, humour in her voice.

‘Oh God! They put out the day after.’

‘No more than seven days’ lead,’ Al said. ‘The navigation data we stole suggests a twelve-day journey. We can beat them there easily.’

‘Good,’ Aneka replied, pushing two fingers into her victim and beginning a slow, thrusting motion which produced a squeal of pleasure. ‘Naseena earned her reward, I think.’

‘I would not deny her. What do you plan to do when we actually get to station two-zero-six?’

‘Kind of depends on what we find there. I’m not expecting it to be good.’

‘I wonder how much effort the Pinnacle would go to to kill one pirate.’

‘Given the amount of effort they put into luring her there, quite a bit. Now shut up, I’m concentrating.’

Gwy, 17.12.559 FSC.

‘It appears,’ Al said, ‘that “quite a bit” was an underestimate.’

Cloaked and hanging above the primary plane of the system’s worlds, Gwy’s sensors had a good view of the force waiting for the Hope of Sanctuary. ‘Eight light cruisers,’ the AI said, ‘the station, obviously, and the large vessel is a dreadnought-class. The latter is primarily designed for planetary bombardment, but its main gun will make a mess of a ship if it can hit it.’

Aneka looked at the ship markers highlighting where the actual vessels were. ‘They’re clustered around the station.
Too
clustered. They aren’t expecting her to arrive yet, which means they know when she left Haven.’

‘They have a spy on the station,’ Cassandra stated.

‘Yeah. Go over the communications traffic Gwy intercepted. See if you can spot anything out of the ordinary. Gwy, I’m sure you can devote a little time to help, but I want to get closer and gather as much data as we can on those ships. We’re going to have to disable them somehow, probably terminally.’

‘Without using active sensors there is only a limited amount I can determine.’

‘I know. I need some points of ingress I can work with. I’ll sneak aboard and tap their internal network once we know what kind of sensors we’re up against and where I can get in.’

PDN-003, 18.12.559 FSC.

The dreadnought had the feel of an older ship, but the technology was up to the Pinnacle’s usual standard. That meant that cracking the locking system on one of the airlocks had been a relatively simple task for Al, who was built to a considerably higher standard. Not trivial, but simple enough.

Aneka had decided that her personal force field and cloak was not going to cut it, primarily because of the power drain, so she walked through the corridors of the huge vessel clad in her nanosuit which had a more physical camouflage system and so could operate for a day easily. It had got her onto a Herosian space station under the nose of a Xinti AI, so she figured it would work here.

‘What’s the crew complement on this thing?’ she asked as she walked, hunting for the primary computer room.

‘Four thousand, three hundred and twenty, plus any additional men they may be carrying,’ Al replied. ‘There’s a substantial hangar bay, but they may have foregone a marine contingent for an operation like this. As Gwy said, this is primarily an invasion weapon.’

‘The cruisers?’

‘Nominally one hundred and two each. The station has a staff of two hundred and ninety-three.’

‘Over five thousand people. I hope Ella appreciates this and Kade better be worth it.’

‘We’re going to have to kill all of them, aren’t we?’

‘Unless we can figure out a way to get them to leave.’

They had entered at the rear of the vessel. The primary sensor array was near the bow and coming in from the rear had reduced the chances of a lucky operator spotting Gwy. It meant that one of the main sections they came across quickly was the loading system and main generator for the big, spinal gun.

‘This is nuclear,’ Aneka said, her eyes scanning over a large shell waiting on the loading rack. ‘They’re packing nuclear warheads into a gravity accelerator gun.’

‘It seems overkill,’ Al commented. ‘The physical impact should be sufficient without adding a nuclear explosion. They certainly mean business. I’ve managed to negotiate their internal network. I’m having to use low power to avoid detection. Can we find somewhere to hide for a few minutes while I attempt to gain access to their primary computer?’

Aneka found a service crawlway under the gun and slipped inside. It gave her the opportunity to disengage the suit’s camouflage and allow it to shrink back from her face. She lay in the darkness, staring up at the metal panel above her, and tried not to think about what she was probably going to have to do soon.

‘You are not entirely comfortable with this,’ Al observed.

‘Should I be? I can’t make this a fair fight. It’s going to have to be done quickly and ruthlessly. Five thousand lives snuffed out to save some pirates from a trap they shouldn’t be walking into.’

‘To save Ella. The pirates are incidental. Though if the Pinnacle are expanding and this Captain Kade represents whatever resistance there is to them, keeping her alive would seem to be a politically astute step.’

‘I’m not sure Shadataga would agree, but you might be right. Old Earth was certainly worried about the Pinnacle. They would likely agree this is necessary. But this technology is no match for what we can use against it. If the Pinnacle moved against Earth, the Guardians could hold them until Shadataga sent in their warships. At that point it would be no contest.’

‘Yes, but the Pinnacle do not know that. If they move, there will be significant loss of life. I’ve located the orders sending this fleet here. Kade is to be eliminated “at all cost.” They appear to recognise force above any other form of diplomacy.’

‘You’re suggesting that we may need to employ some gunboat diplomacy here?’

‘Cassandra has done some analysis on the communications traffic we acquired on Oberian. The Pinnacle consider themselves a superior species, the ultimate in Human evolution. They are, for want of a better word, racists at a cultural level. Ridding them of that kind of prejudice is a very long-term goal, but demonstrating to them that their superiority is not what they thought it was may persuade them to reel in their efforts at conquest.’

Aneka sighed, softly. ‘See if you can work out how to get their reactor to overload. We’ll have to go ship-to-ship and set it up. And we’ll need to be able to trigger it remotely.’

‘The communications array on the station will need to be disabled as well.’

‘Yeah… That’ll be Gwy’s job.’

BES-206, 19.12.559 FSC.

Holding herself against the rocky exterior of the station, Aneka waited while Al hacked his way into the controls of the airlock a metre away. Everything was ready, but she had decided that the station would be handled in person. Getting in there and tapping into their computers was a useful goal, but it also felt less like mass slaughter to handle at least some of the troops personally. Not that they were going to have much chance.

‘I’m in,’ Al stated. ‘Ready when you are.’

‘I still think I should be there with you,’ Cassandra said. They were employing the latest in communications technology that Reality had cooked up: gravitational communicators inducing tiny fluctuations in local space-time. The Pinnacle had no way of detecting them and they worked through pretty much any solid object, but the range was not especially great on the micro-sized one Aneka was carrying. It was enough for their purpose.

‘This is going to be ugly, Cassandra,’ Aneka replied. ‘You’re better off out of it, and having both of us in there won’t make much difference in close confines.’

‘Just so you know I’m not happy.’

‘I do, but think about me.
I’ll
be happier if your hands aren’t dirtied with this. Gwy, blow it.’

To the right kind of sensor, Gwy’s main gun lit up like a flare, but nothing in quite a few parsecs had that kind of sensor. Invisible, essentially intangible particles were accelerated through a ten-megajoule magnetic field, exiting the ship’s bow through a narrow containment port. The range on the weapon was not long, especially compared to the gamma-ray lasers in her wing turrets, but its effect was spectacular. Ten megajoules of energy passed right through the rock and the heavy, diamond lattice around the station’s core where the particles decayed into a lot of tangible, high-energy particles and gamma radiation. For a brief instant, a small nuclear explosion blossomed inside the main communications and sensor array. The ten men on duty died instantly. Equipment was torn apart. Electricity arced through vital components as the radiation induced power surges.

‘Open it,’ Aneka said as she began moving for the airlock.

Around her, nine ships detected a radio pulse coming from somewhere near the station and were just about to run further analysis to discover what had caused it when alarms began to sound. It took an average of nine seconds for the bridge engineering technicians to determine what was causing the alarms, by which time all they could do was issue ship-wide evacuation orders, knowing it would not be fast enough.

Aneka pulled herself into the airlock against the centripetal force trying to push her out and the door closed behind her. ‘We’re sure they aren’t detecting this?’

‘It will require a minimum of twenty seconds for their systems to fail over to the backups,’ Al replied. ‘The inner door will open in ten.’

Standing on the outer hatch, Aneka slipped her pistol free of its holster. The holster, strapped over her nanosuit, was visible, but she did not really care. The camouflage was there to make it harder for the men on the station, not to provide perfect cover. Aneka was not hiding. Not this time.

The airlock door opened, not above her, but to the side, and she walked out onto a corridor. Alarms were sounding and there were men running, heading for the station’s core. They were hurrying, not paying attention, and they did not see the gun rising until it fired. Twenty rounds a second of high-density needles lashed out along the corridor at a high fraction of light speed, each round flashing into a spear of plasma as it hit a solid surface. Aneka watched the men fall and turned, heading for the core and the main control room.

‘Gwy, situation report.’

‘Station communications have resumed, but their primary FTL system is down. They are scanning actively. Three of the cruisers have suffered catastrophic reactor breach. All of them are without power. Passive sensors are detecting high radiation levels on all vessels.’

‘The dreadnought?’

‘Apparently their engineering was not up to code. Their reactor ruptured and most of the rear of the vessel was torn open. I am detecting breaches along extensive areas of their hull.’

‘Okay. Stay hidden until this is over.’

‘As you wish, Aneka.’

‘They’ve sealed the bulkhead door ahead,’ Al said as Aneka approached a heavy door. ‘Do you want to go through or around?’

‘What’s around?’

‘There is a power conduit above us which should be useable, and it will put us in the reactor room.’

‘Up then.’ Indicators in Aneka’s vision field showed her the ladder on her left and she started up it quickly, sliding her pistol back into its holster as she went. ‘Are their internal sensors seeing this?’

‘I have blinded them here, but they will be active on the other side of the bulkhead.’

‘Start hunting through what we have on their reactor. I want a way to cut their primary power without blowing us up. It’ll take out their weapons.’

‘If you can gain control of the room, that should not be a problem.’

‘Then that should not be a problem.’ Floating now, she hauled herself into a duct which was half full of heavy cables and barely wide enough to deserve the term ‘crawl space.’ ‘You give me the best routes.’

‘I aim to please. I know how you love air ducts and it has been quite a while.’

Her breasts squashed against the cables, Aneka began pulling herself through. ‘Oh, thanks. My boobs are appreciating this a lot. You know, the old ones had some kind of oxygen storage gel in them, which kind of made sense. Why are they still huge?’

‘Aside from maintaining the aesthetic? Buoyancy. They provide much-needed buoyancy. You would sink like a stone in water without them.’

‘You know when you’ve asked a question, and then you get the answer, and you wish you’d never asked?’

‘I’m aware of the concept.’

‘Yeah… like that.’ She felt some sort of grill below her back, tensed her muscles and pushed, folding herself up to pass through the hole she had made and swing out into the microgravity of the reactor room.

There were men in the room, technicians with surprised looks on their faces as they saw a grill burst open for no reason. All of them were strapped into their chairs, sitting ducks. Her pistol slid from its holster easily and she set it for targeted, multicore rounds, and then she was firing. Each round split a short distance from the barrel, plastic binding shearing away as four slim smart-missiles burst out, locked onto their targets and powered toward them. Each impact punched through a chest, and then the small explosive charge went off. Two more shots followed in quick succession and then the panic which had begun to set in was suddenly quieted.

‘Lock the doors,’ Aneka ordered.

‘They sealed automatically when the station went on alert. Plug me into one of the consoles and I’ll put the reactor into shutdown.’

Pushing herself out from the vent, Aneka glided down to the deck as her nanosuit retracted away from her head and neck. There was a data port on each control station and it was a moment’s work to plug in.

‘This will take a short while,’ Al said. ‘They will have time to prepare a defence.’

Aneka sighed. ‘They really don’t have much of anything that’s a viable defence, and you know it. Anything they could use to get to me would probably blow a hole in their station. Is that taking a lot of your attention, or can you spare some to see if you can access their security cameras?’