Aneka Jansen 7: Hope (2 page)

Crushing the last man’s throat with a single, swift blow to the windpipe, she caught his falling body and lowered him to the ground. ‘Gwy, I’ll be needing extraction pretty soon,’ she said as she started making her way through the maze of vehicles to where the meeting was happening.

‘I am on my way,’ Gwy responded.

Nodding to herself, Aneka rounded a truck that was twice her height and found herself looking at the four remaining men.

‘As you can see,’ Jarrow was saying, ‘this weaponry will give you a significant advantage over your competitors. And for such a small price.’

‘A thousand tonnes of gold is hardly a “small” price, Mister Jarrow.’ Closer now, Aneka could see that the chief negotiator was an older man, probably fairly senior in Duchema. The Elspans lived long, quite active lives, but they had none of the genetic advantages Jenlay did, and the executive was greying and starting to show lines around his eyes and across his brow.

‘Too much for total control of your planet?’

‘Weapons are not effective if the men using them are dead. What about protection?’

‘Ah yes. My associate is wearing our latest body armour. The motorised exoskeleton enhances physical strength and speed, even over rough ground. The plating is a hyperdense alloy which can stop anything up to and including any anti-armour weapons your competitors have–’

There was a loud thud and the bodyguard’s head more or less exploded. Aneka appeared beside Jarrow, already slipping her gun into its holster. ‘But as you can see, it’s fuck all use if you forget the helmet,’ she said.

Jarrow started to move. He was fast for a salesman and was already two steps away, heading for one of the doors when Aneka held out her hand and fired off a pulse from the force weapon in her arm. There was a grunt as all the air left his lungs in an instant and then a clang as he slammed into the side of an excavator bucket.

Aneka smiled at the Elspans. ‘Good afternoon, I’m Aneka and I’ll be conducting the second part of your product demonstration.’

The younger exec moved, grabbing one of the blaster rifles from the top of a case and pointing it at her. He looked like he was about to wet himself. ‘D-d-don’t come any closer!’

Aneka kept smiling. ‘That’s not going to do you much good. No power cell.’ He looked down at the weapon, fear and frustration evident, as well as distrust. ‘Those blocky things in the case?’ She waved a hand at the metallised crate the guns were stored in and he looked down, grabbing one of the cell units. ‘That’s right. Locks in right under the grip. It’s an up-and-back motion… There you go.’

He pointed the rifle at her again and she shook her head. ‘You need to turn the sighting system on. You see, these things need an accurate range to target to fire properly and they’re usually stored in a locked-down state. It’s a lot safer, considering you’re dealing with an antimatter system.’ The man was frantically looking for the ‘on’ switch now. ‘It’s that red slider beside the sight. Push it forward.’

Once more he pointed the rifle at her, looking no more confident than he had when it was an inert lump of plastic and metal. ‘Great!’ Aneka said, her smile broadening. ‘Now you are ready to really kick some arse. Seriously, those things are fucking lethal, but there are a few important safety tips regarding their use, and the first of those is–’

She stepped forward and his finger closed on the trigger. The air sparkled in front of him as an ultraviolet laser carved a channel in the air between the gun and Aneka where it hit her force screen provoking a shimmering wave of light to dance across its surface. The beam was followed, a fraction of a second later, by a few positrons which hit the shield and stopped briefly, having nothing to interact with, before the vacuum collapsed and they interacted with the protons in the air. Aneka vanished in a wave of white light, which washed over her shield, and the backwash from the explosion hit the two Elspans in the face, staggering them back and leaving them blinking.

When their vision had cleared, Aneka was still smiling at them. ‘Never use one of them at close range unless you’re wearing body armour,’ she continued. ‘And when Mister Jarrow said those things were state of the art, he was lying like a son of a bitch.
I’m
the state of the art. Now put that gun down before you hurt yourself and start running.’

As they bolted towards one of the doors, Aneka walked over to the crate of grenades and began setting the timer rings mounted on the top of the stubby cylinders.

‘Gwy? You in the neighbourhood?’

‘I am fifteen seconds out. There are armoured vehicles heading in your direction, but I will be there at least forty-three seconds before they arrive.’

‘Put down outside and prepare for immediate dust-off.’ Aneka turned the ring on the grenade she was holding to sixty seconds and then set three more before turning and walking swiftly towards the doors. Her cloaking system cut in on the second stride and she vanished from sight in a flicker of distorted light.

Gwy, 7.11.559 FSC.

Aneka watched from the flight chair as Gwy carefully manoeuvred herself into the hangar bay of a light wormhole carrier. The smaller transports were primarily designed for cargo and shuttles; sliding a larger vessel like Gwy into the bay and locking her down took precision and time. However, the smaller ships were also designed for more discreet insertions. The Elspans were not going to notice the cloaked vessels as they got ready to leave.

‘At least we’ll be back home soon,’ Aneka said, sighing. ‘It seems like years…’

‘A little over two hundred standard days,’ Gwy informed her. ‘Not even one year.’

‘I said it
seems
like years.’

‘Yes. Sorry, I’m concentrating.’

‘Gwy, you can perform routine operations while calculating pi to a billion places.’

‘I do not want any scratches on my hull when I see Aggy again.’

Aneka smirked. ‘No, of course not.’

‘Docking clamps are in place. Wormhole transition in one minute, seventeen seconds. I have received a message that Cassandra is aboard the transport and on her way down.’

Frowning, Aneka slipped out of her seat and started for the gravity lift at the back of the room. ‘Cassandra’s here but not Ella?’

‘Yes. Cassandra needs to speak with you, urgently.’

The tall, blonde android was as beautiful as ever, long legs on show thanks to the simple, white mini-dress she was wearing. The frown she was wearing was unlike her, however, and the fact that she did not immediately hug her friend and the host of her boyfriend tended to indicate that something was
very
wrong.

‘Cassandra,’ Aneka said as soon as the AI was out of the airlock, ‘what’s up? Winter doesn’t want me somewhere–’

‘We’re heading out from the Junction as soon as we get there, but it’s not for Winter,’ Cassandra interrupted. ‘You know that Ella was going to a dig on Lacora?’

‘It was in the final planning stages when I left.’

‘Yes. Something’s happened. The site was attacked. The Amethyst Hyde is out there now trying to determine exactly what happened, but… Ella’s missing.’

Aneka stared at her for a second and then looked up. ‘Gwy? Where’s that fucking wormhole?’

Lacora.

The camp facility which had been set up on Lacora was extensive. There was a mystery surrounding the planet, a mystery which had wiped out the native sentient species and two attempts at Human colonisation before and after the Xinti War. The base had been set up to prevent the same fate befalling those investigating it and, as far as Aneka could tell on first viewing, it had failed.

That impression lasted long enough for her to take in the damage properly. No form of natural disaster had hit the prefabricated structures. She could see impact points from particle beam weapons, evidence of explosives. Someone had attacked this place with fairly sophisticated weaponry. Someone from off-world.

Winter was there, standing in what appeared to be a ruined laboratory when Aneka found her. ‘I want
everything
shipped back to Shadataga for analysis,’ the AI was saying. ‘All of it. Maybe there’s something…’ She trailed off as she spotted Aneka. ‘We’re doing everything we can,’ she said.

‘I’m sure you are, but what do you have?’

‘Unfortunately, very little. Whoever is responsible for this went to a great deal of trouble to eliminate the evidence.’

Aneka looked around. Laboratory equipment lay on the floor, broken for the most part. What might once have been a computer server, the main processor for the base, looked like it had been broken open before someone set off a plasma grenade inside the case. There was blood on the walls…

‘You think you can get
anything
out of the computer?’

‘Unlikely,’ Winter admitted, ‘but we may be able to get scraps from the memory. We have the reports of their progress, but there was nothing indicating any problems before they missed their last check-in. I came out on the Hyde as soon as we failed to raise them.’

‘Cassandra said Ella was missing.’

‘We’ve identified all of the bodies. Ella is the
only
person unaccounted for. We’ve scanned the entire planet and there’s no sign of her.’

Aneka looked at her. ‘The only one? How many–’

‘Thirty-two. Several died in the initial attack, but most of them were executed. This was brutal, Aneka.’

‘Then why keep Ella alive? Never mind that. How much of a head start do they have?’

‘We think they were hit the day after their last check-in. The twenty-first–’

‘Sixteen days… They could be just about anywhere. Maximum of about fifty parsecs out, but that’s going to cover a lot of space.’

‘I would suggest more like thirty parsecs, but probably much closer. I don’t believe it was coincidence that the attack happened so soon after the check-in. I think they were being watched. It gave them almost ten days before we noticed–’

‘They were checking in every ten days? I normally set a five-day period for potentially dangerous sites.’

‘You were not here. Ian Devor was the lead facilitator. Was being the operative word. He was one of the ones we found executed.’

Aneka gave a grunt of displeasure. ‘Devor? How did that sloppy bastard get this?’

‘Ella requested him,’ Bashford stated as he walked into the room. He came in through a wall: using the door seemed pointless. ‘I know you don’t like him, but she seemed to get on with him well enough and he’s not as incompetent as you think. Besides, you were busy.’

Aneka looked around and then back at the bald, muscular Head of Vocational Training. ‘I’m going to reserve judgement on his competence until you’ve worked out how this happened.’

Bashford gave a slight shrug as though conceding the point and then said, ‘This was a military operation. If you’d been here… maybe, but…’ He turned to look at Winter. ‘Have you told her what happened to this building?’

‘No. It was a missile strike, we think. Tore open the side and killed at least three people. It also hurt Ella. We found blood, but no body so–’

‘Ella’s tough,’ Aneka stated flatly. ‘We
made
her tough. What’s the plan?’

‘We’ve combed every inch of this place,’ Winter stated. ‘I’m having the entire facility boxed up and taken back to Shadataga. We’ll recreate it there and go over it with everything we have.’

Aneka nodded sullenly. ‘Where are the bodies?’

‘On the Hyde,’ Bashford said. ‘What’s left of them anyway.’

‘I want to see them.’

Amethyst Hyde.

Each of the corpses from Lacora had been sealed into an individual container and placed in one of the Hyde’s cargo bays, and even then the only reason Aggy was allowing Aneka in to see them was that she was immune to every known viral and bacterial agent.

‘This… looks unnervingly familiar,’ Aneka said as she looked down at the twisted shape through its casing. There was a crystalline shimmer to the skin, as though something had skimmed the body over with silica.

‘Ella believed the agent which killed the Lacorans was the original virus upon which the Chuck Virus was based,’ Aggy replied. She was a hologram, standing beside Aneka as much to give her company as for information.

‘Shit. Thirty years on and that’s still coming back to haunt us. I thought that was artificial, based on Xinti tech?’

‘It is. Artificial anyway. This is a simpler nanovirus than the one we’ve met before. Someone enhanced its capabilities and made it more species specific. This one affects more or less any organic life form, aside from plant life.’

‘Why the Hell would someone make something like that? Uh, that was rhetorical. I know why.’

‘Indeed. Warfare. Our own nanotechnology was keeping it off the researchers while they were alive, but when they died it began eating. It seems that it simply converts the body into a viral production machine rather than a chuck. These bodies are showing minimal signs of biological activity even now, but it seems that converting a corpse is not effective. Still, we’ll need to ensure the virus is dead before we can perform proper burials.’

Aneka nodded. ‘Lena Freemont. She was only seventy. Younger than Ella was when I first met her…’

‘You’ll find her, Aneka. I have every confidence in you doing so.’

Aneka looked at the golden woman standing beside her and nodded again, more slowly this time. ‘I’m going to have to take Gwy away from you again. Sorry.’

‘I know.’

‘You’ll have tonight. I need to review a few options. I can’t run off hunting for her without somewhere to start.’

‘No, of course not. I have assessed the situation and sent the most probable targets to Gwy for your consideration.’

‘Thank you. Fast work.’

‘Not really. As soon as we found out Ella was missing, I knew you would be going after her.
None
of us expect you to sit around and wait.’

Aneka managed a bleak smile. ‘I’m that obvious?’

‘Under the circumstances, yes.’

‘Al,’ Aneka said silently, ‘you’d better make sure you’ve said farewell to Cassandra–’

‘If you honestly believe she won’t be coming with us,’ her AI interrupted, ‘then I’m going to have to believe that worry is incapacitating you to an unacceptable degree.’