Aneka Jansen 7: Hope (21 page)

‘But if they were planning to attack Iyonvrie… maybe?’

‘Doesn’t work. There were no warheads, and that fleet is too small for an invasion. The Pinnacle have ten of those hulking bastards.
Had
ten. They’d have sent six, and a lot more cruisers, and logistics vessels, transports for troops… No, those were there because they were expecting us. They dangled a big, juicy worm in front of me and they knew I’d have to take it and then… What the fuck happened to them?’

‘I don’t know. Something major. Something
very
coordinated. Meticulous.’ There was a pause; Aneka could almost hear Ella’s mind going over the possibilities. ‘I’d almost say… But that would be crazy.’

There were sounds, but nothing Aneka could identify. Ella thought the destruction looked like Aneka’s work; she was only dismissing it because it seemed so highly unlikely that Aneka could actually be there.

Then she heard Kade say, ‘I know a better way of making the ghosts go away. And I’m not drunk this time.’ Well, that explained the sounds.

Aneka cut the feed off from her own mind. ‘Let me know when they’re asleep. Keep an eye on the crew. When it goes quiet, we’ll go in.’

‘You’re disappointed in her?’

‘Not sure yet. I wouldn’t say no to Kade myself. I’m just not keen on Ella bedding a woman who seems to care more about her revenge on the Pinnacle than pretty much anything else.’

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There was no one on duty in the gun compartment. The weapon was powered down, dormant, and she ship was running on a minimal active complement. There was no need for anyone to be in the dark room, so there was no one to see Aneka slip out of her hiding place.

Her nanosuit was a belt around her waist now and she paused to strap her holster to her thigh before moving out. Her screens could provide concealment if she needed it, but Al was monitoring the corridor cameras and they were showing empty halls. The crew were sleeping, or in rooms and on duty. In the engineering section, a small, plump man was tinkering with some small gadget. Data feeds Al had tracked suggested that about half the crew were actually awake and watching porn. Well, there were relatively few women on the crew, so that was, perhaps, to be expected. The cat-girl was on duty on the bridge; Al had seen one other go in with her.

‘Gwy? Situation?’ Aneka asked.

‘We are in orbit at one of the Trojan points of the largest of the system’s gas giants, approximately three light seconds from the station. I am standing off at two thousand metres. Cassandra is worried.’

‘I’m not… worried as such,’ Cassandra’s voice cut in. ‘Concerned, perhaps. I think Ella may take all this badly, and I believe we have found at least one spy on Haven.’

‘Oh?’

‘We found an image which had been transmitted to the system’s main network. It contains embedded data which we cracked using one of the Pinnacle’s military encryption systems. It was little more than an acknowledgement of receipt of a report, but it seemed to indicate that someone informed the Pinnacle when the Hope left.’

‘Could you have found it without the stuff we stole from the Pinnacle?’

‘Found it? Yes. Decrypting it would have taken longer. Nothing Haven, or Kade herself, has access to could have broken it within an acceptable time frame.’

‘I’m shaky on the whole “acceptable time frame” thing…’

‘Several centuries.’

‘Okay… Just so you know, I’m going to be pretty shitty to Ella for a while. I need to find out where Kade’s loyalties lie.’

‘That’s fine,’ Cassandra said. ‘I think she deserves it.’

Letting herself grin, Aneka dropped down the access ladder to the lower floor and then followed the route Al had worked out from the security cameras to Kade’s cabin on the upper level.

‘Okay, cut all the comms in and out of the room, and unlock the door.’

‘The door,’ Al said, ‘is not locked. It appears that the locking systems all through the ship have been disabled centrally. They could be activated, but they do not automatically seal.’

‘Really? How… egalitarian, or something. When we get in, lock down all the doors in the midsection.’

The room was dimly lit, but Aneka’s eyes were the highest spec Winter had been able to fit into her body. Kade was lying on her back, sprawled out on a lot of cushions, which seemed to be her idea of furniture. Ella lay on her side, face buried in a cushion, nearby. Both of them were naked and Aneka suppressed a sudden burst of anger. This was
not
the same as Ian Devor.

Stepping smoothly across the room, Aneka stood over Kade, one foot between her spread legs, and aimed her pistol directly at the pirate’s face. ‘Al, turn the lights on.’ Light flooded the room.

Kade’s eyes flickered open. ‘What the fuck?’ Green eyes focussed on the wide barrel of the gun sticking in her face. ‘Oh shit!’

Ella stirred, turning onto her back and blinking as she tried to work out what was going on, eventually realised who was holding the gun… ‘Aneka!’

‘Oh yes,’ Aneka said, her gun remaining quite level. ‘“Oh shit, it’s Aneka.”’ For some reason, the irrational anger was back and it was not as hard as she had expected to act the outraged spouse.

‘But–’

‘First I hear you’ve been kidnapped. Then I hear you’ve been shagging Ian fucking Devor behind my back. Then I find out the people that grabbed you were probably Pinnacle. And when I finally track you down you’re shacked up with Pirate Queen Barbie here!’

‘Yes, but how are you here? How the Hell did you find me?’

Aneka barked out a mirthless laugh. ‘Oh, that was actually pretty damn easy. I’ve spent months developing contacts in the region. One of them put me on your track. If you’d stayed in Haven I’d have caught up with you days ago. Instead, I have to come here to save your sorry butt.’

‘You did–’ Kade began.

‘Yeah. You were wondering what happened to those ships and the station? Well,
I
happened to them.
I
killed five thousand, four hundred people so they didn’t kill you. Now you better explain to me why I bothered
pretty fucking fast
or I’m going to pull this barge apart with my bare hands!’

Part Six: The Death of Captain Kade

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‘Can I at least get dressed before you kill me?’ Kade asked.

‘I’m enjoying the view,’ Aneka replied, but she lifted her pistol and stepped back, turning away as she holstered her weapon.

‘What the Hell kind of gun is that anyway?’ Getting to her feet, the captain began collecting her clothes.

‘Now you’ve done it,’ Ella muttered as she followed suit.

‘This little beauty,’ Aneka said, patting her holster, ‘is Racine, a fifteen-millimetre, gravity pulse smart-gun with micro-replicator ammunition feed. She’s capable of firing twenty three-millimetre projectiles at roughly seventy per cent of light speed in one second, or a variety of situational combat rounds, including non-lethal projectiles and micro-missiles, at lower velocities, all selectable as required by the user. She features integral sighting through a multi-spectral, high-zoom imaging system and integrates fully with my internal targeting mechanisms. I came up with the concept, but it took a genius and two of the most intelligent AIs in the galaxy to actually make it work. Any questions?’

‘Uh… Yeah. Who the Hell are you, lady?’ Kade had managed to get her composure back, and with it came the anger.

‘Aneka Jansen, born third of March, nineteen-eighty-three. That’s a bit over twelve hundred years ago. I was kidnapped by the Xinti and turned into a robot, and then a Xinti AI gave me this body, which is far superior to either of the old ones and quite capable of ripping off your arms and legs so I can bludgeon the rest of you to death with them. So, aside from the fact that I didn’t want my cheating partner to die, why did I just kill a lot of people?’

Any answer she might have got was postponed by the banging on the door. ‘Boss?’ It was Lanyon’s voice. ‘Boss, are you okay? Someone heard shouting and all the doors have locked. Boss?’

‘Unlock it,’ Aneka said silently.

The door opened and the big man was left blinking at the scene in front of him. He put two and two together, got a fairly accurate answer and, letting out a roar of rage, charged.

‘Lanyon! No!’ Ella shrieked.

Aneka let him get a pace into the room before raising her left hand. The air rippled in front of it, and Lanyon gasped as the air was blasted out of his lungs and he was pushed back to the doorway. He staggered, blinked at them and then keeled over backwards. The door slid closed.

‘Lock it,’ Aneka instructed. Then, aloud, she said, ‘He’ll probably be fine once the shock wears off. You were saying, Barbie?’

‘Who’s Barbie?’ Kade asked.

‘She was a child’s doll,’ Ella mumbled. ‘She had… large breasts and an out-of-proportion figure. They made costumes for her.’

‘Hence “Pirate Queen Barbie,”’ Aneka explained. ‘I mean, seriously, have you looked at yourself in a mirror? Remind me to see if I’ve got
Pirates of the Caribbean
in the library as at least you’d be wearing slightly more authentic bad pirate costumes.’

Ella sighed. ‘Johnny Depp…’

‘I feel like I just walked in on a conversation I have no clue about,’ Kade growled. ‘You seem to know a fair bit about me. Surely you’ve figured out I’m trying to stop these bastards taking over the galaxy?’

‘Nope. I see a woman hell-bent on revenge for the loss of her people who’ll go to just about any lengths to destroy the Pinnacle, but that’s got nothing to do with stopping them. You want them gone, and you don’t really seem to care who gets hurt while you do it.’

‘That’s not true!’ Ella said. ‘She saved me. She’s saved a lot of people. She–’

‘Sells nuclear weapons to arms dealers who I
know
sell those on for use against civilians. Lives within a culture which idolises brigandry and is scared of every last pirate it busily idolises. And at the same time they’re enslaving captured Pinnacle women. For use in brothels.’

Ella shrank back, wrapping her arms around her chest and clutching her clothes to her breasts.

‘They–’ Kade began.

‘Is it true?’ Ella asked. Her voice was quiet, but there was so much hurt in it that Kade stopped.

‘Ella–’

‘Is it true?’

‘There are some…’ Kade trailed off as Ella closed her eyes.

‘The Pinnacle are assholes, but one of their core beliefs is their superiority over the other subspecies. They’ve internalised it. I could see it in their eyes while they were torturing me. They didn’t care, because I was little more than an animal. You’re taking women like that and making them into sex toys for people they’d probably think were beneath them anyway. As far as they are concerned, every day, dozens of animals come to fuck them, and they don’t have any choice but to accept it.’ Ella opened her eyes and looked at Kade. ‘And they’re right. They
are
being fucked by animals.’ She marched toward the door, screaming in frustration when it would not open. When it did, she pushed past Lanyon, who was standing there looking very uncertain, and hurried off down the corridor.

‘Track her,’ Aneka said.

‘I am following her,’ Al replied.

‘Well, that went better than expected,’ Aneka said aloud. ‘She hasn’t totally lost her sense of taste. You have space in your hangar bay for a hundred-tonne ship. I want to bring mine in and dock her.’

‘Are you… crazy?’ Kade asked.

‘It wouldn’t be the first time someone’s suggested I am, but I do need to talk to you about all this and what you’re going to do next, so I dock Gwy in your hangar, or we have to piss about with docking tubes.’

‘You don’t trust–’

‘There’s an implosion bomb attached to your reactor. If you try anything I’ll leave you stranded here for the Pinnacle to find when they turn up to investigate the station.’

‘I don’t recall us planting such a device,’ Al commented.

‘We didn’t. I wonder how much effort she’s going to spend trying to find it.’

‘Dock the ship,’ Kade growled at her.

‘Very reasonable of you, Captain.’ Turning on her heel, Aneka headed for the door. Lanyon stepped quickly aside as she approached, but she waved for him to follow her. ‘Come on, big guy, you’ve probably got broken ribs and I want you checked for internal injuries. We’ll have you back to fighting strength in no time.’

‘Uh…’ he started.

‘Move!’

‘Yes, ma’am!’

~~~

Ella lay on her bed with her eyes closed, trying not to think about anything. She had never really mastered it as a technique. In fact, she really sucked at it. Her mind tended to work at full speed all the time, and then it had been overclocked. When the door of her cabin opened, she knew exactly who it was without opening her eyes.

‘Fuck off, Ana.’

‘I just wanted a chance to explain.’ From the sound of it, the captain had stayed just outside the door, which was an improvement.

‘You lied to me, and you covered up how bad things are on Haven. You needed a pilot and… Or is it that you’re hoping to get Shadataga to side with you? Were you planning to use me for that too?’ There was a long enough pause that Ella knew she had at least considered it. ‘You know what? Get out. In a bit I’ll go and
beg
Aneka to take me back with her, and you can go fuck yourself.’

‘Okay, so I thought about it. And okay, so I maybe could have checked the dealers I was selling to better, but the slaves thing? That was in place before I ever got to Haven. I’ve
never
brought a woman back there from the Pinnacle. I hit military ships and bases. They don’t put women on those.’

‘Have you ever tried to stop it?’

‘Uh… no.’

‘You’re all just proving them right. Sure, they take slaves, so you have to go one better and make them do the most degrading thing they could possibly be forced into. I’m willing to bet they
never
sell arms to other species either. Go away, Ana. Let me get my self-recrimination over with so I can work on my begging.’

Gwy.

‘All right, strip.’ Aneka stood in the medical bay, which had not been there until Gwy had reconfigured the space, hand on her hip, and stared at Lanyon.