Hegemony (25 page)

Job done for now, one of her men glided over to the body, still spinning in free-fall, but now silent.

"Sorry, but he's dead."

"Daemon?" Ylayn asked. A daemon in an avatar might still be "alive"; just killing the body might not hurt the neural-net mind.

"No, human. Dead meat," the man said, and Ylayn shrugged. Bad luck. Oh well.

Ylayn could see the command pods light up as her team activated them. For a few minutes, there was no sound on the command deck. The team was taking control of the ship, getting it ready.

Then Ylayn heard the clang of airtight hatches closing as the ship separated its pressure environment from the station. A rumble was building, audible through the hull; first a sound, and then a vibration.

Suddenly, slowly, the ship was moving. She had pulled away from the docking spire, blasting the tough structure of the spire with plasma exhaust from her maneuvering drives. The station hull was deliberately armored against a ship's plasma thrust. This close in, the fusion plume of the main drive would still have vaporized station's armor, but the maneuver drives were much less powerful. Outside the armored core of the docking spire, causeways and connecting hoses tore and snapped, venting clouds of atmosphere and liquid into space. Severed power conduits arced and spat sparks as the vast freight-liner lurched away from the station, scattering work-pods and maintenance shuttles like leaves in a wind. There was a tiny thump as an automated work pod collided with the 'liner and was smashed aside in a tumble of fragments. No doubt the communications channels would be full of alarms and screams.

Timing was everything, thought Ylayn as she watched the station fall away. It always was. The team had had to wait for the 'liner to be ready for this, for the singularity reactor to be refitted, and for new escape shuttles to be fitted aboard, since many of the old ones had been destroyed by the damage the ship had taken. And finally, just yesterday, the repair crews had used the anchorage station's vast power to start up the 'liner's singularity reactor. The team had been waiting for that. Starting up a cold singularity reactor would have taken dedicated specialists who weren't usually part of an infiltration team. Besides, there was no easy way to start the reactor quickly and covertly. They would have had to subvert and hijack the station's power systems to do it; that would have been very risky. But now, there was no need, since the repair crew had done it for them. Now the ship would have power without needing to draw it from anchorage station. Power to do this.

The freight-liner
was moving. On schedule, Nas thought. At this range, even if the  main optical scopes could have had a clear view they could not have provided much detail. But still, even with just the tiny sensor relay drones, it was easy enough to see the ship. If one knew where to look, even a low-end optical sensor could see something the size of the freight-liner at millions of kilometers. In fact the
Whisperknife
was a lot closer than that, parked in a waiting pattern holding orbit less than a hundred thousand kilometers away. There was a risk in that; even with her fake hull panels the converted swift-ship looked like a predator. The size of her drive and radiators alone would have raised alarms: too big for a civilian ship, too much mass devoted to speed. An experienced observer might also have noted that the
Whisperknife's
"cargo pods" were placed to conceal the places where weapons mounts would be, if she were a warship. So Nas had taken precautions, choosing a parking orbit that interposed one of the gas giant's tiny moons, just a captured asteroid a few kilometers across, between the
Whisperknife
and the station. But plenty of other sensors could see them.

But that was the other side of the coin about optical sensors, Nas thought. They could see for millions of kilometers, but their view was very narrow. A quick scan with wide array sensors would show no details, and there was no reason that anyone would task a high magnification optical sensor to look at his ship. There were never enough of the "scopes" to look at everything at the same time, and there was every reason to expect that the local authorities had seen nothing out of the ordinary. Of course they knew
where
his ship was; the exhaust plume of an active drive could be seen for
billions
of kilometers. But in this busy system, unless she did something unusual, the
Whisperknife
was just one more contact, indistinguishable from hundreds of civilian ships.

The infiltration team was doing well; the 'liner looked like it was on course.

The station's traffic control would probably expect the stolen freight-liner to make a run for the edge of the gas giant's planetary system, to try to escape via an FTL transit. After all, why steal the ship if you don't mean to get away with it?

Why indeed? Nas could think of many reasons, but none were a perfect fit to the facts. Why had the ship been attacked in the first place, and now, why was someone so keen to have it destroyed? There was no cargo left on the ship; Nas had been paid to ensure that certain cargos were never delivered before, but that couldn't be the case this time.

Was there still something on that ship that had to be destroyed? Or was it the ship that was the target? Maybe its owners needed this ship for something... insurance would pay for the loss, but money wasn't the same as
having
a ship. Or maybe money was the point. It might have been the owners, or their agents, who wanted the ship gone. Nas could imagine someone wanting the insurance money in place of a badly damaged ship. Or maybe that was just that the conclusion that his employer wanted someone else to make?

Not that it mattered, really. The
Whisperknife
's orbital transfer shuttle had been carefully pre-positioned, launched well before the 'liner started to move, which reduced the odds of anyone noticing where it came from when the business got hot.

The little shuttle was already inbound, burning its little plasma reaction drives to build a vector that would match vectors with and intercept the 'liner in less than half an hour. Once the shuttle docked with the 'liner, the impossibility of smuggling a nuclear demolition charge onto the anchorage station would be quite moot. The nuclear mining charge that the shuttle would deliver was small, as nukes went. But it was going to be detonated right inside the freight-liner. At the very least, it would still be enough blow the huge ship to radioactive fragments. If it actually set off the singularity reactor, instead of just tearing it apart, then that would reduce the ship to radioactive vapor. Either way would work fine.

The tricky part was timing. Timing was always the tricky part; timing to get the 'liner's singularity reactor up and running, a task his infiltration team could not have done themselves; timing to put the two local guard-ships on the wrong vector in their complex patrol orbit around the gas giant; and now, last, timing to bring the little shuttle in to dock with the 'liner. Nas allowed himself the thought that he was quite good at timing.

---

"What in
hell
could they be doing?" asked Section Supervisor Kanton, again, mostly to himself. He supposed he was still talking to Smit, who was now fully committed to tracking the 'liner. There was no communication from the 'liner, and somehow the comm-code for the repair contractor whose team were aboard was answering with a recording of a cosmetic products commercial.

"Could it really be a runaway, sir?" asked Smit.

"Of course it's a damned runaway! They've hit a work pod, for God's sakes!" said Kanton. His voice was getting high pitched. "Maybe a short in the maneuver drives, or a computer problem!"

"A short in the maneuver drives that just happens to pull the ship away from the dock?" asked Smit. "And then lights up their main drive?"

"Or a computer error, dammit! Maybe a pre-programmed undocking-and-departure routine got executed!" said Kanton, almost shouting. "They must be out of control!"

Maddeningly, the rest of his team had to continue to run local traffic, dealing with a cascade of confusion as the runaway freight-liner disrupted arrival and departure schedules and plowed, heedless, through approach lanes. The 'liner was on a corkscrew of a course, accelerating seemingly at random. At least the giant ship hadn't lit her main drive too close to the station, Kanton thought, as the communication channel to the repair crew's main office continued to play an annoying jingle for insta-tan lotion.

His comm system was showing another incoming message; it was the PTC watch supervisor. God damn it all! Now the fucking supervisor wanted to know what the progress on the "situation" was. Kanton smoothed his uniform and looked briefly at his reflection in one of the vid-screens; the supervisor's call was a holographic video call, not a direct interface connection.

"Sir," Kanton began, as the supervisor's holographic face appeared in front of him.

"Sir," came another voice. It was Smit, intruding a max-priority call into the comm line.

"Controller Smit, get off this line!" shouted Kanton.

"Sir," Smit continued, addressing the supervisor in a calm voice. "I have reason to believe that the 'liner has been stolen!"

---

"The device is not, repeat, not operational, Captain." Ylayn's voice was far from calm. She spoke quietly but with exaggerated clarity. No room for misunderstandings. Somehow, she could feel the captain's presence. It felt much closer than the hundred thousand or so kilometers that actually separated the captain, aboard
Whisperknife
, from Ylayn, sitting in one of the command pods of the freight-liner
Ulia's Flower
.

Lag was not a serious issue. It took less than a half a second for her signal to reach the captain, less than a half a second for his reply to reach her. None the less, there was a long pause.

"What do you mean, it's not operational?" came Nas Killick's voice.

"We went over it with diagnostic tools, Captain. The detonator is too old; the initiator is just fucked. The super-conductors are decayed. It won't go off."

"Shit. Can you fix it?"

"Hyuer says no. We'd need a full micro-factory setup, and it'd be nuclear ordinance work; we didn't bring anyone who can do it."

There was a pause, and Ylayn could almost imagine the captain pacing. He usually paced when things went wrong, if he could. Though with the ship in free-fall, he couldn't now, Ylayne thought. There was always a sense, with the captain, of restrained energy. New members of the crew sometimes thought he might lash out at the crew that brought him bad news. But he never did. Plenty in the Brotherhoods did use violence to control their crews. Not the captain, though. It was, Ylayn mused, as if having so much ability, so much potential for violence, made the actual act unnecessary. Thinking of the captain brought a faint thrill of attraction. She wished she were with him now, aboard
Whisperknife
.

"OK," came the captain's voice. "I'm bringing the shuttle back. We'll load the nuclear device off of one of the old anti-ship warheads instead and send it back to you. That will go off, or there's at least one ordinance master that's floating home without a vac-suit."

"OK, captain. I'll get everyone on the navigation, and we'll update our vector info to you for the new rendezvous." Ylayn's voice was brisk, businesslike. The captain liked that, she knew.

The shuttle was headed back. Its tiny drive was flaring bright, building a vector back to the
Whisperknife
. It would be arriving in about half an hour. That was enough time. Nas did not allow slack for his crew, not on ship, on duty. Reaction mass tanks would be standing by to refuel the shuttle. The power coils would have to be recharged as well;
Whisperknife
had an ultra-compact singularity reactor for power, but it still took up almost a third of the swift-ship's internal volume. The smallest singularity reactor was
far
too large to fit into the shuttle. So was a fission reactor, given how small a swift-ship's shuttle had to be. Instead, compact superconductor coils storing vast amounts of power were crammed into the little shuttle. But the shuttle's plasma drives
used
vast amounts of power, accelerating reaction mass to almost one percent of the speed of light. The design used reaction mass and power in equal measure; no point having one without the other. So the shuttle would arrive almost out of both. 

Refueling was fast, but recharging the power coils meant cooling them back down to their ideal super-conductive state, and that would take more time. There was no point trying to use the little atmospheric interface shuttle that rode piggyback on the
Whisperknife's
dorsal aspect. Its reaction mass tankage was barely adequate for limited orbital maneuvers; air intakes sucked in atmosphere for reaction mass when the interface shuttle landed or took off from a habitable planet; it was useless for deep space operations like this. So there was no way around taking the time to refuel and recharge the
Whisperknife's
orbital transfer shuttle.

Time was the issue, Nas knew, but if your timing was good, you could use delays to your advantage. Recharging the power coils on the shuttle would give his crew enough time to strip the nuclear device out of an old anti-ship warhead and cram it into the orbital transfer shuttle's little cargo hold. He'd have the ordinance master ride back with the shuttle. That way there would be no problem in setting the nuke to explode.