Hegemony (30 page)

There were times when Nas might dwell on this sort of thing, sometimes to plan his course, and sometimes just to stoke the anger that he used for his edge. But just now the whole matter had little appeal. The mission had succeeded, and Nas felt more satisfaction than worry.

He turned to Ylayn, who was standing poised beside him, and smiled. Ylayn was very good at her job, and the ship needed a data intrusion expert. So she would have had a place on his ship even is hadn't been exotically lovely and an extremely skilled lover. And of course, if a good fuck was all she was, she wouldn't have had a place here at all. But, as she liked to say, it was good to mix business with pleasure.

He slowly looked her up and down, taking in the compact lithe figure, little of which was hidden by the minimal clothing she had reverted to as soon as she was back aboard the
Whisperknife.
He didn't particularly like the feline features or the fur that was her latest Modification, but hers was smooth and soft as velvet, and fur or no fur, she was the most skilled bed partner he knew. It would be good to relax.

"Ylayn?" he said, smiling, turning her name into a question.

"Yesss..." she answered, which was all the answer he needed.

"OK," he said, his smile growing. "Go on back to my quarters, get out of what

you're wearing, and wait for me. I'll be there as soon as I help out with the status check... Unless you're too worn out from whatever boy-toy you fucked to get those access codes?"

"Not at
all
worn out, Captain," said Ylayn with a bright smile, the tip of her tongue tracking across her dainty pointed teeth. Her eyes glittered. "I like my work, but there's no way I'd let it get in the way of my play."

---

Labeck Pyer unplugged the secure data feed cable from the interface port at the back of his neck with a faint click, more felt that heard, and slowly stretched, flexing shoulders and arching his back. His body had barely moved for most of the last two standard hours.

At length Pyer allowed himself a thin smile. One bit of clean-up done at last. The
Ulia's Flower
, the freight-liner that had deliberately escaped destruction, was now destroyed. Of course, it was not the actual destruction of the ship that mattered; it was that the destruction of the ship would call the right sort of attention to itself. People would be wondering why. Which was what Pyer and his masters wanted them to wonder. The plan was still too complex, but at least this part was working.

But now there was one more bit of clean-up to attend to; the void-runner ship that had destroyed the freight-liner. Luckily,
that
bit was going to be easy. In fact, it would take care of itself. Each of the warheads he had obtained for the pirate had a simple nano-scale timer, separate from, but linked into the weapons' control systems. Isolated from the control system of the weapons and so small as to be almost indetectable, there was no practical way that the pirates could have found the timer modules, even assuming that they had checked.

Each timer had been running down from the moment they had received his coded signal, broadcast as soon as he had confirmed the initiation of the attack on the freight-liner. That had been the only worry; if the void-runner ship had FTL'd out of the system quickly enough, before the light-lagged signal reached them, they would have escaped. But they hadn't... not in time.

And now, in less than twenty hours, the activated timers would reach zero, and then the little nano-structure modules would begin to grow, integrating with the detonator control systems of each warhead. Once they were integrated, they would simultaneously activate the detonators of each warhead. Idly, Pyer hoped that whatever system the pirate ship had transited to, it would be in deep space when the warheads detonated. He didn't want to cause needless collateral damage.

---

"Look at this," said Muir.

He and Freya had taken stock after a few exhausted minutes of just sitting, next to the smoldering wreck of their skimmer and the body of their attacker. Freya still felt that she could not get a good purchase on what had just happened.

Her injuries were mostly no worse than the equivalent of bad bruises, and even the burns would heal, or be easily repaired. But Freya found herself shaking and unable to stop, a psychosomatic reaction. She had been in battle before, had been shot at before. But that was aboard a ship, in space, and even though it seemed to Freya that the danger of death was the same, she could see that her reaction to this was going to be different.

They had searched the body of their attacker, and looking around, had found his skimmer touched down neatly in the same clearing which they had crash landed in. Freya, with her hands still shaking, had taken off the man's helmet. A quick check had shown that he was human, and very dead. He was no one Freya knew, though she could not shake the feeling that she might have seen this man before. Muir found no familiarity at all. They had checked the man for more weapons, but he was unarmed except for the laser.

Next they had checked the man's aircar, a nice looking skimmer with a retractable canopy. It was a four-seater, if you stretched the definition of seats to include the little padded shelves behind the two real seats. According to its logo, the skimmer was a
Synergy Electron IV
. Freya did not recognize the make; nothing strange about that, she had never before been to this world, and only a handful of aircar makers were interstellar. But the basic type was familiar enough; an expensive toy, made to go fast and feel faster. They had found a spare charge clip for the laser lying on the passenger seat. When they looked, the traffic computer in the dashboard was still running a tracking program, looking for the traffic code of some other aircar. It wasn't finding it, but Freya suspected that their own wrecked skimmer was the target of the search. The laser fire, or the crash, must have destroyed the traffic beacon that the computer was searching for. But there was no doubt that this man had been hunting for them, tracking their skimmer and armed to attack them.

Muir said, "I think I found his personal comp." He was holding up a small cylinder, the size of a pen or a stylus, that looked nothing like a wrist-comp.

Muir's words gave her something else to focus on, and she gratefully turned her attention to what he had found.

"What is it?" she asked.

"A portable computer. Like a wrist-comp, but concealed. I thought it was a data entry stylus, but then there was no wrist-comp to use it with. But when you open this cap, you've got a standard data port. And when you press this stud," Muir showed her, "you get it to open, like this, and there's a holographic interface."

"Neat toy," Freya said. "This fellow was obviously after us, but there's a lot I don't get here. No spare weapon. I've never heard of an assassin or gunman who didn't carry a spare weapon. Not even a shock-stick or a knife."

Muir nodded. "The secret porta-comp is right out of some cheap spy drama. Why not have a normal wrist-comp?"

Freya said, "Maybe this guy's wrist comp was full of stuff he didn't want anyone to see. I don't think he was a..." she shuddered as she spoke, "...professional assassin." She paused to draw another long breath. The shaking was still there, but she was beginning to get control of it. She tried not to dwell on what would have happened had the man been a professional. "Can you tell what's on that concealed computer of his?" she asked.

"Maybe, Captain. It's..." Muir paused as he activated the little comp. "It's not a military encryption. Commercial, I think. A Fleet wrist-comp should be enough for me to crack it."

Freya said, "This guy really
was
an amateur."

"He almost got us anyway," said Muir, as he set his own wrist comp to work, plugging one interface wire into the other computer and another into a socket at the back of his neck.

"Too close," echoed Freya.

Why was an amateur assassin gunning for them? Freya thought. Or maybe just for her? Still, why? She fingered the laser pistol he had used; a 50mm military sidearm laser. The weapon was styled with some useless cosmetic decorations but it seemed solidly made. The controls were familiar enough. The weapon was set to a highly focused pulse, intended to burn through a tough target like a white-hot needle. The pistol was not Fleet issue, and not, she thought, from a system defense fleet either. Or at least not of a sort she had seen yet; the Hegemony's system defense fleets were a vast confederation of separate organizations and standardization was a goal to strive for, not always attained. The laser was perfectly deadly, whatever the make was.

"Muir," Freya said, coming back to a thought that had briefly bothered her, "why are you carrying a concealed needler?"

"Ah, Captain," Muir smiled slightly, his tone and manner settling back to his usual levity, "you don't, I suppose, have that much familiarity with old lineage politics."

Freya was pleased to see Muir return to his usual manner. Seeing Muir lose his jocular manner had underscored the danger. On the other hand, she was nowhere close to calm herself. "You know I don't, Muir, so get to the point."

"Of course, Captain. When we were informed that you would not be returning to command
Ice Knife
, I... let us say I suspected that all might not be well. And if I wasn't
certain
that there would be trouble, well, I also wasn't certain there wouldn't be. I thought a small weapon might be, uhm... fashionable, planet-side, just now." Muir smiled sadly again. "Had I known, I'd have brought an infantry combat laser, or at least a pulse laser sidearm. And another for you."

Freya frowned. "Assassination is not a usual part of Hegemony politics, Muir. Or are you telling me it is?"

"Not a usual part, no. But not unheard of, particularly among powerful lineages out here on the frontier. Well, on the frontier as the Central Throne would see it; I know we're at least three FTL transits from the actual border." Muir made a deprecating gesture, a flip of the hand with his usual grace, then went on, "But something about the situation made me... perhaps a touch nervous, as opposed to just suspicious."

Freya said, "I think I know what you mean. The
acro-telestos'
'offer' of promotion to an SDF guard-ship was a trap if ever I saw one. Do you think that the local system
archon
has suborned him? That there's some sort of intent by the Yuro system against the Central Throne?"

"No... no, that wouldn't quite fit, I think. I think that the destruction of the
Conquering Sun
has to play into this, but that's going to bring in
more
Fleet ships, sooner or later. I can't see how that would be any good for a system hoping to break away--" Muir stopped suddenly as his wrist-comp pinged.

"Captain, we just got past the encryption on that concealed comp," said Muir.

"Well, what's on it?"

"Not too much," said Muir, in a tone that belied his words, "but this
might
be of some interest; there's a code here that's designed to grant access to the Yuro Defense Fleet's Fourth Medical Annex building, in New Capital City, and then erase the record of the access. That's for starters. There's also a number of a medical neural net system in the Annex and shut-down codes for that system, and the shut-down codes have the same 'clean-up' program in them, so there'll be no record of the shutdown."

"What does that mean, Muir?"

"It means, this fellow has codes to enter into a military hospital, kill a daemon stored there, and leave, and leave no trace of how it happened."

"Shit."

"Right."

"How the fuck do you get codes like that?" asked Freya.

"I can think of two way, I suppose. You could run a long term, high-intensity data penetration against the Medical Annex's computer systems... or you could have
access
to those systems to begin with, and design these codes to do what they do from the inside. I know where my money would be in a wager though, Captain."

"At this point, Muir, mine too. So we weren't the only would-be victims on this amateur assassin's hit list. Do you know who else this bastard was supposed to kill?"

"Yes. The identification is here too; 'Deputy Wave Leader / Interceptor Pilot Alekzandra Neel; Sigma-99-Alpha-29-Theta-22,
Conquering Sun.'
The interceptor pilot we picked up."

---

Captain Nas Killick of the Brotherhood swift-ship
Whisperknife
snapped open his eyes. He had been dozing in his command pod, but the signal from one of his crew had woken him.

His ordinance master and gunner, Xulios Kavi, had something for him... something that the man had tagged as maximum priority and maximum security. Nas' eyes widened at that, and he plugged a data line into his implant.

"What is it?" he asked, vocalizing into the data link.

"Captain," the ordinance man said, "we have a really serious problem..."

---

The face on the display seemed to be made of shadow. There was a hint of a nose, darkness for eyes, shadow for a mouth. The voice was flat, the timbre metallic. Pyer thought the entire matter foolish. If this man's (if it was a man) face was so secret, why use a visual communication? None the less, he answered the first recognition phrase with the correct counter phrase, and waited for the second. It came, after a tiny pause, and Pyer nodded to the man.