Hegemony (40 page)

On the other hand, that ability was not unlimited, and perhaps it could be used against them. To transfer a daemon required a hyper-bandwidth data link, usually a laser comm of considerable power. The swift-ship had the capability to send and receive that sort of data density, but not too many places planet-side had the same capabilities, and a lot of those would be off-limits to the fugitives.

He was almost certain that the fugitives would want to return to the swift-ship in orbit. He was willing to bet on it. If he could cover the locations that the daemons could use to try their transfers, then they would come to him. For a moment, he considered using local assets, hired guns, maybe local criminals, to watch the locations and kill the fugitives. But that would require using the local agent to obtain them; Pyer had nowhere near the time available that it would take to forge such contacts himself. And he did not
want
to use the unreliable local agent again, for more reasons than one; the man might do something stupid again, or he might do the job well, but expose himself to scrutiny in the process.

No, despite the risk, the best course of action was to use his own support team of commandoes. They didn't fit in perfectly, but they were all trained at infiltration, and all were skilled and dedicated soldiers, more than able to do the job. He'd need to find out all the possible uplink points, and have to hope that he wouldn't have to spread his men too thin to cover them all. 

---

"How are you doing?" Muir asked.

"OK. Better," Zandy answered. "I guess it's easier the second time... I took almost a hundred and fifty hours to adapt to my first avatar."

"It does get easier...," Muir agreed. 

Zandy was sitting on a bed in a little rental housing unit, holding her new head with her new hands. The two other officers were sitting in cheap-looking extruded plastic chairs. A noisy ventilation unit in the corner gave a faint but rhythmic hiss-thump, hiss-thump as it moved air through the dusty room.

The view out the window showed what looked to be an industrial neighborhood, seen from what Zandy guessed was about the 20th floor. The building facing the window looked to be some sort of chemical factory, with rows of pressurized tanks and a maze of color coded pipes, though the colors were faded and patchy.

Zandy had woken up in this little bed, obviously in a new, un-configured avatar. But given what had happened, she was not sure how much of her disorientation was from the new avatar and how much from what had been explained to her.

Executive Officer Muir Zanados and Demi-Captain Freya Tralk had explained the bewildering situation to Zandy, letting her link into the portable data unit that they had captured from the would-be assassin, as well as one of their own data units.

Zandy told herself that, given her disoriented state, it was too much to deal with. Instead, she concentrated on simply acclimating herself to her new body. She could feel the rest of it, the chaos and anger and grief at the loss of the
Conquering Sun,
the confusion and sense of betrayal at the attempted assassinations, all waiting under the surface. But she could not bear to deal with any of it. Not yet.

"Thank you for getting me out of there," Zandy said, abruptly.

"Owed you," Captain Tralk said. "You're part of my command now. And anyway, I wasn't about to leave you helpless in that holding tank."

"What now?" Zandy asked.

"Well, now we get back to my ship," Tralk said. "I'm sorry to say, but your new avatar is going to be a very short ride. We're going to need to get to a secure hyper-bandwidth data link and leave all these avatars behind."

"Oh," Zandy said. "Why bother waking me up, then?"

Zanados interjected, "we needed a place to put your daemon, to get you out of the holding tank. Your records had full face and body-type specs on your preferred avatar, and the quickest thing we could think of was to just purchase an avatar for you. Also, no offense, it was probably the best thing for your mental state given how long you had been in a low-res holding 'net."

"Right," Zandy said, surprised at the bitterness in her own voice, "I suppose there'd have been no point rescuing me if I went irretrievably catatonic or something..."

Zanados looked at her sharply, then away, but Captain Tralk met her eyes.

"I'm sorry, Pilot Officer Neel," Tralk said, "about what happened. I'm not sure I can fully know how you feel, losing the
'Sun
. But Muir and I feel some of it too. We'd been attached with the
Conquering Sun
for a long time... under Captain Ari-Kani's orders for a long time. We've all lost friends."

"It must have been expensive," Zandy said, flat-voiced.

"Expensive?" said Captain Tralk.

"This avatar."

"Well, yes," interjected Muir Zanados. Captain Tralk seemed not to mind.

"Rather expensive," he went on, "particularly since we required very rapid work. But we have the resources. Or rather, we had them. At this point, my private numbered portfolio is getting rather thin, and my other accounts are too easy to trace. On the other hand, it is technically a Fleet mission expense... so I hope to be reimbursed, eventually."

Captain Tralk nodded. "Good thing you're rich, Muir," she said.

"It's a resource, Captain," Muir answered. "You're the one who always says, use the resources you have."

"Why bother?" asked Zandy.

Tralk answered, "given how long you'd already been in a storage 'net, I thought a generic female avatar would be a bad idea. Psychological shock to a daemon that's been in long-term storage is no joke. And it's not a matter of being 'tough enough' to handle it. No one is.

"And anyway, we couldn't just rent a generic avatar; they have tracking tags built in," Tralk continued with a grim smile. "Whereas a limited custom biosim like this is pretty hard to track once we picked it up. Luckily, we could match most of your recorded specs without getting beyond what the vendor could do from one of their default female models. As is, the one you're wearing is fully synthetic; no cloned tissues, of course."

"It's... it's a nice avatar," Zandy said. "I guess it's lucky that... I guess
I'm
lucky that you could match it to me so closely. I... ah..." Zandy took a deep breath, "...thank you. For getting me out."

"You're part of our squadron," Tralk said. "We don't leave people behind if we can help it."

"Well, we can rule out the System Defense Fleet base and all the local government installations," Muir said, a few hours later.

The three of them were sitting around a small fold-out table that was part of the rental unit's minimal furnishings. Muir's pers-comp was set up in holographic mode at the center of the table, displaying a schematic map of New Capital City.

"True. They're almost bound to be watched," Freya said.

"Does that leave us anything?" Zandy asked, almost idly.

"Not much," said Muir.

Finding a hyper-bandwidth link to get them back to the
Ice Knife
was going to be a problem. They had to operate under the assumption of a local traitor in a position of power, and that ruled out every obvious option. It made a physical transfer, using a surface-to-orbit shuttle or taking the orbital elevator, more or less suicidal. It was far too easy for the enemy to watch those. But the presence of a traitor also meant that every government-run uplink installation might be watched as well.

In any case, the attempt to transfer back to the swift-ship was going to have to wait until the ship was ready to fly. With her reactor in the midst of a restart, the
Ice Knife
was stuck, and they would be stuck aboard her if they carried out the transfer of their daemons before the ship's reactor was ready. But, in the meantime, Freya had wanted to do as much as she could to plan out their eventual escape from the planet's surface.

"Are we certain that we couldn't get in and complete the transfer before our hypothetical watchers could react?" asked Muir.

"Can't chance it," Freya said. "First off, all three of us will take some time to transfer. Secondly, they've tried to kill us before. If the traitor has enough resources, and if he's who we expect, he does, then he could have armed men at each of those locations."

"Armed men at the local System Defense Fleet facility?" asked Zandy. "How could he manage that?"

"They'd be local System Defense Force guards, most likely," answered Freya.

"Shit. That's bad," said Zandy.

"Very," said Freya. "For all that this is a Hegemonic World, Pilot Officer Neel, I think we need to consider ourselves in hostile territory.

"For that matter," Freya went on, reaching into her formal uniform blouse and pulling out a needler pistol, "you need a weapon."

She held the pistol out to Zandy. It was a large needler, Zandy saw, as needlers went, though still a compact little pistol; much smaller than the side-arm laser holstered at Captain Tralk's side. Zandy took the proffered needler somewhat hesitantly.

"We took it from the security man who was guarding the storage 'net you were being kept in," Muir said from behind her. "It's got twin-ammo feed; chem-stun and high explosive darts in the magazine. There's no tracking hardware or bugs that I can detect.

"This way we're all armed." Muir went on, holding up his own needler, an even more compact weapon, finished in shiny mirror black with the grips inlayed with platinum wire.

"No bugs?" Zandy echoed, and Muir nodded. She wasn't trained with needlers. Fleet Academy training focused on laser weapons, Fleet standard issue. Zandy tried to activate her new avatar's wireless data feeds, found them workable. The needler's tiny internal computer interfaced and sent out a simple data feed, showing basic loading, firing and safety information for the weapon. The data coming through the new hardware had an odd feel to it, almost like an unfamiliar taste.

---

"OK," said Ylayn, "this is what we have." She was sitting in her command pod, leaning back with her hands behind her head and her legs up. Nas found it a touch distracting, since she wore only her halter and briefs. Her sleek fur did nothing to hide the shape of her body.

The
Whisperknife
was in orbit of Yuro IV, placidly hurtling through space in a circuit 35,000 kilometers above the planet. As far as anyone in authority was concerned, she was just another civilian ship with some business to do on the planet below.

"So," Ylayn said, "I've tracked the initiation signal that set off the boobytrap. It wasn't easy, but if you use a commercial comm system, there's always traces left, and whoever did this to us used a commercial comm system to send the signal. That's not really sloppy of them, by the way," she went on, looking at Nas. "There's no way a small portable comm set could have punched that signal out past the gas giant's radio interference; they
had
to use a big commercial transmitter."

"So they left a trail?" Nas said.

"Yes. Not much of one, but yes. It's going to take some time to track it down, though," said Ylayn with an almost eager smile.

---

"Take a look at this, Muir," said Demi-Captain Freya Tralk. She had just walked in from a trip to get basic supplies.

Executive Officer Muir Zanados walked over, taking a flimsy single-use disposable data display from Tralk's hand.

"Fucking Hells, " he hissed.

"What is it?" Zandy asked.

"The freight-liner that escaped..." said Muir.

"The one that was just destroyed in the pirate raid at Yuro V?" Zandy said.

"Yes," Muir replied. "At the Jyu-Lau station. It seems that the ship was contracted to fly for KRR, the Kerril Resource Recovery mining cartel. Well, the initial Yuro System Inspectorate report seems to have leaked to the info-nets. According the Inspectorate report, now get this, the raid was part of a quote, 'cartel trade war,' end quote. And the news services are floating nebulous hints that KRR might have wanted to terminate local shipping contracts in favor of its own fleet."

"There's no way people will believe that!" Zandy exclaimed.

"I wish that were so," said Tralk, after a moment. "The fact is, given KRR's reputation out here, the story is almost plausible. With the local Inspectorate's report, most people won't think twice about it. Whoever is doing this obviously has a lot of pull in the Yuro system government. But we knew that already."

"I still don't get why they actually bothered to destroy the surviving 'liner," Zandy said.

"At a guess," Muir said, "maybe to take out her sensor logs. But, more likely, to fit in with an official cover-up story. What do you want to bet that there will be other evidence of this 'cartel trade war' showing up, here and in nearby systems, over the next tenkay or so?"

"No bet," said Demi-Captain Tralk. "Our not-too-hypothetical traitor obviously has a lot of resources. We more or less have to write off the sensor logs of the
Skyrunner
, and I absolutely guarantee that whatever sensor logs were transferred from the surviving 'liner to the station are gone by now too. By the time an agent of the Central Throne Inspectorate gets out here, I'm certain the 'evidence' of a trade war will be pretty solid. Hells, maybe there'll even be evidence of sabotage or something, to explain the destruction of the
Conquering Sun
."