Hegemony (42 page)

Her attack code probed, reacted to the barrier as it reacted to the probes, and then seamlessly infiltrated the barrier, taking its form, replacing it, and leaving the network it had protected open to Ylayn's interfaced mind.

Now Ylayn could see the whole structure that she had just before only had hints of. It wasn't a large structure, but there was a lot there. Even in her disembodied, almost dream-like state, Ylayn hesitated, shocked by what she saw.

The return to her waking mind, to her normal thought patterns, felt like a slow, cold descent through layers of icy clouds.

Ylayn opened her eyes, seeing the rest of the crew turn to look as her body stirred. She was achingly aware of the termination of an exalted fugue state. She moved slowly to unplug the data cable from the interface port at the back of her neck, blinking back tears at the crushing feeling of limitation, of mere being, that flooded into her. But there was no sign of any of that in her voice.

"Captain," she said. "I've found something you need to see."

---

They took off with the local sun high above, maybe an hour before local noon. The sky, Zandy saw, was a saturated blue, almost violet. The asymmetric gleaming crystal towers of the city core loomed distantly on their right as they flew, sparkling like stained glass in the alien sunlight. The tallest tower, anchoring the orbital elevator, sent up a thin glinting line of reflected sunlight that reached up beyond view.

The skylane they flew in was marked mostly by the pattern of other aircars, though once in a while they flew past shimmering holographic adverts aimed at the air traffic. Below was the sprawl of Yuro IV's New Capital City, not nearly as photogenic here on the city's fringe as it was in the city's core, among the kilometer high showcase towers that flanked the city's orbital elevator. Most of the buildings below were 20 stories or less, and drab, though to Zandy's eyes they at least did not have the pre-fab, low-tech look of a residence zone. Out this far from the city core, the streets were full of ground vehicles, darting along below the elevated tubes of mag-lev train lines.

It wasn't a pretty city, Zandy thought, not compared to some she had seen, but it looked vibrant enough. Yuro IV, Zandy mused, must be just barely large enough to warrant the investment of an orbital elevator. It reminded her of New Ionia, though the towers were smaller and fewer here; not as elegant, though more colorful. Only the silver thread rising up into the sky really looked the same. But Yuro IV wasn't large enough to need residence zones... This wasn't a raw frontier world, but still, there wasn't enough population to require massive government-built holding zones to keep the unproductive, and Zandy wondered idly what her life might have been like if she had been born here, on Yuro IV, instead of on the densely populated core world of New Ionia.

No one spoke, and the whine of the aircar's lift fans filled Zandy's mind. She tried to get herself ready, but there was an unreality to all this. Her hand touched the grip of her needler and she tried to remember her sidearm training, but it was hard to focus.

The
Conquering Sun
had been her first assignment out of the Fleet Academy. Her fellow interceptor pilots, Pixie, the rest of the crew --even Captain Ari-Kani-- they had been all the family she really had. And now all of them were gone.

Given the size of the Hegemony, there was no guarantee that she'd ever see her Academy classmates again. And she had no wish to try to go back to New Ionia, to the people who had once been her family.

What was she doing here? What was she even doing alive... if she even
was
alive? It had been a long time since she'd had that thought. Were daemons really alive? Her biosim avatar, her new one, was almost biologically alive; the analog bio-mechanical processes by which it operated were almost like biological life. But the avatar wasn't
her
.

With a mental sigh, Zandy broke away from the futile train of thought she'd started. Answers were elusive, but she was a member of the Fleet, and there were fellow Fleet officers next to her, expecting her to do her part. That would have to be enough, for now.

---

"A Coalition computer system?"

"A Coalition data structure, Captain. Both the system that initiated the detonation command and the inner data structure of the detonator," said Ylayn. There was no playfulness in her voice now, Nas noticed.

"...Fuck... me..." said Nas.

"Could it just be some freelancers using Coalition equipment and software?" asked Warez.

"I thought so at first, but the way the data moved, the way it was all structured...
and
the attack codes stored in that little system," Ylayn shook her head. One of her cat ears twitched. "No," she said. "It's not just Coalition codes. The way the data was going back and forth, all the security subroutines... The guy who hired us was a Coalition agent. And he's got a whole team of other Coalition agents down there on Yuro IV."

"You are
very
sure about this?" asked Nas, quietly.

"Very sure, Captain. I had a lot of subjective time to look at the data structures. They started out as Coalition military codes, like the sort you can buy sometimes, from some of the Coaly data-mongers. But these have been worked over by a big team of high-grade data warfare specialists. It's... too formal, too organized and redundant, to be a freelancer's work. This is Coalition issue. At a guess, for some special operations type deal."

"Fuck," said Warez.

"So that's what we're up against?" said Senny, "Coalition special operations?"

"Right," said Nas.

"What now?" asked Xulios, the gunner.

"Now we get into a lower orbit," Nas said, sliding into his command pod and plugging himself in to the
Whisperknife
's piloting systems.

"You're going to try to hit a Coalition special operations team?" asked the gunner.

"Yup," said Nas, "them being the fuckers who set us up and tried to kill us.
Nobody
gets away with that if I know the 'who' and the 'where.'"

"But..."

"No buts. We get a rep for walking away from this sort of thing, we lose face with the Brotherhoods forever. Oh, sure, we can
explain.
We can say, 'oh, it was Coalition
special
operations...'" Nas' voice was momentarily hectoring. "But every other Brotherhood 'runner is going to know we got played, and we had a chance to get even, and we backed down. Fuck that.

"Besides, they don't expect us, and they're not going to have a lot on the ground down there, on a Hegemony world. And when we pull this off,
no one
who gets word of this is going to want to mess with us again."

"Very risky, though, Captain," said Warez.

Nas looked at Ylayn, sleekly lowering herself into her command pod in anticipation of acceleration. She looked back at him, said nothing.

"Risky, yes. Crazy, no," Nas said. "It's like
telestraal
. You use the time you have with no hesitation, use the fractions of seconds that the other side ignores, and you can do things that seem impossible. We can pull this off. If I thought we couldn't, I wouldn't do it.

"And those fuckers have it
more
than coming to them," Nas went on. "For one thing, I don't like working for the Coalition. If there's anything worse than the Hegemony, it's the Coalies. And for another, nobody double crosses me and walks. Not if I know where they are. And I know.

"And one more thing. When we
do
pull this off, the Brotherhoods are going to hear our names and give
homage.
You all think about that," Nas finished with a hard smile. 

From his command pod, Nas tracked his gaze across his crew, projecting their faces on his display one after another. He could see fear in some faces. Eagerness in a few, Ylayn, for one. But all of them were ready to follow him.

"Now, all of you," he said, "shut up, get into your 'pods and get ready. We're dropping orbit. Once we get to low orbit, get the atmospheric shuttle ready. We're going downtown."

---

"Pyer Beck" (he was almost used to thinking of himself by that meaningless name now) gave the autopilot a maximum-priority command and sat back in the pilot's seat as the aircar interacted with the central traffic control system, routing through the air traffic above New Capital City towards his destination. He could have piloted himself, but that would have taken his attention away from watching, through his visor display, as his team's position indicators converged on the target site.

Using his own team this way was a constant source of anxiety. His gut feeling was against it. But, rationally, this was the right move. The local agent couldn't be trusted with this, except in an utmost emergency. And his people could.

In a way he had been lucky. There were only a few private commercial hyper-bandwidth uplink in Yuro IV's New Capital City. Most of the others were operated by the local government, and he was fairly certain that if the fugitives had tried for those they would have been intercepted. 

The fugitive Hegemonic Fleet officers had apparently figured out the same thing, and, as he had hoped, had picked the one of the few private sites that boasted a data service capable of a hyper-bandwidth data link.

But since there
were
only a few private uplink sites, Pyer had been ready. Hacking into the control systems of the uplink facilities would have been difficult, but all of the facilities had reservation computers that were deliberately run as separate systems, isolated from the control systems as a security measure. On one hand, that security measure had worked; Pyer would not have been able to breach the defenses of the uplink control computers without setting off alarms. On the other hand, breaching the defenses of the reservations computers had been easy.

His local agent had given him the patterns for the data implant codes of the swift-ship captain he was after; as soon as she and her two comrades had signed onto the queue to use one of the uplink centers, Pyer had known within seconds where they were heading and when they planned to use the uplink.

Even now they must be approaching the site, headed for the facility at which they would leave their counterfeit bodies behind and escape...

Except, of course, that Pyer's team of elite commandoes would be waiting for them.

Thankfully, there was enough time to get most of his people to the target site. That had been a concern; the commercial uplink facilities couldn't be used without reservations, but if the reservations had come too close to the scheduled uplink window, Pyer might have had only a single commando in place to try to stop his quarry. So that was lucky too. Well, it was about time there was some good luck on this operation. Pyer didn't like counting on luck; that was the hallmark of amateurs. But when it came his way, he would not hesitate to use it.

---

Ylayn blinked as her implants pinged her with a pre-coded signal. Somewhere in the sprawl of Yuro IV's New Capital City, the Coalition special operations network she was monitoring was active again.

Ylayn rolled over in her lavish hotel bed and reached out for pers-comp, closing her eyes as she unspooled a data cable from the little portable computer and plugging it in to one of the small sockets in the back of her neck. Patterns of data unfolded in her mind.

The Coalition system was sending out signals to its nodes, interfacing with a planetary navigation system, getting directions and planning multiple routes. There were five mobile nodes, all converging on a particular spot in the New Capital City below. A reflexive cross-indexing gave her the location: a place called the Ki-Leng Multi-Emporium, North Atrium. And at least five Coalition data signals, each one probably a single agent, were converging on the location.

Ylayn triggered a comm-signal, sending her words directly to the Captain's implant.

"We've got the location, Captain."

"Time to move," came the Captain's subvocalized response. "Get us the traffic clearance, Ylayn."

"Right," Ylayn said, and triggered a program she had prepared on the shuttle flight down from the
Whisperknife.
The Captain had expected that they'd have to move fast, if and when the Coalition agents gave away a location where they could be reached. So Ylayn had gone to work on the local air traffic control. As usual, the key to defeating a powerful government system was to go around, go with, work within. The traffic control system would have been fiendishly hard to hack in a way that compromised the system's safety or primary function. But tagging their rented aircar with the codes of a sky ambulance? That had been comparatively easy. And it would let them zoom through traffic at maximum speed while the traffic control system routed other vehicles around their path, helping them instead of hindering. Of course, as soon as an oversight routine noticed them, there would be sharp questions and demands for authentication headed their way. But the infiltration team of the
Whisperknife
wasn't planning on staying on Yuro IV long enough for that to be a problem.