Reason For Vengeance (Dark Vengeance Book 1) (13 page)

Furioso’s vast bulk filled the small VI Screen with its gun metal grey skin.  Resembling the bottom half of a pyramid with the top removed.  The feed came from the shuttles outside sensors.  It was set into the back of the seat in front of Valerie, giving her a clear view as they approached Bay One Furioso’s main transit hub.  The shuttle swept in smoothly, the experienced pilot guiding it to one of the docking slips.

The flight took a little under six hours.  It was now almost nine hours since her family were murdered.  By Valerie’s best estimate, the alarm could be raised at any time, if it hadn’t been already.  It was entirely possible she would be arrested when she stepped off the shuttle.  It didn’t concern her.  It was just a faint thought floating around the pain and loss constantly threatening to overwhelm her.  Through all of that Valerie began to feel a new emotion filter through. 

From the very moment Valerie witnessed the deaths of her family she had been reacting, at first in retribution and then in her need to escape.  All of her training and experience pushing her to run, but an anger had started to rise up inside her.  An anger at the dead men and woman who pulled the triggers, anger at those who sent them, anger at a system that allowed families to feel just as she did every day and most of all, anger at the universe itself. 

The shuttle docked and the crew chief made sure the gangway was secure, before giving the all clear for the passengers to disembark.  With a face set in stone, Valerie got out of her seat, retrieved her bag from underneath and exited the shuttle.  Several private soldiers stood at the end of the gang way to act as guides for any officers requiring it.  They reacted to Valerie’s expression and coal black uniform, stepping smartly out of her way as she headed out into the main deck of Bay One.

The first place Valerie needed to go was her quarters.  A large personnel lift arrived, with a queue of officers and ratings waiting to board.  The lift was actually a train carriage, designed to move large numbers of people and goods between sections of the station, with separate compartments for officers, ratings and equipment.  When Valerie got there, all the seats in the officers compartment were taken.  She looked at one particularly young Navy Ensign and he leapt out of his seat, offering it to her.  With her mind completely elsewhere, she didn’t even acknowledge him as she sat down.

The lift car moved off shortly, running silently along its tunnel deeper into Furioso, away from relatively lower security sections and clear across the station, until it arrived at the maximum security Rosso section.  Rosso was home to some of the Legion’s most important and secret Research and Development projects, along with its elite units like Shadow Company.  The car’s original occupants got off at the various stops on the way and it was now sparsely populated.  It pulled up to a station that was not much different to those used in the Underground.  The main exception was the large and well-guarded security post you needed to pass before entering Rosso.

The Commando’s stationed here were fully kitted out with helmets, body armour and Pulse rifles.  Everyone who entered was thoroughly checked before being allowed to pass through, rank giving no special exceptions.  Valerie joined the queue and waited patiently until it was her turn.  As the last person in front of her passed the guard, she turned to Valerie and saluted smartly, something none of the others entrants enjoyed.  Rank made no difference, but Valerie and Shadow Company were well known among Rosso’s small contingent of elite troops.

“Welcome back, Major.”  The guard said with a smile and Valerie passed over her ID.

Taking a deep breath, Valerie forced herself to smile back.  Reacting as closely as she could to every other time she had been through.

“Thank you, Corporal Senhold.  Are you looking forward to getting out of this can?”

“You can bet on that, Major,” she replied.  “Rangers just aren’t cut out for a year in a big metal box.  Give me dirt under my boots any day.”

“Any news on where your Battalion is being deployed?”  Valerie asked politely.

“Nothing confirmed yet.  Word is it will be with the 141st Heavy Mech Regiment on Themyscira.”

“That should be more enjoyable for you.  Still got your Scout Mech licence up to date?”

“Yep.  Playing in the simulators is just about the most fun you can have in Rosso.  It also keeps the boss sweet if you keep your skills sharp.  It stops her thinking up all sorts of wonderful pastimes.”

“Heh.  No point in having bored troops lying about.”  Valerie said with a fake chuckle.  “Speaking of which, the Company will be due back from leave in a couple of days so I will leave you to your work.” 

“Of course, Major,” she replied with a second salute.

Returning the salute Valerie walked past the guard house and along the corridor.  Rosso was almost a separate entity, with a limited number of entry points, despite being part of Furioso’s main structure.  It had its own power plants, life support, supply ships and even its own docking slips for light cruisers.  Corporal Senhold’s Ranger Battalion supplied the security detachments as part of their year long tour on the station.  The rest of the troops based on board were Devil’s like Shadow Company.

It did not take long for Valerie to get to her quarters and she hesitated outside the door.  Inside were many mementos, holopics and other reminders of her family.  She knew in her gut this was going to be one of the hardest things she had ever done.  Only the anger building inside of her gave her the strength to enter her ID card and walk through the door.  It drove her to keep going.

It was still no defence when she took in the pictures Bobbie and Daphne had drawn.  Tom and their beaming smiles coming from the dozens of holopics around the room. 

Completely overcome, she broke down onto the floor sobbing as it all crashed down upon her.  It felt like her head would explode with the boiling cauldron of pain, loss, anger and heartache.  It rolled around and around inside her head.  Images flashed of Daphne laughing, Bobbie bouncing on the bed and Tom proposing to her, again and again.  The black clad assassins breaking through the door, the shots ripping her family apart and their bloody and broken bodies lying on the floor.

Finally it just became too much and Valerie screamed at the top her voice, letting the universe know how deep her pain was, how great her loss.  She screamed until her throat was raw and she came to a coughing and spluttering finish.  She lay on the floor completely wrung out sobbing.  Then in her head everything seemed to converge into one cold lump of pain and fury.  It wasn’t enough to escape, she had to hurt them as they hurt her.  She had to show them just how much pain they caused her and make them feel that hurt, even if it was a tiny proportion of what she was feeling.  It left her with a deep seated need to lash out, to get vengeance for her family and now she knew how.

Her instincts, since entering the escape hatch under her Kingfisher, were purely to get out of the system.  Now a plan emerged.  Valerie lay on the floor, her sobs quieting and her tears stopped flowing as the plan melded together, the scenarios playing out step by step.  The odds of her escaping went down dramatically.  The prospect of her being intercepted by the Rangers went up and she gave herself a probable twenty percent chance of success.  There was only one certainty.  They would not take her alive.

Opening her eyes she looked out across the floor of her quarters and pulled herself to her feet.  Her eyes took in all the reminders of her family and she nodded to herself.  Selecting two of the drawings, one from Daphne and one from Bobbie, she placed them on her desk with one of the holocubes.  It didn’t matter which one, they all contained the same selection of holopics. 

Crossing the room to a secure door she inserted her ID and entered her personal armoury.  Down both walls of the small room, were racks of Valerie’s personal weapons and armour.  Various rifles, knives, pistols and other equipment lined the walls and at the end stood her Fully Powered Body Armour.  A datapad sat next to the armour monitoring its readiness.  Valerie checked the reading and there were no maintenance or service queries.  It had been given a full service after Shadow Company’s return from Gomez.  For ease of deployment it sat ready in her Tea Chest.

Closing the front of the Tea Chest to seal the armour in, she activated its bottom antigrav so it rose slightly off the ground.  Valerie spun it round and opened the rear compartment.  In this she loaded numerous rifles, pistols and grenades, with her light and heavy unpowered body armour.  If she survived the next few hours, she would need all the equipment she could lay her hands on and filled the chest to capacity.  Finally she opened a small safe that was on the floor under the weapons rack, taking out a small black oblong box, the length of her hand.  Opening the top she checked the contents, inside were fifteen square pieces of different rare metals, each one thirty millimetres on a side.

Most of the Boundary would accept the Pantheon Sovereign, but once you got beyond that into the Edge and the Wild, you needed something of a tradeable common value.  Precious, rare metals used in nanotech, could be sold anywhere in known space.  The Legion issued them to Valerie for numerous covert missions over the years and she had built up a large stock pile.  Twenty boxes in total were transferred into the chest before she shut it.

Switching on the antigravs, she lowered the Chest onto its back and pulled it out of the armoury.  Before securing the armoury for the final time, she selected her two favourite Mag Pistols and strapped them around her thighs, along with half a dozen, fifty millimetre in diameter, disc grenades, she slotted in on the back of the belt, out of sight under her uniform tunic. 

Using her room’s terminal, she sent a request through to Rosso Central requesting a Porter to take the Tea Chest to Bay 41 and wrote the authorisation, so its appearance wouldn’t be questioned.  Then she accessed her deep secure files, where the Legions most advanced offensive cyber programs were kept.  Raising a notification of a training exercise, she downloaded several to her wristcomp and sent one with a few additional commands into the system.  Finally she took the cash from her pack, Daphne’s and Bobbie’s drawings and the holocube.  Placing them in the Chest, Valerie locked it to her ID only.

Valerie glanced around her quarters one last time, the pain and loss was still there and hadn’t been lessened in the slightest.  Only it was now contained by her pure rage and clear purpose.  Towing the Tea Chest out into the corridor, she locked her quarters, left the Chest for the Porters and headed to the personnel lifts.

It was a short trip, two floors down to the Rossos officer’s mess.  Valerie spent a very difficult half an hour making small talk with her colleagues and acquaintances, while forcing down some dinner.  Valerie’s com beeped, the tracker on her Tea Chest had arrived.  Making her excuses, she left the mess and took the lift down thirty-two floors, almost to the bottom of Rosso.  There was only twenty metres now between her and the dark and cold of open space. 

This was the main engineering for this section of Furioso.  It contained the life support, water recovery and waste recycling along with the Antimatter power plant.  Everything was built around those efficient and massively powerful reactors, specifically constructed on the edge of the station where they could be jettisoned as a last resort.

Antimatter was the most efficient fuel Humankind had yet discovered.  Without the heavy radiation of Fusion and the need for hydrogen of Fission, it became the most common type of space based reactor.  Despite Antimatter being in use for the best part of fifteen hundred years, a healthy regard for its risks were still very much part of the reactor’s designs.  Never used on a planet’s surface, as the release of energy would be devastating, they were reserved for space based installations and ships.  Even then, they were always built, like the ones on Rosso, close to the surface.

After placing a small and unobtrusive minicam in the corridor, Valerie stepped through the massive blast doors into the vast globe of the reactor room.  The immense room had over a hundred staff at various consoles and monitoring stations around the room.  Those nearest the door were giving her odd looks, she was very much out of place in the black uniform of the Devils.  As her eyes searched the room, it occurred to her in the most abstract way.  Even if she wasn’t successful, there would be massive changes in the training for the Devils.  The Legion educated her in everything she would need to attempt this.  There would be questions to answer.

Finding what she was looking for, she strode up to a station, pushed the engineer out of the way and inserted her wristcomp.  The engineer was so stunned that someone would do that, he was slow to react.

“What.  How dare you.  Who are you?”  Valerie ignored him and carried on.  She entered her commands and uploaded the offensive programs.  These were designed to attack systems exactly like those governing the reactor.  They went to work almost instantly.  The holo display blanked and then scrambled before shutting down.  The consoles next to them went down one after another in a cascade effect.

“What did you do?”  The engineer spluttered.  Consoles all over the room where shutting down.  People were looking up in confusion and the beginnings of alarm.

The engineer stepped forward and tried to shoulder Valerie out of the way.  Her back fisted blow flung him to the floor.  Those around them realised something was very wrong.