Reason For Vengeance (Dark Vengeance Book 1) (17 page)

The quiet hum of the intercom buzzer grew in volume increasingly, until Billy Bac turned over and hit it with his large hand.  “Yes?” he almost barked as he forced the sleep from his brain. 

“You need to get down to ops right now, Billy.  There’s something you need to see on the datanet.”  The voice of the Hive’s Intelligence Officer, Alan Sutherland told him.

His first instinct was to ask for more details, but Billy thought better of it.  The number of times he had been woken, while on board the Rebellions mobile headquarters, could be counted on one hand.  If Alan was waking him up in the middle of the night it was important.  When it took days, weeks or even months, to get information from another star system, then either something had gone very wrong on Thrace, the Pantheon planet they were currently orbiting, or it was something much worse elsewhere.  Either way Billy needed to get out of bed.

“OK, Alan.  Let me get some trousers on and I’ll be with you in a couple of minutes.”

Three of those minutes later, Billy strode into room the Rebellion long ago converted to be its operational nerve centre.  This freighter was known to the galaxy at large as the Wandering Pony, but to those within the Rebellion, it was the Hive.  With only a small portion of the ship dedicated to the Rebellion, it was able to move between systems with genuine cargos, unnoticed by the Pantheon authorities.

At three in the morning ship time, the ops centre was understandably quiet.  Only Alan along with James Evans, his deputy, were inside.  Both of them had their backs to the door, studying a small VI screen on the console in front of them with intense interest.

“I’m here.  What’s so urgent?”  Billy asked them and they both spun around in surprise.  If it wasn’t the middle of the night and Alan hadn’t sounded so serious, it would almost be comical.

“Sorry, Billy.”  Alan apologised.  “I didn’t hear you come in.”

“Evidently.  Did something happen on Thrace?”

“No.”  Alan said shaking his head.  “An hour and a half ago a news Courier arrived in the system and immediately dropped a flash story straight into the datanet.”

That was very unusual, Billy thought with a frown.  Generally news stories would be sent to the company’s planetary headquarters, to be reported by one of their local people.  Only the most important stories would be uploaded to the net on arrival in the system, to ensure the network was ahead of its competition.

“Within an hour, three other news Couriers arrived with the same story and also uploaded them to the datanet.”  Alan continued.

“What was the story?”  Billy asked with a sense of dread.

“There has been an incident on Furioso.  From what we can gather, an anti-matter reactor exploded.  Details are sketchy at best.  The couriers left for their fourteen day trek to us within an hour of the explosion.  One of them managed to get some visuals of the station on their way out of the system and it doesn’t look good.  Here.  Take a look.”

A holo of the wounded station appeared instantly over the console.  Billy swallowed heavily as he took in the damage.  It was obvious the station was moving out of its normal orbit with multiple explosions still rippling out of it at several points.

“How bad is it?” he asked.

“About as bad as it looks.”  James Evans reported.  “We’ve overlaid the damage with what we know of the interior and the loss of life is going to be catastrophic.”

“The really interesting thing is, as far as we are able to determine, the explosion originated in the Rosso section.”  Alan interjected.  “That’s highly secret R&D and Commando Devil territory.  If this was an accident, it would have to be a massively coincidental sequence of events.”

Rubbing his chin, Billy took in what the other man said.  “So we have to presume it wasn’t an accident and no matter what, we are going to get blamed for this.  Could it be a rogue Cell?  The Zeus people I spoke to, certainly wanted a more direct action approach.  I don’t think it was them, but that’s not to say one of the other Cells on Olympus or elsewhere, don’t have similar feelings and decided to act on them without authorisation.”

“Not a chance,” Alan shook his head vigorously.  “James and I discussed this before you got here and nothing we’ve seen in their reports, says they have anything like the capability for an attack of this magnitude.  You’re right though.  The Privileged will blame it on us.”

Billy nodded.  “Get onto Julianna.  I want her on a news courier heading to Olympus as soon as possible.”

“No problem.”  James replied.  “She’s already got the cover set up and TSE’s daily courier isn’t scheduled to leave for twelve hours.  She’s close enough to make that.”

“Good.  We have to know what really happened.  Tell her to start with the Zeus Cell.”  Billy ordered.  “If any of them are still alive, they’ll have the best chance of getting to the truth.” 

Bobbie ran through the long grass, laughing as he tried to catch the ball Tom threw to him.  His little hand reached out and missed by a good thirty centimetres.  Daphne was right behind him and showed why she was a striker in the Gooseberries, by scooping it off the ground.  Her little brother charged at her with a mock howl and she danced out of his way, holding the ball high over her head.

The Sun shone clear over her family, as Valerie watched from the shade of some trees.  Tom ran up behind Daphne, scooped her up in his arms and in one smooth, practised motion he had her dangling from her feet.  Bobbie didn’t waste this opportunity and darted in to claim the ball from his sister.

Valerie smiled at their happiness and exuberance for life.  She stepped forward to go to them and found they moved further away from her.  Valerie moved faster, her walk became a jog, to a run until she was sprinting as fast she could.  Still she could not get near them, she shouted their names and they acted as if they couldn’t hear her.  As if she wasn’t there.

Dark clouds obscured the sun and a sense of foreboding came over her. The wind whipped up to tear at her.  Valerie felt her heart pounding, the sweat pouring from her face, and suddenly she was there with them.  Bobbie turned to face her, tears of blood running down his face and collapsed in her arms.  She looked up in horror as Tom loomed over her, Daphne’s limp body in his arms.

“Why?” he asked her.  “Why them?”

“Arrrggghh.”  Valerie screamed, sitting bolt upright and slammed her head against the low ceiling.  She gasped for breath disorientated.  A low light came on. 
It’s a dream.  It was just a dream.
  She thought, struggling to control her breathing and to think clearly.  She looked around herself and saw she was fully clothed on a small bed.  Her head had hit the bunk above when she woke and lurched up.  The bunk was in a narrow corridor.  On the metal floor sat her open Tea Chest and it came back to her.

She was on-board the Spectre and her family were dead.  She had wandered the ships tiny crew area for over two weeks, dozing only fitfully in nightmare filled hours and eating only mouthfuls at a time whenever her body drove her to it.  Finally she collapsed onto the bunk and fell into an exhausted sleep.  She glanced at the clock on the beds wall.  Fourteen hours.  For fourteen hours she slept.  For fourteen hours she had been able to not think.  For fourteen hours she had been able to not remember, not feel her pain.

She rubbed her face and ran her hands through her unwashed hair.  She hadn’t showered since she got up for her birthday.  It was the smell of stale sweat that forced her to get up and not collapse back into the bed.  She reeked.  It was tempting to just not bother and she really could not say what made her do something about it.

Pulling herself out of bed, she stripped off the clothes she wore since her escape and dumped them in a pile on the floor.  Stepping into the small hygiene cubical, she switched the water to a scolding hot setting and stood there as it streamed over her.  The hot water tasted of salt as it ran over her face, the remains of the old tears flowing away with the new.  It was a slow process as she washed her hair and scrubbed her body.  Her movements were mechanical and stilted, her thoughts were far from what she was doing.

Finally clean, she shut off the water and switched the dryers on.  Warm energy engulfed her and dried the moisture from her body, while a stream of hot air took care of her hair.  Dirt-free she stepped out and could immediately smell the clothes piled onto the floor.  She scooped them up and stuffed them straight into the small hatch of the auto cleaner.  In half an hour, they would be washed and dried.  She replaced them with a dark sleeveless top and trousers from her Chest.

She felt no better, just cleaner, and headed up to the cockpit, collapsing into the pilots chair.  A dispenser dropped several ration bars that were designed as the pilot’s emergency rations.  Each one contained massive amounts of vitamins, minerals, protein, calories and anything else the human body needed to keep going.  They tasted bland and boring, but Valerie really didn’t care.  It was all she had lived on during the flight, whenever she actually remembered to eat.

Munching purposefully she looked at the screen showing the flowing silver of hyperspace and the curve of the hull of the freighter, Histria Azure.  The Spectre had many excellent attributes, interstellar travel not being one of them, it was far too small to include a hyperspace engine and the massive reactor it would need to power it.  The Spectre was incredibly fast in a Solar System’s gravity well, allowing Valerie to catch up to the massive hauliers heading out of the system.  She attached the Spectre to the first one she could find, completely without their knowledge and sat back as it took her out into hyperspace, not caring where she would end up.

Now eighteen days later, the Histria continued on, unaware of the tick on its side hitching a lift.  For those days, Valerie had been in a stupor, unable to function.  All the rage and drive that got her off Olympus and caused her to wreak such damage, drained from her shortly after entering hyperspace.  Those days were a blur and she knew she had barely been functioning.  She felt better now.  The tears hadn’t stopped, they still continued in their constant slow progression down her face.  Her gut felt like a ball of ice, with heartfelt loss constantly ripping at her.  The difference today was that she could think beyond all that, to see outside of herself for the first time.

A three hundred and sixty degree holographic display encircled the pilot’s and co-pilot’s chairs in the cockpit.  With a variety of different views, from simple optics for atmospheric flight to tactical displays for the vaster volumes of space.  In hyperspace a ship could not see any further than its flight field so tactical displays were useless.  The Spectre automatically switched to visual upon entering hyperspace.  While it wasn’t capable of independent flight, it was designed for just this kind of piggybacking.  The visual came up to give the crew less of a feel of claustrophobia, from being in such an enclosed environment for long periods of time.

She looked on the display to see what woke her.  A graphic showed the status of the hyperspace flight field surrounding the freighter.  It indicated the field was shrinking.  It began half an hour ago and the computer sounded a warning beep to notify her.  Valerie was grateful for the interruption to her nightmare.  It was good to see her family and believe them to be alive again, even for the most fleeting of moments.  Only it made the loss and pain, when she realised the truth, raw and fresh and she did not want to do that again.

A flight field reduced as a ship approached its destination.  A Vrachtschip built, Spediteur class freighter, like the Histria Azure, had a hyperspace cruising speed of Velositas three.  It would take an hour to reduce the field, ready for return to normal space.  Valerie thought about that for a moment.  At that speed, in eighteen days, they would have travelled twenty-five light years, which made their destination in all likelihood to be Blaze.  She grimaced to herself at that.

Blaze was a very unusual system.  It was one of a handful of systems humans had discovered containing a world friendly to them.  The Blaze system was made up of a single star burning hotter than Sol, with two planets inside the Goldilocks zone.  The area of a solar system that was neither too hot nor too cold, to sustain human life.  Blaze A was of a similar size to Earth and slightly further out.  Its hotter star made much of the equatorial zone uninhabitable by humans, without purpose built protective environments.  Blaze A evolved its own carbon based life forms and oxygen producing fauna.  Many earth species were capable of surviving, though they could not thrive on the planet’s surface.

Colonisation of Blaze A took place before the founding of the Pantheon.  Although terraforming was available at the time it had been too expensive for most colonists.  When a viable planet became available, they went there in their hundreds of thousands.  Many struggled to survive when they arrived, mostly congregating north or south of this world’s tropic, where the majority of its plant and animal life lived.

For hundreds of years, Blaze sat outside the expanding sphere of human influence and the trade spreading outwards from Sol.  With limited gene pool and little contact with other nations, Blaze had been stuck in a kind of stasis, where technology did not advance.  There were periods in its history when they went backwards and struggled to re-discover a lot of knowledge.  It was not until the vast corporations, such as Ambrosia, founded the colonies that would become the Pantheon, Blaze was able to move forward.

That progression had been slow, the corporations keeping Blaze at arm’s length and contact at a minimum.  Protective of their prerogatives and privileges, they built their advanced colonies with a far reaching plan that did not include Blaze.  A little over five hundred years ago, Blaze had been entered into the Pantheon and not by choice.  An aggressive campaign by a few of the Pantheons Privileged First Families, using the corporations who were the successors of the founders, bankrupted the Blaze government.  Those same Families stepped in and ‘saved’ Blaze, running it as their personal cash generator ever since.  The same template was currently being used on Gomez.

Blaze became the bleeding sore of the Pantheon.  Bribery and corruption were a way of life in the Pantheon and Blaze took it much further.  Every kind of product or service was available, no matter its legality in the Pantheon or even on Blaze itself, and the Families took a cut of it all.

Blaze B, the second planet in the Goldilocks zone, had been largely ignored.  It did not have a bio-system of any kind, though it was fully susceptible to modern terraforming techniques.  The original Blaze government did not have access to those technologies, and the ruling Families were uninterested in doing anything that may interfere with their cash flow.  Merely a hundred and seventy years ago they finally contracted out the work.  The process was still years from completion, only the terraformers and their families lived there in enclosed environments or on the orbital laboratories and staging areas.

It would be easier to lose herself in a society used to transients passing through and hiding their identities.  At the moment she really did not have any idea of what she was going to do next.  The other good thing was that she knew exactly where she could hide the Spectre.  She couldn’t land it at a normal space port, even on Blaze it would raise red flags that would bring every Legion Navy ship in the system down on her head. 

Ten years ago, Shadow Company were tasked with dealing with a particularly aggressive band of nomads who roamed the Ginormican mountains, named as they contained over a dozen peaks higher than Earths Everest.  Descending from the original colonists, the Nomads had carved out a life for themselves transporting goods from the North, over the Ginormicas and across the deserts to the South.  Stopping to trade at the small isolated, underground communities eking a life out there.  The Nomads were the life blood of Blaze before the intervention of the Families. 

Not wanting such a lucrative revenue stream to be outside their control, a bloody war was fought between them and the Nomads.  Unsurprisingly, given the technology and resources the Families could put behind it, the Nomads lost.  They did not give up and now the clans hid away in the Ginormicas, occasionally coming out to raid for supplies.

The Butler clan had gone further out and done more damage than any other for generations.  The Blaze Police, a bloated and corrupt institution, more interested in lining their own pockets than risking their necks, were outclassed.  If they could catch the clan in the open, their technological advantage would have allowed them to deal with the Butlers.  The Nomads did not let that happen, every time the Blaze PD came out in force, the clan retreated back into the Ginormicas.  There they were been able to hide, avoid and even ambush the Police.

The Families appealed to the Legion for help.  Not wanting a messy large scale confrontation the media would eat up, they asked for the scalpel over the hammer.  Shadow Company had been picked to be that blade, with limited air support.  It took Valerie and the Company three weeks to track and corner the clan.  The fight had been brutal, bloody and close in the narrow canyons.  When the company left the mountains, little of a clan able to date its descendants all the way back to the fourth colony ship to land on Blaze survived.

There were parts of that mountain range that had never seen a single human being and others the Company were the first humans to set foot in.  It was there she could hide the Spectre.  It would be incredibly hard to get down to civilisation on foot for her and impossible for anyone else.  Of course they could use an aircar, there was just no reason for anyone to do so.  The Spectre had almost a zero energy signature when all the systems were running, when it was shut down in standby mode, it would be impossible to find, even if the entire mountain range were subject to a full orbital scan.

It was very possible they were not going to Blaze.  The freighter could be stopping due to another reason.  Valerie thought this to be highly unlikely, hyperspace travel was not accurate enough to make deep space rendezvous possible and there were no other systems 25 light years from Olympus.  Some were closer and many further.  It was possible the Histria Azure was not running at its cruising speed and they were about to arrive at Themyscira, if slightly slower, or Midgard, if slightly faster.

Time was money for any commercial freighter however and conversely it would increase maintenance costs significantly, if they overburdened the engines.  If you knew the rated cruising speed of a civilian vessel, you would have a very good idea how long it would take to reach its destination.  Military or courier vessels were a completely different matter, having much more powerful engines and reactors and often without a specific time frame, they were more flexible.