The Iron Admiral: Deception (29 page)

“May I introduce Anton Tepich, Your Excellency? And Mister Tepich, His Excellency Lord Azzenaar, representing Lord Governor, His Excellency Anxhou.”

Anxhou. So Anxhou was involved in this.

They bowed, exchanged pleasantries, but Tepich and Frensberg seemed just a bit uncomfortable and trying hard not to show it.

“I understand your tests have been successful,” Azzenaar said in accented but excellent Standard. His tentacles waved inside his ornate sleeves, lazy as sea grass, with only the occasional flicker to show his distaste.

“They have. A resounding success,” Tepich said.

“This test; I understand you had one satellite stationed over a group at Buena Suerte.” He stumbled a little over the pronunciation of the planet. “Do you believe that is sufficient proof that your device will work against a planet like Melchior?”

Allysha sucked in a breath. Melchior. The Confederacy’s capital planet.

“It is simply a matter of scale, Your Excellency,” Frensberg said, smooth as silk. “Indeed, since the communications satellites relay broadcasts from one to another, the spread will be faster and more thorough. No part of the planet will be immune.”

“What of warships?”

“They also are not immune. Warships have shields, of course, but they must, of necessity, receive communication broadcasts.”

He was right. Of course he was right. This death ray would kill as indiscriminately as any virus.

Azzenaar’s eyes faded to the orange of introspection. “I ask again; will you sell us your technology?”

Frensberg’s lips turned up in a mirthless smile.

“No. Well then, will you contract to perform a service for us?”

“I am authorized to consider any request you might make.” Frensberg said.

“A Confederacy fleet is at this moment in orbit around Carnessa, capital planet of the Qerran Suldanate.

We respectfully request that you send a ship to Carnessa and deploy your system there.”

Carnessa. She forced herself to concentrate while her whole body stiffened.

“Our understanding is that the fleet is there at the invitation of the Suldan,” Frensberg said.

“That is so.”

“This is well beyond what we agreed.” But she could almost see the cogs turning in the diplomat’s head.

“It is merely an extension of our understanding.” Azzenaar’s tentacles swayed a little faster. “You have already agreed that you will not intervene in our move to annex the Qerran Suldanate; we simply ask you to help us avoid unnecessary losses by removing the threat posed by the Confederacy fleet.”

Frensberg and Tepich exchanged a smile.

“And at the same time remove His Excellency’s bane, Grand Admiral Saahren?” Frensberg said.

Her heart froze. A rush of nightmare images rose in her mind; the test subjects, their contorted bodies lying on the ground. But now the faces were those of people she knew, lying dead on the decks while their ships drifted uselessly in space. Chaka, dead.Don’t think about it . She had to listen.

Azzenaar’s tentacles shimmered with amusement. “It may be a consideration.”

“Give us a moment.” Frensberg and Tepich stepped away, heads together.

Allysha enhanced the volume in her implant.

“Can it be done?” Frensberg said.

“Easily,” Tepich said. “We send the ship we have here on a normal commercial run to Carnessa. It broadcasts as soon as it gets close enough.”

“A pity we don’t have the Confederacy’s multi-dimensional comms systems. We could have done it from here.”

Tepich frowned. “That’s almost blasphemous, Ambassador.”

“True. All right. We will concur, I think. It will be a telling blow for us, too. Destroy their famous grand admiral and his fleet; insist they accede to our demands or more will die. If they argue, we’ll simply hit Melchior, as we originally planned.”

If they hit Melchior with this thing they would decapitate the Confederacy. Malmos’s glittering towers rose in her mind. The virus would destroy the government, destroy the Fleet hierarchy. She imagined the buildings, untouched, pristine, filled with bodies. The automatic cars would finish their journeys, avoiding collision, the occupants dead. Death; destruction. Just like the Tisyphor virus all over again, only in a different format on a different scale.

Frensberg returned to the screen. “I think we can do business, Your Excellency.”

Azzenaar’s speaking mouth jerked just a little and his eyes swirled green to blue. He was excited. And pleased. “This is most excellent, most excellent. I shall advise Lord Anxhou forthwith.”

Frensberg cleared his throat. “Will you still be wanting us to send you the woman?”

A horrible feeling snaked down Allysha’s backbone.

“It hardly matters now, I suppose. But then, why not? It might amuse His Excellency to taunt her with her lover’s death; and at her hand, too.”

Allysha reeled. Her? They were going to take her to Anxhou? How had they found out about her and Saahren? She shoved the thought aside. It didn’t matter a curse. Right now she had to deal with that death ray. Think; think.

With half an ear on the conversation as Azzenaar and Frensberg negotiated terms, she went through the options.

No use to destroy the function; Galen knew how to rebuild the software. It might take him a while but he would persevere. If she could at least say the technology was restricted to this one place and had not been disseminated she’d have a start. Yes. The ship had returned. Galen was paranoid enough not to share everything, she was sure. And although she expected he had made copies of the software onto data sticks, anyone who had worked on the project was here. She’d checked their profiles. Frankly, the best thing to do would be to destroy the base. With everybody in it.

She let that thought percolate for a moment. She would die, too. She felt calm about that. She had caused the problem; she had to fix it. There could be no possibility of another Tisyphor, where someone could inadvertently rediscover the code on a machine, or find a data stick with the function.

The question now was how to make it happen?

Perhaps a bomb. She turned to the inventory and searched. Nothing. Oh, maybe some scientist could concoct a bomb from ingredients listed but she couldn’t. What she could do was blow the ship while it was still in the airlock. She could get down into the propulsion units and damage the dampeners for the fusion generators. That meant getting on the ship undetected.

Movement in the conference room caught her eye. “A pleasure to do business with you, Lord Azzenaar,” Frensberg said.

He bowed, Azzenaar saluted with a swirl of both upper arms and the screen went blank.

Tepich turned his fat face to Agnita, who loitered against the wall, drab and inconspicuous in her brown robe and scarf.

“Fetch the woman.”

Allysha withdrew from the system.

Not bloody likely.

She waited, sitting on the edge of the bunk, her weight balanced forward, feet firmly planted. The door lock clicked. Agnita stood in the doorway.

Her head tucked in, Allysha launched forward with all the power she could muster straight at the woman. Her forehead connected with Agnita’s nose. She staggered backwards with a grunt of pain.

Allysha kept going, slamming her adversary against the wall. She sagged to the ground, blood streaming from a broken nose, head lolling to one side. Allysha dragged her into the room she’d just left. Agnita wasn’t light but if she could shift Chaka, she could shift her. Calmly, methodically, she removed Agnita’s clothes and put them on. She’d pass if nobody looked too closely. She stared down at the unconscious woman, the nerve stick in her hand. A large enough dose could kill. And the woman would die anyway when the station was destroyed. No, she couldn’t do it. She rolled Agnita over onto her stomach and tied the woman’s arms and legs together behind her back with the tasselled sash. That should at least slow her down. Out in the corridor she locked the door behind her and walked, firm and calm, toward the airlock, the robe whispering around her feet.

“Agnita. I told you to bring the woman.” Tepich’s voice snapped with irritation.

Allysha kept walking. Damnation. No chance of getting on the ship undetected now. One more corner.

Boots thudded behind her. She ran, the cumbersome skirt flapping around her legs. A guard loomed in front of her. The door to the right led to maintenance. If she could get there before him… The door began

to close. Summoning every bit of strength left to her, Allysha flung herself forward and underneath the man’s outstretched hand. She hit the ground hard and rolled through the narrowing gap. Something fumbled at her leg but she wrenched free.

The door slid shut. For a moment someone tried to force it open again but Allysha used the system to keep it closed and locked it down. She lay face down, panting, while fists hammered uselessly for a moment.

“What are you doing, Miss Marten? The ship is ready to take you away.” Tepich’s voice, all sweetness and oiliness, boomed from the speakers.

“Not likely. I’m not going off to visit Anxhou.”

“Anxhou? The ptorix? What a foolish notion. We promised to—”

She shut down the speaker.

Allysha dragged herself to her feet. Her leg hurt where it had caught on the door. She’d have a nasty bruise; not that it mattered. She smiled to herself and pulled off the headdress; Agnita’s headdress.

Horrible thing. So was the robe. All right, she’d escaped from Tepich but the maintenance unit was a dead-end. Shelves lined the module’s walls, stacked with spare parts and tools. Eight emergency air cylinders were lined up on a bottom shelf. A rack of survival suits hung on a rail near the station’s crawler.

APE. Assess, Plan, Execute. Werensa’s mantra had been drilled into her. She had to stop that death ray. And then she had to destroy this base. For a moment Chaka’s face appeared in her mind.I love you.

I’m sorry . Tears pricked her eyes; she pushed thoughts of him aside. She had a job to do.

The ship was still there, the connection to the base in place, but she wouldn’t have long. She changed into a survival suit even as her mind worked on the ship’s IS. A few small changes, that was all she could manage.

Galen’s intrusion as system administrator alerted her. She smiled mirthlessly. So he thought he could beat her, did he? She diverted him. Hopefully they’d give up and send out the ship. As soon as they did, she’d

begin plan B.

She commandeered the surveillance system and swiveled the cameras to show her Tepich and Frensberg still standing at the maintenance center door. He’d summoned guards. They’d shoot the doors.

Well, let them. She wouldn’t be here. The crawler stood ready, ugly but utilitarian, a long, low goods tray with a covered cockpit at the front. She swung into the driver’s compartment and started the engine.

It stalled once, twice until Allysha adjusted the injectors. It would have to do. She slipped on the helmet, sealed the suit and opened the airlock.

They were called ‘crawlers’ but they weren’t, of course. The vehicle used damped artificial gravity technology that allowed it to hover centimeters above a surface. The crawler rose and drifted forward.

Just in time. A round patch on the door behind her glowed red. They must be trying to cut through.

Nerves jangling, Allysha overrode the systems constraints on opening the external doors. The air rushed past her, escaping into the firmament.

The crawler slipped outside. The brilliant orange ball of the gas giant filled the sky. Two massive circular storms, each as big as a planet, chased each other around the equator. The huge spirals of multi-colored clouds almost looked like two malevolent eyes. They seemed to move slowly, but that was an illusion; down there in the gas clouds the wind howled at super hurricane force; six hundred, seven hundred kilometers per hour. The shadow of the planetary ring drew a curved line across Isabella’s face like a caricature of a mouth and two dark dots cast by two of the larger moons could almost be imagined as nostrils. A huge face stared at her but at least it smiled. All the best to you, Isabella. Pardon me if I don’t want to visit.

She gazed around the asteroid’s barren surface. No air, no gravity to speak of. Everywhere she looked impact craters had impacted the surface, their ridges defined in the feeble light reflected from its massive host. The comms tower jutted, man-made and so very alien in the stark, inhospitable landscape, about a kilometer away.

She urged the crawler forward, stately as a funeral barge at ten klicks per hour.

A ship slid out of the base’s airlock into the vastness of space. It looked different out here, a tiny box with propulsion units. The vessel drifted away, maybe half a kilometer before it used its side thrusters to pivot to the correct angle. In a blink of a moment it accelerated and disappeared, on its way to Carnessa.

She soughed out a breath. It was the best she could do. Now to make sure they couldn’t escape.

Connecting to the communications system through the tower beside her, she stopped them from sending an external signal. Then she locked the airlock doors open and shut down the environmental support systems. Now communications. It was done. The base was isolated. The people inside would survive until the air ran out. Or a missile hit them. And she would survive as long as they did. She’d loaded every air tank in the maintenance section onto the crawler. Enough for a day, maybe two.

Not long now, surely not long now. Knowing Chaka he would have deployed a ship somewhere nearby.

A jump to the moon’s coordinates, fire a missile into the base’s hangar bay and bang. All over. The tears she’d blocked threatened again, blurring her vision. She’d been looking forward to a passionate reunion.

She wished there was some other way, some way out.

From her implant Allysha retrieved the images from the Fleet Ball, the famous dance. She’d been tempted; sorely tempted that night to call him, as he’d asked. “I’m sorry, Chaka. So very, very sorry,”

she whispered into the endless night. “I would have married you. I love you.”