The Iron Admiral: Deception (30 page)

****

It didn’t make sense; it just didn’t make sense. Saahren frowned, eyes flicking over the holographic image of the ptorix fleet’s deployment, or at least their deployment based on the intelligence. “You’re sure about this?” he asked the intelligence officer.

 

“I checked it twice. They say the ships are on high alert.”

That was at least one advantage of an alliance with Qerra; the Suldan had spies in Anxhou’s fleet, something humans had never managed to achieve. Saahren glanced around the table. Pedder, Valperez and Larsen were here in person. Holograms of the other fleet admirals and captains were beamed from their ships.

“They’re just sitting there, on the edges of their own territory,” said Shimmon, captain ofParagon .

“I still think the target’s definitely Carnessa. Unless he veers off at the last moment and takes one of the smaller systems of the Qerran group,” said Admiral Valperez.

“Maybe it’s a feint and he wants us to believe it’s not Qerra?” said someone else.

Saahren scratched at his scar. The ptorix admiral was entirely open about it. The huge battle cruiser Chohzu, surrounded by lesser craft, drifted in clear space. If you could call ships the size ofArcturus lesser. “It’s as though he’s waiting for a starting gun to be fired. Some sort of signal.” All eyes turned to him. “You know the plan, gentlemen. We wait.”

A little more discussion of tactics and they returned to other duties. Saahren took the opportunity to go to the gym. The exercise would do him good. He lifted weights, ran, practiced self-defense with one of the instructors and went to bed tired. But even then erotic thoughts of Allysha tormented him until at last he fell asleep.

****

Saahren sat up, instantly awake.

 

‘A signal from the bridge, Sir. The ptorix fleet has just appeared from shift space.’

He paused at his door for a moment to finish fastening his jacket. It didn’t do to appear hurried or flustered. He’d already checked the data via his implant; they would have some time to prepare.

All butArcturus’s admirals appeared in the conference room as visuals, almost as real as if they were there in person. Saahren reviewed his plan. The ptorix fleet sat within range of the Qerran sensors, just beyond Qito Ras’s outermost planet. Strange. They’d appeared from shift space, slowed down and now

they loitered, like children on a street corner.

“They still seem to be waiting,” Valperez said. “Do we have any idea what for?”

“I wish we did. I expect we’ll know when it happens.”

The voice in his head froze him in his seat. Valperez stared at him and opened his mouth but Saahren waved him into silence.

I’m on an asteroid, a rock in the ring around the planet Isabella, which is part of the El Roya system. The GPR has built a base there where they’ve developed a piece of code that over-stimulates the human nervous system and causes death in moments. They transmit the signal to the brain via the implant so anyone without an implant is unaffected. But the human implant has a superb security system. So they used me to break the security.

Her voice broke.Please believe me Chaka. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know what it was or how they were going to use my work. But I’ve seen the effects. They tested it on ten people here at the lab, people they’d rounded up from somewhere. Even a baby. She coughed and then returned, stronger.And then they tested it again, on a planet where they’d left some more victims, a place called Buena Suerte. They sent the signal via a communications satellite .

Saahren’s mind buzzed. A weapon like that could decimate any Confederacy planet.

Anxhou has organized for them to send a ship, just an ordinary GPR transport, to Carnessa. It’s supposed to broadcast the signal to your ships. Then he’ll attack. He’s expecting you and all your crews will be dead. He’ll just walk in. And meanwhile, the GPR is going to unleash this thing on Melchior.

What ship, Allysha, what ship?

It was as if she’d heard him.Here’s the identification for the GPR ship. I’ve sent this message from where the ship exited the jump gate, using your military shift space frequency. You’ll probably be able to find the ship on your scopes. It’ll come in close to Carnessa before it sends out its signal. But don’t worry, I destroyed the code.

She took a deep breath.Chaka, I can’t destroy every instance of this code. And even if I could, I’ve taught at least one person how to recreate it. But it’s all here, isolated on this one base. You have to destroy it. If you don’t, billions of lives will be at risk. She paused as his heart hammered.You have to do

it, Chaka. Please, please trust me. There is no other option. If you send in people to rescue me, they’ll die an awful death and it might just be a way for these fanatics to escape. I don’t want there to be any chance that this thing can linger, as the virus did on Tisyphor.

She stopped talking. Saahren thought he heard her swallow.I’m so sorry, Chaka. I love you. I’ll love you forever.

 

Saahren’s hands clenched and unclenched on the table in front of him. He sat in the conference room, the ptorix fleet floating in the hologram, his command staff staring at him. Now at least he knew what the starting signal was. She’d given him a huge advantage. She knew that. But kill her? Give an order to kill her? There had to be another way, therehad to be. Send inSpartan , get her out. But if she was right and the attackers died, the risk would be huge. Her life… or billions of lives. Could he take that chance? His father had risked everything in his idiotic, misplaced, suicidal attack on the rulers back on Ceres. His father had gambled and lost and his family and friends had suffered the consequences.

Allysha. His eyes prickled and he squeezed them shut. He must not, he could not think about her now.

He turned his mind to the advancing ptorix fleet.

“I’ve just received intelligence that the ptorix have gained access to a new weapon. I don’t have details but suffice to say it uses our implants to kill us. That fleet out there is waiting for a signal that tells it the weapon has been used and therefore all of our ships are floating in space without crews.”

They murmured, exchanged glances.

“I hesitate to ask,” Admiral Larsen said, “but can we be sure?”

“Yes, we can be sure. This meeting is not a discussion. We have two hours to cobble together tactics to blow that ptorix fleet into fragments. But they must assume that what they think has happened,has happened; that our ships are ghost ships.” Saahren heard the bitterness in his words, saw the slight frowns, pursed lips and breathed deeply. He had to remain calm, in control.

“Part of that’s easy. At a given signal, we stop all verbal communication—nothing but electronic ship chatter,” Valperez said. “But it also means we can’t have fighters out.”

“We must appear to act normally, react to the threat they pose as we always would. So we must have fighters out. Come up with something, Valperez.”

“What about an accidental collision?” Admiral Beaumont said. He jagged his fingers around the word accidental. “Let two cruisers drift together—seemingly out of control. Just a nudge. You know, like a transfer drill without a transfer.”

“Good move. Organize that with your group,” Saahren said. “This is what I want our configuration to look like.”

He shifted the ship images.

“Oh ho. An invitation to the shooting gallery,” Larsen said.

“Yes,” Saahren said. “Only we’re the ones who’ll be doing the shooting.”

****

The plans were in place. Just one more thing to do. Saahren returned to his office. Trust me, she’d said.

 

If she was still there on that base—and he had no reason to believe she was not—she would die. But what choice did he have? Billions of people, or… He forced his voice to remain normal. “Get me Captain Loris onSpartan , code five.”

Captain Loris’s image appeared when Saahren was already sealed in his command chamber. “Sir?”

“You are to take your ship to this asteroid in the El Roya system.” He sent Loris the coordinates. “The asteroid has a base built into it. It must be destroyed completely. The place has been used to develop a weapon. Do not under any circumstances be tempted to send any people to the base.” His heart ached as he said the words. “You will be entering GPR space. If anything attempts to divert you or intercept you, then do what you must, including blowing it away. This base must be obliterated.”

“Sir.”

The merest smile played around the man’s lips. For him it was something to do. The ship had hovered as close to El Roya as Saahren could manage for days now.

“Any questions?”

“No, Sir.”

“I’ll want to know when the objective is achieved. Good luck with your mission.”

Loris saluted and his image vanished.

Saahren ran his hand over his mouth.You bastards. You filthy, toe rag bastards. You’ll pay. This is for Allysha, Anxhou. Her face hung vibrant in his mind as the harsh bray of the battle stations klaxons started.

ChapterThirty-Four

A germ of an idea insinuated itself into her mind. Sure, the crawler wouldn’t take her anywhere. But if she could get off this moon, away from it, at least she wouldn’t be blown apart when the base was destroyed. The vehicle itself had radiation protection; otherwise she’d be dead already. If she turned off the artificial gravity unit… no, the crawler would just drift. She needed momentum; speed and direction.

 

Not far away one of the larger craters offered a slope. She’d have to angle her launch so that she headed

away from Isabella. She started the crawler and drove it to the right place. Maximum acceleration, override the speed restriction… The vehicle sped up the slope, slower than Allysha would have liked.

She turned off the artificial gravity. The moonlet’s rocky surface began to recede below her. The vehicle drifted away, above the pock-marked surface.

Weariness flooded through her. Nothing more she could do now, except turn on the crawler’s tiny transmitter. The chances of anybody detecting the signal were miniscule; a snowball’s chance in a volcano. Still, a tiny chance was better than no chance. She rested her head against the seat. Above her, a brilliant river of light marked the galactic plane. Brighter than all, like a jewel on a necklace, blazed El Roya.

The crawler moved through space. Allysha had turned off the propulsion unit. Sheer momentum would take the unlikely vessel out far enough. Time wore on. Time to relive past events. They said that when you died, your whole life flashed before you in moments. No need for that. She could relive events at her leisure, try to conjure up an image of a mother who died before she was old enough to remember.

Maybe, when the air finally ran out, she’d see them both; her mother and her father. So much unsaid, so many regrets. Would her father have approved of Chaka? He hadn’t, in principle, approved of the military. So maybe not. But at least Chaka wasn’t a womanizer, or a gambler or a drunk.

The memories flooded back and she relived them all from the moment she first saw him in the control room on Tisyphor, just another security guard but maybe a little more. The Mountain Garden and its towering waterfall; making love under the tree. He hadn’t been very good, that first time but he’d been more than willing to learn in those first few days before Marcus Roland blurted out who he was. She smiled at the memory. He’d been almost insatiable, truth be told. Her memory played on, through the race against time in Shernish University to prevent the release of a killer virus and then to the meeting in the parliamentary building where Tesso tried to kill him. She’d been so adamant she wanted to go home but he’d kept her on Malmos. She saw him again, as he was when he invaded her apartment to take her to Cusang, dinner and Lake Sylmander, Saahren in his dress whites at the Fleet ball. They’d danced.

She

felt his fingers on her bare back, the smell of his uniform, the blue jewel glittering at his throat. She’d been

so tempted to go home with him. And his eyes as he leaned over the bed inArcturus’s sick bay. She blinked away tears and checked the crawler’s vector. For a time she slept, leaving the machine to correct

itself. And then she dreamed her waking dream again, while the stars wheeled past in the endless black.

She wondered if he’d received her message. The tiny code packet, fired via a high-speed military frequency the instant the GPR vessel exited shift space, would have bought him a little time to prepare while the ship finished its cruise to Carnessa’s planetary space. She had his image now, emblazoned on her implant. She could see his face whenever she wanted, dance with him under a river of stars. She closed her eyes. She could dance with him in her dreams.

A soft beeping noise brought her back to wakefulness. A light flashed on the console. The cold had stiffened her body so she had to force her head up to look. The air cylinders were running low. It couldn’t be helped. She turned off the warning light and sucked a sip of water through the straw in the suit. Not much of that left, either.

Shrugging her shoulders to warm them, she checked the rest of the vehicle’s sensors. Something moved on the screen. A ship. Was it a ship? The sensors on this thing weren’t built for identifying vessels. She turned her mind to the task, scanning her implant for anything that matched a Confederacy warship. A frigate, identified asSpartan . She should be elated; she was, wasn’t she? Chaka must have got the message. At this distance the ship was invisible in the blackness. Allysha imagined the targeting sequence,

missiles armed, launch tubes opened. Almost on cue the asteroid exploded.

 

A few moments later the crawler lurched, tumbled even at this distance by the shock wave.

She managed a smile.Take that, Tepich, you fat, oily, fanatical bastard. This is for all those poor bastards you murdered like lab rats .

The transmitter still broadcast its signal. She corrected the tumble and set a vector which would take her to the warship. If it stayed there long enough. At least she could direct the signal from the transmitter at a target. That done, she checked the air cylinders again, turned the temperature down a little more and summoned the image of Saahren from her implant. “Find me, Chaka,” she murmured under her breath.