The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III (41 page)

The suit’s flypack sputtered to life of its own volition and boosted her out of the lock. She resisted an urge to take over manual control, and instead let the autopilot do its job.

It lifted her out of the air lock, out into space, toward the
Banquo’s
shield, a black wall of nothingness, rippling with shimmering starlike sparks of light, the steady light of the true stars barely visible behind.

For a brief, horrible moment Suss thought the shield was going to stay on as she went through it. The flypack was driving her closer and closer, twenty meters, ten meters away, so close she could imagine the magnetic fields plucking at the fabric of her body. Then the sparkling wall snapped out of existence and she sailed through empty space.

Suss looked behind through the rearview mirror set into her helmet. For the briefest of moments, she could see the ship back there—and then the ship’s shield reappeared, shrouding
Banquo
in darkness.

She looked ahead, looking for the black-cloaked asteroid that was her destination. Without magnification or sensors to guide her eyes, she couldn’t find it. Then she remembered the UV vision system built into her visor and switched it on. The visor clouded for a moment as its delicate electronics came on, seeking far ultraviolet radiation it could translate down into visible light.

Suddenly, a blindingly bright wall of violet-white lit up the sky, dead ahead. She had not been able to see it because it took up half the sky, and what she had taken for a backdrop of stars was the telltale pattern of surface sparks, moving too slowly for her to notice.

In down-shifted UV, the shield was a huge, garishly bright blast of radiance, far too intense for her to see anything. She fumbled with the visor’s controls and adjusted the intensity. With the brightness cut back, she could see patterns, surging, dark-blue lines of force weaving their way around the blue-white glare of the energy field itself.

The flypack fired a control jet, turning her back to the asteroid. Flying backward, she tried to find the
Banquo’s
shield in the sky, but the ship was already lost to view. There was nothing to do but wait for the ride to end. The flypack was flying an automated run that was meant to bring her right up against the closest of the communication ports, and Suss was strictly along for the ride.

She longed for all of the devices that had been denied her because they contained too much metal, starting with a simple watch, right on up through a cutting laser to that most unimaginable of luxuries, her AID, Santu. But all were too risky passing close to an electromagnetic shield.

The best
Banquo
had been able to provide was a few varieties of plastic explosive—and even a few of those had to be left behind, because the chemistry of the explosive itself contained too much of the wrong kinds of metal. Suss was strictly, utterly, on her own.

The flypack fired again, blasting at full braking power. Suss suddenly realized that she must be getting close to the target. How much time had passed? It had seemed only a moment that she had stared at that blinding wall. It must have been much longer.

A tiny amber glowlight began to blink, just at the edge of Suss’ vision. Fuel low! Damn it. The attitude jets fired again, swinging around until she was flying nearly parallel to the asteroid’s surface, still traveling backwards. How long was there to go? She looked down, past her feet, and saw the hellish blue-white glow of the shield below her. She was close enough now to gauge her movement over that pseudo-landscape of writhing energy. She couldn’t be more than a hundred meters over it, and getting closer all the time.

She checked her tiny rearview mirror again, looking over her shoulder in the direction she was traveling. There! Up ahead, a black column thrusting up through the shield. That had to be it. The low-fuel light began winking faster.

The plan had been for the flypack to bring her to rest right alongside the comm port, but the only
possible
trajectory was right at the limits of the pack’s fuel supply, with no hope of a second chance. If the pack failed to get her there, Suss would just keep right on going, sailing out into space with no hope of rescue.

She watched the black column grow in the mirror. It was going to be damn close.

The flypack’s engine chuffed and coughed once or twice, and then shut down. Suss shut her eyes and cursed the fates, fighting back tears. She opened her eyes and swallowed hard. To be that close and not make it.

She suddenly realized the fuel warning light was still winking, not staying on. She still had fuel. Then why had—she looked again in the tiny mirror.

The black column was hanging motionless, right behind her, not ten meters away. Now that she was closer, she could see it was some sort of open framework, not a solid construction. The asteroid’s shield was beneath her feet, scarcely twenty meters below.

Suss grabbed for the manual controls, rotated halfway to face the column, and blipped the maneuvering jets, giving herself the gentlest of nudges forward, so she was moving forward at only a few centimeters a second.

She reached up and switched off the UV vision system. The blinding glare of the shield as seen through amplified ultraviolet faded away. Below her, the shield resumed its inky black appearance.

The column resolved itself, at least somewhat, as an open latticework construction, gloomy gray in the dim starlight. The tower was obviously designed to be retractable. When threatened, it could be pulled in under the shield and the shield port closed.

As long as that didn’t happen while she was around . . .

Suss looked over her head and saw a small forest of antennae sprouting from the top of the girder box, no doubt attached to various communication and detection systems inside the asteroid.

Had any of them spotted her? In theory, it was possible, but even with the suit and flypack, Suss knew she had a very small radar cross-section, and those dishes and sensors were pointed up, away from her.

Her gentle movement forward was bringing her closer to the antenna tower. She looked down at where the tower entered the shield itself. She flicked the UV viewer back on for a moment and saw that the shield almost lapped up against the tower. She swallowed hard. Obviously, the best way in was to climb down the
interior
of the tower.

She was only a meter or two away now. She resisted the temptation to speed up her travel, and let her very slight momentum carry her forward. She put out her hands and grabbed hold of a corner girder.

Wrapping her legs around it to hold herself steady, she wrestled her way out of the flypack. She wouldn’t need it anymore, and it was going to be tough enough going without humping the rocket pack along. She got the thing off her and shoved it away. It drifted down toward the shield. She watched as it struck the shield—and disintegrated into a cloud of debris.

Like sticking your arm in a slicing machine,
the man said.
More like a shredding machine.

Never mind. Keep going. Don’t think about it.

She wriggled her way into the center of the girder box and was relieved to find a set of handholds built into one line of girders. She swung herself around so her head was pointed down toward the shield and the asteroid below. She started climbing.

One hand after another, moving as delicately as she could, she pulled herself along, closer and closer to the hole in the shield. It was all too easy to imagine the hole as a mouth, gaping wide and eager to swallow her.

Closer. Closer. She could feel the power of the shield as she went toward it. Her hair was literally standing on end, caught in the surging electrical fields. She could feel her hair brushing the inside of her helmet, felt the hairs on her arms bristling against the sleeves of her suit.

Closer, closer,
into
the mouth, the hole, let it swallow her up, let the magnetic eddy effects set the little telltale lights in her helmet blinking and flickering, indicating the status of a flypack that wasn’t there anymore. It didn’t matter. Just keep going. You are still alive, when by all rights you should be dead a dozen times by now.

Through it, past it, under it. Pause for a moment, feel the hair on your head settling back a bit, turn around and look up at the violet anger of the shield that was
over
you, and realize you were in.

Suss sagged back against the handholds and started to breathe again, not quite sure when she had stopped.

Chapter Twenty-Three
Landing

They had received no word from Suss and could hope for none. Obviously, it would have been impossible for her to carry a radio, let alone use one, if she was trying to get past a communications center.

There had been a microscopic twitch on the
Banquo’s
shield power sensor just after the time she should have arrived there. Whether that flicker on the meters indicated her death, the wreckage of her discarded flypack, or the impact of some completely unrelated bit of debris was impossible to say. There were bits and pieces of missile wreckage crashing back all over the asteroid’s shield. There were no ruined Pact missiles raining down—Spencer wasn’t even bothering to fire yet.

If Suss’ fate was uncertain,
Banquo’s
was scarcely less so. She was in under guns, all right, skirting so close to the asteroid that there was a certain amount of interference between its shield and the ship’s. Fortunately, the asteroid’s shield was as effective in masking the enemy’s sensors as the
Banquo’s
weapons.

Now and then they would get a fix on the destroyer and drop a missile on her, but this close in, magnetic disturbances were interfering with marksmanship: The enemy was as likely to hit the asteroid’s shield as
Banquo’s
.

So far, the weapons officer had always managed to boost power to the shield in time—but sooner or later either she was going to be a millisecond off, or
Banquo
was simply going to run out of power for the shield.

The navigation officer was close to a nervous breakdown, keeping up a random series of course changes that would keep the destroyer skating over the asteroid’s shield without any predictable pattern to its movements. If
he
got it wrong, the crew of the
Banquo
would receive a graphic demonstration of what happened when two EM shields interfered with each other. But as
Banquo
would turn into a cloud of debris in about ten seconds, the lesson would not be very useful.

Spencer glanced at the mission clock. In ten minutes they would fire a flight of missiles, one to each detected opening in the shield—including the one Suss had been aiming for. They needed those sensor ports destroyed anyway, to ease up the pressure on
Banquo’s
defenses, but the main point of the exercise was to provide Suss with a diversion. In theory, if the enemy had detected the agent’s arrival without being certain of what it was, a fusion bomb over her entry point would discourage any investigation.

Without vaporizing her, with any luck.

###

A hatch. A plain old, manually operated, nonsecure hatch, lying open right there at the base of the communications tower.

Suss stared at the hatchway for a long moment, scarcely believing her luck. She had sweated out the way into the asteroid’s interior a dozen times, sketching out in her mind how she would have designed a secure entrance and kept someone like herself from gaining entry. And now all she had to do was cycle through a lock. She climbed inside and decided it wasn’t so incredible to find a way in. After all, what point in securing an entrance behind a force shield and twenty million klicks from anywhere?

With a lack of drama that Suss somehow found disappointing, she cycled through the lock and stepped out into a small, unoccupied engineering room.

WHOOMP! Suddenly the whole compartment shuddered. A status monitor by the air lock suddenly turned bright red and flashed out a warning.

***

ENEMY MISSILE DETECTED

AUTO-EMERGENCY COMM TOWER RETRACTION PERFORMED

COMM PORT SHIELD OPENING COLLAPSED

Suss breathed a sigh of relief. Close, very close. Time to get on with it. She pulled off her pressure suit, unpacked the few non-metallic gadgets she had brought in its pockets, and stashed it in a closet. Underneath she was wearing tan coveralls, rather sweat-stained but otherwise quite nondescript.

Unless the civilians on this rock were issued some odd-looking uniforms, her clothes ought to pass muster. She smoothed down her hair and broke into an equipment locker. She found not only a tool bag, but a whole collection of hand and power tools that might well come in very handy. She stuffed those and her plastic explosives into the bag, opened the door to the compartment, and set off down the corridor she found behind it.

Find the shield generator,
she told herself.
Shut it down,
blow it up, stop it working. Somehow.

The corridor was actually an access tunnel, drilled straight through the rock to this point from some central area. Suss peered down the length of raw, cold rock and could see no other doors opening on to it. Obviously it had been built for no other reason than getting workers back and forth to that comm tower service room. With the tower out of operation, it was unlikely that anyone else would come along it. That suited her fine.

Not that it made much difference. She’d meet the locals soon enough. She grabbed a handhold and started pulling herself along.

The tunnel was not as long as it looked. After only a hundred meters, Suss found herself decanted out into a busy—indeed frantically crowded—concourse, the meeting point of four or five large tunnels.

She moved cautiously out of the access tunnel and hung back from the obviously panicky crowds of people.

She was in no danger at all of being spotted as an outsider by these people. They were dressed in any number of styles, many of them close variants of her own worker’s coverall. No one wore a name badge or a unit ID, let alone a uniform.

This was clearly, patently, a civilian crowd—and not a very well organized one at that. Everyone was shouting at once, banging into each other as competing teams struggled to get this or that large piece of equipment out of the way.