by James Evans
“I’m doing research, obviously. I’m a research scientist. What else would I be doing?”
Exasperated, Cohen turned to Warden for support, but his eyes narrowed suspiciously when he saw the look on the Marine’s face. He turned back to Skar.
“How did you board my ship? Why did you board my ship? Are you a spy?”
Skar laughed. “Why would I want to spy on you, Captain? Are you a physicist?”
“Not you, madam, your government. I repeat, why did you sneak aboard?”
She cocked her head. “I didn’t sneak aboard. I presented my credentials and your crew accepted them and welcomed me aboard. A nice young lady showed me where the cafeteria was.”
“Your authorisation was the result of breaking into our computer systems, Miss Skar,” Cohen fumed.
“I didn’t break into them.”
“Then who did?”
“Ornament, of course. I don’t know anything about cracking into computers, but for Ornament it was apparently a ‘breeze’. That was the word it used. Does that make sense?”
It made sense to Warden, though it wasn’t entirely comforting to know the AI had described their security that way.
“What in the name of the stars possessed you to come aboard the ship without permission?” Cohen asked.
Skar stared at Cohen in puzzlement. “We came to save the hostages, of course.”
“Save the hostages?” Cohen spluttered.
“Yes. Why else would I be here? My research is impaired by being in this environment. I would only place myself in this situation if it were of the utmost moral imperative.”
“To save the hostages?” Cohen asked helplessly.
“Yes, to save the hostages. Must I repeat myself so often? It is tedious, and I have work to do, you know. Even without a laboratory, I have notes to collate, data to interpret and hypotheses to test.”
Cohen’s shoulders sagged and he turned to Warden and mouthed something at him. Whether it was an imprecation or a silent plea for help, Warden wasn’t quite sure, but he thought he’d give it a go.
“Frida, how are you going to help free the hostages?”
“I would have thought that was obvious, Captain Warden,” she said.
He nodded along. “Sure, sure. But perhaps not quite as obvious to us as to a genius like yourself. Would you mind explaining how you’ll help, and while you’re at it, it would be really nice to know what made you think you should try?”
Skar sighed. “The hostages are citizens of the Children of Freyja. It was explained to me in some detail that it is our responsibility to do everything we can to rescue them without further harm. So I came with Ornament to assist you with the liberation of the mining colony. Ornament can help you plan your assault and provide intelligence as you carry it out, much as it did on the research facility.”
“You are a thing, Ornament. You don’t have gender, or biological life, so ‘it’ is the correct pronoun,” Skar responded verbally, though Warden, and Cohen by the look of him, had seen the message too. How had Skar, though? Warden wondered. She wasn’t wearing a HUD visor. These Valkyr had an air of mystery about them. Did she have an audio feed perhaps?
“No, you have forks. And this is not the time to revisit that particular philosophical discussion, Ornament.”
Skar sniffed. “I refuse to do that. It’s childish.”
Skar rolled her eyes at Cohen and Warden, throwing her hands in the air as if to say, ‘See what I have to deal with?’
“So, gentlemen, we are several days from the colony by my calendar, and I have a lot of work to do. Since I am here primarily to bring Ornament onboard and monitor how well it processes the tasks that you will have for it, perhaps you might leave me to my work? If you have any questions of a tactical or military nature, I’m sure Ornament will be more than happy to answer them. At length. In great detail.”
Cohen gave up in exasperation and stormed from the room. Warden smiled lopsidedly and waved over his shoulder as he followed.
19
“Yes, thank you, Agent O, we’re well aware of that. Midshipman Elson, fire when ready.”
“Package away, sir. Impact in T minus forty-five seconds.”
They watched the feed in the rail cannon bay as the skeleton crew reloaded the weapon with another sabot. This one was a shining tube of metal, with a pointed end and an interior filled with dense rock. With a mass impact driver, you didn’t need an elegant sabot, merely a mass that would hold together until it hit the target.
Cohen glanced at the second feed, which showed the progress of the first shot.
“How are you doing in there, Captain Warden?”
“Hnnggh!” came the strangled reply. Vital signs were good, though a couple of the marines had passed out from the g-force. Cohen glanced across at Parks, who was monitoring their trajectory and checking to see they hadn’t been killed outright by the rapid acceleration. Parks held out her hand and wiggled it from side to side.
“You’re doing splendidly, Captain. Everything is absolutely fine. You’re on target and the boarding pod will have you there in no time. Just a few seconds more,” he said encouragingly, grinning at the Marines’ discomfort.
“Second shot away, sir. Impact in T minus twenty-five,” said Elson as he fired the rail cannon again, this time with a rather deadlier cargo.
“Any sign of a response?”
“No, sir, enemy ship’s status is unchanged,” Midshipman Shepherd said.
“T minus fifteen seconds on the drop pod,” Parks confirmed.
“Robinson, follow that sabot. I want to make sure the threat from the GKI ship has been removed.”
“Aye aye, sir. Engines full ahead,” Robinson acknowledged.
“Railguns targeted on the enemy vessel and ready on your order, sir.”
“Hold until we know it’s necessary, Elson,” Cohen said.
“T minus five seconds on the drop pod,” Parks said.
“Enemy vessel is emitting chatter, sir. She’s firing thrusters,” Shepherd said.
“Drop pad retro rockets firing.”
“Drop pod engaged with target. All troops safely delivered,” Parks confirmed.
Cohen smiled grimly at the completion of the first phase of their plan. Now he just had to finish off the GKI vessel so it couldn’t cause problems. “Elson, will our shot connect?” he asked.
“Thrust and mass parameters of enemy vessel unknown, sir. It’s going to be close.”
“Stand by to fire railguns.”
“Aye, sir.”
Cohen ignored the AI, grateful that it was using text and not a voice, which he was sure would be giddy with excitement.
“Three, two, one. Impact!” Elson said.
“Damage assessment, Mr Elson. Quick as you can, please.”
Elson turned to face him. “Not a direct strike I’m afraid, sir. We hit the fore section and appear to have taken out their comms array, but the ship was moving and hasn’t been crippled. Damage to the enemy vessel is substantial but not critical.”
“She’s moving, Captain!” Robinson called out.
“Then let’s pursue her, Midshipman.”
He sent a message to the assault team as he gave orders,
“Elson, fire railguns at will. Robinson, don’t lose them. These GKI privateers are going to learn that the Royal Navy doesn’t tolerate piracy.”
20
“Fletcher, Drummond, take point. Colour Milton and I are your support. Goodwin, get me dron
e coverage of the areas that have gone dark. Ten?”
“Yes, sir?”
“You’ve seen the footage of the GKI attack. These people kill women and children for sport. They deserve a taste of their own medicine, wouldn’t you agree?”
“My sentiments exactly, Captain.”
“Teach them what it means to be hunted by a Royal Marine, Ten,” Warden ordered.
Ten snapped a quick salute and then pushed off with his legs, jumping with the assistance of his power armour up through the remnants of the bio-dome roof. The bundles of artificial muscle fibre, combined with the low gravity of the asteroid, allowed him to leap like a cricket. He thrust out one hand and a grapnel fired out over the surface of the station, pulling him quickly from sight.
Warden didn’t know exactly where he was going, but Agent O had cracked the station’s security and accessed archived and current video feeds throughout Oldervik. Ten was receiving updates as quickly as they came and, guided by the near omniscient Agent O, he would take care of any GKI troopers while Warden and Milton led the rest of the team directly to the hostages.
He waited for Goodwin to finish launching drones and follow Colour Milton into the station before he moved. The frozen trees were a harrowing reminder of the video Agent O had extracted from the station shortly after Palmerston’s arrival.
They had watched the attack from the perspective of cameras inside the bio-dome. Watched as the GKI boarding pod crashed through the alloy and glass lattice. Watched as atmosphere, plants and people alike were sucked into space. Watched as the GKI mercs, heedless of the carnage, had tramped past the dead and opened the doors into the rest of the station.
Warden rolled his shoulders, checked his rifle and headed after Goodwin, who was moving through the first door. He wanted to be calm, rational, in control. But deep down he knew there was another part of him that wanted revenge, that wanted to punish the attackers for what they’d done.
“You okay, boss?” Milton asked as he closed the door behind them, as if she sensed something wasn’t quite right.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Let’s get this done and get these people their station back so they can rebuild their lives.”
“Roger that. You heard the captain. Let’s get in position before Ten makes himself known,” Milton said, gesturing with her left hand for Fletcher and Drummond, in their hulking ogre clones, to move out.
Ten sighed.
Green and red lines appeared beneath his feet, tracing the corridors and rooms of the station interior as he looked around him. Red indicated an airlock or doorway. A fat yellow arrow floated at the bottom of his view, pointing off to his left.
Turning, Ten saw that the hatchway he had been looking for was a hundred metres away or more. He reached it with a few leaping steps. In gravity as low as this, you had to develop a new way of moving if you wanted to make speed. You couldn’t just run as you would on a normal-sized planet, you had to turn each stride into a long bounce, loping across the surface almost as if it were a gigantic trampoline. It took a lot of practice, and it had been years since Ten had tried.
Caution being the better part of valour, he took his time. He didn’t want to risk a stride that would bounce him far into the void before bringing him crashing back down somewhere he hadn’t intended, like onto an observation window, for instance.
Ten considered that for a moment. Was it likely there was an enemy merc standing in just the right spot to guard this particular entrance without showing on a camera? They had assessed dozens of entry points while planning the assault, but this one had seemed to Ten to be the most likely to be useful. It wasn’t particularly special, so it shouldn’t be guarded.
See? he thought. That’s exactly the sort of sloppy over reliance you need to avoid. If he hadn’t been looking for guidance from the AI, he would have breached the airlock already and found out for himself if it was guarded, dealing with it on the fly. Now he had wasted valuable time just thinking about it.
He tapped in an engineering code the Valkyr had supplied and, sure enough, it overrode the airlock’s protocols and allowed him to open the external hatch. Ten dropped down into the wide tube below, pulling the hatch shut above him. Gas flooded the chamber and the lighting scheme inside changed from a wan red to a lurid green. He span the wheel on the door opposite him and pushed it open, weapon raised.
Ten checked left and right. The corridor was empty.
Ten moved off immediately. He had a lot of work to do, and very little time to do it.
Ten stopped as the rage rose, struggling for calm. He needed to be in control, not let his personal feelings get in the way. This portion of the station was living quarters and had functioning artificial gravity, allowing him to run toward the target.
