Picking up the small metal sphere, which was all that was left of the missile, she started back toward the house. Her ident unlocked the access panel as she walked and she flipped it open, surprised to see only a single data card inside. Generally there was more, even the odd handwritten note; getting a single object in one of the pods was unusual.
Taking the card to her private office, Justine plugged it into her terminal and watched in silence as the data unspooled onto her screen. She watched footage of Winter being assassinated from the viewpoint of three different news channel cameras, her face impassive. She watched the text which followed and frowned. Not telling Aneka and Ella, especially Aneka, seemed wrong. They were not going to do anything stupid. What could they do? Just like Justine, they were stuck on this island until someone came to get them.
It was, however, the last message on the card which lifted Justine’s eyebrows and made her jaw drop. It was just one line, but she had never thought she would ever see anything like it.
If your location is compromised, bring them here.
Harriamon, High Orbit, 13.8.527 FSC.
Another tachyon relay sat in high orbit above another world. Harriamon had a thicker, and more toxic, atmosphere, and the relay was newer, having been built earlier that year, but it did the same sort of job. Tachyons streamed in from distant worlds, impinged upon the detection field, and so became a stream of data to be processed and redirected.
In the case of this relay, however, more or less all the data was simply retransmitted. The entire machine had been built to relay messages from New Earth to Old Earth, and vice versa. It rarely relayed anything to a local destination, or even a remote one which was not one of the two Earths.
The crew, two technicians and one scientist, were expecting nothing more than tachyon beams transiting through their station, so the barrage of gamma-ray beams came as something of a surprise. It ripped open the central section of the hull like a tin can leaving the missiles which followed to wipe out the main sensor arrays.
By the time the Admiral Banfry had swung around from the far side of Harriamon and got within sensor range, the source of the attack was gone and all they could do was begin mounting a rescue operation.
FSA Headquarters, 14.8.527 FSC.
‘I don’t understand,’ Dowler said into his phone. ‘You won’t take Elroy out, but you attack the relay station at Harriamon?’
The voice at the other end was apparently quite angry since Dowler’s face paled. ‘No, of course I… Yes… It’s still working on the files. I’ve found a few leads, but nothing solid yet. There’s evidence that she was definitely hiding something serious, and I have the full details on Jansen.’
He listened again, nodding a few times. ‘I’ll forward the files to you immediately, and of course I’ll tell you when I have more on Winter.’ He closed the connection and reached for his terminal. He would need to be careful about sending out the data on Jansen. It was a level-seven secret and he was sending it to an unauthorised location. If someone found out about it… But they would not, he was sure of that at least. As long as he used the encryption software he had been supplied with, no one would be able to crack it or trace the connection.
Yorkbridge Mid-town.
Justine watched the data streams going into and out of the FSA’s communications hub. It was mainly routine data: email, file transfers, video calls. Little was drawing her attention, but her computer was checking over everything, just in case.
When one file transfer was flagged for her attention, she moved, her fingers sliding over her tablet to bring that stream to the forefront. The encryption being used was strong, and of an unknown type. Frowning, she ordered the computer to copy the data for decryption and locate the source and destination.
It had been sent from the terminal in Winter’s office, and the only person with access to that was Dowler. The destination was harder, but the computer was running very advanced software. After passing through a dozen routers, the stream terminated at the firewall of the Herosian embassy.
Justine flagged the decryption as urgent, to be prioritised over other work. She needed to know what the interim head of the FSA was sending to the Herosians. Especially since he was taking such pains to ensure no one found out about it.
Odanari, 15.8.527 FSC.
Ella let out a small whimper as Aneka’s fingers traced over her stomach, moving upward at a slow crawl. Aneka had her arms pinned above her head, not firmly enough to really hold them, but Ella was not really trying to get free and the whimpering was as much play as anything.
‘You’re beautiful, you know?’ Aneka whispered.
‘So is just about everyone,’ Ella replied.
‘It’s not your looks that make you beautiful, love.’ Aneka reached up and tapped Ella between the eyes. ‘This is what makes you beautiful.’ She lowered her hand and pinched Ella’s right nipple, eliciting a sharp cry of pain followed by a moan. ‘That and the cute little noises you make.’
‘That’s mean… if you stop.’
Aneka grinned. ‘I don’t plan to stop.’
The bedroom door opened and Justine walked in. Both girls looked up since their caretaker had said she had a few things to do around the house and that they should have some couple’s time. The fact that she seemed to be wearing combat armour of some form was the second surprise.
‘Sorry, but you need to get up and dressed,’ Justine said, her voice carrying urgency. ‘We’ve got company.’
‘What kind of company?’ Aneka asked, releasing Ella’s arms and rolling across the bed to sit up.
‘That I’m not sure of. Sensors detected a ship dropping out of orbit about an hour ago. Ninety-eight tonnes, probably a fusion torch engine, no identification echo. It dropped out of sight ten minutes later, but the course suggested it was heading this way.’
‘Are we expecting someone?’ Aneka was pulling on her suit and she glanced around at Ella, who had not moved. ‘She’s going to need some armour.’
Justine nodded. ‘When you’re dressed, we’ll go to the armoury. I have some weapons you might be interested in too.’
Ella blinked. ‘There’s an armoury?’
~~~
The armoury was hidden behind a wall on a corridor next to the solarium, and it was quite an armoury. Ella busied herself putting on an armoured combat suit, which looked a little too much like the suits the Negral AIs had given them for Aneka’s total comfort, while Aneka examined the weapons mounted on the walls.
‘This stuff,’ Aneka said, ‘it’s Xinti weaponry.’
‘Not… exactly,’ Justine replied, taking a rifle down from the wall.
‘Then…?’
‘The Xinti used some similar weapons. These are developments on some of those, and some unique developments.’
‘Developed by Winter?’
‘Yes. She’s older than she looks.’
‘I… know that. Something about her eyes. You have the same look.’
Justine pointed at a large, bulky-looking weapon near where Aneka was standing, and changed the subject. ‘I think you’ll like that. It’s basically the same as your sniper rifle, but it’s fully automatic. Most people use it from a mount, but with your strength…’
Aneka took the weapon down. It was connected to a backpack via a flexible ammo feed and it weighed easily twice what her sniper rifle did. As her hand closed around the grip an in-vision display indicated that it was loaded, with a four thousand round magazine.
‘All right,’ she said, ‘now we’re talking. Ella’s pretty useful with a beam-based pistol…’
Justine pulled down a pistol and handed it to Ella. ‘Graser pistol. The range is reduced in atmosphere, but if you’re shooting at something more than fifty metres away in this situation I’ll be surprised.’ She looked up suddenly. ‘Sensors have picked up a low-flying ship, five kilometres to the south. It’s armed. Forward-mounted beam weapons and ground assault cannon on turrets.’ She looked down at Aneka. ‘The configuration
matches a Herosian light gunship, Hachadim class.’
‘Ashad Hithor,’ Ella said. She took the pistol from Justine, saw the heads-up display appear in the vision field, and nodded.
‘If they’ve got any of those armoured suits…’ Aneka said.
Justine walked across to a box and pulled out a pair of thick cylinders. She handed them to Aneka. ‘Don’t use them inside. They’re graviton pulse implosion grenades. They have significant range and…’
‘War, the Negral weapons designer, told me about these. I’ll be careful.’ She clipped them to her belt. ‘Let’s hope we don’t need to use them.’
‘We’ll know soon enough. The ship has landed at one end of the strip. The shield door is dropping and I’m arming the exterior defences.’
‘We have exterior defences?’ Ella squeaked.
‘Yes, and those and the door should hold them for a while, but if it’s the same group who attacked the facility on New Earth we have to assume they’ll get in.’
‘We need a defensible position,’ Aneka said.
Justine smiled. ‘You hadn’t noticed the chokepoint out of the lounge?’
‘That corridor doesn’t provide much cover.’
‘That is because it doesn’t normally need to.’
~~~
The first man to leave the rear access door of the gunship was hit in the chest by a stream of hydrogen pulses heated to several thousand degrees by a laser. The plasma burned through his combat suit as though it was barely there and, a second later, there was almost nothing left to identify him as Jenlay.
The mercenaries had not been expecting that kind of resistance, but they still had their ace in the hole; the heavy suit went out next. The sealed, hardened armour with a neutronium outer layer, powered by an antimatter reactor just to give it the power it needed to move, seemed to ignore the bursts of super-hot plasma as they exploded uselessly against it. Wearing a stupid shit-eating grin, the man inside lifted his arms, the suit’s motors responded to the action by lifting the, much heavier, arms of the small mech he was riding in, and with them the two heavy antimatter blasters they were holding. A normal man would have had trouble lifting one of them; the suit could handle one in each hand. He began firing back.
~~~
Heavy, laminated metal and plastic shields had risen from the floor of the corridor. They were staggered, the first about five metres from the door into the lounge, and about a metre high. They looked very solid, but Aneka had no illusions about their ability to stop antimatter explosions. Ella had been positioned behind the last of the five with orders to stay put and only use her pistol if someone got too close. Aneka was behind the first, Justine taking the next.
They were speaking via their implant communicators, and Justine had patched the feeds from the exterior cameras through to them as well. The second of the two turrets had engaged the suit, but it was having no more luck breaching the dense armour than the first had.
‘They’ll either hit the door with those cannons,’ Ella said, ‘or use breaching charges.’
‘Agreed,’ Justine replied. ‘We’ll know soon; the second gun is down.’
Sure enough, the view from the second Gatling’s sighting system had gone to snow. Another camera showed six men in combat suits running down the ramp at the back of the ship. One of them appeared to be carrying a large satchel.
‘Looks like it’s going to be explosives,’ Aneka commented. ‘As long as they can’t get that bloody tank in here we should be fine. Only eight men?’
‘I count six,’ Ella put in.
‘They lost one to the cannon, one’s in that battlesuit.’
‘Oh, yeah.’
‘The Hachadim carries two crew and eight marines,’ Al supplied. ‘They were built to drop fire team pairs into combat situations. The stealth hull provides superior incursion capability.’
‘If possible,’ Justine said, ‘we want to take it intact.’
‘Why?’ Ella asked, sounding perplexed.
‘Our position is compromised. My orders are to take you to a secondary location, and that is currently the only safe way I have of doing so.’
There was a loud explosion from the front of the house. Dust billowed down the corridor as far as Aneka’s shield. She lifted her gun, balancing it on the shield top and then ducking back out of view. The weapon’s integral sight would do fine for aiming.
‘They’re through the door,’ Justine said. ‘The hole is large, but nowhere near big enough to allow the heavy suit through.’
Aneka was watching the camera in the lounge. Three men swept into the room, rifles raised high, and immediately covered the three main directions. She smiled, standard room clearance tactics not much different from what she would have done. She could imagine the point where they announced the room clear, estimated when the second trio would move in, and smiled again when they did. Now they would move up…
‘Get ready. Here they come.’
The first of them rushed through the door, his gun darting left and right as he went. Aneka had time to analyse his motions as he spotted the shields along the corridor, took in the heavy weapon poking out from over one of them, and realised he had made a mistake. She pulled the trigger. It was almost unfair; the man was shredded, almost literally by the stream of heavy needles, as were the two men following him. The problem was that the three remaining men were going to be far more cautious.
She held the trigger down, watching as the ammo counter clicked down. She could not keep that kind of suppression fire up for long, but it stopped them getting in line with the door. It did not stop them firing back, however. An antimatter pulse impacted the wall inside the corridor, blasting fragments of Plascrete over a wide area. Aneka felt the backwash hit her, but there were no damage indicators in-vision so she ignored it.
The view from the lounge camera showed one of the men pulling something from his belt. ‘Shit,’ she muttered, releasing the trigger of her gun and moving out from behind the barricade.
‘Aneka!’ Justine snapped out. ‘What are you doing?’
‘They’ve got a grenade.’
Another explosion blasted dust and debris from the wall nearby. The grenadier was moving toward the door, taking a more direct line since the shooting had apparently stopped. Maybe he thought she was reloading. She could hope so. She bolted forward into the doorway, bringing her gun around, clamping down on the trigger, and sweeping the stream in an arc. Just inside the door, one man fell backward as his body was riddled with plasma darts, then the stream of bullets blasted holes in the wall before slicing the grenade thrower almost cleanly in two.
But there was a third and he was on her left, almost behind her. She dodged randomly, swinging to her left and rolling, but she felt the impact on her back, the searing pain as the pulse exploded tearing away fake flesh and exposing the mesh armour beneath. Briefly she saw damage indicators flashing past her vision, and then she saw nothing.
~~~
Justine made it to the doorway in time to see Aneka fall, and fired on the merc. The graser beam bit into his chest, carving a line through his armour and the chest beneath. He fell back and she kept firing, the beam cutting up over his throat and then through the faceplate of his helmet, and he stopped moving.
‘Aneka?’ Ella’s voice came over the radio. ‘Is she…?’
‘She’s down, but I don’t think one blast from one of those things could stop her permanently. We have another problem. Stay there.’ There was little likelihood that the redhead would obey, but the heavy suit had to be taken out.
Running over to Aneka’s prone form, Justine found one of the grenades on her belt and moved to the hole in the door. Hitting the priming stud, she leaned out long enough to get a fix on the huge, armoured form, and tossed the cylinder out. Then she turned back in time to see Ella arriving beside Aneka.
‘I said to stay put,’ she growled. ‘Help me get her out of the way.’ She grabbed one of Aneka’s arms and, with Ella helping, pulled her to one sid
e of the room.
They had made it perhaps five metres when the sound happened. It was not an explosion, exactly, though there was a rumble, which could have been the aftershock of one at the end. It was more like a loud crack followed instantly by a sound like a tornado whipping past in an instant. The building creaked audibly and the edges of the blasted metal shield door began to glow a dull red.
‘Shit,’ Justine grumbled, ‘I hope it didn’t damage the damn ship.’ She looked around at Ella. ‘Stay with her. I have to get the crew before they decide to bug out.’ Ella nodded dumbly and Justine bolted for the gap in the door.
The battlesuit looked like a car wreck. It was tipped on one side and visibly crushed, the heavy metal bent and crumpled where the sudden intense gravity field had pulled it in toward the point of detonation. The man inside was probably soup. Justine had never actually used one of the things on a real target. She had seen what it could do in tests, but the actual results on real people… Shuddering, she ran toward the gunship still sitting on the deck twenty-five metres away.
The crew, it seemed, were still in shock from the explosion. Maybe some of the radiation damage had penetrated the hull and done her job for her, though that might be bad since it could have damaged the electronics. The only thing which had saved her and Ella was the thick Plascrete wall between them and the detonation. As she ran up the, still open, rear gate she made a mental note to never use one of those grenades again.
The ramp led into a small staging area, and then to a flight of stairs which brought her up a level. There had been a visible cockpit window above the nose and she expected the crew to be there. Two of them, as Al had said, probably with side arms. She swallowed. She was trained to fight, but she rarely had to actually engage in combat. Her eyes darted left and right, checking the doorways along the corridor, but she saw nothing until she reached the forward section of the craft.
The Winter War Page 22
