Molehunt

by Paul Collins

  This was Maximus’s own headquarters. He had left the monitors and consoles intact and restored their coating of thick unbroken dust after each visit – specially constructed nanoants that did their work and turned into dust. He sat down in the ‘pilot’s chair’, as the maintenance jocks called it, and activated his systems.

  He had already spliced one of these into the main communications net. He quickly found what he was looking for and activated a directed ear signal broadcast. Privately, he listened to the automatic recording his system had made in his absence; safe from any sentinel nanoparticles RIM or Oracle might have floating around.

  ‘Jake? Viktus here.’

  ‘You meet with the lad?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He’s an interesting kid.’ Maximus snorted at the word ‘kid’. ‘He knows about the Cygnus Sector.’

  ‘He what –?’

  ‘Jake, Maxim put it together himself. Even showed me on my own view tank. Fact is, he added a few wrinkles that we missed.’

  ‘You don’t say?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘What about that other matter? You rule him out?’

  ‘About him being the mole? Yes. He’s just a kid, excited at having found out something the grown-ups had missed.’

  ‘Makes sense to me. Unless –’

  ‘Unless that’s what he wants us to think.’

  There was a moment’s silence, and then both burst out laughing. When the laughter subsided, Viktus snorted. ‘Listen to us. We’ve been in this business too long.’

  ‘You’re telling me,’ said Jake. ‘Yesterday I was convinced my mother was the mole.’

  ‘I’ve met your mother. I think you could be on to something.’

  They both laughed again.

  Jake said, ‘So what are you going to do with our pet genius?’

  ‘I’ve already promoted him and invited him to join the Task Force.’

  ‘Good thinking. Heck, if he were a few years younger I’d take him in like you did Anneke.’

  ‘You, a stepfather?’ Viktus laughed throatily. ‘I’ll be dead when that happens!’

  The conversation moved onto other matters. Maximus relaxed for the first time since he’d been told to report to Viktus.

  The fools suspected nothing. Now he could get on with his own priority program, which was the elimination of Anneke Longshadow.

  The first thing Maximus did when he arrived on the Task Force assigned to find the mole – if there was one – was to construct a low-level smoke screen. What was once called a ‘red herring’.

  The red herring’s name was Harbage. Cadet Esprin Harbage. He was already, as they said in the business, ‘in play’.

  One of Maximus’s new jobs was to search personnel files and backgrounds, and review original application interviews and psych evaluations, searching for patterns others had missed. It became apparent that his brain was peculiarly wired to find patterns where sometimes Oracle could not perceive them. Maximus had secretly augmented his neural jack with several interesting features, including his ‘death code’ instruction. Not only could he absorb advanced pattern matching algorithms, but if he thought about the colour yellow and repeated the death code sentence in his head ten times, the electrical stimulation of his brain’s speech centre and related de Bono neural loops would trigger nanomechanical relays, releasing tiny but deadly microcapsules of prion X, the notorious ‘self-destruct’ instruction the body used against cancer. A handy guard against torture, although the technology had cost the scientist who provided Maximus with it an arm and a leg prior to his newfound generosity. Literally. The limbs were re-grown from drench vats, of course, but there was little Maximus could do about that.

  More than once Viktus had thrown up his hands in disgust. ‘Why do we have this trillion dollar pile of hardware, when Maximus here can out-think it twice before breakfast? Trillion, hell, it’s worth five times that in Averaged Galactic Currency. Can anybody tell me why?’

  This time they were in the main open-plan room of the Task Force headquarters. Floor to ceiling plasglass windows gazed out over a lava lake from which great geysers of fiery magma regularly erupted, shooting up to a thousand metres into the air. Above the lake, a vast artificial aquarium shaped like a curved band floated in the terraformed sky. Its exact colour was hard to place: somewhere between turquoise and magenta.

  Viktus was perched on the edge of a desk holding a sheaf of notes, handed to him by Maximus. The notes were on e-paper, digitally ‘ink’ capsulated paper that could be updated any time by electrically moving colours in each microcapsule.

  Maximus had identified twenty-three agents who had concealed potential breaches of security during their recruitment interviews. Most were trivial: one had a brother serving a jail sentence on Sigma Gamma. While this wasn’t cause for instant dismissal, and understandable in other times, such revelations took on a darker tone in these days that would become known as the Great Mole Hunt.

  One of those who had concealed a breach was Cadet Esprin Harbage.

  Esprin had entered the cadet program a year before Maximus. He had an exemplary record, came from a fifth generation agenting family, and seemed ideal officer material.

  But he had three things going against him.

  One, he had a gambling addiction that he had managed to conceal. Two, he knew Anneke Long-shadow. Three, Maximus needed a fall guy.

  The fact that Esprin came from a happy, loving family and had had an idyllic childhood just made Maximus hate him more. Maximus’s own childhood had been anything but idyllic. By the age of six, slavers had murdered his parents and he had been rounded up and shoved, along with hundreds of others, into the stinking vermin-ridden hold of a star freighter. He was left alone. Terrified. Bewildered. Inconsolable.

  The irony was that those ten days were the best days of his life for the next ten years. Until he murdered his abusive master, escaped his world, and found refuge on a mercantile planet where he reinvented himself. Then, as Maximus Black, he had joined the only organisation that had some chance of giving him what he wanted most.

  Revenge.

  Against the galaxy.

  ANNEKE’S biggest surprise, when she came round, was that she was alive. She knew she was alive because her head throbbed abominably, but there was also an insistent beeping noise that no dead person should be able to hear.

  Wincing, she prised open one eye to scan her surroundings.

  She was in the glider cockpit. The cockpit had sealed itself automatically and the autopilot had steered a reverse course, retracing its inward journey.

  The alarm indicator was frizzing. She sat up straight, as near as her pounding head would allow, and gazed out the forward bubble. Right. The glider had plunged itself out of the repulsor field. That meant two things: one, the plane was going down since it no longer had the standing wave turbulence ridges to ride, but more alarmingly, she was a sitting duck out here. Would it take long for the Quesada hunkies to figure out she had flown in under the city and had a ride sitting around somewhere? They were dumb, but not that dumb.

  Anneke contacted her ship and told it to come and get her. The autopilot rapped back that it was on its way and not to panic, but then autopilots can’t be killed and can afford to have attitude.

  While Anneke waited she scanned all frequencies and channels and eyeballed the sky above and behind her. Arcadia had one interesting feature, which was the reason the floating city was built where it was. The moon, like many moons, kept one face constantly turned towards Arcadia, but unusually the moon was also in a geosynchronous orbit above Arcadia. Thus it hung above the city eternally, day and night, except when the small shadow of Arcadia occasionally engulfed it in an eclipse, briefly snuffing it out. It was one of the eeriest things she had seen. Below the striated moon face, she could still see the city floating in the distance, seemingly on clouds. This was because the repulsor field was warming the air then spewing it out beneath the city where it immediate
ly condensed. It had a benign look, like something out of a fairytale. On the other hand, most fairytales also contained grim monsters and dark evil, so that fitted, too.

  Anneke’s head still hurt and now she realised she was bleeding. Her first aid autokit cleaned the wound, sealed it with a skin regenerator, and then sprayed liberal amounts of derma-gro on it. This initially acted like a new layer of skin, until the flesh beneath it could regrow and cast it off.

  Out of paranoia she popped a broad-range antibiotic. She wanted to drop a painkiller, too, but her body was already overflowing with enough additives to fill a datt encyclopaedia. Anyway, painkillers took the edge off reactions, and without optimised reactions she would be dead.

  Suddenly a shadow darkened the cockpit. It was a Quesadan cruiser lining up, slowing and angling its subsonics weapon tubes for a shot at her. She could see the grim-faced pilot.

  A moment later the pilot looked down at his instrument board and his eyes widened a tad. There was a deep whoosh and he had time to look up and meet Anneke’s eyes. His gaze contained an expression of serious and justified alarm. Then he and his cruiser were dust on the wind.

  A streamlined spacecraft nosed through the dispersing cloud of debris and fell in alongside the glider. Lucky the autopilot has attitude, Anneke thought as she caught a grapple line and abandoned the glider. She held her breath as she swung between the craft, the planet below seemingly inviting her to plummet.

  The line took her weight and the grapple tugged her up. The moment she pulled herself onboard the rescue craft, she radioed instructions to the glider to sail back to the cloud city and crash into the underbelly of the Block. She included an all-channel message.

  Hi. This is your friendly neighbourhood burglar. Just wanted to pass on my thanks. Oh, and by the way, this craft contains a Gentor-KL sub-atomic fusion-inducing warhead. Anyway, it’s been fun. Gotta run. Suggest you start running too. Seeya.

  Of course, there was no sub-atomic warhead on the glider and if there had been, the repulsor field would have neutralised it. How long before they figured that out? The Quesadans would still be trying to figure how she had flown an aircraft into the field in the first place, which was technically impossible, so they might well take the bomb threat seriously.

  The space station orbiting Arcadia was legally in free space, since it was outside the planet’s atmospheric profile boundaries. After docking among hundreds of other small craft, Anneke wiped her ship’s memory of their recent adventures, and then walked through the boarding gate like any other tourist or transit passenger.

  What came next was an abuse of her VIP status as a Rimmer. On the station was a dimensional proximity gate. In terms of convenience it was the easiest way possible to travel across the vast chasms of light years. In terms of expense it was the most ruinous. The energy to transport her to Se’atma Minor was about the same as was needed to send a battle cruiser there through conventional warp-space, but this way the trip was instantaneous. An added bonus was that nobody pursuing her could afford to follow. One step, and she was back on Se’atma Minor, liberating the service of a large chunk of its travel budget, and she was safe. Immediately she began decrypting the wafer she had liberated from the Quesadans.

  Anneke was sure that it would contain the name of the mole that had penetrated RIM headquarters. If it did not, she would have some explaining to do, and several lifetimes of salary to pay back into the travel fund. RIM agents were expected, in theory, to demonstrate initiative and to pursue cases in an individualistic way. It said so in the RIM manifesto. Is this not initiative? she asked herself.

  In practice, RIM command frowned on such a thing. Initiative was messy and unpredictable. And expensive.

  This place is getting hidebound, thought Anneke, as she ran a series of complex algorithms against the encryption matrix. After what she had just done she should have spent weeks filling in reports about why she had travelled on such an expensive facility, but then why save all that time on travel if only to waste it at the destination.

  She sighed. Uncle Viktus would not be amused.

  An hour later she was not amused either. On the chip was not quite zero, it was more like zippo. The repulsor field had clearly damaged the wafer. All she could extract from it were tantalising fragments, hints that something big was planned, that an illegal Majoris Corporata might be involved, and references to a ‘mole’.

  Tell me something I don’t already know, she thought angrily.

  All that effort – all that danger – for nothing. Well, the longest report begins with the first word, she thought as she began her preliminary synopsis of costs, benefits and damage.

  When submitting a troublesome report to Operations, the trick was to click the SEND icon, then immediately click the LOGOFF icon and run for the door. That way she would be outside and un-contactable before the duty monitor read the first sentence.

  The streets of Prospero, the capital city of Se’atma, were jammed with workers enjoying the evening. The day had been a hot one. With sunset a cool breeze off the ocean had dropped the temperature and breathed new life into the congested streets.

  As Anneke strolled along the esplanade, avoiding crowds of apprentices and tourists, she noticed that a storm was brewing out over the ocean. Jagged lightning ripped from the sky, disappearing into the blurry grey horizon. She hoped the storm would strike soon. She loved storms. She loved their energy, their unpredictable violence. She also liked being reminded that there were forces out there, greater than humankind’s, and under nobody’s control.

  She knew she was being followed by the time she reached Obin’s, her favourite café. Obin’s had loads of atmosphere and jutted out over the water, making it lots of people’s favourite café.

  Instead of entering the establishment, she kept going, using her skills to identify the tracker. It turned out to be easier than expected. She led him to a ‘throat’, a point where all the paths narrowed to one, giving the tracker little option but to take that single, exposed road. When he did so, Anneke swept quietly from concealment and pinned him to the nearest wall in a chokehold, semi-paralysing him.

  She took a deep breath, pressed her lips to his ear: ‘Try anything, anything at all, and you’re dead. Nod if you understand.’

  After a slight pause the man attempted a nod, which was not easy with Anneke’s wrist hard up against his Adam’s apple. ‘I’m going to relax the pressure on your throat slightly, just enough for you to talk. Who are you? Who sent you?’

  The man’s words came back in a hoarse croak. ‘Esprin. Hurting!’

  Anneke blinked then peered more closely at the man and released him. He staggered slightly then glared balefully at her. His face was blotchy from the chokehold. Esprin rubbed his throat and checked that he could still move his head.

  ‘Nice to see you again, Anneke,’ he said, his voice still wheezing. ‘Don’t you have a nicer way of saying hello?’

  ‘It’s dark,’ she said simply. ‘You’ve … changed.’

  By the time they had sat down at a table in Obin’s and ordered Pixan shakes, Esprin was over her greeting. He was, after all, a fellow agent and was used to that sort of thing. Esprin was the same age as Anneke, but not a born field agent. In the year since she had last seen him, he had put on weight and looked soft and slow. The kind of agent destined for a desk job at Command, she thought. Field agents usually loathed deskwork. After a lifetime of danger and excitement working in exotic places it was hard to settle down to a career as a planner and strategist. Everybody knew that practical, experienced veterans were exactly what Command needed most, but her uncle was one of the rare exceptions who took this option.

  ‘What are you doing here, Esprin?’ Anneke asked, still a little perplexed. Esprin was stationed on Lykis Integer, at RIM headquarters.

  The same RIM headquarters penetrated by the mole. Significant, she pondered.

  ‘Family,’ he replied, eyeing Anneke appreciatively.

  He and Anneke had dated a year ago
. Briefly and, on Anneke’s part, pointlessly. Esprin had been like a besotted puppy dog. Indeed, he looked more like one now than he had back then.

  ‘You’re looking good, Anneke. Real good. You’ve grown a bit.’

  Anneke changed the subject. ‘What do you mean, family?’

  ‘Huh? Oh, yeah. My sister lives here. You didn’t know that, did you? I should have told you. You two would get on great. I got a call from her. Some kind of legal bind. She needed some help, so I figured I’d come out and lend a hand. Weird though. As soon as I spoke to the local council they backed right off. I have to tell you, we Rimmers don’t get that kind of respect on Lykis. We’re a dime a dozen, whatever that means.’

  ‘So you’re heading home soon?’

  ‘Well, maybe,’ said Esprin, throwing her what was meant to be a significant glance. ‘That all depends on what kind of reception I get here.’

  ‘Don’t even think about it, Esprin. That was another lifetime.’

  He looked hurt. ‘It was only a year ago.’

  ‘It was three dates and I only went out with you the third time because you told me you were dying of a terminal illness.’

  ‘I was. It was love.’

  ‘Well, pull that one again it will be terminal.’

  ‘You’re being a bit harsh, aren’t you?’

  ‘I just got back from the field.’

  He nodded. ‘So you’re uptight. Give me a break, here.’

  ‘Actually, I don’t need adjustment buffer time.’

  ‘Everyone knows you’re a super woman, Anneke.’

  Anneke finished her drink and stood up. ‘Esprin, I just realised I need to be alone.’ She suddenly stopped. She had that feeling again, that she was being watched. But this time it wasn’t Esprin, although he was certainly watching her.