Molehunt

by Paul Collins

  Great.

  The generators on the spaceship would take several minutes to overcome the momentum of the dropping city. During that time the place where she was anchored would become furnace-hot.

  After checking one last time that the link was secure and the generators were working, Anneke headed back to the ship. Before she had travelled three metres she collapsed, her legs paralysed by the repulsor field.

  Anneke raised her head, staring blearily at the ship. Why was she going back there? If the field came back on full, the ship would shut down. Its tractor beams would switch off and it would drop like a brick to the surface of the planet below.

  Not good as plans went. So, forget the ship. What else?

  Hatch. Find a hatch.

  She blinked several times and rammed her head against a sharp projection in front of her. Pain, pain brings focus. Need focus. Need a hatch. Need to focus on a hatch. Schematic. Check the schematic. She did so, moving clumsily, only one arm working. Finding a hatch next to the ship. A bulkhead… that bulkhead… maybe.

  Could she get there? The heat was climbing to critical. The air felt like hot sand in her throat. Her eyes were searing.

  Anneke kept crawling, pulling herself along the surface with her good arm, moving closer and closer to the door. She thought of Deema, patiently waiting for her return … She could not fail the girl, could not let her drift back into slavery, not after all she had been through. After the loss of Viktus, she could not die, could not leave Deema without the support she herself had been given.

  Why did it have to be so far away? A world away … a life time away … her life … Her skin was sticking to the metal decking now, cooking and coming off in lumps. Each breath seared her throat, scorched her lungs …

  Her vision dimmed. She remembered the milky white eyes of cooked fish. Was that how she would look if she made it out of here?

  Anneke risked a glance at the planet below. It was closer, tilted off-centre, the city still falling.

  She had failed.

  With one last effort she hauled herself to the door, hit the switch, and pulled herself through into the icy cool darkness within. For a long time nothing happened, but that was no problem. Her arms and legs hurt like hell, and her head even worse.

  ‘Hey mole, I sure sprayed your precious coordinates around, didn’t I?’ she raved to herself. ‘Bet you were going to sell them for some serious credit. Bet you had the Cartels and Companies lining up to bid.

  Now they all have the coordinates. How’s it feel to have a fortune turn to dust in your fingers? Bet it feels worse than I feel.’

  Footsteps clattered somewhere nearby.

  ‘Auxiliary power is being piped in from here, the trace box says so.’

  ‘There’s no friggin’ generator here.’

  ‘Don’t tell me, tell the box.’

  ‘Must be a bolt-on unit somewhere nearby.’

  ‘Hey, over there, a body.’

  Anneke felt herself being grabbed under the arms and dragged across the floor.

  ‘Can’t stay here, lady. Where’d you come from?’

  ‘Flew a ship in to stabilise the field with the drive unit,’ managed Anneke.

  ‘Explains why we’re all still alive,’ said a voice behind her.

  People were calling into comm units, medics, medivac stretchers, sedatives, painkillers and guard squads. Sentinels checked Anneke, deciding she was not what they were seeking.

  ‘Coordinates, have you heard anything?’ Anneke asked a paramedic. ‘Some coordinates, posted to public space on the Web?’

  ‘Has anyone not heard?’ he replied, laughing. ‘The battle fleet coordinates, part one. People are already selling T-shirts with the coordinates printed on them.’

  ‘Go figure.’

  ‘Ask anyone. Hey, Jim!’

  A burly young technician loomed over Anneke’s stretcher. Written across his chest was the first set of coordinates, printed in white, on black.

  ‘You the lady who stabilised the field?’ he asked. ‘That was some magic you pulled there.’

  ‘Nearly got fried,’ whispered Anneke.

  ‘If I ever catch up with the deadwit who trashed the generators he’ll get fried, bet your life savings on that one.’

  If I catch him first, you will only have afew bits left over to fry, thought Anneke. Which reminds me …

  ‘Your medikit, do you have a sample phial in it?’

  ‘You don’t need to give a sample –’ the medic began.

  ‘Just get one!’ she shouted hoarsely.

  By sheer willpower Anneke managed to stay conscious and functioning until the medic returned.

  ‘Scalpel,’ she demanded.

  She took the scalpel the medic produced and cut a small blood-streaked strip of cloth from her trouser leg.

  DNA sampling could be tricky. Cut off a prosthetic finger and you get no DNA at all. Blood was different. Bone marrow made blood, and it was a pretty big deal to transplant one’s bones. Even if the mole had given himself a total blood transfusion, his body would continue to produce its own blood. Red blood cells did not have any DNA. The white cells were a different matter. Every one of them had the mole’s DNA. And every one of them pointed at him.

  Now she had him tagged. He would have to avoid her, and that meant sending his minions after her. With the exception of the alien, they were not very bright. That gave her an advantage.

  Colonel Jake Ferren of RIM studied the document in front of him. The whole matter was baffling. What was Anneke doing back on Arcadia? Why had she gone to Reema’s End? They knew that the matter on Se’atma Minor had been manufactured, which cleared Anneke’s name of any wrongdoing. The problem was that they did not know why.

  All they knew was that there had been an attempt to form a Majoris Corporata, as Oracle had warned them. Oracle had detected the plan to activate the Old Empire fleet technology. Now, in the face of this undeniable danger from sources unknown, RIM had to find the fleet and activate it for its self-preservation. RIM had to tear apart the jamming Veil and occupy the Non-Aligned Zone, even if it meant war. The Cygnus Sector was too dangerous to leave untouched. Of course, it would also rejuvenate and focus Regis Imperium Mentatis in a way only external aggression could. The Clans, the Corporations, the slavers and pirates might unite now that the status quo had been broken.

  So many loose ends, and without Anneke to answer key questions Jake was not sure if they would get to the bottom of it. He sighed heavily, wishing for the umpteenth time Viktus was around. That family had more than its fair share of tragedy. And now this.

  He pulled another document toward him and signed it. At least Anneke’s efforts in saving the city of Arcadia would be officially recognised and her file amended to read: Achievement Outstanding’.

  Few RIM agents ever received such a high accolade but the girl deserved it. Single-handedly saving a million lives? How many agents accomplished that? Still, the whole thing was a mess. It would take months, maybe years, to clear up the details.

  Well, at least he had his newest, brightest, and most recently promoted attache to help. Oracle had sent him an agent with a level head on his shoulders, though sometimes he wondered if the artificial mind was perhaps a little too zealous in protecting RIM. Oracle left strict instructions never to let the kid know that it was grooming him. The lad was a marvel, according to his profile.

  He looked up from his desk to find his attaché’s bright eyes upon him.

  ‘I’m afraid there’s a lot of late nights here, son,’ Jake said. ‘There’s going to be months of unpaid overtime, mark my words. Probably not what you signed up for, huh?’

  Maximus hesitated for the perfect pre-calculated length of time, and then shrugged slightly. Good impressions? He could get gold medals in generating them. The length of the hesitation tagged him as modest but confident.

  ‘It’s right solid with me, sir. I signed up to do a job, and I want to do it really well.’

  Providing I can keep my
other job ticking over…

  Anneke examined the DNA profiles returned by the hospital’s diagnostic unit. Earth merino, Gafavrian snow barva … these were the animals that had contributed their fleece to the cloth. One female human. The mole, a woman? She checked the reading against her own DNA profile. Sure enough, that was her. The unit had picked up skin flakes in the cloth. Lastly, three human males. That was only to be expected; the mole was sure to have been topped up with donated blood, yet his body would have generated at least a few of its own white cells.

  Three men, and one of them was the mole.

  Anneke looked around the ward, where two bodies were lying. The assassins the mole had sent after her had been hospital orderlies, not serious assets. They thought they were injecting a toxin into a helpless patient. Big mistake. They had thought they were going to live. Bigger mistake. Hidden within the toxin’s dermal injector was a location pulse transmitter.

  After dressing in the clothing of an orderly, Anneke collected her gear and printouts. The room was not monitored, the mole’s men had seen to that. That suited her fine. She dumped one body onto the bed and injected the dermal into the pillow. This would set off the homing pulse – only seconds to get out.

  Anneke made the cover of a fire-rated door on the emergency stairs by the time a missile struck the hospital, shaking the building like an earthquake. Moments later she was just another member of the hospital staff on the emergency stairs, fleeing the blast and inferno that was once her ward.

  Clever, mole, but a bit too clever.

  Nobody could survive that blast, except as ash. There would be no body count. Two orderlies and one patient would be unaccounted for. The mole would assume three deaths, including hers. The mole was in RIM, the most dangerous place for Anneke to be. As the organisation’s newest hero, RIM wanted to take her back into the flock, shower her with honours, give her a promotion – even a pay rise. All very nice, except one of the people lining up to shake her hand would be equipped with a dermal toxin – or worse.

  Colonel Jake Ferren had promised Uncle Viktus that he would look after Anneke if anything untoward happened. He was surprisingly happy to take Deema into his own family. Given the right circumstances, the child might become another Arial Naproxa.

  Now there was a dream to hang on to.

  It was true that Deema was vulnerable to the mole. However, her link to Anneke was her best protection. Should the mole kill her out of sheer spite, people might remember there had once been a mole hunt, and that nobody was ever caught. Not a good move for someone who didn’t want to be noticed.

  By framing her, the mole had shown Anneke the best and safest way to work. And that was outside RIM, where he could not see her.

  Now someone was going to die. And it wasn’t going to be Anneke Longshadow.