‘Don’t you worry yourself,’ she offered. ‘I’ve got this.’
‘You can get us out?’ Nathan asked in surprise.
‘How do you think drugs sometimes get smuggled in?’ Betty asked as she climbed aboard the CDF shuttle. ‘There’s always a way.’
Nathan climbed aboard the shuttle and within moments they lifted off and turned, Betty aiming not for the main landing bay doors but for gigantic vents mounted in the walls of the landing bay.
‘The heat exchange system?’ Foxx uttered.
‘It’s really big inside there,’ Betty enthused as she flew the shuttle toward the nearest of the vents. ‘Took us a while to figure out how the smugglers were getting packages inside the station.’
‘People have flown through here before?’ Vasquez asked as the shuttle slipped through the hard light shielding on the vents and the walls closed in around them.
‘Of course not,’ Betty admitted airily without even the mildest sense of irony. ‘They send automated drones through. Nobody would be crazy enough to actually fly through one of these.’
Nathan saw the confines of the venting system close around them and he looked at Foxx with a concerned expression on his face, but she shook her head to silence him.
‘How long?’ she asked Betty.
‘Oh, not long,’ Betty replied cheerfully. ‘We just need to blast our way out one of the emergency ducts before we get crushed inside the vents.’
‘Whoa wait a minute there,’ Vasquez said, ‘crushed in the what now?’
Before Betty could reply they saw a huge set of blades before them spinning in the darkness. Nathan grabbed the edges of his seat as Betty chortled.
‘Hold on now, this bit’s gonna be a little tricky to get right!’
The shuttle rushed toward the huge fan that filled Nathan’s vision and he let out a howl of terror that mingled with more from the rear seats as Betty suddenly pushed forward on the control column and then rolled the shuttle hard over to starboard.
The shuttle dived and rolled, matching the rotation of the enormous fan and then it slipped through between the blades and was suddenly hauled to the right by some unseen force. Betty stamped down on the rudder pedals and the shuttle slewed around into a tight tunnel illuminated by white running lights above their heads.
Nathan flinched as the shuttle slammed against the metallic side of the tunnel with a clanging of metal on metal and then was carried along on some kind of turbulent airflow.
‘Whoopsie!’ Betty chortled as the shuttle shook and vibrated as it travelled along the tunnel.
‘Where the hell are we?’ Allen asked.
‘This is the ventilation system that acts as a coolant for the city outside the North Four arm,’ Betty explained. ‘It works because one side of the station is always heated by the sun, while the other is cooled by the shadow of deep space. That creates convection, which creates a flow of air that smooths out the temperature variations inside the city and also circulates some of the build up of water vapor in the atmosphere. The turbulence inside the tunnels is what’s shaking us about a bit.’
The shuttle rushed along the tunnel and then turned sharply at the end. Nathan looked at the endless curved surface of the tunnel passing them by and realized they were now following the outside rim of the orbital station.
‘How can you shoot us out of here? Won’t it breach the station’s atmosphere?’
‘Nah,’ Betty scorned with a wave of her hand. ‘Bulkheads separate the sections of the tunnel and will seal off any breach. Secondary, smaller tunnels keep the air moving around the breach until it can be fixed.’
Foxx frowned but said nothing as Betty wrestled with the controls.
‘Shuttle zero delta five report your position.’
Nathan looked at the communications suite as Betty replied politely.
‘Zero delta five is outside the southern quadrant, checking the exterior panelling.’
‘Zero delta five, we have you located inside the station.’
Betty smiled.
‘Young man, will you next be telling me my bra size and what I had for breakfast this morning?’
Nathan listened to a long, silent pause before the controller replied. ‘Ah, no sir, I was merely…’
‘Your scopes appear to be malfunctioning,’ Betty cut across him. ‘There may be some interference out here, stand by while I check it out.’
Betty turned the shuttle as it was dragged along by the turbulence and Nathan saw what looked like a square panel in the surface of the tunnel up ahead. She glanced over her shoulder at Lieutenant Foxx.
‘You sure you wanna do this?’
‘We have to,’ Foxx replied. ‘CSS Headquarters could be in danger.’
Betty nodded, turned, and without further hesitation pulled a trigger on her control column.
Nathan saw two bright plasma bolts blast out and impact the panel as they flew past. The panel was smashed from its mounts in a cloud of burning embers and almost immediately a vortex of frozen air rushed out of the cavity in writhing coils of icy mist. The shuttle slowed as the direction of the airflow in the tunnel altered drastically and Betty hurled the throttles open. The shuttle accelerated into the new flow of air and rushed out of the station and into the vacuum of space as Betty keyed her microphone.
‘Control this is zero delta five, we have a plating breach in sector three. I can see it from out here. It must have been causing the sensor confusion you had a moment ago.’
The reply came back after a moment’s pause.
‘Roger, zero delta five, breach identified. We’re shutting the section down.’
‘Copy that, control. Zero delta five is returning planet side.’
Nathan looked at Betty and smiled. ‘You’ve got a real sly side to you, you know that?’
‘I do.’
Foxx leaned forward in her seat. ‘Something’s not right.’
Nathan frowned as he looked at her, but he knew that her instincts were rarely wrong and almost immediately he realized why.
‘Zero delta five, what is your operating identity and patrol tasking?’
Betty smiled tightly. ‘Oops.’
‘Where are you supposed to be, Betty?’ Foxx asked her.
Betty looked over her shoulder apologetically. ‘Traffic patrol on South One.’
‘How did you get this shuttle?’ Vasquez asked.
‘It’s complicated,’ Betty replied, and then became defensive as Foxx’s features paled. ‘You said it was urgent!’
‘I didn’t tell you to steal police property!’
‘We’re not stealing, just borrowing.’
‘Zero delta five, dock immediately or we will be forced to open fire on your position.’
Vasquez slapped his head in disbelief. ‘Oh, you’re kidding me.’
Nathan looked at Foxx. ‘They think we could be shape shifters.’
‘They’ll shoot us down if we don’t comply, but if we don’t get down there to CSS then this whole invasion will get going.’
Betty took the matter into her own hands and opened the throttles. The shuttle surged away from New Washington toward the vast blue–green sphere of the earth even as they saw a pair of bright stars rocketing toward them.
‘I think we’re being intercepted,’ Nathan said as he saw the two points of light resolve themselves into CDF armed patrol vehicles. ‘We need to get out of here.’
Betty pushed the control column forward and the shuttle dove away from the orbital city, accelerating rapidly both under its own engine thrust and the gravity of the planet drawing it down. Nathan saw the vast surface of the earth spread below them, the shuttle diving directly downward and the armed patrol vehicles swiftly gaining on it.
‘Shuttle zero delta five this is ARU Flight, reduce speed and turn port immediately or we will be forced to shoot.’
Foxx didn’t wait for Betty to reply, instead punching a transmit button on the center console herself.
‘This is Lieutenant Ka
ylin Foxx, New Washington PD. We have information that the Director General of the CSS may be in danger and we need to get units to the surface immediately.’
There was a pause that seemed to last an age, and then a reply crackled over the channel.
‘This is ARU Flight, heave to immediately or we will be forced to…’
Betty shut the channel off and looked at Nathan. ‘Any chance they could be shape shifters?’
Nathan knew that it didn’t matter now either way.
‘Head for the surface,’ he said. ‘Can you outrun them?’
‘No,’ Betty admitted as she leaned around in front of Nathan and checked the position of the incoming Armed Response Unit craft. ‘But I can outsmart them.’
The pair of patrol vehicles soared in toward her and Betty hit a switch on the console before her as she turned away from their pursuers. Almost immediately Nathan saw a cloud of sparkling material trail behind the shuttle and the two patrol vehicles veered away sharply and overshot their target.
‘What was that?’ Nathan asked.
‘Dust particles,’ Foxx replied, ‘designed to clog up the instruments and engine intakes of drug dealing vehicles. The particles are magnetically charged and attracted to the hulls of spacecraft.’
Nathan peered out of the windows and saw both patrol vehicles swinging around in broad turns to resume the pursuit.
‘They’re not quitting.’
Betty kept her eyes on the instruments before her as she accelerated at full throttle toward the atmosphere.
‘Hold on to your hats,’ she uttered as the patrol vehicles closed in.
Nathan flinched as a stream of plasma bolts rocketed past his window with bright flashes. Betty jerked the controls and the shuttle veered right and away from the attack, and then moments later she hauled back on the control column and the shuttle reared up. Nathan felt a mild sense of G force pushing down on him under the aggressive manoeuver and then suddenly the shuttle shook violently as the patrol vehicles pulled up and away.
The shuttle shuddered again and Nathan saw the fearsome glow of red and orange flames flickering from beneath the shuttle as it slammed against earth’s upper atmosphere.
‘They won’t pursue us through the atmosphere,’ Betty said as the shuttle shook violently in the ferocious turbulence of re entry, ‘but they’ll launch interceptors to meet us from the surface.’
Foxx leaned forward and rested one hand on Betty’s shoulder.
‘Whatever it takes. We have to get down there.’
Betty nodded and gripped the controls tighter.
‘You asked for it.’
***
XXXV
CSS Headquarters
New York City
Arianna Coburn paced up and down in the senate conference chamber, in front of broad windows that looked out over the East River, rivulets of rain spilling down from the dark gray clouds tumbling past overhead, the city a metallic blur in the mist. For a moment, it seemed to her as though the sky itself were crying, reflecting her own anxiety as she awaited news from the fleet.
The nearby spaceport was devoid of life and she could see from her vantage point high above the city that the streets and parks were empty. The citizens were already hunkering down, the reports on Global Wire of what was happening on the orbital stations and here on the planet sending them into a frenzy of paranoia where anybody, even their own friends and family, could be the enemy.
Nobody could have predicted this, she told herself. Nobody could have known that the enemy would have been among mankind for so long, perhaps even for centuries, watching, waiting. She turned to a series of holograms levitating before one wall of the chamber, each showing images from mankind’s distant past that she had requested be displayed to that she could study them.
Arianna stared at an image of an oil painting from the year 1710, by Flemish artist Aert De Gelder. The graceful picture depicted John the Baptist and Jesus, and shining down on them a silvery disc emitting rays of light. Another image nearby portrayed the “Glorification of the Eucharist” painted by Bonaventura Salimbeni in 1600. In the center, two men sat either side of a metallic sphere with two probes that looked uncannily like mankind’s earliest satellites. More images abounded, artwork, archaic photographs taken by witnesses to strange phenomena in the skies hundreds of years before the CSS had even existed, and records as far back as ancient Egypt describing fleets of unknown craft traversing the skies long before humanity had built its first aeroplanes. The words of countless conspiracy theorists echoed through her mind: They have been here for a very long time, watching and waiting. Everybody knew it, but nobody thought to do a thing about it.
The entrance to the chamber shimmered and vanished as a man walked through, and Coburn turned to see Commodore Hawker striding toward her. He turned as the doorway rematerialized behind him and sealed it shut.
‘What is it?’ Coburn asked.
Hawker walked toward her as he gestured to the city outside. ‘They could be anywhere, or any one of us. We need to be cautious.’
Arianna nodded but then a thought crossed her mind. ‘They could be you or I.’
Hawker smiled faintly in agreement. ‘I think that if that were the case, one or the other of us would not be standing in this room. Their invasion, or whatever it is they’re planning to do, has already begun and we have precious little means to stop them.’
Coburn turned and looked out across the city and then up toward the angry skies roiling overhead. A lone gull had braved the storms and was wheeling near the building, searching for morsels of food or perhaps somewhere to shelter from the coming storm. It was oblivious to the greater storm gathering on the horizon, one that all life on earth faced.
‘There’s nothing that we can do,’ she whispered.
Hawker frowned. ‘There is always something that we can do, even if it means leaving the system and returning later.’
Arianna turned to him. ‘We cannot evacuate three billion people from the planet in a matter of hours, and what of the colonies?’
‘I wasn’t talking about the entire population, Arianna.’
Arianna stared at Hawker for a long moment. Despite her fear for the future she had not yet considered implementing the Savior Protocol.
‘We can’t,’ she said. ‘We just can’t do that.’
‘There may be no other option,’ Hawker pointed out. ‘Nobody wants to talk about it but we’ve seen what happened on Ayeela and if we don’t do something to mitigate this crisis before it overwhelms us then we will go the same way that they did. We will become extinct, Arianna.’
Arianna turned away from him and closed her eyes, unable to bear the thought of what the commodore was suggesting.
The Savior Protocol had been created a century before, when the newly formed CSS had decided that humanity could not risk facing extinction again as it had once had with The Falling centuries before. To aid in this, a system had been devised where the majority of the senate and congress, along with their families and selected military personnel, would evacuate the planet should a Global Extinction Event occur again.
Ever since then a small flotilla of twenty spacecraft, all equipped with super luminal drives and all capable of carrying at least two hundred passengers, had been kept on stand by in orbit around Mercury Station, a solar observatory post on the planet closest to the sun where few civilians ever travelled. The presence of the flotilla was a closely guarded secret, as nobody was under any illusion about how the public would react if they knew that there was a private fleet of ships ready to whisk their leaders away at the first hint of trouble.
‘The Savior Protocol is there to protect the future of the human race,’ Hawker said, apparently sensing her discomfort. ‘Not to provide the lucky elite of the grounded with an escape plan while leaving the masses behind. Unless every human being alive today possessed a super luminal transport we could never hope to save everybody anyway.’
Arianna lifted her head as she thought of Ad
miral Marshall.
‘Unless we stayed, and we fought.’
‘That, my dear, is what the Ayleeans did,’ Hawker pointed out. ‘That didn’t turn out so well for them. Look, believe me when I say that I find the protocol as unpalatable as you do, but staying and fighting isn’t what a government does best. Surviving is what they do best, and survive we must, even if we are down to our last few hundred survivors. We’ve been there before and prevailed.’
Arianna shook her head.
‘We would be viewed as cowards,’ she said. ‘We do not yet know if this invasion force will even reach earth. The public are in panic over the possibility that there could be an advance force among us, but Global Wire have grossly exaggerated the threat to the point of invoking civil war on the streets and…’
Arianna stopped in mid sentence and stared into the middle distance as a sudden and troubling thought occurred to her.
‘What is it?’ Hawker asked.
‘Global Wire,’ Arianna whispered, ‘they’ve been fomenting propaganda, false news, inflating minor stories into major issues for the people for months now.’
Hawker frowned. ‘That’s the media, Arianna, it’s what they do and…’
‘No,’ she insisted, ‘this is different. You know as well as I do that one of the first tasks in an invasion is to insert specialist troops behind enemy lines to observe the enemy, find weakness, spread disinformation and create chaos before the main invasion force arrives.’
Hawker nodded. ‘Yes, of course.’
‘What better way to do that than to plant the seeds of defeat long before the people even realize that they’re in danger? The media have been responsible for eroding public trust in government for months now. Look at the people, hiding in their homes, distrusting everybody, fearing everyone and everything. They couldn’t fight now if they wanted to, and if an invasion force landed outside the city there would be nobody to oppose it.’
‘We can’t place responsibility for the crisis in the hands on the media alone, Arianna.’
Predator (Old Ironsides Book 3) Page 27
