She edged toward the area behind the stage. When no one was looking, she quickly gathered some equipment, a small amp and cables. Though she was overdressed to be a technician, it seemed the best chance. Several of the band support people looked up briefly then disregarded her, their concentration on the show. She made her way backstage in a maze of cables and amplifiers.
“Hey,” called a voice. A bouncer had noticed her, “What are you doing back here?”
Shasti turned toward him with what she hoped was a seductive smile. Denshi taught feminine skills to some assassins, but she’d never had such training. Still, her natural beauty made up for what she lacked in art. She lifted the cables and amp with an expressive shrug. The guard looked at her curiously. Despite everything Jenner did to cover her inhuman beauty and symmetry, she was still remarkable. He might take her for slumming Engineered. He smiled back. “Okay babe. Remember to hang on to your backstage pass next time.” He watched her posterior as she headed toward the other side of the stage.
Once out of sight, she cut toward the dressing rooms. A couple of dancers were in the hallway, stretching out in the next to nothing they wore for costumes. One reached out and patted her on the rear as she went by. “Nice ass,” she called out, as the others giggled. Shasti suppressed an urge to knock her the length of the hall. Two more turns left her in a deserted hallway. The music had faded to a tolerable level. She opened several doors to find an empty storeroom with an exterior window into an alley. Relieved, she ducked in. Ditching the amp and cables, she reached the window. Predictably, it had a security system. Shasti pulled out her intruder tools, disabling it in seconds.
Behind her in the corridor she heard running feet. She lunged out the window in an instant, into the alley. Shasti cursed silently. She’d had no time to conceal the amp or cables. She looked upward. The roof seemed safest. A drainpipe dropped down from the roofline. Shasti leapt three meters up it in one move. The pipe held her weight and she shinnied up, pulling herself onto the roof. A lance of red light hissed by her shoulder. Her sensitive nose smelled the crisping of a stray hair, whiffed to gas by the weapon. In a convulsive move she surged up and over, even as her brain coolly noted the weapon as a laser. Tri-autos used particle accelerators and pulsed an irregular blue. They had to be Denshi. Police would have called for her surrender.
Wasting no time, Shasti headed up the series of ascending roof levels, seeking a height from which she could leap across to an adjoining building. In the crowded off-port, buildings tended to be close together. She would never have been able to make the leap on any of the broad avenues outside the strictly zoned spaceport.
She reached the highest roof level, running flat out. The next roof was ten meters away. She hurdled the edge of the roofline, sailing across the gap. Her eyes were on the next roof, but she could still see the street below, a ground car running down it, lights and people on the sidewalk, all unaware of the life and death battle over their heads. It’s cold, she thought, wondering why she even noticed. The roof came up and her feet slammed into it. She stayed on them, running and drawing the small slug-thrower Jenner had supplied her with. Not much of a weapon against lasers and tri-autos, at least it had a silencer. Fortunately, they wouldn’t use mini-grenades in this built up area.
A rooftop door ahead and to the right slammed open. Two Denshi lunged out. Instantly, she went down in a shoulder roll and came up, firing first. The man took a bullet in the right eye and dropped bonelessly. The Asian woman was behind him. She dropped to a knee, firing a laser. It cut through Shasti’s jacket. She jerked away from the beam, snap firing. The other woman stopped three rounds, center-of-mass, and fell backwards down the stairwell. Shasti doubted the woman was seriously hurt. Body armor under the street clothes would stop the bullets. Still, squash-head rounds felt like being hit with sledgehammers; that and the fall would slow her down.
Shasti raced on, again leaping the distance to the next roof. Pulling up, she quickly checked where the laser bit her. Her genetically engineered body shrugged off cuts well, but this was a burn, and she’d never been hit with a laser before. The area already felt numb from endorphins and anesthetics. Bleeding had stopped. To her surprise, the wound had already closed. It looked like one several days healed on a standard human. She wondered what other abilities might be hidden in her body. Things she never learned, having escaped her training so young.
Recovered, Shasti sprinted on, leaping to a third rooftop. Shots cracked behind her. A bullet hit the roof’s edge as she vaulted over. A second hit her, a glancing blow across the shoulders of her light body armor. It knocked her sprawling for a second, slamming the wind out of her. She got to her feet in a low crabbed run. No more shots came. She realized she must be below the sniper’s sights. Shasti leaped to the fourth roof top and stopped. She faced an office tower across the next leap. It loomed over her level, and she could see no place to land on its sheer side. To her right lay the roof’s edge as she now stood on the corner building. One glance at the nearby roof hatch told her that even her strength would be insufficient to force it without tools. On the left, the adjoining building stood four stories higher. With time she did not have, she could climb it.
Trapped.
She turned. The Engineered she recognized from the bar leapt from the second roof, where she had shot the two Denshi. He was as big as she, probably as strong, but she thought grimly, not as desperate. Shasti ran back toward the Denshi, firing the rest of her clip. It was too far for accuracy. She wanted the Denshi to take cover. Obligingly, the Engineered dropped behind an air-conditioner unit. Two other Denshi, firing from the second roof, also dropped. They thought she was running back toward their net. All they needed to do was wait. She dropped the empty clip, slamming in a new one.
Suddenly she doubled back, heading for the office tower. Running faster than she ever had. Running for her life. She heard the Engineered start from cover behind her, leaping to the rooftop she was on. The roof’s edge came up. Shasti flung herself across a gap far wider than any of the others. Her body lofted toward the side of the office tower. Wind whipped by her. The Denshi behind her stopped his rush, probably thinking her suicidal.
It was not so. Shasti held her body in a diver’s form as she dropped in an arc toward the building’s glass side, her auto- pistol held in front of her in both hands. The pistol bucked as she fired 5MM squash heads as fast as her finger could move. Commercial glass exploded inward. She curled her body into a ball at the last instant. Hurtling through the shattered glass, she struck a desktop, wiping out computers and video screens as she careened into a cubicle wall. Shasti groaned, staggering to her feet, almost falling. Her body armor protected her somewhat, but she was cut on the face and hands, bruised all over. Only the thought of what capture would mean got her to her feet again. Alarms would be sounding, summoning police and private security. A mixed blessing. Local police were Neo-Reformist or Quest. Denshi would not find them friendly.
Shasti hit a fire exit heading down. She needed to get out of the building before the authorities showed up. Not for the first time, she was grateful for the absence of security robots on Olympia. She hit the ground floor door and vanished into the night.
*****
On the rooftop, Mikhail Vaughn, Head of Section Three, Denshi Special Operations, stood staring across the gap, shaken. He could scarcely believe his eyes. The leap was impossible, yet she had done it. For the first time in his existence, he, Fourth-Generation Engineered, was physically bested—and by a Third-Generation woman. “But what a woman,” he murmured, the details of her fleeing form still before his eyes. He looked at the street below and the distance between the buildings, then simply shook his head. He considered pursuit, but she would be long gone by the time even he could reach street level. His sensitive hearing already detected the sound of incoming sirens. Time to withdraw.
A door banged open behind him. Misa Tanaka and two others of her team ran onto the roof. They were Selected, not Engineered and were b
reathing hard. “My Lord,” Misa called, “are you all right?”
He nodded calmly as they ran over. Misa was quite beautiful, though considerably older than he, her Asian heritage stamped flawlessly on every feature. She looked battered and bruised at the moment.
“You are not,” he stated.
“No matter,” she said, shaking a headful of midnight-black hair. “She shot me. I fell down some stairs. Parmelan is dead. She hit him in the eye. Where is she?”
He turned and pointed at the window. For the first time he could recall, he saw astonishment on Misa’s face. “Impossible,” she said. Recollecting herself, she started to apologize. He cut her off.
“Don’t bother,” he said. “I saw her do it and I cannot believe it. She’s special, that one.
“Now we must flee as well. The local police are en route. Come. We must recover Parmelan’s body and get you to an infirmary.”
“I’m fine,” she protested.
“I smell blood,” he replied, “and I see pain in your walk. I will somehow survive a day until you can rejoin me. Remember, you taught me well.”
She sighed. “I was little enough use to you tonight.”
Vaughn shrugged. “It is on my head. I said to try and take her alive. It was a mistake. Next time we must shoot to kill on sight, even if we risk collateral damage. She is a tigress and we will never take her alive. Pity. She is magnificent.”
Chapter Eight
Sidhe burst into Apollo System at ninety percent of the speed of light. The entry flare created by her materialization was a small fragment of hell, dragged into the normal universe. Her scarlet hull coasted out of the flare. Her weapons and scanners immediately searched space around her, though the odds of encountering another ship so far out in the system were minimal.
Fenaday was desperate to get to Olympia, and the star frigate plunged into the system at a reckless speed. Finally, he ordered Sidhe turned end for end. Riding her fusion torch, the starship began braking for entry into the inner system. Fenaday knew it would take the mass of the gas giant, Atropos, to slow her to tolerable speed for the next window to Olympia. She could slow on her own, but only by exhausting her fuel, a risk Fenaday saw no reason to take.
Sidhe’s active sensors began to paint a picture of space around them as the disturbance of their entry dissipated.
“Contact,” called Sharla and Sharon Hafel simultaneously. There was alarm in the human’s voice, but Hafel was navy-trained. Her hands whipped over the deep radar controls deftly. Sharla’s ECM board read a microwave emitter. They quickly compiled electronic hints and identified the contact.
“Sword Class destroyer,” Hafel announced, “Eight-hundred thousand kilometers distance, bearing one-seven-eight, mark two-seven-zero, relative.”
“Heading and speed,” Fenaday snapped.
“Heading is ninety degrees by ten. Speed estimate... Sharla, I have a low confidence reading of .05C?”
“I have a reading of .0425,” Sharla said.
“No threat,” Telisan said. “He cannot catch us.”
“Still,” Fenaday murmured, “a warship so far out.”
“Contact ahead,” Hafel said. “No ID yet. Extreme range. Thirty degrees by twenty, speed .30C. Heading, similar to ours, system inward. I estimate she’s on the plane of the ecliptic.”
Fenaday exchanged a worried glance with Telisan. “What did we blunder into, a fleet exercise?” Fenaday said.
“I have a very low confidence ID, auxiliary or small spacecraft carrier,” Sharla advised.
“Poor acceleration, then,” Telisan said, who had served on one. “She’ll have a combat air patrol,” he continued. “A CVE could have as many as fifteen fighters—Crusaders, possibly Spacefires.”
“Scan?” Fenaday said.
“Nothing. The range is too great,” Hafel responded. “We won’t be in reliable radar range for at least three minutes.”
“More for the microwave scanner,” Sharla added. Telisan hurried over to their stations and began examining readouts and panels.
Mmok walked down to the place vacated by Telisan. Fenaday ignored him. “Best guess,” Fenaday called, his gut tight with tension. On the voyage out, the idea that Sidhe might be in danger from the Olympian Self-Defense Forces seemed ridiculous. Now, barreling into their system at a high percentage of light-speed, with warships unexpectedly on their screens, it seemed much less improbable.
“An escort carrier,” Telisan said. “Not a crackerbox by the look,” he added, using the Navy slang for a converted civilian ship, “but a fleet escort.”
“Intelligence reports Olympia bought two of them,” Mmok announced unexpectedly. His face had an abstract look to it. Fenaday realized Mmok was accessing some internal database. “One was Yukikaze class, with ten Crusaders, the other was a Denlenn model, Lollor class.”
“Not good,” Telisan said. The Denlenn’s formal Standard slipped into the Navy style he learned in the Confederate Combined Fleet. “We sold several CVEs. One went to the Frokossi, but there were rumors it was a front for Olympia. I think I know this one, Fleetfoot. She was a special purpose carrier, carrying a flight of six ConAvro Daggers and brace of Crusaders.”
“Damn,” Fenaday said. “I’m beginning to understand how Mandela feels about member planet navies.”
“Watch it, Fenaday.” Mmok grinned mirthlessly. “You’re starting to sound like a Federalist.”
“God forbid,” he replied, “and that’s Captain Fenaday to you.”
“Yes, sir,” returned the cyborg, not discomfited.
“Confirming,” Hafel snapped. “Her profile is still on file. CVE Fleetfoot, ahead and to starboard, twenty degrees relative. I am now reading two fighters.”
“Two Daggers,” Sharla chimed in. “I have confirmation; they just lit up with big burns.”
“That’s the CAP,” Telisan said. “If that carrier has any sort of a captain, the ready reaction fighter will be coming off the catapult inside of two minutes.”
“Are they heading toward us?” Mmok asked. For the first time Fenaday could recall, the cyborg looked nervous. He’s a grunt, realized Fenaday, he doesn’t know what’s going on.
“Imagine a broad sloping well, Mr. Mmok,” Fenaday said, “with a sun at the bottom. We’re falling into that well at .90C, riding our fusion torch to slow down, on a very narrow window to a braking orbit with the gas giant Atropos. If we don’t slow, we go to the bottom, up the other side of the well and off into deep space. So we have to go in ass backwards, our main gun unusable on targets inward of us.
“Those fighters aren’t braking and they aren’t heading toward us. They are diving into the well head first, as fast as their torches will push them, adding to the speed of the launching carrier. We’re still doing over three times that. Sidhe will plunge past them in a blur. Unfortunately, not so fast they can’t get a shot at us as we pass.
“Normal fighters can’t maneuver with us at near relativistic speeds,” Fenaday continued. “They don’t carry artificial gravity fields. Anything but the gentlest turn can make the pilot into jam at these speeds. Fighters are only a threat near planets or stations, where you move at orbital velocity.
“These aren’t normal fighters. They are ConAvro Daggers, almost as big as a small ship. They carry a small singularity created by the carrier’s drive. It will last four hours, as will the AG field it generates. In those four hours they can outmaneuver us. Daggers carry four anti-shipping missiles and a fighter mass accelerator.”
“Enemy fighter launching,” Hafel interrupted.
“Easy, Hafel,” Fenaday said. “That’s the Olympian Navy out there, a member planet, not the Conchirri.”
Mmok snorted.
“That’s the ready-reaction fighter,” Telisan mused. “So he’s at Defcon Four. He can get another fighter out in five minutes, but any launch after this point will be irrelevant. They won’t get up enough speed to be a factor.”
“Begin broadcasting a hail on all Confederate frequencie
s,” Fenaday said. “Make it loud. I don’t want anybody playing games about not knowing who we are. Cheetah must have told them of our approximate ETA and vector, but so far they do not seem to be reading our IFF transponder.”
“I just picked up a maximum speed burn on that Sword destroyer,” Sharla said as she worked her instruments, “identifying as Bogie One.”
“Stupid,” Fenaday muttered, “waste of fuel. They couldn’t close on us before we reach Olympia. Any reply to our hail?”
“No,” Susan Bernard replied from the communication station.
“Captain,” Sharla said, “there is a lot of ECM out there.”
“Gunner,” Telisan asked, “what IFF are you getting off the vessels ahead?”
Wardell turned back to him; there was worry in the old gunner’s eye. “Non-standard, sir. They are not using Confed Identification Friend or Foe codes.”
“Our own is broadcasting?” Fenaday asked.
“Affirmative,” Sharla said. “Transponder is working.”
There was a crackle of static and a voice sounded from a speaker. Bernard adjusted the controls.
“This is Olympia Self-Defense Naval Vessel Leonidas to unknown vessel. Please cease your approach to our inner system. You have not been cleared for entry.”
Fenaday looked at Telisan, then gestured to Bernard to put him through. “Leonidas, this is the Confederate Private Starship Sidhe, under command of Robert Fenaday. We are hardly unidentified. We are broadcasting Confed IFF, and our entry into Olympia was announced by the Navy courier Cheetah two weeks ago. My ship’s silhouette is also the best known in explored space, unless you are aware of someone else flying a Conchirri frigate.”
Fearful Symmetry (The Robert Fenaday and Shasti Rainhell Chronicle Book 2) Page 10
