Aneka engaged the antigravity system and pushed the ship upward a few metres. A touch raised the landing gear and she fired up the main engines, blasting them forward at full throttle, though the inertial compensation took most of the bite out of it.
‘Aren’t you a little low?’ Grumand said.
‘There’s not much ground clutter to help, but if I stay low they may not detect us so easily. I have a few advantages when it comes to low-altitude flying.’ In-vision she could see the view from four forward-looking cameras, which gave her an unobstructed view of where the hull was in relation to the ground.
‘They’ll detect the exhaust from those engines quickly enough.’
‘Not where we’re going.’
‘And where are we going?’
Aneka grinned. ‘Somewhere hot.’
~~~
The only light came from the basic readouts on the consoles and the molten lava outside. They had crossed the terminator into night amid the low peaks of an active volcano arc and Aneka had set the shuttle down in one small area that seemed to be relatively safe, a small hill of old basalt surrounded on all sides by streams of molten rock.
‘I wasn’t picking up anything,’ Monkey said, his voice quiet. ‘Not a thing. Did they follow us?’
‘We don’t know that they had a fix before we left,’ Aneka replied. ‘Whatever it was, it must have had a stealth hull. Isn’t that a little high-tech for pirates?’
Grumand gave a slight shrug, his eyes fixed on the blackness outside. ‘Yes, but it’s not impossible. They usually scavenge whatever they can, refit with more weaponry. They could have got their hands on a military-grade drop ship. It just seems unlikely.’
‘Everything’s quiet back there,’ Delta said as she appeared from the back. ‘The outside temperature isn’t good though.’
‘We should be okay in here,’ Aneka replied. ‘Don’t know about you, but I don’t plan on going out.’
‘I hadn’t planned to.’ Her gaze swept out over the glowing landscape. ‘You think this’ll mask us from sensors?’
‘If memory serves, there’s a fairly high metallic content in the lava, and the heat should stop anyone spotting our infrared signature. Hiding isn’t the problem. We need to…’ She stopped, frowning into the darkness. ‘Do you see that?’
Everyone looked in the direction she was looking. ‘I don’t see…’ Grumand began, and then stopped as he spotted the long, slim tendrils of what appeared to be lava rising up from a particularly broad section of flow. They were writhing and twisting like snakes. Big snakes. ‘The big brothers of the worms we saw back at the camp?’ Grumand suggested.
‘Delta, get Lidia up here,’ Aneka said, her voice tense.
The biologist arrived a few seconds later. ‘I saw them out the side window,’ she said, sounding enthusiastic. ‘Aren’t they amazing?’
‘Amazing, yeah,’ Aneka replied. ‘If they decide to pay us a visit they may not be so amazing.’
‘I don’t think they will. The smaller ones seem to be able to move away from the lava more. We’ve seen no evidence of the big ones until now, and they’re sticking to the flows. Maybe they need to keep their internal temperature higher or something. I wish I could scan them to figure it out.’
‘Sorry. If we use active sensors…’
‘Yeah… I figured that would be the case. If we get out of this alive I swear I’ll push to get another team out here with equipment to study them.’
‘I might even agree to bring you.’
‘Huh, thanks. So how do we get out of here?’
‘For now, we wait. And hope the Hyde isn’t orbiting debris.’
9.9.528 FSC.
‘The ship’s sensors are detecting a tight-beam laser emission,’ Al said. ‘A modulated one.’
Aneka leaned forward and tapped at her console. ‘Jansen to Garnet Hyde. You still in one piece?’ She was alone in the cockpit having sent everyone else back to get some rest.
‘Yes,’ Drake’s voice responded, his voice a little distorted by the transmission medium. ‘We’ve Aggy to thank for that, and some very stupid Herosians.’
‘Herosians?’
‘Yeah. We can discuss that later. It’s taken us a few hours to find you. Luckily that drop ship is still hunting. They’re about twenty clicks north of your position. If you lift off they’ll blow you out of the air.’
Aneka frowned. ‘What’s their search pattern?’
‘It looks like they’re moving closer with each sweep. Someone figured out you hid among the nearest volcanos. Well I did and some Herosians are brighter than others. You’re just lucky we spotted you first.’
‘Any idea how long before they get here?’
‘From their flight pattern… an hour, tops.’
‘Okay, well they’re probably looking for me, not the shuttle as such…’
‘Aneka…?’
‘Let’s just hope they want me alive,’ Aneka continued and then cut off the channel.
~~~
‘You’re insane!’ Adams exclaimed. ‘It’s over ninety out there. I realise you aren’t Jenlay, but even you can’t survive long in that. And there are lava streams all around us!’
‘I’ve got it covered,’ Aneka replied calmly as she checked over her rifle.
‘He’s right, you know?’ Grumand said. ‘A survival suit isn’t going to help if you fall into that stuff, and there’s no way you can get across it…’
‘Really,’ Aneka said, ‘I have it covered.’ As she spoke, something like glistening, black tar was spreading out from the collar of her leotard. ‘If I’m not back in an hour, you fly this thing up to the Hyde and you get the fuck out of here.’ The black fluid covered her mouth and started up her cheeks as she turned toward one of the airlocks. Speaking was now out of the question.
Grumand turned to Monkey. ‘What in Vashma’s name is that?’
Monkey shrugged. ‘New one on me. That’s Aneka, full of surprises.’
‘Are you sure we can clear the lava stream?’ Al asked as they waited for the airlock to seal and cycle.
‘Pretty sure.’
‘That is not entirely convincing.’
‘With the nanosuit enhancing my own muscles, we can jump a helluva distance. We’ve practised this…’
‘Yes, practice. This is a rather extreme way to test that your skills are up to spec.’
The outer door opened and the suit’s sensors immediately registered the heat. Ninety-two Celsius, way above Aneka’s normal operating parameters, but well within the range the suit could handle. The oxygen level was another matter. She could breathe, but it was like operating in a thin atmosphere, and the hydrogen sulphide levels were lethal.
‘Can you think of another way to get them off our backs?’
‘As you well know, strategy and tactics are your department,’ Al commented, a little sourly.
‘Yeah… Well, here goes nothing…’ She started forward, picking up the pace as she accelerated into a dead run toward the narrowest section of lava she could see. Her own artificial muscles were enhanced by the overlay of living metal, and the combined force gave her a speed she could not hope to match normally. She spotted a rock jutting up near the edge of the stream, diverted her course slightly to aim for it, planted her foot, and took off.
Inside the shuttle there was a communal gasp. And then Garlan said, ‘Vashma’s tits, she cleared it!’
‘I would be grateful, Mister Garlan,’ Indaia said, ‘if you would refrain from taking Vashma’s name in vain.’ Garlan glanced at her, his cheeks colouring. ‘However,’ the Torem went on, ‘I concur with the sentiment and I think you can be forgiven. Just this once.’
Wisely, Garlan kept his mouth shut.
~~~
Aneka recognised the stubby bulk of a Hachadim gunship even through the smoky atmosphere as it glided toward her. The throb of its main engines, active even though they could not have been using them, was almost drowned out by the rumble of nearby volcanic activity. She h
ad stopped where she was because the lava flows ahead of her were too wide to jump, even with her suit, but it had not been long before the ship came into view.
Lifting her rifle, she sighted through the scope and fired off three rounds in rapid succession. The aim was not to bring the craft down, that was asking too much of even a souped-up, hyper-velocity, Xinti-tech sniper rifle, but she was still quite amazed when it looked as though all three rounds had penetrated the hull. Apparently she had done some damage too since the vessel twisted sideways, bringing one of its side turrets around so that it could line up on any visible target, and then dropped toward the ground, rear hatch opening as it did so. Humanoid shapes were visible in the light within the ship; they were sending out an assault team.
The throb of the twin fusion torches was stronger now and she could feel it through the ground as the ship touched down. She lined up on one of the figures running down the ramp. Three rounds ripped through the man’s armoured suit like red hot needles and he went down. The remaining four, still not quite sure where the fire was coming from, started in her direction as fast as they could. Another of them, and they were all Herosians from the leg structure, fell before they had gone more than three metres.
The throb of the engines had shifted in pitch, becoming more of a subsonic rumble. Laser beams sizzled through the air as the remaining three Herosians fired wildly in the hopes of hitting something. Aneka’s suit’s camouflage system was obviously working well in the thick atmosphere. She lined up on another Herosian… And then the world shifted.
Aneka steadied herself against a rock as the rumbling around her grew louder. ‘What the Hell is that?!’ she asked silently. Two of the three Herosians were sprawled on the ground, though one had managed to keep his footing.
‘I do not know,’ Al replied, ‘but look at your infrared readings. The area around the gunship is showing a significant temperature increase.’
Her vision was not calibrated to show actual temperature, but Al was right; the area under the Hachadim was showing as a brighter red than it had been. There were brighter spots as well, points where the ground was getting very hot. As she watched, one of those seemed to burst, like a boil opening up, and several of the small magma worms erupted out onto the surface. Almost immediately they began to wriggle away toward the lava flows down the slope. They ignored the men, even when their path took them close by, and they moved with a lot more speed than Aneka would have expected. They almost looked scared…
‘We’re leaving,’ Aneka said. She slung her rifle, bolted to her feet, and started running for the river of molten rock she had crossed to get to this island. She saw a laser beam burn through the air on her right, arcing toward her, and her suit registered the hit, but she felt nothing. And then she was airborne, flying over the lava stream as a sound like the world splitting open began roaring in her ears.
Landing, she rolled and regained her feet, looking back toward the gunship. It was not there. At first she thought a volcano had erupted under it, but the plume of lava was not acting like the other streams she could see. This reached into the sky, a glowing, red-orange column that twisted and writhed the way the longer worms had done, except that this was thirty metres in height and almost twenty across…
‘No fucking way,’ Aneka said.
The giant, silicon beast twisted around once more, and then dropped back into the hole it had come from. A few seconds later Aneka could see the temperature rising above the crater, the first signs of lava rising from the pit. Pretty soon it would overflow and the island would just be another part of the volcano chain.
Turning, Aneka started running. ‘I’ve changed my mind about bringing Lidia back here,’ she said.
‘A wise decision,’ Al replied. ‘I think that putting this world on the quarantine list would be a better idea.’
‘Once she sees the video of that thing, I think even she will agree.’
~~~
It took five minutes for the airlock to clean out the external air and cool Aneka’s suit to the point where it could be retracted without causing damage to her skin. It felt like the longest five minutes ever.
‘You found them?’ Monkey asked as she stepped into the main cabin in her more usual leotard.
‘I found them,’ Aneka replied, and turned immediately for the cockpit.
‘I take it you took care of them?’
‘I put a few holes in their ship and killed two of them. Now we’re getting out of here.’
‘Won’t they come after us?’ Delta asked. ‘That doesn’t sound like all of them.’
Aneka dropped into the pilot’s seat and began powering up the antigravity and thruster systems. Not the main drive. The main drive was not getting turned on until they were far higher. ‘They will not be coming after us. I’m sending the video to the ship’s computers. Lidia, you’re going to want to see this.’ Taking it as smoothly as she could, Aneka lifted the shuttle upward into the black sky. ‘We were seriously lucky that it was just the little worms Indaia’s emitter attracted.’
At two hundred metres Aneka retracted the landing gear and cut in the main engines. As the whine of the fusion torches filled her ears she heard Rice from the rear cabin.
‘No fucking way!’
‘I think she’s going to agree,’ Al commented dryly.
EML4 Ship Construction Facility, Old Earth, 10.9.528 FSC.
‘Titan Transport Zero-Three to EML-Four, requesting clearance for docking.’ The voice came over the speakers in the space station’s control room and a bored operator turned to check his sensor displays.
Answering did not require any movement; his implant actioned the opening of the channel by remote just before he spoke. ‘EML-Four Control to transport. You are cleared for hangar bay two. Any trouble on the way down?’
‘Not a damn thing.’ The transport’s communications officer sounded disappointed and the operator was just about to reply when he spotted a second blip on the sensor display. He was damn sure it had not been there a second ago…
‘Transport Zero-Three, you have an unidentified contact bearing one-eight-nine by one-seven-six, range two thousand. Speed is two-oh-seven-K, accelerating, two G. Vector is… intercepting.’
‘Acknowledged, Control.’ The voice had gone flat, calm, even cold. It belonged to an Enforcer… No, they were calling them Guardians now, but whatever they were called, the owner of that voice had gone out there for precisely this reason. The controller watched as the speeding vessel closed on the apparently unprotected transport, saw the smaller vessel reorient toward its attacker, and then the emission detection system registered the sudden burst from the transport’s bow.
Out in space it appeared as though the transport had been hit. The plating over the bow exploded as two gamma-ray laser weapons that ran the length of the hull fired together. The incoming frigate’s bow armour buckled and there was outgassing visible as sections depressurised. Apparently taken entirely by surprise, which had been the whole point, the frigate shifted course. Turrets around its midsection shifted and fired on the smaller vessel, meeting first a force field and then the hull. There was the flare of light as the graser beams cut into the hyper-dense material, but the little ship had been engineered to take damage as well as hand it out.
It handed out more. The rear section of the frigate lit up brightly on the sensor display as the twin mega-joule lasers burned into it. The powerful drives, twin antimatter torches, sputtered and died, and it drifted on for another few seconds before the entire rear section ripped open like an over-pressurised tin can.
Even inside the station the controller could see the light from the explosion through his suddenly darkening windows. He activated the communications channel. ‘Transport Zero-Three, are you okay? Any damage?’
There was the sound of cheering in the background before the comms officer’s voice came in. ‘We took some damage to one of the habitation sections amidships, but there were no injuries. Damage control is underway. We’re going out
to see if there’s anything identifiable in the wreckage.’
‘Acknowledged, Transport Zero-Three. Well done. I’ll let Prime City know of your success immediately. Control out.’
FScV Garnet Hyde, in High Orbit over Farrington’s World.
‘The vessel is a Gadetta class heavy gunship,’ Aggy said from the wall of Drake’s cabin. She was standing next to a slowly rotating, schematic image of the other spacecraft in orbit around Farrington’s World. To be specific, her virtual image, that of a naked, golden-skinned woman with large breasts, honey-blonde hair, and silver eyes, was standing beside the wire-frame model. It took a little getting used to, but once you did you tended to treat Aggy as just another member of the crew, rather than the ship’s AI.
‘The same as the one which attacked…’ Aneka began and then cut herself off. ‘Well, I’ve seen one before.’
‘It is one of the standard Herosian military vessels,’ Aggy replied. ‘Its crew were, however, sloppy.’
‘When they hailed us to demand that we allow them to board the Hyde,’ Drake said, ‘Aggy hacked their computer systems through their own communications channel.’
‘I should point out,’ Aggy said, ‘that I would not have had the time to do so if Captain Drake had not kept them talking. It was a joint effort.’
‘All my blustering would have got us was a laser in the nose if you hadn’t been there to do the hacking.’
Aneka grinned. Neither was going to accept the credit. Drake had been career military, the captain of a frigate, until his ship had been ordered into an impossible situation and he had lost almost his entire crew. He still looked like a naval officer: tough, rugged, with a handsome face capped by hair cut within an inch of its life. His nose had been broken at some point and he had let it set slightly twisted, which just made him look more like an experienced spacer than a punch-drunk boxer. ‘What did you do to them?’ she asked to stop the mutual honour shifting.
‘Closed down their reactor and then opened all the airlocks,’ Aggy replied.
Aneka Jansen 5: The Greatest Heights of Honour Page 4
