‘Where’s she now?’
‘New Earth. She still dances. The club she works at is nicer than the one here and she actually loves the work. She…’
‘Sound to room speakers,’ Monkey said, interrupting her, and the room piped the audio from the news channel through.
‘…are sketchy currently, but it is thought that around eighty people were in the port when the bomb was detonated. No demands made have been communicated to the press, but the terrorists appear to belong to the group known as “The Knights of the Void” an anarchist group thought to have been responsible for the destruction of the CSV Blue Auriga two years ago.
‘Once again, terrorists have assaulted the Harriamon Shuttle Landing Port and have taken hostages.’
‘Not a cave-in then,’ Aneka said. ‘We may be stuck here for more than one night.’
‘You think?’ Ella asked. It sounded like a genuine question.
‘Depends on the actual situation and the intelligence the police have. They won’t want to risk storming the place, assuming they can get to it, unless they’re sure of what they’re up against. They’ll risk losing hostages. And that’s assuming the terrorists don’t have explosives. I’d imagine it wouldn’t be too hard to bring the roof down and cut the planet off entirely.’
‘Not entirely,’ Ella said. ‘The commercial port, where the metals are shipped out of, is in a separate cavern. They’re only holding the passenger port. And there’s the military facility which has its own landing pads.’
Aneka frowned. ‘That makes relatively little sense. Unless that was the easiest to take.’ She shrugged. ‘Nothing we can do about it. Put a movie on or something, Monkey. Maybe I can get used to what passes for humour these days.’
8.11.523 FSC.
Aneka woke to an odd chirping sound and it took her a second to realise that it was not in the room. There was a message in her vision field indicating that there was an incoming call from a blocked source identifier. Assuming it was Gilroy checking up on them, she was surprised when the video feed showed the unassuming face of Winter.
‘Miss Jansen, I’m sorry for waking you. I need to discuss something with you, privately.’
‘You’re on my internal feed,’ Aneka replied.
‘Very well. You’re aware of the terrorist situation at the spaceport?’
‘I’ve seen the local news channel’s report.’
‘Indeed. What they aren’t reporting is what the terrorists want and what they plan to do if their demands are not met. They’ve smuggled a micro-nuke into the port…’
‘What’s the yield?’
‘One kiloton. Not huge, but in the confined space of the Harriamon facilities quite enough to kill everyone in the town.’
‘And I assume you’ve some rule about not negotiating with terrorists?’
Winter smiled her humourless smile. ‘We prefer not to, but we will under the right circumstances. In this case it isn’t an option. They are demanding the dissolution of the federal government.’
‘I see your point, but why are you contacting me?’
‘There is one way of getting into the port which they will not be expecting, largely because it is technically impossible to use. There’s an electrical ducting system between the cargo port and the passenger port. It has little air and it’s very cramped, and it would take a hydraulic jack to lift the access panel at the far end. It’s useless to an assault team…’
‘But I could maybe crawl through it and I’m strong enough to lift the panel.’
The blonde woman nodded. ‘There’s no time to evacuate the population through the military port, and they’ll detonate the bomb if anything leaves the cargo port.’
‘You’re not actually leaving me much option. I’ll need schematics of the port and a weapon.’
‘Yes, I had considered that. I’m transmitting the plans now. You can collect your knife and pistol from me in the cargo port.’
‘You’re on the planet?!’
Winter smiled again. ‘I work very much in secret, Miss Jansen, but I’m quite a hands-on manager.’
‘All right. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’ A second window popped up to tell her that the schematics had been downloaded and processed into the navigation system. ‘One thing. I’d like you to get Ella and Monkey out of here once I’ve gone in.’
‘I’ll see to it personally.’ The link broke and Aneka pushed herself up onto one elbow.
‘Wake up, you two, we have to go.’
Monkey blinked at her from the other bed. ‘Huh? Is the port open again?’
‘No, but you two are leaving.’
‘We are?’ Ella said. ‘What about you?’
~~~
Ella had been, predictably, less than pleased, but the awe involved in meeting the mysterious Winter had been enough to make her accept that this was going to happen and that was that. Monkey had not been happy either, more because she was going in alone and there was nothing he could do, and he was not allowed to say anything about it. As Aneka crawled through the wiring duct toward the spaceport she was not exactly pleased herself.
It was a data conduit, thankfully. There were no thick power cables, but there were bundles of fibre optic cables, and they had not always been put in the best of places, or even properly fixed down. She was pushing a bag with her equipment ahead of her and she had left her boots behind with Ella because they were just too clumsy for this kind of activity. She was quite glad she had not inherited her mother’s classic English pear-shaped body, but on the other hand she was beginning to wish the Xinti had not “perked” her breasts up quite so much. She had to be almost a cup-size bigger and the added firmness was not helping.
On top of that, she was in pitch darkness. Her glorious enhanced vision was no use down here where there was no light at all aside from the heat her own body gave off, and she was not using a torch because there were holes in the plate at the other end and there was the small possibility that a light might be seen. At least she was crawling to the end of the tunnel so there was no chance of missing her exit.
When her bag finally bumped into something too solid to be another cable blockage her clock told her she had spent twenty minutes crawling five hundred metres. Shuffling onto her back, she got her hands under the metal plate an inch or two above her nose and pushed. Stress measurement indicators in-vision soared upward, turning yellow as she managed to shift the steel. Fifty kilos of metal levered upward, the task becoming easier as the angle on her arms changed and she could use her back. Finally, holding the cover up on its edge, she pulled her bag out, found the lifting holes by touch, and lowered the plate back into place.
It was still pitch black, but she had the schematic of the port and knew the stairs up were on her left orienting against the duct. Internal gyroscopes and magnetometers made sure she knew exactly where that orientation was and how she had moved since getting out of the duct. The door at the top of the stairs was locked, but she had the code to unlock it and it slid back without complaint. After almost half an hour of total darkness the dim light from the sparse emergency lights in the service corridor seemed incredibly bright.
Aneka used the opportunity of the unguarded corridor to open up her bag and get her equipment out. It was a classic piece of poor security design; assuming that an ingress point was “impossible” and so did not need guarding. There were no security sensors down here because “no one” could get to it without going through the port which did have cameras. The fact that you needed a respirator to breath in the unventilated space just added to that sense of false security.
With her belt strapped on and her pistol in its holster, a clever black full-face mask on which was opaque from the outside and transparent from within, and her knife strapped to her left thigh, Aneka took her last piece of equipment and walked down to the one security feature the tunnel did have. Staff were required to check in on entering or leaving, and that meant that there was a small terminal at each end attached to the port’s sec
urity system. The terrorists had cut the connections between the port’s systems and the central administration system in the town, but that was not going to stop her connecting to it through the terminal down here. She plugged the small gadget into a data port, turned it on, and waited. A second later a green light appeared and she turned it off and stowed it in a pouch on her belt. The security system would now ignore her; all she had to worry about were the actual terrorists.
That was something of a problem. Intelligence suggested there were at least five of them, and probably no more than ten. That was a lot of leeway, but they had eighty-three hostages to look after, assuming they had not killed anyone yet, which meant keeping the majority of their force in one location. Winter’s best guess was that that would be the central passenger lounge; it had cover and a large enough open space that they could hold everyone there. It was also likely that the bomb was there. However, they likely had at least one person in the security suite.
Her hand closed around the grip of her pistol and she checked the setting; lethal, single-shot. She had asked Winter whether she wanted the terrorists alive and the answer had been, ‘My dear, I don’t want them at all.’ At least the gloves were off. Taking a deep breath she opened the door and stepped out into the port proper.
She had expected no lookouts down here, but it was gratifying to discover she was correct. Picking up the pace, she padded on bare feet down the service corridor toward the emergency staircase at one end. The passenger lounge was closer to where she had come up than the security suite, but she had about an hour to neutralise the terrorists and she needed accurate information. The security suite could give her that.
Four floors up she eased open the door and slid her pistol out to scan up and down the corridor. This floor contained the security suite and some break rooms for the security and customs staff. The building was vaguely pyramid shaped with the flight control room above this floor, staff and crew facilities below, and passenger facilities below that. Most of the major services were under the cavern floor, where Aneka had come in. And they had not posted guards; bunch of amateurs. She slipped out into the corridor and edged down to the security room door, setting her pistol to stun as she did so. She had no obligation to keep any of the terrorists alive, but lethal mode was damn noisy.
The code lock on the door released and the door slid open with what Aneka felt was far too much noise, but the man on the security console was still intently watching the screens in front of him, apparently oblivious. She moved forward, coming up behind him, and clamped one hand on his jaw, effectively silencing him, the other on the back of his neck. He gave a startled, muffled squeak, and grabbed at her arm. There was a momentary struggle, and then she wrenched his head sharply to the right, hearing the wet crunch as she dislocated his spine at the neck. He went very limp, very fast. Laying his body down under the counter, she moved to the security displays.
There had been ten of them, now there were nine, but they had one man in the control tower, and three watching the entrance hall from Cavern One. That left five of them in the central lounge with the hostages. One of them, the spokesman for the group if not its leader, was standing beside an open, metal suitcase. That, presumably, was the bomb, but the view from the camera was not good enough to see whether it was on a timer. They seemed to be armed with various weapons. There were a couple of what looked like laser rifles, but the leader only had a pistol, and the man she had killed was carrying a projectile weapon, a caseless automatic pistol.
Well the front gate guards could wait, but the man in the control tower had to go first. She went out of the security room and back to the stairs, running up a floor and slipping out unseen. She knew where he was, at the other end of the wide room where the supervisor’s radar screens were located. Then she switched her pistol back to lethal and lined up the shot; two full floors between her and the other men should be enough to mask the sound. Aiming for his head, she squeezed the trigger. She winced; someone was going to have a nasty cleaning job.
Next was the passenger lounge and there was no good way to take this one. The leader had to go first, that was for certain, and anyone else who went near the bomb. She had surprise on her side, and the probability that these were not trained soldiers. When the shooting started, some of them would hesitate, but she had seconds to deal with them, and the noise might attract the three guards at the front. Well, there was no helping it. She would have to deal with whatever happened.
Ingress points were a bit meagre, unfortunately. The front, widest, entry point was out since that led to the security gates and the link tunnel. There were three other pathways in or out leading to the various boarding bridges and landing platforms. Aneka came down from the staff floor on the right hand side of the passenger hall. There was a man standing at the entrance to the room, what looked like a hunting rifle in his arms, but his eyes were on the prisoners. Aneka pulled her dagger from its sheath, and moved silently across the floor toward the gunman.
As soon as she could see the leader, she raised her pistol and fired, squeezing off three rounds in rapid succession and targeting centre of mass. From the way the first shot ripped open his chest, he was probably dead on the first hit. The second pulse hit his left hand as it whipped around with the twist of his body, vaporising it, and the third blasted his left leg off at the thigh. Aneka’s eyes widened at the sight of what her pistol did to a human body; the thing was horrific! The rest of the room froze in shock.
Aneka ignored the man directly in front of her, swinging wide and aiming for the one across the hall from the leader. Three more pulses of energy burst out, three more hits, another corpse hitting the floor, this time with a torso which looked like someone had scooped it out with a bulldozer and no right arm.
Now the screaming started and the gunmen started to gather their wits. Aneka lined up a third one, standing in the middle of the room. She needed to be more careful with this one; his head appeared in her targeting window as she pulled the trigger. The man’s head disintegrated into a cloud of blood and bone fragments and people screamed as the backwash from the explosion hit them. Or perhaps it was the shower of blood. They were not badly hurt, but they were starting to panic.
Aneka yelled, ‘Stay down!’ The shout seemed to wake up the man she was still more or less standing behind, and he turned, bringing his rifle around. She moved, stepping in and bringing her knife up toward his neck. His eyes widened and he twitched sideways, the fine edge of the blade slicing off a lock of his long, unkempt, black hair. At this range, the rifle was too unwieldy to use as a gun; he swung the barrel at her instead. It was clumsy and stupid, and his swing bumped into her arm with no force. Then there was a sound a bit like a lightning strike, and the rifleman screamed as his right leg was cut out from under him.
Across the hall, the fifth terrorist was holding his laser pistol in a good shooting stance, but his jaw was hanging open. Aneka decided to put him out of his misery; her gun spoke and his smoking remains fell to the dirt coloured carpet.
There was a bang from Aneka’s right and fragments of plaster and concrete bounced off her hood. The fallen man was not giving up, but he was clearly in shock and his shot had gone wild. Well, if he was not giving up… Her knife slammed down, point first, lancing through the roof of his mouth as though there was no bone in his body. He twitched once as she pulled the blade free, and then stopped moving entirely.
She started moving almost immediately. ‘Stay where you are!’ she yelled as she ran for the entrance tunnel. ‘Do not move. You’ll be rescued soon.’ Skirting the circular area containing the passenger seating, she started down the corridor.
Two of the three were running back toward the lounge. Aneka raised her gun; range thirty metres, well within effective range. She fired, the bolts tracking across her target’s body from right to left. His hand, chest, and arm vanished in explosions of gore, and the detonations smacked into his compatriot, bouncing him off the corridor wall. He stumbled, fell, and did not get up
again. She was considering making sure he was out of the game when a bullet flew past her, followed by the sound of the shot.
She dropped to one knee, raising her pistol and using it to zoom in on the man at the end of the corridor past the security gates. He was holding a hunting rifle, large calibre, something close to an old NATO round, and he was lining up for another shot having missed with the first. She fired back, one round, straight through the chest just below his rifle. Through her sighting system she saw his ribcage blown back and outward, the rifle flying up and away from him, his eyes glazing over just before he fell backwards onto the concrete floor.
‘It’s done,’ she said inside her head, breaking radio silence.
‘Any survivors?’ Winter’s voice replied after a second.
‘One of them’s still breathing. Some of the hostages may need a bit of medical assistance. This gun’s about as subtle as an anti-tank rocket.’
‘The local police are pushing through the barricades now. I don’t want you found there. Is that man going to wake up before the police get to him?’
Aneka turned the terrorist over and prised one of his eyes open. ‘I doubt it.’
‘All right. Get to gate twenty. There’ll be a shuttle there in five minutes… three minutes. Move.’
Aneka moved.
Harriamon Naval Station, 9.11.523 FSC.
Ape Gibbons was waiting outside the cabin Aneka and Ella had been sharing when Aneka walked out with the remains of their baggage. He was glowering, which either meant he was thinking something bad, or he had been told about her part in ending the hostage incident and did not like the fact that she had helped.
‘So you went down to the planet with my son and the next thing that happens is terrorists taking over the spaceport.’ Apparently it was the former.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Kind of sucks. I’m not sure I like your inference though. I was with Ella and David the whole day, and night.’ She could see from his face that he did not like that either.
Steel Beneath the Skin Page 14
