But nonetheless, he hired his cleaning drones. He recalled little of his mother, but he did remember she always insisted on cleaning their tent for guests.
Then, of course, she had died, and the Final Consciousness had taken him.
By 03:00 the next morning, the Tiger was equipped, all systems were green, and the cargoes had been loaded. March finished the preflight checks, received a departure window from Antioch Station control, and headed into space.
Vigil began calculating the first hyperspace jump. It would take about three and a half days and fifteen hyperspace jumps to get to NB8876X. Due to the vastness of space and the difficulty of navigation, the easiest and safest method of interstellar travel was to jump from star system to star system, almost like a man crossing a stream by jumping from stone to stone. It would have been theoretically possible to open a hyperspace tunnel from the Antioch System to NB8876X, but the slightest error in navigation, multiplied over thousands of light years, would throw the Tiger wildly off course.
More than one ship had disappeared forever after a reckless captain had decided to take navigational risks.
Hyperspace carried other risks as well. Within hyperspace lived macrobes, creatures constituted of dark energy that were attracted to human consciousness like moths to a flame. A human possessed by a macrobe, with certain highly classified exceptions, inevitably mutated into an insane, murderous monster. Before the development of the dark energy resonator, anyone traveling through hyperspace had been sedated or even stored in cryogenic suspension. Macrobe possession was something that did not trouble March, thanks to the large quantities of nanotech and cybernetic implants remaining in his blood and flesh, but nonetheless, he made sure that both the main resonator and the backup resonator were functioning.
Especially after the disaster on the Alpine had killed so many people.
Once he was ready and Vigil had finished her calculations, the Tiger’s dark matter reactor energized the ship’s hyperdrive, and March entered hyperspace, beginning his jump to the first deserted system on his course to NB8876X.
While in hyperspace, he did his usual routine of ship maintenance and diagnostics, with regular heavy exercise sessions in the gym. He also practiced with weapons, using a holographic range in the dorsal corridor since the cargo bay was full.
In between those tasks, he studied the materials that Censor had sent him about Dr. Adelaide Taren. There were official records, some of her books, and copies of her video productions. March started with the records. It would be easier to get the truth from them.
She had been born Adelaide Renton, and her background was that of a normal Calaskaran woman of common birth. Her father had been a veteran of the Royal Calaskaran Navy, and her mother had helped manage the family’s business, which specialized in repairing autocabs and other automated vehicles. She had gone to the university to study history, and her ID picture at the time showed a girl with thick black hair and a bright smile, her face a little too angular to be pretty. She dropped out after two years to marry Duncan Taren, a man ten years her senior who had left the Navy and returned to civilian life as an employee of the university.
All that was unremarkable.
It was a year after her marriage that things took a turn for the worse. Duncan Taren had been killed and Adelaide badly hurt in a car accident caused by an industrial explosion. She had been seven months pregnant, and the child miscarried. At least, the official record said it had been a car accident. An addendum from the Silent Order detailed that the explosion had been caused by a Machinist terrorist cell. Most of those responsible had been apprehended, but the leader, a graduate student named Samuel Laredo, had never been caught.
After a tragedy like that, March would have expected Adelaide Taren to settle into a life of quiet widowhood. She would have inherited Duncan’s pension and was young enough that she could have remarried and led a comfortable life on Calaskar. Or she would have killed herself or wasted away from grief. March had seen both outcomes.
Instead, she had done neither.
Once she recovered, she had returned to the university and finished her degree in record time. Shortly after that, she wrote her first book, and on the strength of that the book, she produced a documentary video series on some of the ancient alien races that had populated the region of space near Calaskar long before the great diaspora from primeval Earth had begun. The series had proven remarkably popular, and after that Dr. Taren had gone from hit to hit. The serious academics sneered at her work, but that never slowed her down.
And all the while, she worked in secret for the Silent Order, exposing Machinist collaborators in the academic, media, and publishing circles of Calaskar. Censor had included a brief list, and March found himself impressed. She had taken down a great many powerful and influential fools who had thrown their lot in with the Final Consciousness, and she had often done it so neatly that no one suspected she had been involved.
The files included the official photograph used by her production company. The girl from the university ID picture had become a striking woman. The face was a little thinner, with faint lines near the mouth and eyes, and March saw evidence a few minor cosmetic procedures. She had clear gray eyes, and there was a faint smile on her lips. March knew as well as anyone that photographs could be manipulated with ridiculous ease, but he could not shake the feeling that Adelaide Taren looked confident. Like a woman sure of herself and her work.
He wondered what drove her. Was it vengeance for a husband and a child murdered fifteen years past? March understood that well enough. Or was it money? She had accumulated a small fortune from royalties and prudent investment, and the Silent Order’s records noted that she lived frugally and had no major vices, save for a tendency to chain-smoke in times of stress.
Censor had sent along copies of her books, and March bypassed those after skimming the first few chapters. He did not read for recreation, and the thought of reading lengthy books about long-dead alien races was not a pleasant one. Yet the curiosity tugged him. Long-dead alien races had been haunting him of late, first with the Machinist agent Lorre and the hideously dangerous Wraith device, and then his encounter with the Custodian at the Eschaton system. Perhaps there would be time to read the books later.
The files contained several copies of Dr. Taren’s videos and documentaries. One video file caught his attention. It was far shorter than the others, and it was security camera footage. Intrigued, March watched it first. The video showed men in suits and women in gowns arriving for some sort of banquet at the University of Calaskar. March spotted Dr. Taren among them, wearing a sleeveless black dress with a long skirt. As the guests arrived, a group of protestors attacked – the video’s metadata said they had been incited by Machinists. One of the protestors knocked Dr. Taren to the ground, a lead pipe in his hand.
Before he could crush her skull, she had removed one of her high-heeled sandals and buried the spike in his neck.
March was impressed. Video and photographic trickery could make someone look more attractive or more intelligent than they truly were. Coolness under pressure was impossible to fake. When people were attacked, they either froze, fled, or fought, and it looked like Taren was a fighter.
He watched some of her documentaries in the background while he did other tasks. March was unable to sit still and watch something for entertainment. That had been beaten out of him during his training as an Iron Hand when every waking moment was spent improving his skills or destroying the enemies of the Final Consciousness. Nevertheless, he half-listened to her videos as he did maintenance, worked in the flight cabin, or exercised in the gym.
Taren did make for an interesting presenter. Her voice was calm and pleasant, and she spoke with just enough of a common Calaskaran accent to emphasize that she wasn’t one of the nobles. Perhaps that helped with viewing figures. She toured ruins on alien planets, pointing out features of interest, or interviewed other historians and archaeologists. For most of the videos, she wore a white
shirt, a black jacket, and a black skirt, common formal clothes for women on Calaskar, but they fit her well.
Her entire image was that of a popular historian, a celebrity archaeologist who had built a following, and there was absolutely no indication in her public image that she exposed traitors for the Silent Order.
No wonder the Final Consciousness wanted to kill her.
He finished exercising in heavy gravity while one of her videos played on the wallscreen. Dr. Taren interviewed another scholar with interest in the extinct alien races, and the man expounded his theory that a colossal war had wiped out those races. Based on what March had learned, he wasn’t wrong.
He wondered if Taren had ever heard of the Great Elder Ones, or if she dismissed them as myth.
March got to his feet with a grunt, his body dripping with sweat, his limbs and breath aching as he moved in the heavy gravity. His reflection in the wall mirror caught his eye, and he grimaced. The metal arm seemed like an alien thing, a machine grafted to his flesh. March often wished he could have gotten rid of the mirror in the gym, but it was necessary to check his form when performing some of the more intensive exercises.
“Vigil,” he said, turning away from the mirror, “normal gravity.”
“Acknowledged,” said the pseudointelligence. A shudder went through March, and then he suddenly felt lighter.
“ETA?” he said, picking up a towel and wiping off his face and chest with it.
“Two hours, thirty-seven minutes to the NB8876X system,” said Vigil.
March nodded. It was time to get to work. He took a few moments to clean off the gym equipment, shut off the wallscreen, and went to his cabin to use the sanitizer. He dressed in his usual jumpsuit and coat, gun belt around his waist, and headed to the flight cabin.
He spent the remainder of the time checking the Tiger’s weaponry and defensive systems – the central railgun, the plasma cannons, the laser turrets, and both the radiation and the kinetic-energy shields. Everything came up fully functional. Thanks to its armament, the Tiger could deal with starfighters, blockade runners, gunships, and even corvettes if March could get a clean shot from the railgun.
If the Machinists had hired the Graywolves mercenary gang to kill Adelaide Taren, March would be ready to fight them. The simplest way for the Graywolves to kill Taren would be to blast her ship out of space. Of course, she had hired two Ronstadt Private Security Corporation gunships to escort her freighter, which meant the Graywolves would have to bring enough firepower to deal with them. And a competent Machinist agent would have assassins waiting on Rustbelt Station in case Taren escaped the space battle and made it to the station.
“ETA five minutes to the NB8876X system,” announced Vigil. “Our terminus point should put us ten million kilometers from Rustbelt Station.”
“Acknowledged,” said March. “Start the prechecks for exiting hyperspace. And get ready to bring up the weapons and shields as soon as we’re back in real space.”
March went through the final checks as the Tiger neared the terminus of its hyperspace tunnel. All systems showed green, and March watched the timer count down on the engine display. The screen flashed zero, and March drew back the power levers and cut power to the hyperdrive, the dark matter reactor shifting to its standby state.
The Tiger entered normal space and arrived at the NB8876X system.
At once March flipped the switches on the tactical board, sending power to the weapons and shields.
NB8876X was a binary star system, with a small blue star and a red supergiant. The first nine planets were rocky but too close to the suns to hold an atmosphere or too far away to support life. The remaining twelve planets were gas giants, and each one held a constellation of moons ranging from planet-sized to small asteroids. The system had two asteroid belts, one between the sixth and seventh planets, and another beyond the ninth planet.
The system was deserted of any life save for Rustbelt Station.
The station occupied an asteroid in the outer belt. As the Tiger drew closer, March watched the sensor data scroll across his displays. The asteroid was about fifty kilometers in diameter at its thickest point, and it was shaped like a potato. The radar and ladar picked up dozens of metallic domes clustered near its southern pole, and the radiation sensors detected several active fusion reactors. The sensors also registered enormous empty spaces within the asteroid, places where the mining equipment had cut deep into the rock. Once the asteroid had been home to rare ores, and a mining company had tried to exploit them. Then the market prices changed, driving the company out of business, and the mine had shut down.
But Rustbelt Station remained, catering to those who wished to conduct their business far from official eyes. Smugglers and pirates and drug runners turned up here, along with people involved in more serious crimes, such as Kezredite slaving and kidnapping. Naturally, spies from the various starfaring nations and races turned up here as well. Nominally the station and the system were under the control of the Kingdom of Calaskar, but Rustbelt Station was far more corrupt than every other Calaskaran installation March had ever visited. Evidently, the Silent Order kept the station that way, using it as a net to sift through the various flows of spies and illegal money coming into the Kingdom.
Easier to catch the rats, Constantine Bishop had once told him, when you know where they are going to nest.
“Tactical scan,” said March, firing up the fusion drive and the ion thrusters and turning the Tiger towards the station. “How many ships in the system?”
“Fifty-two vessels are docked at Rustbelt Station,” said Vigil. “Additionally, there are thirty-nine other craft within twenty million kilometers of the station.”
“How many of them have active shields and armed weapons?” said March.
“All of them.”
That wasn’t surprising. The Kingdom of Calaskar might have nominal control over the station and the surrounding system, but NB8876X was a long way from any of the major interstellar powers, and out here a man could do whatever he liked so long as he had sufficient firepower to back him up. Terrorists and slavers and fanatics like the Kezredites thrived in systems like this, to say nothing of old-fashioned pirates. Anyone coming out here needed to be well-armed and well-prepared, which was no doubt why Taren had hired Ronstadt Security to escort her ship to Xenostas and back.
March gazed at the display, wondering which one of those ships had been hired by the Machinists. None of them had Graywolves insignia, but the Graywolves had been banned from Rustbelt Station. That said, removing insignia and falsifying a ship’s ID was a trivial matter.
“Start a tactical analysis of every ship within range,” said March. “See if we can figure out which one of these ships is most likely to take a shot at Dr. Taren when she arrives.”
“Analysis underway,” said Vigil. “However, we have insufficient data to make an accurate assessment.”
“Do it anyway,” said March. “Once the shooting starts, the more tactical data we have, the better off we’ll…”
One of the displays chimed.
“Incoming transmission from Rustbelt Station,” said Vigil. “It is marked urgent priority.”
March grimaced. That, he suspected, would be Administrator Heitz.
He accepted the transmission, and a video link appeared on one of the displays, showing a small office illuminated by the glow of computer monitors. Administrator Heitz sat before the camera, scowling. He had lost weight since March’s last visit, and it left him looking sallow and irritable.
“Administrator Heitz,” said March.
“Jack March,” said Heitz. He all but snarled the words. “Here to make more trouble for me? You have no idea how upset Ronstadt Corporation was about those men you got killed.”
“That I got killed?” said March. “Machinist infiltrator drones killed them. You ought to recall. You were there.”
“I ought,” said Heitz, “to have you shot down right now.”
“That would be unwi
se.” March glanced at the engine and weapon displays, making sure that the Tiger was ready to defend itself and start evasive maneuvers. He didn’t think Heitz would start shooting missiles at him, but if the man had a big enough grudge, he might do something reckless.
“Why are you here?” said Heitz. “Are you bringing me more trouble?”
“You’re about to have trouble,” said March, “whether I’m here or not.”
That got Heitz’s attention. The man was greedy and venal, but not stupid.
“Hang on,” snapped Heitz, reaching for his computer keyboard. “I want this encrypted.”
The display blurred, went pixelated, and then calmed down at a somewhat lower resolution. The icons at the bottom of the screen informed March that the transmission had been encrypted at a quantum level. It was theoretically possible to break, but March and Heitz would have at least a few minutes to converse in privacy.
“All right,” said Heitz, a faint overlay of static on his voice. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Check the flight plans for incoming ships,” said March. “There should be a medium freighter called the Shovel coming in, accompanied by two Ronstadt Security gunships.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Heitz, scrolling through his display. “Let’s see, Shovel, Shovel…here we go. It should be arriving in fifteen minutes.” March had cut it closer than he would have liked, but the timetable had been tight. Still, fifteen minutes earlier was better than fifteen minutes late. “Registered to Adelaide Taren of Calaskar. Wait, I know her. She’s the historian, right? The one with the nice ass who wears the tight skirts?”
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