Aneka Jansen 7: Hope Page 10

  Ella forked pasta into her mouth and chewed, delaying the answer. ‘He wouldn’t have been the first.’

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  Ella walked onto the bridge of the Hope and Kade turned in her seat to look back at her. The captain’s eyebrows raised a little, asking an unspoken question.

  ‘All right,’ Ella said, ‘I’m in.’

  Kade gave a nod. ‘I’ll organise some familiarisation simulations. We should have time for that, but you won’t get much real experience, I’m afraid. It’s fifteen days to Haven, but once we get there I’m hoping to get the information we need and be gone pretty quickly.’

  ‘What is this “big score” you’re working on?’

  The captain grinned and tapped her nose with an index finger. ‘Need to know until we’re on our way. I’ll be briefing the entire crew then.’

  Ella started to turn. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever met a woman named Winter have you?’

  ‘Not that I remember. Why?’

  ‘I think you two would get on really well.’

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  Ella had more or less been expecting a planet, and what she got was an asteroid belt. Given that she was meant to be familiarising herself with the controls, Kade had suggested she sit in the second helm position and fly the ship in. It gave her a good view of things, but she was glad Tebbot would be taking over for the final docking manoeuvre. If she were honest, she was used to far more responsive ships than the Hope: it felt like she was having to drag all that mass around by hand as she manipulated the controls to push them in toward their target station.

  ‘Pirate Cove,’ Kade said from behind her. ‘Home sweet scummy home.’

  It was a vaguely egg-shaped asteroid a bit less than half a kilometre on its longest axis, which it was rotating around. More spin gravity, Ella guessed. Primarily it was all rock, pale grey and boring. There were a few lights dotted over it and, around the midsection, a number of turrets. Out at one end was a pair of docking gantries near a large hatch which was presumably the hangar bay. They were heading for the gantries.

  ‘You mostly live on the ship, Boss,’ Tebbot pointed out. ‘Uh, start braking and I’ll take over in a minute.’

  Ella gave a nod and pulled back on the throttle stick. The engines went into reverse, even if their pitiful push was unnoticeable through the compensators. They seemed to decelerate very slowly, but Tebbot seemed quite happy with things. The drive unit back there was definitely one of the earlier models.

  ‘Kade to the crew.’ Ella heard the captain speaking behind her and figured it was going out ship-wide. ‘We’ll be docking in… whenever we can wake up the control team anyway. Should be soon. I want the cargo that’s going out off the ship in an hour so get your behinds ready for that. When we’re done, we get twelve hours’ shore leave. Twelve. If I have to come around with Lanyon and Trin to drag you out of a brothel, I will forget to bring you back from the next trip. Kade out.’

  ‘Do you have to do that often?’ Ella asked, her eyes on velocity displays and vector tracks.

  ‘Drag them out of brothels? More than I’d like, but they’re actually pretty responsible. Except for Tebbot there. How many times have we had to get you treated for pox, Tebbot?’

  Tebbot mumbled something incomprehensible and then added, ‘I’ll take the controls now.’

  Kade burst into laughter as Ella hit the button which would switch primary control over to the other seat and then sat back in hers.

  ‘So, I get shore leave too, I guess. Any suggestions?’

  ‘Stick to the core areas. There’s a park in the East Wing, but it can get a bit rough. I know you can handle yourself, but you don’t know the area.’

  ‘Sensible.’

  ‘There’s a club, Nightside, which isn’t too bad, a gym if you want to work out, a few shops. I can lend you some cash, in advance, if you like, if you want to shop or exercise the other way.’

  ‘Other way?’

  ‘There’s a brothel.’

  ‘Oh, that way. Uh, which end’s east?’

  ‘Hangar bay and cargo, and the gantries are all in the West Wing. East has the lower rent areas–’

  ‘The brothel’s not as clean,’ Tebbot grumbled, ‘but it’s cheaper.’

  ‘–the park and farms, and also the refinery and fuel storage. We aren’t the only ships that work out of here and most need fuel to run.’

  ‘Sounds like a garden spot.’

  ‘Just keep your gun on you and visible. You’ll be fine.’

  Ella watched the approaching station as it grew larger in the view screen. ‘In this outfit, where am I going to hide it?’

  Pirate Cove, Haven System.

  Highside and the area around it were like nothing Ella had ever really seen before. There was a bit of her home world, Harriamon, about it in that it had been carved out of rock and it was a bit of a sleazy maze, but there the similarities stopped.

  Dropping from the core on a lift took you from free fall to one G, and gave you a good view of the interior of the asteroid. Above her, wrapped around the top side of the void, was Highside proper, where the houses were. None were huge, but they were apparently comfortable and big enough even for a small family, even if families tended to avoid Pirate Cove. Below it was Nightside, the club, and the arcades and shops which served the inhabitants. It looked kind of scruffy, but well maintained.

  The lift came to a stop, and Ella checked the pulse gun clipped to her right boot and the dagger tucked into the left. Trin had slipped it in there as they had left the ship.

  ‘I don’t really know how to use that,’ Ella had pointed out.

  ‘They don’t know that,’ Trin had replied.

  There were younger adults but no children that Ella could see as she walked through the twisting alleys between the blocks. There was a shop selling produce, so it seemed like the farms Kade had mentioned produced a variety of basic vegetables. Ella figured they were hydroponic, but fresh food was fresh food. She found a shop selling a variety of weapons, melee and firearms, from all generations of technology.

  The clothing shop was interesting because it indicated the style of the residents. She decided that ‘pirate chic’ was in, but there were slightly more general clothing for men and long dresses, all be it with low bodices, for women. A long skirt had to be a real pain in low gravity, but then any kind of skirt was prone to modesty failure in those conditions. Not that Ella was really prone to modesty. However, her own outfit was getting not even a second glance so the populace was comfortable with a variety of fashion styles. Eclectic came to mind: pieced together out of scraps, like the Hope, and Pirate Cove itself.

  Most of the technology was a little on the low side for the region, but not too far. The structure of the place was pretty low-tech, early interstellar level probably. There was some stuff closer to Shadataga… for a given value of closer anyway. Better than New Earth had had during the Federation period and probably stolen from the Pinnacle.

  And there was one more thing about the people: for the most part, they were very, very firmly minding their own business. Ella figured it was the clothes. Dressed as pirate crew, or at least in the style the pirates seemed to favour, Ella was treated as someone you spoke to only if asked a question, and avoided by preference. On the other hand, there was respect about it more than fear. The fear was there: some of the crew had shown something of a casual attitude to morals so that was likely warranted. But no one seemed scared of her while she was just wandering around window shopping.

  Turning a corner and finding herself looking at a half-dozen women, and one man, wearing barely anything at all suggested she had found the brothel. These employees were there to attract customers, and the man seemed to be quite keen to persuade Ella to spend her money, but they all seemed healthy. There was supposed to be a small clinic somewhere in the ring which handled the medical needs of the residents, presumably including treatments for the common STDs.

  But Ella had decided to forgo the cap
tain’s offer of money, aside from a few dollars to buy some drinks, so hiring the man in the gold shorts was out of the question. The local currency was the dollar and it came in the form of small, gold coins. Ella had been surprised to say the least: actual, genuine, physical money! They had found some coins from Aneka’s time when they found her and she had pointed out that the money was going to be no use to her. Plus the paper notes had been desiccated and crumbling, but the coins had been fine and were in a museum. Around Haven they still valued bits of metal, though Ella doubted the gold content of the coins: copper seemed like the dominant material.

  So Ella gave the man an apologetic look and went off to find Nightside.

  As far as she could tell, the club was the largest structure in the ring and had given its name to the shops and such around it. The décor ran to dark colours and had once been glossy, but years of abuse by the patrons and lack of upkeep gave it a more shabby appearance now. It was somewhere between a high-class nightclub and a downmarket, pirate dive. The patrons certainly seemed to be dressed in the same style as Ella. The staff, primarily women, favoured long skirts, low necklines, and uplift bras. With the amount of cleavage on display, Ella was glad, for the first time in years, that she had had her breasts enhanced.

  ‘What can I get you?’ The girl behind the bar was short, cute, blonde, a little vacant-looking, and possessed of almost inhumanly large breasts which were trying to crawl out of her tight blouse. ‘No, wait… rum, right?’

  ‘Actually, do you have a whiskey in stock? I’ve had a lot of rum recently.’

  ‘Oh, a girl with taste and a killer figure.’

  Ella smiled and wondered whether that was being friendly with the customers or the start of a pick-up campaign.

  ‘I’m Naseena, by the way,’ the girl said as she delivered Ella’s drink. ‘You’re a new face.’

  ‘Just came in, on the Hope.’

  ‘Oh, one of Captain Kade’s crew. She comes in once in a while. Quite a woman. She’s freed… hundreds, maybe thousands, of Pinnacle slaves. Haven was nothing much before she came here with the Hope.’

  ‘She seems like a driven woman. Doesn’t like the Pinnacle much. We kind of see eye-to-eye on that point.’

  ‘She hates them. Pretty much everyone on Haven hates them, and the ones who don’t hate them loathe them instead. We’re all either refugees or freed slaves.’

  Ella sipped her whiskey. It had about the same basic quality as paint stripper. ‘Refugees?’

  ‘The Pinnacle’s been expanding for a few decades, more and more aggressively. Lots of worlds have fallen to them. They must’ve grabbed you from somewhere way out of the way.’

  ‘Outside their normal sphere of operations, yes. But I’m stuck until I can find someone who can take me back. I have the navigation data they’d need, but it’s a long way…’

  Naseena looked thoughtful for a second. ‘Your best bet is to book passage on something going out to Oberian. There are people who trade in and out of there and they have links to a lot of other worlds. Going to take money though.’

  ‘That I’m aware of. How much do I owe you?’

  ‘Three dollars for the whiskey. The information’s free if you’ve got a couple of hours to spend.’ Her head tilted a little and she gave Ella a questioning smile. So it was a pick-up strategy.

  ‘I… have some spare time.’ Well, she had given Ella the best route home…

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  Ella had returned to the Hope a couple of hours before most of the crew. Naseena had got her money’s worth, Ella had got a good, if slightly short, night’s sleep, and there had seemed little point in exploring further. On arrival she had found Kade in a foul mood and Trin trying to calm her down, mostly by lying on cushions and drinking rum.

  ‘Their schedule’s moved up,’ Kade growled when Ella asked what was wrong. ‘I was hoping to get in, watch things for a while… When we hit a station we usually observe it for two days before going in. We’d been in the Ariadne system for three days doing some reconnaissance when we spotted your ship.’

  ‘Good tactical practice.’

  ‘Yes, but we’ll barely get to our target in time before they plan to move. We’ll have to wing it too much for my liking.’

  ‘But we’re still going?’

  ‘Oh yes. This is too important…’ She stopped pacing up and down her lounge. ‘Trin, get whoever’s on board and get started on the prep. As soon as anyone else gets back who’s fit to work, get them started. Ella, would you please start on the pre-flight checks? I know it’ll probably take you longer than Tebbot, but he’ll be late back and probably drunk. I want us out of here by oh-four-hundred tomorrow. Crew briefing at ten.’

  Trin sprang to her feet from a lounging position as though thrust up by a spring. She snapped off a jaunty salute. ‘Aye aye, Captain!’

  ‘And pack that in or I’ll have your tail clapped in irons.’

  The cat-girl pouted and started for the door. Her tail curled around her waist and she looked down at it. ‘It’s all right, she wouldn’t really. No, really, she’s not a mean old–’

  ‘Less of the old!’

  Trin bolted for the door.

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  ‘All right,’ Kade called out. ‘I know half of you are nursing hangovers, but that’s your own stupid fault so shut the fuck up!’

  The bellow produced several winces, and the desired overall effect. Silence, or a close imitation of it, fell across the gym where the crew had gathered to hear Kade’s plan. There were two tables left still bolted to the deck at one end, and she was stood atop one of them, looking pretty magnificent, and a little ticked off.

  ‘Okay, just before we set out on the last trip I got word that the Pinnacle were shipping a lot of munitions out to border station two-oh-six. Not a big thing, you might think, not worth the risk… Except that they’ve shipped about two hundred antimatter warheads out there.’ There was rumbling among the crew. Ella, stood off to one side near the front, glanced around and saw worried faces. ‘Two hundred, ten-megatonne antimatter warheads.’

  ‘Those are planetary bombardment ordnance, Boss,’ Lanyon said.

  ‘Oh yes. And why would they be shipping them there?’

  ‘Iyonvrie,’ Trin said. Ella glanced at her. Iyonvrie had been the world mentioned at the dinner party, and antimatter weapons had been mentioned along with it.

  ‘Oh yes. They’ve wanted Iyonvrie for years, but those strong force field generators they have make nukes useless, and they have a formidable naval presence. Antimatter bombs, on the other hand…’

  ‘So we go in and stop them,’ Trin stated, more as though it were a fact rather than a plan.

  ‘And get our hands on two hundred antimatter warheads,’ Lanyon added.

  ‘And then we buy big piles of dollars to sleep on,’ Trin added, grinning.

  ‘Sounds uncomfortable,’ Kade replied. ‘Also, this isn’t going to be a school outing to happy fun land. They are aiming to move the stuff in around thirteen days. That means we’ll have hours to get a feel for what we’re fighting, get in and take the station. You’re all going to be working hard for this one.’

  ‘Yeah, but the payoff…’ Lanyon said. ‘We sell a few of those in the right places and we’re all rich. And we’ll have armaments that’d take out a dreadnought.’

  ‘And that’s precisely the point. We pull this off and we not only end up with money, but we also end up with a way to really take the fight to the Pinnacle’s front door. Are we up for it?’

  Ella had to cover her ears at the roar of support, but she was not feeling so good. Aneka had been spending months trying to keep weapons not even half as destructive as this out of the wrong hands, and here she was helping Kade sell strategic weaponry to who knew what kind of buyer. Of course, the bombs were already in the wrong hands…

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  ‘Shu taisu de yu ta ma du tahee hu buyeeboo!’ Ella yanked her hands away from the controls and slammed her head back agai
nst the acceleration couch. She had been running simulations for days trying to get the feel of the ship’s responses, and she was pretty sure she had, but she had also discovered that the Hope was hopeless at manoeuvring.

  ‘Sorry?’ Kade asked, sounding rather calmer than Ella felt.

  ‘This ship steers like a barge! Which is not what I said, but it’s true. What I said was a lot of swearing in Rimmic and I’m not going to translate. And–’

  ‘You do realise that you had absolutely no chance of getting through that simulation in one piece, right?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That simulation just piles on extra attackers until it nails you. You either get hit with something too many times or you hit an asteroid. And asteroid fields are never that dense in reality. How long did you last in that one, Tebbot?’

  The pilot tapped at one of his screens to check Ella’s results. ‘Uh, I managed another ninety-eight seconds. I think I got caught in crossfire from six cruisers. You only had five… You’re still good. If there’s two cruisers at two-oh-six we’ll be unlucky.’

  ‘Oh,’ Ella said. ‘Aneka did that to me once. She was training me for the Herosian op and she put me through Hell and then blew me up. In simulation obviously. And then she explained there was no way I could win and she’d cheated like a bitch to see how far I could take it.’

  ‘Herosian op?’ Tebbot asked.

  ‘Uh… long story. I was training for a hot exfiltration against a small fleet of high-speed frigates and a militarised asteroid.’

  ‘Solo?!’

  ‘Me and the ship’s AI, but Gwy is a special kind of ship. She was built specifically to carry out operations like that, with all the best tech they could cram into her. She can turn on one of your dollars. She’s got… a hundred times the thrust. Force screens, a cloaking system, weapons that can fire through pretty much any armour. Our best bet is our own cloak, surprise, and a lot of luck.’

  ‘An accurate assessment,’ Kade said. ‘Thankfully, luck seems to like me so we just need the surprise. Ella, you’ve been working like a dog since we left Haven. Take a break. Relax for a bit. You are as good as you’re going to get, and it’s quite good enough for what we have to do.’