Aneka Jansen 7: Hope Read online

  Nodding, Ella pushed her screens aside and got up. ‘Okay. You’re right. I’ve been pushing myself too hard. I just have this aversion to dying a fiery death.’

  ‘I think we all have that,’ Tebbot commented as Ella headed for the door.

  ~~~

  Ella walked out of the little bathroom cubicle at the side of her cabin, rubbing at her hair with a towel. She came to a sudden stop when she realised someone else was in the room with her.

  ‘I brought rum,’ Kade said, showing her a bottle of the dark liquid. ‘You need to unwind for a bit.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ Ella continued drying her hair.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting the scenic view, obviously, but I can’t say it’s unwelcome.’

  Wrapping her hair in the towel, Ella dropped into the other seat in the room and poured herself a glass of rum. ‘Good, because I’m getting my clothes cleaned and they won’t be ready for another hour. Cheers.’ She slugged back half the glass, grimaced and then sank back into her seat to let the liquid burn its way down her throat.

  ‘You don’t exactly have a lot of modesty.’

  ‘Almost none. Jenlay society considers sex a recreational activity. Most of us are immune to most diseases, pregnancy is a voluntary option, and we were engineered to be pretty so we like showing our bodies off. Aneka thinks I take it to extremes at times, and I have been getting a little more… staid in the last few years, but still…’

  ‘Well, you’ve nothing to be ashamed of.’

  Ella raised her glass. ‘Right back at you, Captain.’

  Kade gave a low chuckle. ‘Amazons were engineered to be pretty too, and extremely feminine, hence the enormous mammaries. They’re a real pain at times.’

  ‘Aneka says the same.’

  ‘Are you okay with this mission?’ The sudden change of subject was a little jarring.

  ‘Uh… In what way?’

  ‘I got the impression you were a little uncertain about selling antimatter warheads.’

  ‘I’m… less than sanguine about that part of the deal, true. It won’t stop me going through with it. The Pinnacle having them is probably a worse option. When I was with them I overheard a conversation about Iyonvrie. They are planning an attack on it, and antimatter warheads were one of the suggested options.’

  ‘Iyonvrie is a beautiful planet. Humans, Felix, and an enclave of Tech-Specs all living in harmony. Kind of the exemplar for what a multi-racial society should be, and they built their technology up themselves. Cubby originally comes from there. It’s got wide, blue oceans, vast forests, gleaming cities… the whole utopian deal. The Pinnacle will reduce it to a spaceport landing site because what it also has is a lot of useful minerals and an environment they can settle in quickly and easily. AM bombs are nasty, but you don’t end up with much long-term radiation you have to clean up.’

  ‘And as long as I keep that in mind, I’m fine. I just feel a little like I’m being paid to hand guns over to babies.’

  ‘The ones we sell will go to people trying to defend themselves against the Pinnacle. People are afraid and they’ll pay for security. The money I can make doing this will let me run more rescue missions rather than struggling to feed the crew. It’s the answer to a prayer.’

  Ella raised her glass again. Toasts were not a Jenlay habit, but she had spent too much time around Aneka and the Humans on Old Earth. ‘Here’s to answered prayers then.’

  ‘Amen,’ Kade agreed, knocking back her drink and then reaching for the bottle.

  ~~~

  ‘You know,’ Kade said, her voice sounding a little slurred, ‘you’re a contra–hic!–tion.’

  Ella giggled. ‘Beg your pardon?’

  ‘You know what I said. You’re a conundrum. You’re this cute redhead, an’ a scientist, but you’re also this kickass, gun-toting pilot.’

  ‘Sometime fireteam member capable of massive destruction too.’

  ‘See! You come out and say things like that. Just like it’s normal. An’ you don’t look like you should be doing anything like that.’

  ‘What do I look like I should be doing?’

  ‘Dancing? Maybe a stripper?’

  Another giggle. ‘My mother was a stripper. She’s teaching dance now. I could never move the way she could, but I’ve been practising a bit.’

  ‘Trin says you’re very flexible.’

  ‘Not like Trin, or my mother, or Aneka, but I’m not bad.’ She emptied her glass and then reached for the bottle, only to discover that it was empty. ‘The rum’s gone.’

  Kade giggled, maybe the first time Ella had heard her make a sound like that, and reached down to the side of her chair. ‘It’s okay. I brought a bottle of brandy too.’

  Ella groaned. ‘This is probably not a good idea.’

  ‘It ish. Trusht me.’

  17.12.559 FSC.

  Ella opened her eyes to see blonde hair and, for a brief second, she thought she was lying beside Aneka. But the hair was platinum rather than white, and longer than Aneka let herself sleep in: she said long hair was just a trap for your shoulders in bed.

  ‘Knew it was a bad idea,’ Ella mumbled to herself. Then again, the sex had been pretty good, if drunken, and this was a whole lot different to Ian.

  There was a groan from beside her as she turned on a light. ‘Turn it off… light hurt…’

  ‘We need to get up. You have a watch in an hour and you need the painkillers to be working before then.’

  Grumbling, Kade turned over and looked up at Ella. ‘You don’t even look like you drank anything last night.’

  ‘Blood scrubbers. Nanomachines that break down the toxins. I used to get drunk really easily and get lousy hangovers. That is something I do not miss.’

  ‘Lucky bitch.’ Groaning again, the captain managed to get to her feet. ‘I’m going to go take a shower and some pain meds. Thanks for last night. It was fun.’

  ‘Thanks for helping me relax. Maybe we can do it again with less alcohol sometime.’

  Kade gave a chuckle and then winced. ‘Maybe we can.’

  20.12.559 FSC.

  ‘Warp exit in fifteen seconds,’ Ella stated, her eyes on the displays in front of her.

  Beside her, Tebbot settled his hands around the control sticks and prepared to take control. Around her, all the crew stations were manned and the people at them were busy about their tasks. The Hope was going to war, more or less, and they had no idea what they would be facing until they saw it.

  ‘Keep the sensors on passive,’ Kade ordered. ‘Bring up the main drive and the cloak. If they detect our warp exit, I want to be away from that point and hidden as soon as possible.’

  There were affirmative responses from various quarters and everyone prepared for the drop into normal space. The screen flickered as the view shifted from its computer-generated sensor view to a real-time one.

  ‘No active sensors detected,’ Mags, the sensor operator, said.

  The view shifted as Tebbot pulled the Hope left and up, swinging her away randomly from their exit point. If they were being fired upon, they probably would not find out for several seconds, if not longer, and the cloak would prevent a good lock.

  ‘Warp drives powered down,’ Ella said as her readouts showed the shutdown completion.

  ‘Power up batteries A and B,’ Kade said. The ship’s reactor was not up to supplying power to all its systems at once; it had to be rationed out as required. It was not that uncommon in military ships, though the added features the Hope had made it worse.

  ‘Captain,’ Mags broke in, ‘I’m… I’m not getting any active transmissions at all.’

  ‘Nothing? Are we in the right system?’

  ‘According to the pulsar triangulation we are.’ That was Trent who seemed to know more about navigation than anyone else. ‘Maybe the sensors are out.’

  ‘They’re working fine,’ Mags replied. ‘There’s nothing out there transmitting… I’ve located the station, right where it should be…’ She was sounding puzzled.<
br />
  ‘Spit it out, Mags,’ Kade said.

  ‘There looks to be eight to ten other masses near it. At this range I can’t resolve enough detail to identify them, but nothing is giving off an EM signature.’

  ‘Okay… Let’s get in closer. Mister Tebbot, if you would?’

  Tebbot turned the ship in toward the station. Ella tapped the sensor readouts through to her own displays and peered at them, wishing she had the systems on the Hyde or Gwy. They could have told her what colour underwear the base commander was wearing at this range. Okay, maybe not quite that much detail, but…

  ‘They’re ships,’ she said, just before Mags could get in.

  ‘I’m reading masses of… eight light cruisers and a dreadnought!’ Mags squeaked.

  ‘But they’re dead in space.’

  ‘Starting to get some radiation.’ Mags paused and then added, ‘Looks like gamma emissions. From all of them except the station. I think their reactors blew.’

  ‘All of them!’ Kade exclaimed. She was on her feet now, moving forward to where she could look at Ella’s screens and the main one.

  ‘I’d have to agree with our sensor operator,’ Ella said. ‘There are nine military vessels out there, and they all suffered catastrophic reactor breaches. And the station is producing no active signals we can detect at this range.’

  Silence fell across the bridge as everyone looked out at the empty space in front of them.

  ‘All right,’ Kade said. ‘Take us in, not too fast. We’ll watch for any activity all the way. If we get nothing by the time we’ve got within a thousand kilometres, we’ll take the cloak down and try active scans. This stinks like week-old socks.’

  BES-206.

  The Hope’s sensors were built for combat, not scientific analysis, but there was a hand scanner available which Ella was the most qualified to use. So, even if Kade was a little reluctant to take her least experienced crewman into an unknown and potentially lethal situation, Ella was among the first off the shuttle.

  Kade and Lanyon stood guard over her while she worked through what she considered a pretty basic analysis of the immediate environment. ‘Point five gravities… standard nitrogen-oxygen mix at a touch under an atmosphere… no contaminants that I can detect so far. Still no EM signatures.’

  ‘No sound, no movement,’ Kade said, her voice hushed in the silence of the station. ‘It’s…’

  ‘A ghost ship?’ Lanyon suggested.

  ‘Let’s keep talk like that to a minimum, shall we? Okay, you take two men and check out the cargo bay. I’ll go through to control. If we’re going to find out what happened here, that’s probably the place to do it.’

  With half a dozen crew in tow, Kade and Ella led the way through from the hangar bay to the ship’s core area with its armoured bubble of sensitive systems. Ella was almost impressed that the Pinnacle considered the crew quarters and cells to belong amongst those.

  ‘As far as I can tell,’ Ella said as they headed for the bulkhead door, ‘the reactor is up, but running at minimum. At least the door should be powered.’

  ‘Small blessings,’ Kade replied. Then she frowned as the heavy doorway came into view. ‘They normally keep it sealed, but it looks like it’s just waiting for us.’

  ‘Trap?’ Ella suggested.

  ‘Well, we’re going to have to treat it as such, but… None of this makes much sense. They could have blasted us outside, or in a non-vital area.’

  ‘They want you alive then.’

  ‘They’ve never shown any inclination to that before. Spread out, cover the door. Ella, stay back, but keep that pistol of yours at the ready.’ Kade moved forward to the door control and put her hand over it before checking behind her for her troop displacement. Satisfied, she hit the button and the door slid open.

  ‘Oh shit!’ someone said.

  Ella focussed her attention on her scanner to avoid looking at the trail of bodies which made an irregular pattern of blood and gore down the corridor. ‘No sign of respiration or neurological activity within range,’ she said softly. ‘Body temperature indicates they’ve been dead… over a day.’

  ‘Someone got here first?’ Kade tapped at her ear to activate her radio. ‘Lanyon, report.’

  ‘There’s munitions in the bay, Captain,’ Lanyon’s voice said over their headsets. ‘None of it is anything out of the ordinary. There’s nothing nuclear in here, never mind antimatter warheads.’

  ‘Does it look like someone took–’

  ‘There’s space, but not for the kind of ordnance we’re talking about. I’d say they’ve got full loads in their guns, but other than that the hold’s full.’

  ‘All right. See what you can salvage. Get more people over from the Hope.’ She cut off her microphone, frowning. ‘None of this makes sense. Damn. Okay, we go through the place by twos. Ella, you’re with me. We’ll check control. The rest of you buddy up and don’t let your partner out of your sight. We sweep the core before moving on to the refinery. Make a note of anything worth lifting, but leave it for Lanyon to pull out. Clear?’

  There was a chorus of mumbled agreement. The men, one of which was a woman, seemed nervous. Ella could not really blame them.

  ‘Do you have stories of the Ghost Fleet in this part of the galaxy?’ Ella asked as the two women moved off down a corridor which would take them around the hull to the control suite on the far side.

  ‘Maybe. There’s a story old spacers like to tell that sounds like it might fit. The captain of a trader out of Earth found himself caught in the gravity field of a singularity. His engines were never going to give him the power to break out so he screamed defiance at the universe and dove straight in. And there he stayed, suspended across the event horizon, frozen in time. But every now and then, when the singularity gets in just the right position compared to a star, the ghost of his ship comes out to attack other vessels. They say his crew are monsters and they kill all but a few on every ship they hit. The survivors are dragged back to Hell with the ship to become part of the timeless crew.’ She paused and looked down at Ella. ‘And that’s exactly the kind of thing I didn’t want Lanyon starting on when we came aboard.’

  ‘Our Ghost Fleet is a little different, but it’s basically the same. Ships attacked, everyone killed, but there are always some missing when the wrecks are discovered. And there are nine ships out there reduced to scrap and everyone here is dead.’

  ‘And I don’t believe in ghosts.’

  ‘Captain?’ The voice over the radio made them both jump.

  ‘What is it, Lent?’ Kade growled.

  ‘We’re in the comms room, what’s left of it. Looks like a bomb went off in here, and there was some sort of EM surge. What’s intact looks fried.’

  ‘Are you thinking sabotage?’

  ‘There’s no hole in the hull, and there was no sign of external damage, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘But something exploded in here.’

  ‘Okay, Lent. Keep looking.’ The captain started walking again.

  Again the pressure door into the control room, which should have been locked, opened easily, allowing them into the room. It was a long rectangle with around twenty workstations mounted along the walls and a large display on one end. Each workstation had a seat bolted to the floor in front of it, and all the stations were active. And each of them still had an operator.

  Twenty corpses decorated the seating around the room. All of them still strapped in place and watching their screens. They had all been shot, the wounds showing burn marks. There was blood spattered over work surfaces, walls, and decking, but not nearly enough for the amount of carnage.

  ‘Looks like laser hits,’ Kade said as she walked up to the nearest body. ‘Wounds were cauterised by the beam. Pretty precise too. Lot of head shots.’ She began to unbuckle the corpse.

  Ella looked at the man as the captain undid his straps and lifted him free of his seat, laying him on the deck. It could have been a laser that had drilled through the
man’s forehead, but it reminded her of something else. Something impossible. No, a laser was the simplest explanation.

  Kade sat down in place of the original operator and tapped at buttons until she got the screen to respond to her commands. ‘Okay, you said a day. Let’s see what the security cameras recorded then.’ There was a pause while she tapped at keys and menu options and then… ‘No data?’

  Ella looked at the screen and, sure enough, it was displaying a message which said ‘No data for requested time interval.’

  Kade tapped at keys. ‘Okay, give me the last data you do have…’ The screen flickered and began displaying a huge array of thumbnail videos from the various cameras around the station. The images were very small, but they all seemed to be showing normal activity. And then all of them went to black.

  ‘Oh-eight-hundred yesterday,’ Ella said, checking the time code. ‘Shift change?’

  ‘Probably. Right on shift change and all the internal sensors go down.’

  ‘External?’

  Kade went through selections, but the result was almost identical. The station had been tracking the ships in its vicinity, and then the sensors had cut out at eight.

  ‘Want to bet that’s when something exploded in the comms room?’ Ella asked.

  ‘I think I’d be foolish to bet against. So, everything was normal until eight, and then everyone died. And that includes eight cruisers and one of the most deadly ships in this corner of space. That’s… crazy.’

  ‘Starting to believe in ghosts yet?

  ~~~

  ‘We’ve stripped everything we could find out of the secondary comms system,’ Lanyon said. ‘I went over the hold myself in case there was anything of real use. We can lift some of the missiles if we want, but they’re all conventional and too big for our tubes.’

  ‘Leave it,’ Kade said, her brow creased into a worried frown. ‘I just don’t like this. Not one bit.’

  ‘You mean the fact that this feels like it was a trap and someone sprang it before we got here?’