Fox Hunt (Fox Meridian Book 1) Read online

  Fox let out a sharp laugh. ‘United Anarchy? Seriously?’

  ‘UA are known to pull operations like this,’ Driscoll said, not catching her scepticism. ‘I’d imagine you’re well aware of the kind of thing they get up to. We’re checking through their known members to see if we can identify–’

  ‘His name is Marick Kriel and he isn’t going to turn up on any of the watch lists for UA associates and members. He doesn’t believe in anarchy. He believes in cold, hard cash. Kriel is not doing this for UA.’

  ‘So this is a cover for straight extortion?’

  ‘Probably. How did he get this gear into the city?’

  Driscoll gave a shrug. ‘I just have to deal with the fact he has it. I’ve let the regular LCSS handle that end of it.’

  Fox frowned, not liking how this was all starting to look, but Driscoll did have something of a point. ‘Okay, let’s get some schematics and see if we can work out how to dig them out.’

  12th January.

  Fox sat at one of the tables in the eatery with a cup of bad coffee in her hands and her eyes closed. The structural schematics of the vault floated in her vision field, but she was not happy. Someone had really screwed up when they had built the place and Kriel was benefiting from it.

  ‘Driscoll got word back from New Moon,’ Hepburn said. Fox did not open her eyes, but she did not complain when he sat down with her either. ‘They can’t raise the money. None of the governments are willing to open up their data or Cold Harbour either. They’ve got negotiators trying to work out how to approach Kriel about it.’

  ‘Go in direct. They built themselves a vault which has exactly one viable point of ingress and egress. We can’t get to him so if he wants to blow himself up with that data, there’s really nothing we can do about it. But Kriel isn’t going to kill himself over this. He’s no terrorist.’

  ‘He’s acting like one. I mean, if this is some sort of extortion racket, shouldn’t he be asking for something he’s likely to get?’

  Fox opened her eyes and looked across at the pale, handsome face opposite her. Hepburn looked tired: there were bags shading in under his brown eyes and he was scrubbing at his close-cropped, light brown hair which, she had noticed, he tended to do when fatigue was starting to set in. ‘Have you slept any?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Go get an hour under your belt. Sometime early they’ll want to send you in.’

  Hepburn’s brow creased. ‘There’s no way we can get in there without him seeing us coming and blowing the place.’

  ‘Nope, but they’ll want to do something. Not a great start to Driscoll’s career.’

  ‘Huh.’ Hepburn got to his feet. ‘I’ll try to close my eyes for a bit.’

  ‘Good. You’re right, though. The ransom demand doesn’t make sense. Maybe he’s expecting to negotiate it down, but…’ Fox frowned and shrugged. ‘Go get some rest.’

  Pushing aside the schematics, Fox pulled up the data she had on Kriel, some of it garnered from personal impressions and some supplied by the UN Trans-Planetary Police. She still had a few contacts there and the UNTPP was generally pretty open about sharing data with other agencies anyway. Even if her departure from them had not been on the best of terms, they kept their bridges intact where they could.

  Kriel was on one of their watch lists and that did not surprise Fox in the least. She had met him on an op with America Special Forces. He had been contracted to assist in anti-drug activities in sub-Saharan Africa: he knew the territory, knew the people, and he had a strong, disciplined unit available for hire. The Army had hired him and he had done his job, but Fox had got the distinct impression that Kriel was always up for switching sides if the money told him to. He was a good tactician but not such a great strategist, so maybe he had come up with this idea and not thought it through… Somehow that was just not sitting right in Fox’s mind. Nothing in the updated data from the UNTPP suggested that Kriel had turned political and yet he had locked himself up in a bunker with one exit. It was a good plan for a terrorist with nothing to lose, but it was just plain dumb for a mercenary. There had to be a backup plan.

  ~~~

  ‘Pierce, what do you know about mining operations in the crater?’

  Pierce was blinking rapidly as she tried to focus. ‘Wha– I was… Where am I? Mining?’

  Fox leaned forward on the table Pierce had been lying on. ‘Sorry, you were asleep. Your husband is in mining, right? What do you, or he, know about the mining operations in Shackleton crater?’

  ‘Uh… They aren’t mining in–’

  ‘No, but they did some. Back when they were setting up the base, they knew there was a higher hydrogen signature in the crater.’

  ‘Oh! Oh, yeah. They thought it might be water ice so they did some exploratory mining. Turned out it wasn’t, but they managed to pull out some useful tritium and helium-three. Then the whole “international resource” thing put a stop to it and they’ve been waiting ever since to find out whether they could reopen it. Word is that they’ve found better sources for the helium anyway.’

  ‘But the mining gear was left down there?’

  ‘That I don’t know. Hold on. Aden won’t be pleased, but…’ Fox got a local call connection request through from her internal telepresence system as Pierce linked up with her, and a frame appeared in-vision indicating that a call was going through. A second or two later a good-looking, blonde-haired man who looked younger than Pierce appeared in the frame, rubbing at his eyes. ‘Aden, this is Inspector Meridian. We need some advice.’

  Aden blinked, which was kind of cute considering that he was probably looking at both women through a virtual interface. ‘Advice from me? Uh… okay. Uh, it’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Inspector. Lenora has been gushing about you since you got here.’

  ‘Aden…’ Pierce whined. ‘The old mining operations down in Shackleton crater, would they have left the gear down there?’

  ‘Well… depends on the gear. That wasn’t my company. Before my time. As I recall, they were hoping that they could reopen operations. Even if all they could do was pull out the hydrogen, they’ve got useful resources there. They likely left some of the heavier gear in situ because it takes energy to haul it out and then back.’

  ‘Like the cutting equipment?’ Fox asked.

  ‘Yeah. Uh, it’s possible anyway. Typically they’ll be using five-metre mining worm cyberframes. They’ll bring in infomorphs to run them when needed and the frames aren’t costly enough that they couldn’t leave them in place for a while.’

  ‘Right. Thank you, Aden, that’s what I was hoping you’d say. That’s how he’s doing it. That’s his backup.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Pierce said.

  ‘That makes two of us,’ Aden put in, looking bemused. ‘This is something to do with this situation at New Moon?’

  ‘Yes,’ Fox replied. ‘I think you’ve managed to give me what I need to get this all worked out.’

  ‘Great, because that place is pretty important right now. Most of the mining companies use it for off-site data backup, and the UN’s helium-three commission is holding all their records there. It was supposed to be the safest place on the Moon for data storage.’

  ‘The UN commission is using that place? I thought it was just an archive.’

  ‘They have the deep archive, but New Moon also does secure off-site data storage and physically secure temporary storage. The commission is due to give out its findings soon and if they were to lose all that data… People could lose a lot of money.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Fox said. ‘Now this is starting to make more sense. Lenora, we need to talk to Driscoll and the negotiation team.’

  ~~~

  Fox’s virtual assistant picked up on the v-tagged data elements in the operations room, accessed the feeds, authenticated her access, and showed her the imagery Driscoll and Seeforth, the negotiator, were seeing, all in the second it took for her to walk from the door to the two men. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked as
she took in the view, which looked like it was being taken from a camera in an elevator.

  ‘They agreed to have a remote frame sent in to handle the communications,’ Seeforth replied.

  ‘You’re going to go in and tell them their demands won’t be met?’

  ‘I’m going to tell them that they can get out of this with their lives.’

  ‘There’s something–’

  ‘I’ll handle things at this point, Inspector. If Driscoll needs advice on handcuffing them, he can ask you about it.’

  Fox watched as a personal message was passed through from Driscoll. He isn’t big on having his publicity shadowed by anyone else. She would have laughed except that political cops were high on her hate list and Seeforth had just been placed on it. On the other hand, if she was wrong he might actually talk sense to Kriel, and if she was right then nothing Seeforth could do was going to change anything.

  The elevator doors opened and the drone they were watching through was being steered out into a corridor. ‘Where is this, and who’s driving?’ Fox asked.

  Driscoll flicked up a schematic of the New Moon offices with a marker showing the drone’s position on the floor below the reception level. ‘They have the main communications and short-term data storage on this level.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ That seemed to be where Kriel’s team were located, and that made sense.

  ‘Barnes is operating the drone. Looks like they’ve set up their position at the entrance to the vault.’

  ‘My turn,’ Seeforth said as the heavily built form of Kriel came into view on the screen. Seeforth was patching his voice through to the robot’s audio output. ‘Mister Kriel, I’m Captain Jason Seeforth. I’ll be handling communications here.’

  Fox noticed the slight emphasis the man put on ‘captain.’ She had met the type before, mostly in the Army: men who had been handed rank for political or administrative reasons who believed they had earned it. They thought other people would be impressed by it. Fox was fairly sure Kriel would not have been impressed anyway. The mercenary stood impassively, the weapon pod on the right arm of his combat spacesuit resting easily at the ready. He had taken his helmet off, at ease with the situation, relaxed and confident. Behind him a pair of heavy armoured doors stood open: the security doors leading to the transport elevator of the vault itself.

  ‘You will meet our demands or your precious data will be destroyed,’ Kriel stated.

  ‘I’m fairly sure you didn’t go down there expecting all of your demands to be met,’ Seeforth said. ‘You’re cornered. Yes, you’re in a position to destroy the vault, but you’ll die too. You don’t want to die, do you, Mister Kriel?’

  ‘You doubt our commitment to the cause. Of course you do. You believe, as all government clones believe, that money and order are the only truth. United Anarchy is here to prove that your government is nothing but a passing phase, a historical footnote. We will demonstrate our commitment.’ Reaching out with his left hand, he picked up his helmet. ‘We detonate the perimeter bombs in ten seconds.’

  Seeforth’s eyes widened. ‘What? You can’t be serious!’ But Kriel was busy locking his armoured helmet in place.

  Fox grabbed Driscoll’s arm and pulled him back, away from the negotiator. ‘This is all about to go downhill faster than a greased snowboarder. You’ll need to get in and clear the bot they left in reception and get fire control teams down to the lower level.’

  ‘But–’

  She held up a hand. ‘Kriel’s playing us. With your permission I’d like to take Hepburn and his team outside. If I’m right, you won’t meet much resistance in there and Kriel is going to be trying to leave.’

  ‘How? If we’re going in through the front, where is he going?’

  Her answer was postponed as they heard Seeforth’s voice. ‘Shit!’

  The drone appeared to be on its side, but it was still transmitting. There was noise and chaos coming over the link, the light from flames could be seen flickering on the wall, and they heard Kriel’s voice. ‘Idiot! You’ve set off all of–’ Then there was another flare and the image went to snow.

  ‘Lost it,’ Barnes announced from the back of the room.

  ‘Shit!’ Seeforth exclaimed. ‘Shit, shit… What the fuck was he…? Shit!’

  ‘You still want to go outside?’ Driscoll asked, ignoring the confused captain.

  ‘Yeah. Get in there and secure what you can. If I’m right, Kriel is on his way down.’

  ‘Down? There’s nothing below there except the vault.’

  ‘The vault, and the bottom of Shackleton crater.’

  Shackleton Crater.

  Endurance Mining and Extraction had been named for the ship Ernest Shackleton had taken on an ill-fated expedition to Antarctica, according to Pierce’s partner. The ship had been trapped in ice and crushed, and the company had been left in financially dire straits after they had had to shut down their operations in the crater, so maybe the name had been a bad choice. Aden had checked and, at the time, they did not have the funds to get their equipment out. Now they were doing better but hoping it could still be used since they had prior rights. They had left behind several mining frames, a couple of heavy pressurised trucks, and a prefabbed habitation unit designed for short-term occupation when humans needed to be in the crater for an extended period. It was all supposed to be shut down and out of use.

  ‘I’m registering EM emissions,’ Pierce said as the team closed in on the structure from the light transport they had used to get down the sloping walls of the crater. ‘There’s something active in there.’

  ‘We know they’ve got robots, probably autonomous ones,’ Hepburn said, ‘so everyone keep your eyes open and watch for movement. We don’t think they can be out of the vault this fast, but we don’t know, and we don’t know what they might have left around here.’

  Fox listened to the interplay, half her attention on a TacNet display she was sharing with Driscoll. This was a far more practical end-of-course exercise than she had planned for the ERU, but if they got out of it without any casualties then it was certainly proof that they had learned what she was teaching. So far, so good.

  ‘Can we get a camera drone in to sweep the area?’ Hepburn asked.

  ‘Not rigged for zero atmosphere,’ Pierce replied, ‘but I’ve got a micromissile with an infrared camera. Won’t give us much flight time, but–’

  ‘Better than nothing.’

  There was a short pause and then a small projectile was flying out across the crater floor, invisible in the darkness and inaudible in the vacuum. Half a second after it fired, the image feed from the missile appeared in everyone’s vision field. Everything was pretty damn cold in the eternal darkness of the crater, so the fact that the habitation unit was far warmer was quite obvious, and the gunbot which hauled itself out of the regolith in response to the disturbance stood out well against the dust. It fired on the missile, missed, and then figured out that there were other heat sources there with it, further away. It was turning its weapon mount toward the team when Hepburn’s own micromissile blew it apart.

  ‘Anything else?’ the team leader asked. ‘Everyone remember to watch for heat build-up in your weapons. Heat dissipates poorly in a vacuum.’

  ‘Motor’s burned out on the shell,’ Pierce said, ‘and I didn’t see anything else warmer than the grit. They could be inside.’

  ‘Any sign that the mining robots have been used?’ Driscoll asked over their link.

  ‘No sign of them here,’ Pierce replied. ‘They should be sitting down here with the habitat and the trucks. I’d say that’s an indication that someone’s used them for something.’

  ‘You can’t see where they cut in?’

  ‘The crater floor is too big and all the same temperature. We could maybe find signs of where they cut in, but the company was digging down here before now. It’s likely they extended existing tunnels rather than cutting entirely new ones.’

  ‘There’s nothing down here that can extract them,�
�� Fox said. ‘We’re supposed to think they’re dead or buried in the archive vault. So they come out here, hole up in the habitat, keep quiet for a while until everyone’s busy trying to dig them out, and then a shuttle drops in here to exfil.’

  ‘So we set up in their cabin and ambush them?’ Hepburn suggested.

  ‘If our expert agrees, I think that’s a damn good plan,’ Driscoll replied.

  ‘No such thing as an expert in this,’ Fox said. ‘The paid consultant thinks it’s better than an open position with no idea which direction they’ll come from.’

  ‘Do it.’

  ~~~

  There was a slight hiss as the airlock door pushed out and then slid off to one side. The locks on prefabbed units rarely, if ever, managed to get a perfect balance before they opened and there was generally some equalisation. The interior lights sprang to life, bright blue-white LED bulbs which turned the darkness into almost uncomfortable incandescence. Kriel stepped out into the habitat proper and came to a grinding halt.

  ‘Luna City Security Services,’ Hepburn said through the speaker in his helmet. ‘Move into the structure slowly and divest yourselves of all weaponry.’ Flanking him were Pierce and Fox; the other end of the semi-cylindrical room was held by the other two members of the team.

  Kriel was surrounded, and he knew it, and that worried Fox more than anything. ‘Looks like the bastard wants it all for himself,’ Kriel growled. ‘There’s four of us and five of you, but we have hardsuits and you don’t.’

  ‘And you’re surrounded by people with armour-piercing bullets in their guns,’ Hepburn replied. ‘You give it up now, no one has to get hurt.’

  ‘Huh… Steyn.’

  Something shot out of the airlock, hit the wall opposite, and erupted into brilliant, white light. Flare protection cut in on everyone’s visors, but there was a moment of blindness and disorientation. Kriel had been ready for it. Fox had reacted to the name being called instead of the flash, but when she could see properly Hepburn was lying on his back with Kriel’s armoured boot on his faceplate and Kriel was holding Pierce off the ground by her throat with his weapon pod’s barrels pressed into her side. Fox rolled to her feet from where she had thrown herself and looked around to check that the airlock door was closing.