Aneka Jansen 7: Hope Read online

  ‘Duly noted.’ He turned back towards the door, speaking to the guard in passing. ‘Leave her on the wall for a few hours, Ensign. I can’t stand terrorists.’

  ‘Sir!’ the guard snapped, raising his hand to his brow in a very rigid salute.

  And a few seconds later, Ella was alone again, clamped to a wall by her wrists. She looked up as best she could at the bracelets. ‘If Aneka ever decides to speak to me again, I’m going to have to see if I can get some of these fabricated.’

  BSE-395, 4.11.559 FSC.

  Aside from the impending threat of death, it was a little like a holiday. With nothing else to do, she turned to all the books she had said she was going to read, had stored away on her implant’s memory, and had never actually got around to.

  She was in the middle of a book called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It was one of the ones on her list which she was reading as a study of how people in the past had thought the world would turn out. She called it her ‘stuff they got wrong’ list, mostly because no one had really seen the Xinti intervention or the war coming. Not that she could blame them for that, and plenty of people had come up with plots which kind of matched. Aneka had told her that they had made a film of this one and the actor in it was pretty good, though Ella had not been sure whether she meant his acting or his looks. She made a mental note to see if they had the film in the libraries on Old Earth at almost the exact instant the door opened.

  It was the guard, holding those metal bracelets again. Ella got up and held her arms out and did not resist as he pinned her to the wall. It had happened a couple of times in the last few days, always when an officer of some sort was coming in to visit her. This time it was Detrow returning.

  The Lieutenant Colonel regarded her dispassionately for several seconds: it seemed as though he had a habit of doing so whenever he walked in. ‘Ella Narrows, your case has been reviewed by the Office of the Pinnacle Commander and you have been found guilty on all charges. The sentence is death. Do you wish to say anything at this time?’

  Ella stared at him. Yes, she had something to say. How could they do this? They had no right! There was no way they could think of killing her. She would never see Aneka again. She opened her mouth and…

  ‘Noted. Sentence is to be carried out on Ariadne. Put her out.’

  The guard stepped forward and applied a hypo to Ella’s arm. There was a stinging sensation and an immediate feeling of numbness. ‘You can’t do… do this. I… I’m… You can’t…’ And then the world sank into darkness.

  Part Three: Ballistic Intelligence Acquisition

  Treamon, Oberian, 8.11.559 FSC.

  Local fashion on Oberian tended to be on the frumpy side, at least outside of buildings. The average daytime temperature was around minus ten Celsius and the population was basically Human. There had been some adaptation and a bit of genetic tampering: they were more tolerant of cold and used to the thin atmosphere. They still tended to wear heavy, warm clothing a lot.

  With all the padding, it was frequently hard to tell what sex anyone was, but Aneka stood out, taller and substantially better endowed than the local girls. It made it harder to blend in, but Oberian did a lot of off-world trading, primarily in metals, so she was probably an outsider but nothing to worry about.

  And she had been there before. It was part of the reason she had elected to start her search there. Winter had sent her there on the hunt for the gun runners and she had made a few friends as well as a couple of enemies. The enemies had learned enough about her to stay out of her way, she hoped. The ones that were still alive anyway. The others were not a concern.

  So she was back in Treamon, which was one of the larger cities on the planet, and hoping that she might find some information on who was the most likely group to have hit Lacora.

  Aggy had insisted on transporting them through to the system personally. It gave her a little more time with Gwy, and Aneka was certainly not going to deny them that. The two ships had the most unconventional relationship Aneka had ever heard of. Al and Cassandra had had something close when they had first met, but Aggy and Gwy had them beaten. Both of them had had algorithms included in their programming to allow them to emulate more or less Human reactions to stimuli in a virtual environment, but while they had some sort of sex life, that was not how they conducted it. Both of them occasionally indulged with crew members, but not with each other. Instead they shared… something else. Cassandra had been trying to analyse and record the nature of their relationship for years, and she had been getting nowhere.

  It was still disconcerting to have your ship humming contentedly to herself as they flew in towards the planet. Gwy sounded for all the world like a woman who had just had the most glorious sex ever.

  Now, however, everything was back to business.

  ‘I have located Dolan Undal,’ Gwy said into Aneka’s head. ‘He is in his usual place.’

  The usual place was a bar called the Happy Chance Saloon for which the term ‘dive’ had been invented. Dimly lit, it had a lot of booths at the back and generally bored-looking staff who were functionally deaf as far as conversations at tables were concerned. It was exactly the sort of place you might expect to find Oberian’s only professional spy and information broker.

  Undal fit the suave espionage agent stereotype. In the warmth of the bar he dressed in a crisp, black, silky shirt and black slacks. His black hair was cut to the latest, short style. He was handsome, and his blue eyes held a lot of intelligence and a substantial quality of shrewdness, and he watched Aneka approaching with the air of someone who could see opportunity walking his way.

  ‘Miss Jansen, what brings you back to Treamon?’

  Aneka settled into the booth beside him, dropping her long, padded coat on the seat beside her. He did not object to the apparent familiarity, recognising it as a move which allowed her to watch the door. ‘I’m looking for someone.’

  ‘What has some poor fool done to incur your displeasure this time?’

  ‘Huh. She cheated on me, but that’s not why I’m looking for her. She was kidnapped from Lacora. It’s–’

  ‘I know of Lacora. No one from here goes there. They say it’s cursed, if you believe in that sort of thing. It’s certainly not a safe world. Every attempt to colonise it has ended in death.’

  ‘There’s some sort of bioweapon in the water.’

  ‘That would certainly explain it. More recently, however, I heard that the Pinnacle were taking an interest in it.’

  Aneka frowned. If the Pinnacle had grabbed Ella… ‘I’d heard they were expanding, but I didn’t think they’d come out so far.’ She had heard rumours on a number of worlds, even this one, but nothing substantive.

  ‘They established a base, a “border enforcement station,” not too far from Lacora last year. It’s the closest they’ve come to a military presence near here.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you could get me coordinates for that station?’

  ‘I am afraid that I don’t have them. We know it’s there, somewhere, but the exact location is an unknown.’

  ‘I could really do with finding out where it is, Dolan.’

  The spy smiled. ‘And I know just the people for you to ask.’

  Aneka’s eyes narrowed. ‘What’s this going to cost me?’

  ‘Oh… Let us just say that if you ask sufficiently harshly that you get the answer, it will be of mutual benefit.’

  ~~~

  ‘The building is heavily shielded against electromagnetic interference and screened against eavesdropping,’ Al stated. ‘It appears that we will be required to infiltrate it to get what we want.’

  Aneka sighed, but she had been expecting it. The building housed the Pinnacle’s presence on Oberian, or the primary part of it. From there they did their best to monitor communications traffic across the planet and given that their technology was a generation and a bit above the native systems, they did a pretty good job. Undal was, of course, less than pleased with that, but there was lit
tle he could do about it. The fractured political structure of the planet meant that at least some of the governments there were quite in favour of Pinnacle involvement in the world’s affairs. The more sensible ones, and Undal, knew that once the neighbours got a foot in the door they would ram in the boot, possibly with a nuclear toecap. Of course, if some outsider took exception to them…

  Aneka slipped down an alleyway and took off her coat, dumping it against a wall. ‘Okay, we go in, get the data out of their computers, and then we pay for it.’ She engaged her shield and the cloaking system which came with it and then marched around to the front entrance of the building, invisible to all but the most advanced sensor systems.

  The building was three storeys, built of Plascrete and appeared to belong to an import/export company. The receptionist, an attractive woman dressed in a thin, pale blue blouse, frowned as the inner doors of the entrance vestibule opened and no one walked in. Her shoulders dipped and she stared at the doorway for several seconds until the doors closed again. No one had entered and the cameras in the little airlock were showing no one inside it.

  Aneka walked around the desk and glanced back. Sure enough, the woman’s hands were resting on a large electromagnetic shotgun hidden behind the desk. Treamon was a relatively safe part of the planet; the policing was efficient and congenial, but effective. The high-calibre gun seemed a little excessive.

  ‘We appear to be in the right place,’ Al commented.

  ‘Now we just need to locate their main hub.’

  ‘Somewhere secure. There is no roof access, so I would suggest the top floor.’

  There was a staircase and it let Aneka move, unseen, all the way to the top. There were more people there, and they all seemed to be moving with a purpose. Oberians were a generally fairly laidback people. They worked hard and they sometimes played hard, but they were usually pretty relaxed. The people in this office had an intensity about them which was distinctly un-Oberian. Aneka moved slowly among them, giving them as wide a berth as possible. Her cloak was good enough that she could stand right in front of their faces if she had to, but tempting fate unnecessarily was just asking for someone to be a little more observant than the rest and no camouflage system was perfect.

  ‘I’m detecting more electrical activity to our left,’ Al informed her. ‘Either the communications suite or the computer core.’

  The unmarked door stood out like a sore thumb. Presumably the fact that every other door had someone’s name on it was meant to suggest that this was a cupboard, but if it was, the offices on either side were very large. Checking that no one was looking, Aneka tried the door. It was locked.

  ‘Try again,’ Al said with barely a pause. The door opened and Aneka slipped inside. ‘People should learn to use physical locks.’

  ‘You’ve locked it again?’

  ‘I have.’

  Dropping her shield, Aneka pulled a length of optical data cable from a belt pouch, located a switch with a free port and jacked in via the port in her neck. ‘Get everything you can out of it and then trash their security system.’ Another pouch produced a device the size of a drinks tin which she placed behind one of the racks of equipment before activating it. Then she looked around. ‘I think it’s the communications suite and the computer core. They must be tapped into half the physical circuits in the city as well as monitoring radio traffic.’

  ‘They are. The data here is extensive. Do you want me to grab their collected information or just stick to Pinnacle-related data?’

  ‘Everything you can get, but prioritise the latter. Dolan would probably like to know what they’ve got on his world.’

  ‘A lot. The station we are looking for is now the primary communications relay for this site. I have its location. We can be there in just over seventy hours.’

  ‘Get everything you can on it. If we’re breaking Ella out, I want to know as much about the place as possible.’

  ‘Already done. I have a subprocess working through the data.’

  ‘Good.’ Her head turned as someone tried the door. When it failed to open, they tried harder. ‘How’s that download coming?’

  ‘Five more seconds.’

  Aneka nodded and slipped her pistol free of its holster. ‘I think we have that.’

  ‘Whoever is in there, give yourself up and you will not be harmed.’ The voice sounded firm, authoritative, and quite genuine. Infrared suggested there were around six people outside the door, all of them armed.

  ‘The door must have additional monitoring on it,’ Al said.

  ‘Not an issue. In fact, it’s kind of a plus given what comes next.’

  ‘True. Download complete.’

  Aneka pulled the cable out of her neck, raised her pistol and fired through the door. Hyperdense needles hit light metal, flashed into bursts of bright plasma and burned through, searing into bodies on the other side. It was likely insufficient to kill them, but the shock would be disorienting. She yanked open the door and stepped out.

  Three men fell as her pistol turned right and fired. Her eyes were on the men on the left, surprised by the sudden attack but recovering quickly. Their guns were coming up. Aneka turned, spraying needles across their bodies, and then she was moving down the corridor past them before they had fully fallen to the corridor floor.

  For several minutes there was nothing but shouting and the sharp cracks from Aneka’s weapon as it threw death at incredible velocity. This had been Undal’s price for ‘introducing’ Aneka to the Pinnacle spy enclave: making sure there were no Pinnacle spies around when she left. She had pointed out that she might not get them all, and he had pointed out that not all of them were in the building. Making a severe dent in their population would do enough damage that he could regain control of the situation. But there was no point in not being thorough and she went from room to room, shooting anyone who even looked threatening, which was pretty much everyone she saw.

  The numbers were thinning on the middle floor, and by the time she got to ground level, she found only a couple of men with force rifles who still appeared determined to take her down. They had no chance. The receptionist was gone and the vestibule doors were wide open, letting freezing air flood the reception area.

  Aneka cut her cloak in as she headed for the street. ‘Blow it.’

  There was a short pause and then the building seemed to scream in outrage as the implosion grenade she had left in the computer room detonated, tearing the heart out of the structure. Masonry collapsed behind her as the horribly destructive device did its work, and Aneka kept walking, putting distance between herself and the carnage she had wrought.

  Gwy, 9.11.559 FSC.

  ‘I have completed the analysis of the data we collected,’ Al said. It was his avatar speaking, and he was doing so in analogue rather than digital, mostly because this was a presentation and he felt it lent something to the process. ‘With Gwy’s assistance, obviously,’ he added.

  The obsidian figure of Gwy’s avatar nodded to him. ‘I have made copies of the appropriate data and sent them to Mister Undal. He sent a message thanking you for the thought.’

  Aneka nodded. ‘I’m sure he’ll put it to good use. What do you have?’

  Al turned to the wall screen and a local area star map appeared showing the Oberian system, Border Enforcement Station 395, and their current location between the two. A fourth point marked Lacora. ‘The Pinnacle put up these stations in star systems which are basically useless but which they consider to be of strategic importance. We have been unable to determine what “strategic” means, but it seems to be their equivalent of marking territory.’

  ‘What’s that? Twenty parsecs from Lacora?’

  ‘A little over.’

  ‘Damn. If we’d known they were that close, we’d have pulled the mission or sent them with a lot more security.’

  ‘Quite.’ The display changed to a schematic format showing a moderately typical-looking space station based on a converted asteroid. ‘They build them all
to the same basic design. An armoured core area, outer regions protected by the scavenged rock, and a substantial amount of weaponry. They typically have at least one light cruiser stationed there at all times.’

  ‘So, if Ella’s there, she’s going to be in the core section? I assume they put habitation in there?’

  ‘According to the standard layout. Security is tight, but substantially below our technological level. We have two generations on them. Gwy’s screens will have no difficulty in keeping us hidden. However, active scans would give us away.’

  ‘You’ll need to go in and find out where she is,’ Gwy said. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Not your fault, blame physics.’ Aneka closed her eyes. The Pinnacle had had Ella for almost twenty days and they were not exactly known for their kindness to ‘aliens.’ On the other hand, she had been taken, which meant they had had a reason to keep her alive… Ella was going to be alive when Aneka found her. It was as simple as that. ‘Right. Now, about you two…’ Aneka opened her eyes and looked first at Al’s avatar and then at Cassandra. ‘What are you doing?’

  Cassandra managed to look a little sheepish. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘You haven’t seen each other in months. I know your relationship is as much mental as physical, but you haven’t even been standing close together much of the time. Frankly it’s starting to piss me off.’

  ‘We were being sensitive.’

  ‘And I did point out that it would not work,’ Al said.

  Aneka shook her head. ‘We’re all adults. Some of us are a thousand years old. Just because Ella’s done something stupid with a man who is not fit to wipe mud off my boots does not mean my self-esteem is sufficiently damaged that I need to be babied. You two better start acting like a couple again or I’ll shout at you. Loudly. Using heavy sarcasm. Understood?’

  ‘I do not believe that further clarification is required,’ Al told her.

  ‘We’ll be good,’ Cassandra added meekly.