by Gem Jackson
“Sir, this is strange. I’m getting some unusual data.” It was a young crewman. “The energy signature of the vessel matches one that jumped away from this system at exactly the same time.”
“Which vessel?” asked an officer.
“I’m not sure, sir. It was a big one we detected on the edge of the system. No IFF signal. We flagged it when we arrived.”
“I remember,” said the Captain. “It was so far out it didn’t merit immediate investigation. Are you saying it’s the same ship?”
The crewman struggled to make sense of what he was seeing. “That’s what the data suggests. I don’t know?”
“Jumping that short a distance is impossible. You must be mistaken,” said Anton. They weren’t mistaken, though. It confirmed his suspicions. It was the Cronus. “Captain, forgive me, I’m receiving the call I’ve been waiting for. I’ll report back as soon as I can.” The Captain waved a hand at him as he said something to another officer. Anton stalked out of the control room. They would be figuring out what had happened for a while yet and he would need only a few minutes now. There was nothing to stop him. It was time to go to work.
Back in his room, Anton worked quickly. He pulled out his bag and took out the composite knife and a collection of mechanical parts, printed over the course of his stay on the ship. He methodically assembled the parts into a simple handgun, spinning a suppressor into place to complete the process. He slotted one of the magazines stolen by Ramis into the weapon and tucked the other into his trouser pocket before yanking back the top of the gun to chamber a round. It felt like a toy. Cheap and flimsy.
From deeper in the bag he took out two small stun grenades, each a slim metal cylinder capped with a pin mechanism and a separate clip, which he used to attach them to his trouser belt-loops. It wasn’t ideal, but it would do well enough. It was a shame he had used his own suicide kit to dispatch agent Abbas. He felt more comfortable going into action with it. It provided a sense of control in all circumstances.
He took off his jacket and hung it over one arm, concealing the weapon. Standing in front of the door, Anton closed his eyes and felt his skin tingling with excitement. This was bigger than anything he had ever done before. This was how history was made. First, however, he needed to collect Ramis. He left the room, closing the hatch quietly and sauntered along the corridors along the now familiar route to the petty officer’s mess.
“Ramis, front and centre sunshine.” The boy obeyed immediately, slamming down his coffee and hurrying across to Anton in the corridor. “Your next assignment. Are you ready?”
“I’m ready.”
“I’m going to the control room to listen in on the diplomatic fracas. I want you to go in just ahead of me and just blend in. Your job is to look busy and not get kicked out for as long as I’m there. This is about being able to get into places without being noticed. Got it?” Ramis positively beamed. It was still all a game. A game he stood a chance of winning. It would be a disappointing day for him.
“No problem, boss. You can count on me. What’s under the jacket?”
“Never you mind, just something for the Captain. Now head off, I’ll follow behind you.”
Without another word, Ramis marched to the control room, Anton keeping a few feet behind. His footsteps seemed louder than usual. His breathing was shallow. He felt adrenaline flooding his body, through his back and shoulders, his forearms and knees. He resisted the urge to tense up and shake his muscles loose.
With the hatch to the control room in sight, Anton tucked the gun into the back of his trousers and swung the jacket on. Ramis opened the hatch door and stepped in. Anton held the door open from the corridor side with his shoulder and detached the stun grenades from his belt loops. He removed the pins and one after another tossed the grenades into the control room beyond before yanking the door shut tight. He felt as much as heard the detonations and steeled himself against the panic he would encounter inside. The yelling had already begun.
He pushed the hatch back open, strode inside and started shooting. First the navigation and communication stations, then the officers in the middle of the room. He was immersed in a cacophony of shouting and noise. Deaf and blind, the crew near to him were easy targets, arms groping outstretched or pawing at their eyes and ears. Blood sprayed the walls and the floor, spattering pristine panels. As the second ticked by, the crew’s vision and hearing began to return. Anton took aim at Bryant, staunchly holding position in the centre barking the order to ‘hold fast!’. Anton allowed himself the satisfaction of two shots on the captain, hitting him in the chest and the jaw. By now the rest of them could see what was happening. He saw fear in their eyes but stepped further into the control room, still taking aim, still pulling the trigger. By the time he reloaded, there were only four remaining. One scrambled towards him in a courageous, though foolish attempt at a counterattack. Anton dispatched her as the other three attempted to hide or crawl away. One after another, Anton put them out of their misery.
He unclenched his jaw and surveyed the room. A few of the crew were still alive, crying out and heaving themselves across the floor. He checked each body in turn, using the knife to cut arteries where life still remained. Ramis lay face down not far from the hatch. He had been shot through the chest. At that moment, Captain Bryant caught Anton’s attention, twitching his head around to look at him. Anton cautiously closed in on him. The Captain’s face was a mess, all smashed jaw and mad, frantic eyes.
“I’m sorry about this, Captain,” Anton gripped the man’s collar with one hand and placed the knife just beneath his ribs. “If it’s any consolation, it’s not personal.” Holding eye contact, he pushed down hard on the knife, being careful not to lose control, before twisting the blade upwards, behind the ribcage and into the heart. It took just a couple of seconds for the life to disappear from the Captain’s old grey eyes.
The body slid from the seat with remarkably little effort. Anton looked at his hands. They were bloody and shaking. His nostrils were thick with the pig-iron smell of blood. He didn’t remember putting the gun down but was on the floor. He checked it over—one round chambered and eleven in the magazine. It was more than enough. He tucked it behind him once more and took a moment to go over what needed to be done next.
“Come on, you old bastard,” he said to nobody in particular. “You’re got more work to do yet.”
This was, without a doubt, the most precarious element of the plan. After closing and securing the hatch door, Anton made his way to the navigation section, stepping over bodies as he did so and keeping hold of the gun just in case. He found a suitable input in one of the consoles and slotted in a small data-stick. Two chimes through the comm system confirmed that the virus was operating. He had five minutes. He placed a metallic strip across his throat, locating it carefully with his fingers in order to best cover the area directly above his vocal chords.
“Testing, testing.” His voice was transformed to match that of Captain Bryant. It was perfect. “Come on, you bally space dogs, let ‘em have it!”
The intelligence panels showed they were closing on the Cronus and the other Titan security vessels, though they were still a fair way out yet. That didn’t matter. The news that Titan had declared independence would be racing across the Solar System like a forest fire. It would capture attention wherever it went and, crucially, bring intense scrutiny towards the small moon. By now, thousands of telescopes and other sensors, active and passive, would be trained on Titan, the Cronus and the Aggressive. They were in the spotlight. He could feel the solar system waiting with baited-breath. He had been paid to start a war with cameras watching and that what he was damn-well going to do. There would be no question of would happen next being deep-faked or propaganda.
Once he had found the right station, it wasn’t difficult to dial up a firing solution on the Cronus. It really was an easy vessel to run one-handed. He confirmed a short barrage towards the Cronus, not especially accurate or tightly focused, but it didn’
t have to be. It merely needed to act as a smoking gun.
“General quarters, general quarters. All hands man your battle stations. This is not a drill. All hands man your battle stations.” The alarm blared out of the intercom, triggered by the virus. Anton checked his watch; it was exactly on time, repeating twice more. He had been assured by a very knowledgeable source that the call to battle stations would not lead to anyone else entering the control room immediately, but he felt his heart pounding and flicked his eyes towards the hatch every few seconds anyway.
Without the bustle of other people in the room, giving the order to fire was underwhelming to say the least. Long had been right about that. It was just glorified button pushing. This notwithstanding, he pressed the appropriate button and launched a thirty second salvo from the forward rail-guns towards the Cronus. The bulkheads reverberated with each shot, ringing through the hull of the ship and building to a deep, thundering crescendo. Across the room alerts wailed into life as the Cronus locked-on its own targeting arrays and returned fire. They wouldn’t be hit, Anton was confident of that. It wouldn’t do for the Titan military to damage such a precious asset as this. Not when they could take it. Bizarrely, a proximity alert had been triggered by something or other.
Anton returned to the centre of the room, stepping over corpses as necessary, and watched the spatial environment board shift as the computer virus manipulated the AI systems, simulating dozens of commands in a carefully orchestrated sequence. He checked the proximity alert and found it had been triggered by an approaching vessel. It had no IFF signal and was moving on a direct intercept course.
“Fucking arseholes,” he muttered. They couldn’t wait an hour to take the damn ship. The more he worked with anyone from Titan, the happier he was that he lived on the other side of the Solar System. Unprofessional didn’t cover it. Still, given the ETA, he had enough time to complete his work and leave the ship on his own terms.
The Aggressive rotated on it’s axis to present the starboard weapon batteries to the Cronus and the small security fleet. He wasn’t going to fire, but it was an extremely aggressive attitude to take and give more weight to a violent response from Titan.
He checked his watch again. By now the rail-gun salvo would have reached the Cronus. That gave them about thirty seconds until the return fire reached them and sure enough the alarm went out to brace for impact. There would be no impact. He told himself this a few times just to be sure.
This, of course, was where the virus got really clever. It was designed to feed conflicting information to different parts of the ship. From the engine room, damage control reports and internal sensor read outs would show hull breaches to the fore of the ship. Similarly, other areas would receive reports of damage to the engines or other distant parts of the ship. Lights would cut out, Life support systems would become intermittent, it would become chaotic. Within seconds the control room was receiving confused chatter from multiple departments. Anton cleared his throat again and checked his voice still matched Bryant’s.
“Attention all crew. This is the Captain. Abandon ship. Abandon ship. Catastrophic hull breach is immanent. This is not a drill. I repeat, abandon ship. Abandon ship.”
He tore the metallic strip from his throat and pocketed it. After removing the cooled suppressor from the gun, he concealed the weapon more comfortably in his jacket and left the control room. The air in the passageway outside was brisk and clean. The lights flickered and, even knowing the cause of the anomaly, he still picked up his pace a little. He went first to his quarters to pick up his bag of tricks, or evidence, as he now thought of it. The few personnel he passed along the way bore a grim look of determination as they made for the escape craft. One asked if he knew where he was going, to which he replied in the affirmative. He went to the shuttle number two on the port side of the vessel, guessing correctly that Long would have left on shuttle one.
The crew, in the escape craft, would be captured by the Titan forces before long, but he had no intention of being in the vicinity when that happened. There was a score to settle still. After being pursued for a decade by agent September Long, a turn of the tables was long overdue.
He squeezed into the drone controlled shuttle and strapped himself in, simultaneously setting the destination for the Titan Chemical Orbital Facility.
“Agent Long—I’m coming for you.” The command to launch appeared on the control panel. He tapped the icon and left the Aggressive behind.
Chapter 25 – Leon
They watched the exodus from the Aggressive. Torren adjusted the optical sensors to get a clearer picture as one after another, escape craft jettisoned from the massive warship. It didn’t made any sense—the Aggressive had sustained no apparent damage. In fact, the salvo from the Cronus had gone far wide. It was as if the weapons officer on the Titan ship had either never fired a barrage before or they had intended to miss. Either way, a stream of small, cube-like vessels continued to detach from the capital ship and drift out into open space. Every now and again one drifted across the face of Titan, forming a sharp silhouette on the face of the cloudy, yellow moon.
Leon wracked his brain trying to figure out what could be going on inside to make them all leave like that? Was there a hull breach they could not detect? A reactor-core overload? He prayed it wasn’t fire. That was the stuff of nightmares.
“Have you made contact yet?” asked Sleet. She was as transfixed as he was, her face a mixture of fascination and horror at the events unfolding before them. “I need to know, ‘cos this is fucked up and right now, I’m all for turning round and high-tailing it back to Ceres, subsistence rations or not.”
“No contact yet,” said Leon. He was so close to being back aboard the Aggressive, yet with every escape craft that departed, he felt his chances slipping further and further away.
“I’m calling it,” said Torren. “There’s nobody left aboard that ship. I’ve counted at least twenty-five escape pods and one shuttle. It’s dead.”
“Hang on, I’m getting something.” Leon adjusted the frequency and pushed the ear-piece tighter against the side of his head. There was someone on the other end, he was sure of it. He repeated his call, “Come in Aggressive, this is the Jackdaw’s Straw, do you copy? I repeat, this is Leon Wood aboard the Jackdaw’s Straw, is anybody there?”
The response was faint, but it was definitely there. Someone was trying to speak.
“Leon? Is that you, you canny bastard?” There was a laugh, followed by a hacking cough. Leon piped the exchange through the cockpit intercom.
“Ramis?”
“Yeah, it’s me. It’s good to hear your voice. I’ve been shot. I’m—” another coughing fit. “I’m in a bit of trouble here, pal. Any chance you can get to me?”
“Ramis, did you say you’ve been shot? What happened?”
“Leon, I can’t, just get here. It’s all gone to shit. I’m scared—”
“Ramis, come in! Talk to me, Ramis!” It was no use. The line was still live, but Ramis had obviously passed out, or worse. Leon turned to the others. “We need to get on board. How long until we can dock?”
“Whoa, slow down, Starflight.” Sleet shook her head. “You think we’re crazy enough to board now? Your friend has been shot? Fuck knows what’s going on inside that ship anymore. We’re out of here.”
“Okay, fine. You don’t have to come. Just get me on board. Please?”
Sleet said nothing, but held her mouth shut, lips tight as she thought it over. Three seconds. Four seconds. Five. She was so close, Leon could feel it.
“You don’t even have to leave the ship,” he continued, “just dock, kick me out and then take off wherever you want. No more Starflight screwing up your day. You’re free.”
This seemed to do the trick. Torren liked the idea, at least.
“Fine. Except, we don’t even know where the docking bays are on a thing like that, and I don’t much fancy doing loops around it with a swarm of small craft firing out every few minutes.”<
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“Leave it to me, I know exactly where we can dock.”
“Oh, you do? And how’s that then?” demanded Sleet.
Leon thought for a second. They still didn’t know he was APSA. “I docked here before, didn’t I? To drop my diplomat off? I’ll just head to the same place.” That seemed to assuage her.
Torren reluctantly hauled himself out of the co-pilot's seat and made way for Leon.
“I’m going to bring us in manually, unless anyone has any objections?”
Sleet sat back. “You have control.”
With that he extended the HOTAS controls and began guiding the yacht closer to the warship, picking up enough speed to close the gap without risking overshooting. He accessed the main console and lit the Jackdaw’s Straw up again with appropriate IFF signalling and sensors. He could feel the others watching his every move. Once he might have crumbled under such pressure, yet now, though tense and nervous, he found himself able to put his fear to one side and focus on the job at hand. He felt like he was balancing on a knife edge or spinning plates—in control but only one wrong move away from disaster. It was exhilarating.
Manipulating the throttle carefully, he brought the yacht above the Aggressive and matched their velocities. The main docking seal was on the top of the ship towards the fore. He spun the Jackdaw’s Straw so that it lay in the same direction, running parallel, though rolled at ninety degrees so as to present the yacht’s starboard side to the docking seal.
“Jesus, Starflight, you’ve got some moves.” said Torren. Leon tried not to smile at the compliment and instead broadcast a docking request using the mission codes to secure a green light from the Aggressive’s AI. It worked. He wondered if anyone had noticed what he’d done, as he would then be forced to explain exactly how he had the mission codes rather than Murray. He could feel the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end in anticipation, as if he had been caught eavesdropping, with one ear to the door. The moment passed. It was time to dock.