‘When that is a positive thing,’ Janna commented from her place nearby, ‘I know we’re in trouble.’
18.11.530 FSC.
There had been five more bombs and six more suicide bombs in three days. Casualties had been kept to a minimum by the curfew and other emergency measures, but a couple of the underground lines through the city were now unusable and people were starting to hole up in their homes. Panic was starting to set in. That was when Cassandra made her breakthrough.
‘Working with the security camera feeds Winter supplied,’ the android explained, ‘Al and I have identified five people who may well be involved in the suicide bombings.’
She turned her head to look at the wall screen and five images clipped from video frames appeared. ‘The one at the bottom was present at all the explosions. I believe that this is the psychic. He needs to be present to maintain control of his victims. Some combination of two of the other four are always present with him, presumably acting as bodyguards and lookouts.’
Truelove’s eyes had gone unfocussed as soon as the images had appeared. She frowned. ‘None of them are in any of our databases. None of our databases.’
‘That shouldn’t be possible,’ Sharissa supplied. ‘Well… If they were from outside the Federation, maybe.’
‘They should still have been identified when they reached their first Federation planet. I think they’ve been erased. Very few people could arrange that.’
‘Like the head of the Federal Security Agency?’ Aneka suggested.
‘Like him, yes.’
High Yorkbridge.
‘Truelove has identified your psychic and four of your operatives,’ Pierce said. He was smiling as though it did not matter, but Part frowned.
‘How?’
‘They were sloppy. They appeared at the suicide bombings. Facial recognition tagged them.’ Pierce’s eyes narrowed. ‘I was unaware that she was using such a broad field of information and it’s surprising that she was able to find them so quickly, but she has watch notices out for them.’
‘You didn’t stop her?’
‘This campaign has been a suitable distraction and has had the side effects I was hoping for. The population are panicking. They are scared to leave their homes. When Elroy demonstrates his weakness, they will turn to those willing to show strength. Let Truelove find your men. They have that contingency covered, don’t they?’
Part gave a slow nod, unwilling to speak and betray his feelings on the matter.
‘Then everything is going according to plan. We’ll need something to keep Winter’s people occupied when we’re ready to deploy Aqua Regia. I have that covered. Now we just need to wait.’
Yorkbridge Mid-town, 20.11.530 FSC.
The tower block had taken severe damage from one of the impacts that had all but destroyed the islands. It was on the edge of the city, near the beach Aneka, Ella, Dillon, and Katelyn would go to on weekends, which had been a bad place to be when the Herosians had come. Now it was three solid storeys and two more which were little more than walls held together with faith.
Truelove watched it through a set of binoculars, seeing no sign of life. ‘We’re sure this is the place?’
‘We tracked one of them here after the last bomb went off,’ Sharissa replied, strapping on her last piece of ablative, laser-resistant armour. ‘Our eyes in the sky say there are seven Jenlay in there. Third floor, north side.’
‘I’d prefer to go in with you.’
‘You’re staying here with Janine,’ Sharissa told her. She picked up a laser carbine and added, ‘You’re coordinating our attack. That’s what prospective heads of the FSA do.’
‘Sit around and send other people into danger?’
‘Yes. Just ask Aneka.’
‘Do I have to like it?’
‘No, you just have to do it. Give the word.’
Truelove’s fingers tightened around her binoculars. Her implant activated her microphone. ‘This is Agent Truelove. All teams prepare to breach.’ Then she cut off the radio and added, ‘Be careful. Janna will never forgive me if you’re so much as bruised.’
~~~
‘This is Agent Truelove. All teams prepare to breach.’
Above the ruined skyscraper, invisible behind Gwy’s cloak, Aneka heard the transmission and dropped out of the airlock, falling fifty metres before she slowed her decent with the gravity harness she was wearing and floated the last ten metres to a stable area of floor.
In the corner was a stairwell, clogged with fallen masonry. There was space to get through, just.
‘This may take a few minutes,’ she said silently.
‘You can get in?’ Ella replied from Gwy’s cockpit.
‘Yeah, but it’s not going to be easy. They may have started before I can join in.’
‘You’re only there in case things get ugly. The assault teams don’t know about you.’
‘Yeah,’ Aneka replied as she began easing her way through the rubble, ‘but we both know it is going to get ugly.’
~~~
‘Grenade!’ The word was followed by a dull thud and a flash of brilliant light as the stun grenade went off. Sharissa ignored it, counting on the flare protection in her visor, and moved forward, carbine at her shoulder and ready to fire.
A figure appeared in front of her, dressed in civilian clothes, but raising a carbine-sized weapon of his own. Her gun spoke, a beam of white light flaring out and leaving a trail of ionised air in its wake. The man fell and she moved on without a second thought.
The ‘terrorists’ were well-armed and trained. They knew what they were doing and they seemed determined to be taken dead. Three of the assault team were down already, but Sharissa had just evened the score. The terrain was not helping things. Their opponents knew the layout better. But it was just a matter of time…
She kicked open a door and whipped her sights around the room and… There was a man standing there, unarmed and alone. He was smiling. She could not work out what he had to smile about until she saw his eyes and realised that she could not move.
‘That’s right,’ he said, his lips not moving. ‘That’s a good little soldier. On your knees.’
She fell to her knees before her mind could decide not to. Her gun dropped limply away from her body and she could not raise it. A dull, throbbing pain began to develop in her forehead.
‘If you fight it, it will hurt. Don’t fight it.’
She realised her arms were moving, lifting her carbine up until the barrel was sitting right under her chin. She focussed every bit of effort she had to stop her finger moving to the trigger. The pain was getting intense, excruciating, and her finger was still edging toward the trigger. The armour there, at her throat, was not as good at stopping a beam. If she fired it would probably penetrate. She wondered whether it would hurt more or less than her head was hurting now.
‘That’s right… just a little squeeze…’
And then Sharissa found herself sprawling on the floor as something slammed into her, knocking her sideways. Aneka materialised, raising one of her pistols to point at the psychic.
‘Care to try that on me?’ Aneka asked. His eyes widened and she grinned. ‘Yeah… Sucks to be you, doesn’t it?’ Then she fired.
Three hyperdense darts lanced through his left eye, flashing into plasma as they hit the back of the socket. His skull exploded, blasting blood, brains, and bone fragments across the wall behind him. And then he slumped to the ground.
Aneka turned, offering a hand to Sharissa. ‘You okay?’
‘Aside from a headache the size of the planet?’
‘Aside from that?’
‘Yeah. I’m okay.’
Aneka nodded and hauled the blonde to her feet. ‘Good, because your team has finished in here and I need to be elsewhere.’ Letting go of Sharissa’s hand, she seemed to evaporate into thin air.
‘Thanks,’ Sharissa said to the empty room, and then activated her radio. ‘Torrence to all team members. Sitrep, now.’
Tristar Township, 21.11.530 FSC.
‘No evidence at all that it wasn’t Herosian in origin?’ Ella asked.
Truelove gave a shrug. ‘It was an excellent information management job. I’m starting to wonder if the Herosians aren’t behind this. The weapons were Herosian manufacture. So were the explosives. The people are not in any of our databases which would tend to suggest they were smuggled in…’
‘But it’s all wrong,’ Aneka said.
‘Agreed,’ Sharissa said, nodding. ‘You want to smuggle Jenlay onto a Jenlay planet, you don’t sneak them in. You walk them in, one at a time over a few weeks. No one would notice. They could have come back with the refugees from Beryum. And you don’t bring in weapons. It’s way easier to source them locally and it doesn’t point straight at you when they get caught.’
‘Well,’ Truelove conceded, ‘there’s that evidence. The lack of evidence is evidence, but it’s not something I can take in front of anyone who matters.’
‘At least we shut them down,’ Ella said, brightening a little.
‘Yes, but the emergency orders are staying in place. We shut down one cell. We believe it was the only one, but the official line is that there may well be more, and Elroy would prefer it if everyone stayed off the streets anyway.’
‘So… we gained nothing out of all this?’
‘We gained people not being so keen to walk around where they can become collateral damage,’ Aneka said. ‘A scared populace isn’t great, but they’ll be worse if they start getting killed in more “terrorist” incidents. We just have to hope we can figure out what Pierce and his people are up to before they need to do anything else to keep us occupied.’
Part Five: Collateral Damage
Tristar Township, 1.1.531 FSC.
Aneka had said the Renewal. Everyone had said they wanted to hear it, so she had said the words with Ella holding her hand and saying them along with her. After the first line, everyone had joined in. Truelove had said that she wanted to hear it because it reminded her that there was something they were fighting for. It was getting hard to remember what that was.
There had been no new incidents on New Earth through the last month, but there had been a few bombs on worlds throughout Jenlay space. There had also been a lot of rumours about Herosian attacks on colonies, but no one had managed to substantiate any of them, and a probe sent to one world had found nothing wrong. Front Line continued to publicise every single rumour as though it was fact.
Janna was already half-cut by the time it got to midnight. She had decided that the start of a new year, no matter the circumstances, was a good time to start new habits, to turn over leaves, to… They had stopped her expounding more resolutions after a while, but the upshot was that she wanted to be fairly well inebriated so that when she went to bed, she would do so with Sharissa, Cassandra, and Al.
Ella was worried about this plan and trying hard not to show that she was. Given that it was Ella, that was not working as well as might be expected, but she had learned to be much better at hiding her feelings than she once was. Intellectually she knew that Al would treat Janna better than any other male she knew, but there was still that hint of worry. Ella had been through a phase of being unwilling to go with a man and knew something of what her mother felt on the subject. It had taken her longer to overcome her fear than she had expected.
‘Do you think she’ll be okay?’ Ella asked once she was alone in the lounge with Aneka.
‘Sharissa and Cassandra are there to keep an eye on things. Al will take it easy, at least to begin with. They want this to be a good experience, but if she’s showing signs of distress they’ll back off. And you know that, love. Don’t worry.’
‘But can’t you… keep an eye on things? You could…’
‘No.’
‘But…’
‘Do you want to watch your mother having sex?’
‘No!’
‘Well, I don’t want to watch through Al’s eyes while he’s having sex with your mother. It’ll be fine.’
Ella fell silent, leaning against Aneka, unwilling to go to sleep just yet in case she was needed, even if the alcohol was getting to her and she felt like nodding off sitting up on the sofa.
Ten minutes later they heard, ‘Oh Vashma! It vibrates!’ from the direction of the bedrooms and Ella burst into hysterical giggles.
~~~
‘You’ve never done it?’ Janna asked, incredulous.
‘Not with Al, no,’ Aneka replied. ‘And is this really a good conversation to have over breakfast?’
‘We’re Jenlay, dear,’ Janna reminded her. ‘Why? I mean, why haven’t you taken him for a spin? He’s gorgeous, skilled, hunky… and very filling.’
‘And he vibrates,’ Aneka said, smirking.
‘Uh, yes. That came as something of a surprise, but it just makes my point.’
‘Janna, you’re gorgeous, skilled, and extremely flexible, but I won’t sleep with you. It makes me uncomfortable because you’re Ella’s mother. Al… is part of me. Neither of us is very keen on trying that option out. Sooner or later we’ll probably do it for the same reason you’re learning to put up with men. You don’t want to stop Sharissa doing something she likes, and we don’t want to stop our partners from doing something they want. But for now, things are fine how they are.’
The elder Narrows nodded and sipped her coffee looking thoughtful. Aneka did not like that look.
‘So,’ Janna said, ‘if I could get Sharissa and Ella interested in…’
‘No, Janna.’
Janna gave her a grin. ‘Just checking.’
High Yorkbridge, 20.1.531 FSC.
‘The main faults have been found and they think the next prototype will be fully functional.’ The report was being given by a thin man who looked as though he had seen things recently which he would rather not have seen. Pierce did not know his name, and did not want to, but the news was encouraging.
‘It’s ready then?’ Pierce asked.
‘They want to run one more series. We’re expecting results no later than the tenth.’
Pierce nodded and turned to Part. ‘We need to initiate the second distraction plan. We’ll need to gather the whole Committee to proceed and I want Winter and her cronies looking elsewhere.’
‘It’s going to kill a lot of people,’ Part said. ‘Civilians.’
Pierce waved the comment away. ‘Collateral damage. They die for the greater good. Send the data stream tomorrow, and get that fool at Front Line working on the necessary media output. We want this to cause mass panic.’
‘Which will likely kill more. Yes, I know. It’s war and it can’t be helped.’
‘Precisely,’ Pierce replied, smiling.
Sapphira, 27.1.531 FSC.
‘What’s this?’ Goddard asked, peering at his desk monitor.
His assistant checked the screen and said, ‘Some new inoculation the Admiralty is sending out to all military bases. Apparently the Herosians have some engineered viruses and this is supposed to stop us getting them. It’s pretty advanced stuff from what I’ve been told. Nanotech stuff.’
‘And the Herosians are going to drop plague bombs on Sapphira?’
That got a shrug. ‘It’s orders. Everyone’s to get a shot, starting with the base personnel.’
Goddard sighed. ‘Better send this to Hayward’s labs. I doubt we can manufacture this ourselves.’
‘Just need you to authorise it, sir.’
‘Right. Tell them to put a rush on it. Sooner it’s done, the sooner we can get on with being ignored.’
Tristar Township, 6.2.531 FSC.
There had been rumours floating around, based on Front Line reporting, that the Herosians were planning viral attacks. New Earth had started getting back to normal: the night-time curfew had been lifted and, while the rules against large gatherings were still in effect, people were moving about more. Now there had been an abrupt about-face, but it was down to choice rather than law.
&
nbsp; And then the news from Sapphira had appeared. Front Line had, somehow, got their hands on the video clip from a message which had been sent out from the distant planet. They were playing it with increasingly alarming editorial comment almost constantly.
The image showed an indistinct, cocoon-like shape sitting on the floor in a hospital room. Ella had looked at it and let out a gasp, but when the picture changed and showed a view from a window of a street below she had started trembling. There were people in the street, but they were not acting like normal people and they looked strange. Gaunt, sickly, almost dead, they shambled along until they spotted something moving and ran after it like a pack of hungry predators.
‘Chucks,’ Ella had said when she could speak again. ‘Those are chucks.’
~~~
‘All communication with Sapphira is down,’ Truelove said. ‘That message, asking for help, was the last thing out before the relays went dark.’
‘The chucks wouldn’t have caused that,’ Ella said. ‘They’re barely able to think, never mind decide they need to sabotage equipment. I watched one with a slung rifle beat another one to death with a rock. I doubt they even qualify as sentient.’
‘So we probably have some living people sabotaging things. Or there’s no one left to send messages.’
‘It spreads rapidly, but it’s not that good. There are thirteen million people on that planet, and they mostly live in fairly dispersed communities.’
‘So there are probably survivors,’ Winter’s Number Seven avatar said. ‘And the only hope they have is the kind of nanotechnology used on you when you went to Negral. You and Aneka are immune, and you have the fastest ship in Federation space…’
Ella closed her eyes. ‘All right. When can we leave?’
‘It’ll take me a little time to get the necessary equipment together. The day after tomorrow.’
Ella nodded and opened her eyes to look at Aneka. ‘We’re going to need guns,’ she said. ‘Big guns.’
Aneka Jansen 6: The Lowest Depths of Shame Page 15