by Paul Collins
According to his sensors, Anneke was in the front of the weapons level, heading for the main bay. Since she had already penetrated that far, he knew she had compromised his passive surveillance systems. In a flash, he saw the problem in its entirety.
Moving at breakneck speed, he hurtled through the corridors and passageways, reaching the weapons level in record time. He burst in, using surprise rather than stealth, judging that Anneke would anticipate the latter.
He was both right and wrong.
As he slammed through the sole entrance to the weapons level he had one second to realise his mistake. In that instant, a projectile weapon exploded towards him. Had he been human he would have died instantly. As it was he performed a wrenching snap-roll to the side, but the intelligent projectile adjusted its trajectory, exploding as a cluster, and blowing off his left arm.
He felt a moment of pain before his autonomous systems kicked in, shutting down blood flow, sealing off arteries, and quenching pain signals.
The Envoy allowed a moment for the pain to die off, then switched into predator mode, moving stealthily down corridors, checking internal sensors, and closing in on the infrared signature of Anneke Longshadow.
Then he came face to face with her. And leapt. Anneke twisted to the side, bounced off the wall and catapulted away. A perfect feint. The Envoy slammed into the wall where she should have been, having never seen a human move so fast.
‘Are you enhanced?’ he asked.
‘You might say that,’ said Anneke. ‘I don’t answer intimate questions on a first date.’
‘First, last, same thing,’ said the Envoy, his voice fiat.
The Envoy blurred into sudden motion, but Anneke had expected it. She let off an electromag stun grenade, slowing the Envoy’s reflexes perceptibly.
He came to a stop, regarding her where she now stood on the catwalk five metres above him, which she had reached in an impressive vertical back jump.
‘You coded that grenade for my species. How did you do that?’
‘It’s called research. Know thy enemy.’
‘Impressive.’
‘Flattery will get you everywhere.’
‘You will not escape this ship. We located the vessel you arrived in. It’s now defunct.’
‘To be expected.’
‘Surrender.’
‘Not today, thanks. Why don’t you surrender?’ The Envoy leapt again. He was not as adept as Anneke and knew he would not catch her out this way. By the time he landed with a clang on the catwalk she was racing towards the exit of the weapons level. He wondered if she had already claimed what she’d come for.
He sped after her, launching a lockdown of the weapons level, but found that Anneke had overridden the systems. Now it came down to speed, and in this he was the superior.
Or he should have been.
The loss of his arm unbalanced him, preventing him from locking into a stable reciprocating motion necessary for his blistering velocity.
She knew, he thought. That’s why she took my arm. This was not an accident.
His respect for Anneke Longshadow increased. Despite this, he was closing the distance. No matter. He would finish her. He would give her a good death, as she deserved.
Then everything changed.
Just within grappling distance, something hissed above him. Instantly, he was entangled m an unbreakable web.
Ixsin net. lmmobiliser field. Pointless to struggle.
He stopped. Anneke sped away, exiting the weapons level. He bid her farewell softly. Until the next time they met.
The Envoy could have almost shrugged.
Black stabbed the air with his finger. ‘And since you almost undoubtedly booby trapped her ship,’ he said, ‘exactly how did she manage to escape?’
‘The jump-gate.’
‘Of course. The jump-gate. The jump-gate you left unguarded and unlocked?’
The Envoy regarded Black calmly. ‘It was guarded and locked.’
‘Naturally,’ said Black, a faint tone of defeat in his vmce.
For the first time the Envoy wondered if Maximus
Black really was the Instrument of Kadros. Perhaps they were wrong about him. ‘Such things are no barrier to her. We will encounter her again.’
‘I have no doubt. But I have other things to concern myself with.’ Black tilted his head and spoke into his ring, a rod logic nanocomputer. ‘Put a reward of one million tonnes of titanium on the head of Anneke Longshadow, effective immediately. Yes, dead or alive.’ He disconnected and locked eyes with the Envoy. ‘That should keep her busy.’
‘It may not be sufficient. Her presence complicates matters,’ said the Envoy.
Black got to his feet, starting to pace. ‘The race is on,’ he murmured to himself ‘Anneke must have the first coordinates. We have to find the second set before she does.’ He stopped pacing. ‘Issue a deathword - a fatwa, against her. Unrestricted kill-rights. To hell with Anneke Longshadow.’
As the scout ship threaded its way towards Lykis Integer, Anneke Longshadow thought about what she had uncovered on the dreadnought. It was undoubtedly an M-Class Destroyer, but it was a hulk, derelict, drifting in space for a thousand years, and looters had gutted it before that. Anneke had found nothing to suggest that the ship could be recommissioned as anything but a symbol of its once formidable power. For now, despite the efforts of the newly established crew, it seemed an empty shell. But Anneke did not doubt the power of symbols, espe cially in the hands of Nathaniel Brown.
Indeed, one purpose would be in appeasing the diehards and critics within the Majoris Corporata. She suspected that the mole had promised them enormous power if they supported him unconditionally and that power had to lie in what the lost coordinates would unearth. And lo and behold, a dreadnought turns up.Just when the mole needed it.
Almost as if it had been put there on purpose. Anneke arrived on Lykis early one morning. She had barely docked when Jake appeared, hurrying her, under armed escort, out a side entrance. He sped her through Immigration under the alias of Amira Kodis, with special envoy status and immunity.
In a secure safe house, Anneke demanded to know what was going on.
‘Quesada has issued a fatwa against you,’ said Jake, dropping tiredly into a chair. ‘We should have expected this.’
‘Guess I just lost my invisibility.’
‘Let’s hope that’s all you lose.’
‘Any way to reverse it?’
‘I’m looking into it. A fiduciary gift might help. Even Brown can’t pervert the normal course of “business”. His shareholders would be up in arms.’
‘That’s a lot of money.’
Jake shrugged that off. ‘RIM has slush funds for such things. You think it’s the first time somebody issued a fatwa against a RIM agent? Hell, at one time it was a nice source of income for the Companies. That’s not what worries me.’
‘Brown has a stranglehold on the Majoris Corporata.’
‘And now he’s got himself a dreadnought.’ Anneke nodded. ‘Buying back the kill-rights might not work, shareholders or not.’
‘It’s worth a try though. Until then, you should stay here.’
‘Who else knows about this place?’
‘Nobody. Just my team, all of whom are here and will stay here, and me.’
‘Brown has ways,Jake.’
‘I know.’
‘I’m not staying cooped up in a safe house.’
‘Anneke -’
‘How do you know that isn’t exactly what he wants?’
Jake slumped, ever so slightly. ‘I don’t. But neither do you.’ He sighed and changed the subject. ‘Tell me about the ship.’
Anneke filled him in on her excursion aboard the dreadnought. She left out the details involving the Envoy’s frenzied attack - that was just ‘collateral acti
on’ and not germane to the core mission - and focused on her assessments of the dreadnought’s capability. She passed Jake a datt wafer file of the downloads she’d been able to score. They would need more detailed analysis.
‘So it’s your opinion that the craft cannot be restored to its original design specs?’
‘Not unless there is a new factor I’m not aware of But I don’t like it. I don’t like it one little bit.’
‘It does seem coincidental,’ agreedJake.
‘Too coincidental, if you ask me.’
Jake shrugged. ‘Coincidences happen, Anneke. You know what the RIM mystics say: The Universe moves in mysterious ways.’
‘So what now?’
‘You lay low. I’ll try to reverse the fatwa. If not, we’ll get you off planet.’
‘I’m not running away,Jake.’
‘Nobody said you were.’
‘I need to put a team together.’ Anneke did not sound happy at this prospect. In the past, she had always operated alone.
Jake stared at her. ‘Since when did you become a team player?’
Anneke smiled. ‘Since I became a big fat target.’
Anneke looked around the underground complex. It was three hundred metres beneath the bottommost levels of Lykis Integer’s subsurface suburbs, that great crammed underbelly that covered most of the planet. Fat Fraddo showed her around.
‘Built it during my paranoid phase,’ said Fat Fraddo, waving a jewelled hand around.
‘Reinforced two-metre thick walls, electrified inner superconductor leaf, in-built deflector dampener fields, self-sensing internal sweepers, diagnostic cores, and every hi-tech anti-listening, anti-locating and anti-gizmatron money can buy. No expense spared. Got me nine escape routes, too. Full spectrum monitoring comm system. And it’ll take a one-hundred kiloton detonation with almost total conduction dampening.’
‘So my teeth stay in my head, right?’
‘Right. So this is what you want, girl?’ Fat Fraddo, all two-hundred-and-forty kilograms of him, eyed her oddly, like she was a six-year-old asking for a rocket launcher. Long ago, Anneke had saved Fraddo’s life. He had never forgotten.
‘This is exactly what I want.’ Anneke’s eyes gleamed. If she had known Black’s own underground complex was a mere ten kilometres away she might have thought twice, but given the level of concealment each bunker system possessed, the two might as well have been on different planets. Indeed, they would have more easily detected each other if they had been.
‘Heard you a fatwaan.’
Anneke nodded and grinned. ‘You tempted, Fraddo?’
‘Girl, you own my kill-rights. Just say the word and I’ll introduce Mr Brown to his own personal everlastin’ nightmare.’
Anneke put a hand on Fraddo’s arm. ‘Stay away from Brown, Fraddo. You’re the nicest bad guy I know. Brown’s something else. A psychopath for starters.’
Fraddo harrumphed. ‘Anything you say, Anneke.’
‘So how about joining my team?’
Fraddo stared at her for a moment then burst out laughing. His huge shoulders shook and his belly rippled like jelly. ‘Now where’s the percentage in that?’
Fraddo turned to go then swung back. ‘Hey, you heard the news, girl?’
‘What news?’
‘You should get out more.’ Fraddo frowned.
‘On second thoughts, you shouldn’t get out more.’ Anneke rolled her eyes, gesturing for Fraddo to spill it. ‘General Rocheford has been put out to space dock. Ill health they say.’
Anneke’s eyes narrowed.
‘And that ole electoral college of High Command? Well, they gone and voted. And guess what? Major General Oderon ‘’Asshole” Rench got the ticket. Looks like you got yourself a new boss, sweetie.’
Fat Fraddo waddled off to his especially enlarged drop tube. Anneke stared after him, horrified.
A shadow moved among the shadows. Neither of the moons of Lykis was up yet and thick clouds obscured even the stars. It was as dark as night could be and the rooftops of the Draco Quarter were locked in blackness.
But nothing seemed to deter, or slow, the shadow.
The figure moved with sure-footed grace across slanting roofs, over ventilation housings, and through standard Mark IV deflector fields, the type sold in every chainstore.
You always got what you paid for, Anneke reflected.
Then flinched as she remembered the fatwa against her. The mole was paying a lot to have her liquidated.
The irony was that Brown himself was the target of a fatwa and had been for a year now. The Myoto Company, which Brown had ex-communicated from the Cartel (overtly) and from the Majons Corporata (covertly) had issued the kill order. Protected by his position within Quesada, the full brunt of the fatwa diminished. But it was still there, a thorn - though a small one - in Brown’s side.
Anneke hoped to enlarge that thorn. Or create a new one of her own.
She moved deeper into the Draco Quarter, that surface section of Lykis colonised by wealthy criminal elements, whose wealth made the quarter a no-go area for ordinary cops and, to some extent, for RIM operatives.
The Draco Quarter was also where Fat Fraddo had his primary headquarters and where each of the major Companies and Clans had ‘embassies’
- front organisations that liaised with the criminal underworld and in which the Companies and Clans owned substantial (but usually untraceable) stocks and shares. It often paid to have good connections with the criminal world. Criminals were, by definition, expendable. And they did not have to be ‘claimed’ when things went wrong. In such a situation, they were cut loose. Abandoned. Denied.
Of course, one had to pay hefty premiums for professional deniability.
Anneke came to a sharply sloping roof and cat- footed across it. That’s when she stumbled.
A moment’s glitch was all it took. She lost her balance on the dew-slick surface and started to slide. The slide became a wild skid towards the yawning edge of the roof and a drop of twenty floors.
Anneke threw herself down, lying full length on the rooftop. Her mind shifted into overdrive. She had two options. She could activate a sticky grappling field that would slow her slide and even stop it, but which would set off every sensor alarm within three hundred metres.
Or she could fall.
She decided on the latter. A 3-D memory tattoo of the Draco Quarter told her what was below the roof edge. It whipped towards her as she picked up speed. She reviewed it in her mind’s eye, the whole process taking less time than a blink.
A courtyard, seven metres wide, then another building, sixteen floors high. A fall of fifteen metres. Barely doable. She calculated swiftly and realised she needed more speed, not less.
She twisted round, sliding headfirst. Then, with every instinct crying out for her to stop her slide, she started paddling, pushing herself down the sloping surface faster and faster.
Suddenly she shot out into space.
And fell.
She did a half forward roll which her momentum completed, so her feet pointed to the ground. The roof of the opposite building, happily sloping in the other direction and ending in a rooftop garden, rushed up at her as she arced across the gap, dropping like a stone. The chill night air rushed past her.
She had to do this just right, first time.
The angle of the other roof was in her favour. Forty degrees. That would lessen the impact. Her Normanskian muscles, which turned her powerful legs into equally powerful shock absorbers, had to do the rest.
Hit. Roll. Slide.
That was what it would have to - Ooooomph!
The impact smashed the air from her lungs, making her gasp as pain shocked through her limbs. Then she was rolling, relaxing into a slide, which ended in a tree as she fell into the rooftop garden.
Then all was still. Anneke bli
nked, her senses reeling, compensating, and calculating. She took three quick deep breaths, the body mnemonic for shutdown.
Her pulse subsided and her breathing returned to normal. Then it spiked again when a voice, below her, said, ‘Can you get my kitten while you’re up there?’
Anneke peered down. A little girl was staring up at her with a tear-stained face. Anneke looked about, finally spotting the kitten scrunched tightly into a fork, terrified at the large intruder.
Anneke dropped out of the tree and handed the girl her kitten, which immediately buried itself, trembling, into her woolly top.
‘She’s such a bad girl!’
‘Somehow, I don’t think she’ll do a lot of tree climbing after this,’ Anneke said, then added under her breath, ‘me neither, if it comes to that.’
‘What were you doing in my tree?’ asked the girl.
‘I . . . er . . .’ Anneke sighed. Kids and their questions. She decided to tell the truth. ‘I fell off that building over there.’ She pointed.
‘What were you doing up there?’ Just ... getting some fresh air.’
‘You shouldn’t be in the tree.’
‘Sweetie, you are so right. I have to go now. You take care of your kitten, okay?’
‘I will. Her name’s Curly.’
Anneke scratched Curly under the chin, then, using her memory tattoo to guide her, climbed onto the adjacent rooftop and continued on her way. A few minutes later she was within sight of her destination.
This was the headquarters of the Ekud ‘embassy’, a front for the Ekud K’dar, a ruthless criminal ‘family’. Just as many freedom fighter organisations in the past had political arms that sought changes through the political system, so many crime families had bifurcated into a crime group and affiliated Clan. Ekud was one of these. The Clan existed in the public eye and did business as normal. It represented the legit and semi-legit interests of the founding family, the Ekud K’dar.
But the Clan also offered ‘embassy space’ and ‘relations’ to any who would pay. Companies such as Imperial Standard, who preferred others to do their dirty work for them.