by Jim Graham
He logged onto the ship’s net and spoke into his graf:
‘Bing, tell everyone to clear the next section of the corridor and let them know we’ll PIKL anyone who shows his face. They’ve got 30 seconds.’
‘OK, Scat. We’re still working on the FDL bleed but should have the video restored in a few minutes.’
Fine. Not that the video would matter in a few minutes time. We’ll be too busy to watch it.
He called up the ship’s schematics, looking for the medical centre. It was maybe 30 or 35 metres further along the ring’s corridor, on the right hand side. There were two large rooms between the fire door and the medical centre: a dining hall and a media centre. The bunks were further up the ring. The medical centre’s corridor walls were made of glass, so there could be no stealthy approach. It would be a rush for the door, hoping to catch the beggar before he scarpered.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked of the team leader.
‘Bradley, sir.’
‘OK, Bradley, when we burst in, I want one man either side of the first two doors, here and here,’ he said, pointing them out on his graf projection, ‘with you, and one other, moving passed the medical centre to cover the next two doors and the next section of the ring, here, here and here. Goosen and I will tackle whoever's in the medical centre, which is here. Got it?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘It’s Scat,’ he said, turning the projection around so the other three could see the schematic.
‘Yes, Scat,’ Bradley replied with a smile. His guys stepped away and made ready. ‘OK, guys, you heard him. Scag, you and I go to the far end. Fanny, Clinker; you’ll cover the first two doors. Safeties off!’
Bradley looked at Scat, waiting for him to open the fire door.
‘And don’t be gentle on anyone who gives you trouble,’ Scat said. ‘Tyson, is the video up yet?’ he asked over his graf.
‘Yes, sir. It’s just the one guy. He’s on the far side of the room, opposite the main doors. He’s fiddling with some equipment.’
Scat looked back at Bradley.
‘OK. Ready?’ he asked as he moved to one side.
Bradley nodded.
Scat pushed down on the red release button set into the door paneling. The security team raced up the corridor. Scat turned to look at Goosen.
‘Let’s go’, he said and then flinched as an explosion rocked the ring.
Goosen hit the floor, joining Scat who was a little quicker.
‘Fark!’
He looked up. The corridor had filled with swirling smoke. The extractor fans sucked hard to pull it into the ceiling.
Scat leaned through the door and peered into the smoke. He shouted.
‘Bradley! Are you OK?’
Nothing. Some coughing. Then some expletives.
‘Bradley! What just happened?’
‘They just got their arses handed to them, Scat.’ It was Bing on the graf. ‘I can’t see the other two. The guy in medical centre is climbing onto a bed. He’s fiddling with a ceiling tile. It looks like he has a PIKL.’
‘Thanks Bud,’ Scat acknowledged. ‘Birdie, let’s go.’
Scat sprang up and raced down the corridor. He passed Fanny and Clinker, who knelt, doubled over, coughing and sucking in dirty air. Racing up the corridor to the medical centre entrance, he saw a pair of legs hanging from the ceiling on the other side of the glass wall. When he reached the entrance, he found the dead and still burning figures of Bradley and Scag.
The centre’s glass doors had two large holes punched through them. In the wall opposite was a larger hole, its buckled paneling opening out into a recreation room. Whoever was in the medical centre hadn’t fired a warning shot, that’s for sure: he had used the PIKL at full power.
Goosen pushed past him, burst into the room and ran across to where the legs were fast disappearing. He jumped up, grabbed an ankle and hung on, pulling himself off the floor.
A section of the ceiling gave way, revealing an air vent that came crashing to the floor with the man lying face down inside of it. A weapon clattered to the ground beside him.
Goosen let go for a second. He scrambled to his knees and grabbed the man’s trouser belt to haul him free. An elbow came back into his face, stunning him. He dropped his PIKL. Then he was in a fight for life.
The man got a hand to Goosen’s weapon and tried to put a finger inside the trigger guard. Goosen smothered him, keeping his arm pinned the floor so he could not bring it around and take a shot. He punched him twice in the back of the head and then grabbed the man’s hair to bring it sharply backwards, but somehow the saboteur twisted onto his back, almost wriggling free.
Despite being the bigger man, Goosen daren’t let the beggar go; not only was he incredibly wriggly, but he was also very quick; his hands couldn’t be held down for more than a few seconds before one of them was free again, swiping him around the ear or chopping into his neck.
A knee jerked upwards, twice, aimed at his groin. It didn’t matter that Goosen was on top—he was taking a beating.
Where the hell is Scat? he thought.
Jeeze – where the blazes is he?
‘Stay down, you fark! Stay down!’ he grunted, but the more agile man wasn’t listening. Again, Goosen got a clip on the neck, and another knee in the groin.
Eventually Goosen had had enough. He pushed the man’s head down with his forearm, exposed the throat, applied a bear sized paw across it and then pushed himself up from the body as though doing a one handed push-up. He looked into the man’s eyes to see if his resistance was fading, but saw only a flash of anger, and, too late, sensed a knee come up to strike him between his legs—again.
Under the crush of such a big hand, and with so much weight bearing down on his throat, Rolf could sense the end. He had slugged it out with some hard nuts in his time, but this brut did not seem to have the same physiology as normal people. He had already slugged him twice on the carotid sinus and he knew his knee had hit its mark on more than one occasion, but the ox just would not roll off him. He had done all he could, and yet all he saw was a reddening of the bastard’s face and a hint of frustration ... and he still has his hand around my throat. I can’t breathe ... Oh, shit! Things are getting fuzzy …
Even after the man went limp, Goosen did not dare let him go. He could see the man’s face swell, then go blue, and had sensed his strength ebb away, but feared it was a feint, a ruse. Still, he relaxed the grip on the throat to allow the man to take a breath if he needed to, making sure he had his weight well and truly covering the man’s arms and legs. But there was no movement. No pulse.
Shit!
He let go slowly, pulling himself to his feet, shaking his head and wiping blood from his right eye. Then he stomped on the man’s chest and dropped to his knees, to conduct some mouth to mouth.
‘Whoa, there, Birdie! Why don’t you use a ventilator? It’s better than sticking your tongue down his throat. We’re in a medical centre, after all…’
Goosen looked up. It was Scat. Finally!
‘How long have you been sitting there!’ he asked, still heaving and sweating from his exertions.
‘Not long. You were doing just fine. Though I’m surprised you let him kick you in the nuts so easily—and so often.’
‘Hand me those paddles, you…’ Goosen couldn’t think of an appropriate expletive. ‘If you want to know what else he was up to, he’s got to be fit to answer questions.’
Scat could see Goosen was angry, so he leaned forward to pass him the paddles, then leaned over again to hand him some gel. Goosen zapped the body and checked for a pulse. He found one as Rolf gasped through a crushed windpipe. Goosen looked up and around the med centre.
‘Find me an endotracheal tube.’
Scat looked blankly at him.
‘His windpipe is a little squishy,’ Goosen explained. ‘It’s a breathing tube. A clear plastic tube, tapered at one end, with a flat opening at the broader end. It’s slightly curved.’
&
nbsp; Scat opened a few cupboards and eventually tossed Goosen an orange box.
‘And get a medic!’
Scat looked around and gestured at an empty room, shrugging.
‘Oh! You mean get one of the crew up here?’
‘Can you stop pulling my chain, Scat? Of course, that’s what I meant. I’m only a first responder. We’ll need better skills than mine to to keep this fark alive.’
‘Relax, Birdie. They’re on their way. Bing’s on to it.’
Still panting, Goosen sat back on his heels and forced a sarcastic smile through split lips. Scat smiled back, got up and walked to the medical centre door. When he reached it, he turned around.
‘Once we’ve found out what else he was doing, he’ll pay for Bradley and Scag.’
‘Blimey, Scat! He’s three parts dead already. You want to show him hell for a second time?’
103
The Venture Raider jumped into G-eo space a few hours too late. Tremont’s Lynthax Tower was a smoking ruin and the V4 was long gone. The neuralnet, companynet, publicnet and Tremont’s Housenet were all down, but the radio frequencies were bursting with traffic.
‘Damn,’ Commander Abel exclaimed. ‘They’re quick off the mark. Ashmore will be next, I suspect.’
From his observer's chair at the back of the cabin, Petroff continued listening to the three frequencies dedicated to Tremont’s emergency services. They appeared to be coping, but only just. He held a quick conference call, or rather an awkward three-way radio conference, with Lynthax’s local head of security and Tremont’s police commissioner. They told him of the extent of the damage, and the contents of Scat’s public broadcast.
Ironically, G-eo’s public now knew more about the rebellion than they did on Trevon, but there was no point dwelling on that. He could sense a pattern was emerging, or at least believed he could confirm the goal of each attack. The G-eo attack was a carbon copy of the one on Trevon. Scat was going for quick and repeatable successes, intent on causing damage to Lynthax, specifically its data and comms. He wasn’t yet going after production, or after Earth.
Petroff glanced over at the star map which showed this quarter of the Outer-Rim, then realised he needed a 3-D version. He interrupted Abel who was talking quietly to his second-in-command.
‘Abel, throw up a hologram of the Outer-Rim—highlight everything that’s ours.’
Abel nodded to the SG operator. They waited for the projection to lock into place.
‘It’s up, sir,’ Abel confirmed, pointing at the conference room.
Petroff sprang from his chair.
‘Then join me.’
They stepped past the star map and into a conference room where they walked around the projection bench, peering into the blue light, looking at the relationship between G-eo, Ashmore and Constitution from various angles.
Abel could see the shortest path between the planets.
‘So—Ashmore, then? That’s next.’
G-eo was the closest planet to Trevon—it just happened to be a Lynthax world; Ashmore was the next along the Rim, again, a Lynthax world; then there was Alba, an Asian Bloc world, which he could ignore. Constitution was the next Lynthax planet after that, though significantly “off plane”.
Petroff looked at his graf to check what time had elapsed since the rebels had attacked the Lynthax Centre on Trevon and did some mental math. If the rebels were taking an hour or so to get to each, and around an hour to launch and retrieve a shuttle, then the race to Ashmore would be a very close-run thing. But …
‘Probably ... possibly,’ Petroff said, considering an alternative. ‘Forget Ashmore,’ he decided. ‘We aren’t so heavily invested there. How long will it take for us to get to Constitution?’
‘At max speed? Two hours.’
‘Then max it out. I want to be there before they’ve finished with Ashmore.’
Petroff marched back to the observer's chair, sat down and drummed his fingers on the armrest.
The chase was on. But, something deep inside his gut was nagging at him. Something was telling him this would not end quickly, or cleanly. This might just take a while.
He shook his head.
No it wouldn’t, he told himself: he would get them at Constitution, and, when he did, he would get on with a day of hangings. And if there wasn’t enough rope to do the job, he would vent them from an airlock himself—and watch their blood turn to gas.
‘Hurry up, Abel. It’s a race. I intend to win it.’
Even if it were to be a long and winding road.
104
2215
Samuel Cohen lay on his bunk reflecting on his reason for being on G-eo.
As far as he was concerned, the upcoming meeting with the rebels was to be the last set piece in a long and bruising game, now entering the last few minutes of extra time. As for what the rebels were thinking, well …
Earth had been desperate for the raw materials needed to sustain its population even before the Resource Wars and the only way to get them, without resorting to yet another round of conflict, had been to persuade the resource companies to risk it all on exploiting space.
In exchange for risks the companies were taking, the UN issued them with mandates to run all the New Worlds they could discover and develop. That became a license to print money—a license that then needed protecting. So the companies bought themselves some insurance: influence within the democratic institutions on Earth. Over time, they began to assert influence over policy.
It became Bloc policy to leave ISRA underfunded, stack the ISRA Appeals Court with company men and to manipulate the United Nations. Gradually the resource companies became more influential than governments.
Cohen had no problem with shareholders making money, even as a quasigovernment employee his retirement plan depended on it, but he had a problem with money dominating the democratic process. He had lived long enough to see the injustice of it, how it could distort a system, stifle innovation and harden the arteries of progress. Things needed to change.
And they now were.
Re-establishing democracy was always going to be messy. Earth was ill equipped for a rebellion in space. Its lifeline to the New Worlds was particularly vulnerable to the rebels’ constant attacks. When the resource companies couldn’t deliver their product, their share prices tanked, global stock markets reeled and commodity prices shot up. Industry ground to a halt, crops failed, and millions died.
Just as he had expected.
The resources companies weren't a Goldman Sachs Levine, a JP Morgan Barclays or a Greater China Banking Corporation. When people described them as being “too big to fail”, it wasn't so they could avoid a recession with a public hand-out. They were simply too important to fail: if they failed, so too did Earth.
The rebellion also hurt the New Worlds. Some companies closed their operations completely and shipped their staff back to Earth. Where they couldn’t afford it, or, because they were going into administration, they took their workers to the local support planet and dismissed them there.
That had left thousands of people reliant on the local New World governments—all of them run for a profit and utterly unsuited and unused to providing social welfare. And with transport links disrupted, life sustaining imports in short supply and local authorities facing an increasing social burden, there followed inflation, increased borrowing and local currency depreciation, higher interest rates, debt default and higher local taxation. People were not happy. Capital had taken flight.
It wasn’t long before Earth realised there was a real possibility of losing the New Worlds; Earth was becoming fearful of its isolation and its population was panicking. Governments were at last asking questions about the New World mandates.
Still, the pushback required an extra shove.
The how, what, why, where and when was provided by Cohen. His paper on the causes of the insurgency was widely circulated. In his conclusions, he made several recommendations, all of which he had carefully consid
ered, even before he unleashed the insurgency on the New Worlds.
As Cohen’s sponsor, the Inter-Space Regulatory Authority had promoted the recommendations to the UN. The Blocs had no option but to endorse them. The UN eventually adopted them and passed the responsibility of implementing them back to ISRA.
The rollout had begun six months ago. It began with a round of consultations on Earth and then across the Outer-Rim. Four months ago, ISRA introduced direct transport links between several of the New Worlds. Next month, they were to review the mandates of several others, making them subject to much stricter ISRA oversight.
The effect was real and immediate.
Two months ago, the Raddox board endorsed the proposals. They told their representatives to persuade the other companies to sign on. Work stoppages at its OR mines became less frequent, and its shipments normalised as the rebels switched their attacks to the remaining holdouts. The company’s share price began to stabilise, and its cost of borrowing dropped.
Other companies followed out of financial necessity. The ripple became a wave, and the wave was fast becoming a tide.
With more and more resource corporations accepting ISRA’s proposals, the citizens of the Outer-Rim now sensed the possibility of a new relationship with Earth. And so long as their Houses signed up to discuss the new transport links, and the resource companies agreed to revise their mandates, they had less need to rely on vaguely worded promises of independence from the rebels. The rebels no longer represented their interests—ISRA did.
The democratic process was at last reasserting itself. Cohen felt confident for the future. Booni’s sacrifice in a side street on Trevon was achieving all he had expected of it. By inciting a physical rebellion, facilitating its initial successes, and then promoting a solution, Earth’s ISRA, more specifically ISRA’s Cohen, had strengthened the position of Earth’s democratic institutions relative to the all-powerful resource companies, at least in space. His final goal—to carve the corporations out of the democratic process on Earth—was clearly within reach.
In the meantime, the rebels continued to push against the tide, which was a pity. Cohen understood their commitment to democracy. He respected their resourcefulness. He admired their persistency. In truth, they had kept him intellectually honest as they continued to innovate and surprise, constantly forcing him to update his plans. But the rebellion had to stop soon. Democracy on Earth depended on it.