‘It sounds like the best way in without tripping any alarms,’ Aneka agreed. ‘Think you’re up for it, love?’
‘I think so. Maybe we could run some simulations. How long before we’re in position?’
‘It will be early tomorrow before we arrive at the designated target location,’ Gwy supplied.
Ella sighed. ‘Being able to warp into a system is really much more convenient, isn’t it? At least we’ll have time for some practice.’
2.2.530 FSC.
Ella’s lips formed a thin line as she guided Gwy toward one of the Herosian shuttles. It had a thirty-minute flight time and it had been flying for seven minutes, but her main concern was that Aneka was currently clinging to the outside of the ship without an air supply.
Not, she reminded herself, that Aneka needed an external air supply the way she did. Somewhere in Aneka’s chassis her body stored oxygen which her semi-organic components used when she could not breathe. Thinking about it, no one had ever explained where the oxygen was actually stored. Ella had this theory: there had to be a reason aside from aesthetics for that increase in cup size…
In front of Ella the virtual display highlighted the shuttle. Light out here was not exactly bright, but the ship’s sensors were making the most of it. Besides, the thermal signature from the fusion engines was bright enough, even when they were not burning, to make the small vessel easily detectable.
Along with the highlighted visuals, Gwy was displaying the current projected flight path. Ella lifted the nose slightly, raising the line of glowing rectangles which showed where she was going.
‘We will pass a little more than ten metres from the upper hull of the shuttle at this trajectory,’ Gwy stated.
‘That’s close enough,’ Aneka said, her voice relayed in through Ella’s connection to the ship. ‘Probably a little too close.’
‘You make the jump and I’ll pull away,’ Ella replied firmly. She was not going to take risks with Aneka’s life at this stage. If the shuttle detected her, and she was pretty sure it would not, at least Gwy had a good chance of getting clear. If Aneka missed the jump then getting her back was going to be a lot harder. ‘Range, Gwy?’
‘Seven hundred metres,’ the AI replied. ‘We are closing at fifty-eight metres per second.’
‘Twelve seconds, sheelee,’ Ella said. ‘You be careful. Make contact once you’re inside.’
‘No problem, love. I’m wearing the ultimate in Xinti adaptive camouflage, remember. I’ll be fine.’
‘You’d better be. If you get yourself killed I’ll murder you. And you know I don’t react well to having to kill people.’
‘Just make sure I’ve got you and Gwy to come back to, okay? I don’t want to have to float back home.’
Ella watched the flight path display vanish in front of her as the distance closed and applied some braking thrust to slow Gwy’s closing speed.
‘Five seconds,’ Gwy announced. ‘Relative velocity twenty-three metres per second… fifteen… Go now, Aneka.’
‘Love you, Ella,’ Aneka said, and then the connection was cut.
Ella bit her lip, counted to ten, and then pushed up and away from the shuttle. With a hundred metres between the two ships she pulled the nose up and put more power into the reactionless drive, accelerating out of the cluster of stations which formed the military complex Aneka was infiltrating.
‘Aneka has successfully attached herself to the outer hull of the shuttle,’ Gwy told her.
‘All right. Give me a flight plan to our holding position and then get the comms system lined up.’ Immediately another set of guide rectangles appeared ahead of her and Ella adjusted the ship’s attitude to follow them.
‘Your heart rate and breathing are elevated, Ella,’ Gwy told her. ‘I understand your anxiety, but you should try to remain calm. Aneka is very good at this kind of operation. She will succeed.’
‘It’s not quite that easy for us organics, Gwy. When someone we have feelings for is in danger, we tend to get anxious.’
‘Don’t worry. I am quite sure that you will soon be making all those strange noises in my cabin again.’
‘I hope so,’ Ella said, her voice soft. ‘I really hope so.’
~~~
Aneka lay with her body pressed as close to the hull of the shuttle as she could manage, holding on via a device which gripped the smooth metal using molecular bonding. She was pretty sure it would hold onto the ship; her only worry was that she might fail to hold onto it, but the little craft she was riding was incapable of sharp acceleration so she was probably safe.
‘Do we have an estimate on flight time?’ she asked silently.
‘An estimate, yes,’ Al replied. ‘Based on the distance we had left to travel and the time we have been here, I estimate another five minutes before we reach the hangar bay.’
‘Right.’ It felt like she had been there for an hour, but it was more like fifteen minutes. She looked up and could see little aside from the lights on the shuttle. The asteroid was dark; composed of matte black rock which reflected little in the way of light. But there was something out there blocking her view of the stars. Something almost two hundred metres in length, massing a hundred thousand tonnes or so. She lowered her face back to the metal.
They knew too little about the interior of the asteroid. It had some fairly extensive communication systems and the sensors on the probe suggested that there was a heavy layer of exotic matter hidden away under the rocky exterior. There was evidence of weaponry; extended observation had shown what appeared to be beam weapon turrets, but no sign of any missile launchers of the type Aneka had programmed into her simulation. The hangar bay was at one end of the slightly irregular, lozenge-shaped object. Aside from that, however, the interior was a mystery.
In preparation for that mystery, Aneka was going in loaded for bear. A camouflaged pack on her back contained her two machine pistols, ten implosion mines, a rather special communicator, and a specialised computer which was going to deliver the virus into the asteroid’s communications system. Hopefully that was going to be enough. The difficult bit was going to be figuring out where she needed to be to use any of it.
‘I’m picking up traffic between the shuttle and the asteroid,’ Al informed her. ‘Standard approach chatter, but there is one interesting thing: the asteroid’s codename is apparently “Summer Retreat.”’
‘Kind of an odd name for an asteroid in a system without planets. Then again, someone could say, “I’m going to my summer retreat,” and no one would understand the reference.’
‘Given how hot most Herosian worlds are, a summer retreat would likely be somewhere a little cooler. We’ll be entering the bay in around a minute.’
Aneka looked up again in time to see a large section of the rocky hull opening outward. Two blocks of stone were hinging out on thick supports to reveal the dimly lit space beyond. There was one flashing navigation light visible and that seemed to be where the shuttle was headed. She could just about make out some structures: docking tubes, what looked like an observation deck with slightly brighter lighting showing through a window, and there were a couple of figures moving about.
The shuttle began reorienting itself as it passed through the doors. Aneka started moving across its hull, releasing and then reattaching the grapple to drag herself around toward the starboard side which seemed to be where the craft was going to dock. A glance back showed the doors closing behind them; there was no going back now, not that she planned to. Docking clamps reached out to lock the shuttle in place and a hard-walled tube began to extend from under the observation window. That was Aneka’s cue; she pushed off from the ship, gliding through empty space to land in the open end of the cylinder. There was a two-metre airlock section there which would be pressurised once a seal had been made, and that was her way in with minimal chance of detection. Still, a couple of minutes trapped in a couple of metres of airless tube felt like hours.
‘One-point-one-five atmospheres,’ Al said,
‘standard for a Herosian environment.’
As he said it, the inside door slid open and Aneka moved into the tube where she had more space to avoid anyone coming off the ship. She did not have to wait long either; a minute later a half-dozen Herosians walked off and straight past her as she stood against the wall.
‘This camouflage system is incredible,’ Aneka commented.
‘It helps that Herosians are arrogant enough to believe that no one could possibly find them here.’
‘Huh.’ Aneka fell into step behind the line, slipping through the door at the end of the tube and into a reception room where she came to a sudden stop at the sight waiting for her. The Herosians ignored it, filing past through a door on the left, but Aneka found herself unable to move.
Guarding the room was a robotic construct almost three metres in height. Everything from the digitigrade legs to the rather small, angular head. She had seen one of them before, in the museum in Yorkbridge. That one had been all polished metal and she had thought it looked kind of stupid, but this one, which was moving, still had a glossy feel to its blue-tinted armour. Maybe when the Xinti had gone to war they had not really cared about stealth. They did care about heavy armament; the thing was holding a massive, multi-barrelled rifle. But beyond the sheer physicality of it…
‘That’s not possible,’ Al said.
‘I think that’s my line,’ Aneka replied. ‘I’m supposed to say that and then you tell me it obviously is possible because it’s there.’
‘The Xinti are gone. And even if they still existed they would never be working with the Herosians.’
‘It does seem a little… No, actually it’s a lot out of character. I’ll accept “this doesn’t make sense.” Right now I need to make my legs move. How good are the senses on those things?’
‘Enhanced, wide-angle, multispectral vision, enhanced hearing, and a spherical lidar system. If you’re quiet, the suit’s camouflage should hide you, however.’
‘He’s going to notice when the door opens on its own.’
‘Not if the doors malfunction.’
The Xinti’s body tensed suddenly as all of the doors in the room slid open simultaneously. Aneka could tell the thing was on alert, which was not going to help, except that then the doors started closing and opening randomly, each making a hiss as it moved. Aneka slipped out in the direction the Herosians had gone, leaving a confused-looking Xinti behind her.
‘How can you tell it was confused?’ Al asked as she moved down the corridor.
‘Well… It was kind of… Just keep watch for any internal alert broadcasts, okay?’
‘I am picking up internal transmissions, but nothing indicating an alert. That guard has sent out a network message requesting a maintenance team. The networks are using Herosian military-grade encryption.’
‘Not Xinti?’
‘Not Xinti,’ Al confirmed.
Aneka spotted a door, tapped the button beside it, and found herself looking into what appeared to be a storage area. That would do. She slipped inside and closed the door behind her.
‘So we have a Xinti in a war body working with Herosians and using Herosian encryption to communicate?’ Aneka summed up.
The room was large enough that the crates in it did not take up too much of the space, despite there being a lot of them. Finding a place to hide for a few minutes while she prepared was not too hard. Slipping in behind a row of boxes, she took off her pack, deactivated her stealth systems, and got to work.
‘The situation appears rather more complex than we thought,’ Al agreed.
‘If you can listen in on their network, I don’t suppose you can hack it and get us a map?’ She took out her guns, putting them down on the deck where she could get at them easily, and then located the communicator.
‘That would require more transmission than I would like. We can no longer assume the staff here are unfamiliar with their technology, and we have to view them as… more competent than a typical Herosian. I would have been wary of such an attempt if all we were worried about was Herosian sensor operators.’
Aneka placed the cylindrical device on its end and activated it. ‘Well, we need a short-range link to this so I can talk to Ella and Gwy. As you said, this has got more complicated.’
‘Connection established. The unit is attempting to synchronise with Gwy.’
The gadget was a neutrino communicator, and it was another piece of ultra-high-tech magic. Aneka remembered her brother mentioning neutrinos; they were weird little particles which basically passed through everything. You could stand on a planet and have millions of the things fly through you every second and you would never know. Back then, detecting them required tonnes of industrial cleaning fluid in a deep mine. This thing could detect them through some interesting use of gravity and force field technology, which was useful since she would have had trouble lugging a salt mine around. The beam it produced was basically impossible to detect or intercept, but it was also point-to-point; right now the device was locating Gwy by dead reckoning combined with trial and error.
‘We have a link to Gwy,’ Al announced after another minute.
‘You made it.’ Ella’s voice, sounding relieved, came over the beam a second later.
‘I made it,’ Aneka replied. ‘I’m in a cargo hold near the hangar bay, but there’s a complication.’
‘What kind of complication?’
‘There was a guard in the reception room off the hangar. Ella, it was a Xinti war body. Just like the one in the museum, except less shiny.’
There was a pause, a long pause, and then, ‘Those things are basically robots. They could have captured some, replaced the Xinti brain with a normal computer…’
‘Yeah, but why? They are not very fond of the Xinti. Especially that form. There were probably more normal robots around they could use.’
‘Yes, but what I’m saying is that that thing doesn’t mean there are Xinti here.’
‘I agree with Ella,’ Gwy interjected. ‘This information indicates a necessity for additional caution, but of itself it does not indicate a Xinti presence.’
‘Well, we did think it was weird to see Xinti working with Herosians,’ Aneka replied. ‘I mean, that would be overcoming some major hate on both sides. Do we have any better data on my targets?’
‘Not really,’ Ella replied. ‘Everything I’ve come across is pointing the same way. Heat distribution suggests the primary power system is in the same area as you are now. All the communications emissions are coming out from the central section, so we still figure that’s where the main comms suite is located.’
‘I’m expecting you to find a high-end fusion reactor,’ Gwy said. ‘It is likely toward the core of the station, probably around twenty metres away toward the midsection.’
‘Okay,’ Aneka replied, ‘I’ll start there. I’ll get in touch again when I’ve loaded the virus.’
‘Be careful,’ Ella said. ‘Please.’
Aneka grinned, an act made a little difficult by her skintight suit of living metal. ‘I will be, love.’ She closed the connection and packed away the communicator, and then she checked one of the nearby crates since it was there.
‘Interesting,’ Al commented as Aneka looked at the contents.
‘Grenades,’ Aneka said and checked another crate, which contained rifles. ‘It’s a weapons store. Antimatter rifles?’
‘It would appear so. The small graphic on the grenades? That thing that looks like an atom in red, it’s the Federal radiation hazard symbol. They may be micro-nukes, or antimatter.’
Aneka slipped one of the mines out of her pack, primed it, and put it into the crate with the grenades. ‘Well if they’re nukes that probably won’t set them off, but if they’re antimatter…’
‘We won’t want to be here when the containment fails,’ Al finished for her.
Aneka grinned and got ready to go out. Her pistols went in camouflaged holsters strapped to her thighs. The all-around coverage would make it hard
er to get to them in a hurry, but it was better than having to get them from her pack. Then the pack went back onto her back and its stealth system was activated. With that done, she slipped back out of the hold and started down the corridor.
~~~
‘If there are Xinti aboard that station,’ Ella said, ‘what does that do to our probability of horrible death?’
Gwy appeared beside the flight chair, apparently hanging in space. ‘It would reduce our chance of success. I’m unsure what you would consider a horrible death, so I can’t evaluate that part of your query.’
‘I can’t really believe there are any. Not really. I mean, how could there be?’
Gwy managed to look thoughtful, despite having features composed entirely of obsidian. ‘The AIs in Negral, when they were still there, concluded that the chance of any Xinti surviving the war outside of that system was essentially nil. They have not revised that estimate.’
Ella looked out at the distant asteroid. ‘I could imagine one or two surviving, but not enough that they could have a guard standing around doing nothing. No… I think there’s something else going on.’ She frowned. ‘That doesn’t make me feel better.’
‘No,’ Gwy said, ‘me neither.’
~~~
‘This place is a ghost town.’
The corridors had been empty as they walked down them. There seemed to be no more guards about. Aneka had, in fact, seen no one for ten minutes.
‘There is a high level of automation on this station,’ Al replied. ‘Far more than one would expect on a Herosian facility.’
‘We’re getting that a lot lately. They’re obviously using Xinti tech to keep the crew requirements down, but why? Why bother? There are plenty of Herosians.’
‘Might I suggest that we don’t look a gift horse in the mouth?’
‘I’ve never met a gift horse with good teeth.’ Aneka stopped in front of the door she had found at the bottom of a ladder. ‘You said that atomic symbol meant “radiation hazard,” right?’
Aneka Jansen 5: The Greatest Heights of Honour Page 26