Eden Burning (Fox Meridian Book 7)

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘Sir,’ another idiot responded, ‘we can’t. The internal cameras are intermittent or down and he doesn’t have an implant we can track.’

  ‘Get security teams out to the Garden and his apartment. Now!’

  No one was willing to point out that a lot of the internal communications system was flaking out on them too, so they kept their mouths shut and tried.

  ~~~

  Fox stepped through the shattered glass of the apartment Jackson and Mariel had been given and made her way to the bedroom door. Pausing, she knocked thrice and then twice more before opening the door and leaning in. ‘Room service,’ she said into the darkened room.

  Mariel stepped out of the shadows first, the gauss pistol Fox had given her held at her side, finger away from the trigger. She was followed by an unarmed Jackson. Jackson built guns, among other things, but his idea of firing them involved a clamp mechanism and a lot of electronics to monitor ballistics. Mariel, however, was checked out on pistols. They were both back in their pressure suits.

  ‘Did you have to blow the whole place up?’ Mariel asked.

  ‘No,’ Fox replied. ‘But I really, really wanted to. Plus, I haven’t, yet.’

  ‘It felt like it.’

  ‘I’m moderately sure,’ Jackson said, ‘that if she had blown everything up, we would not be feeling anything.’

  ‘Oh. Probably,’ Mariel agreed.

  ‘We need to go,’ Fox said. ‘There’s a service access not too far from here, but we still have to do this quickly and carefully. You both stay behind me. Mariel, don’t use that thing unless you really need to. I’ve got a lot more ammo than you do.’

  ‘Why the rush?’ Jackson asked as they headed for the door out onto the corridor.

  ‘We need to be clear of certain access corridors before the next set of bombs go off.’

  ‘Uh, why?’

  ‘They’re in the biotech lab and they’re a little close to the route we’re taking to the computer core.’

  ‘Ah, lead on.’

  ‘Will do. Wait there a second.’ Fox hit the button for the door, let it slide open, and then stepped out into the corridor. There was a slight whine from her rifle and then the crackle of needle-like bullets being accelerated past the sound barrier. ‘Okay, we’re clear.’

  Jackson and Mariel followed her out and then down the corridor, stepping without a thought over the three bodies which had until recently been some of Eden’s security guards.

  ~~~

  ‘We are running behind,’ Kit said. She had sent out data to resolve her virtual image for all three of them, but she was not bothering with the details. Her body, floating along as it kept pace, passed through a ventilation fan and appeared on the other side before she went on. ‘Getting past the biotech filters in time will be tight. If we lose more time, it may be fatal.’

  ‘Backup route then,’ Fox said.

  ‘We’re slowing you down,’ Jackson commented.

  ‘Uh, well, yes, but it’s more that we didn’t expect them to have stuffed random chunks of machinery in these service areas. Someone reasonable would have kept them clear. I should’ve known when we found the filtration units behind the biotech lab.’

  ‘You are both progressing precisely as well as my initial calculations suggested,’ Kit said. ‘Unfortunately, my initial calculations were based upon incorrect assumptions.’

  Jackson actually smiled. ‘So often the point of failure in otherwise perfect systems.’

  ‘Practically,’ Fox said, ‘we’re going to be in microgravity sooner.’

  ‘Lucky I took those nausea meds.’

  ‘And we’ll have to be fairly quiet because we’ll be running right next to the control room.’

  ‘You think we could be heard through the walls?’ Mariel asked.

  ‘I could hear them through the walls,’ Fox replied. She scanned over the recalculated route Kit had created for her, with the time estimations. ‘Of course, by the time we get there, they might be a little busy to notice the rats in the walls, but we should take it slowly and carefully anyway.’

  Pausing beside a ladder set into the wall, Fox checked up to be sure it was clear. ‘And here we go. Gravity will reduce as we go up. Are you going to be okay, Jackson?’

  ‘I’ll manage,’ Jackson replied. ‘I really don’t have much choice now, do I?’

  ~~~

  At twenty-three thirty, two thermobaric mines detonated in the biotechnology lab. In the confined space, the detonations tore apart workbenches and glassware, shredded gloveboxes, and turned the large, refrigerated cabinets used to store viruses and bacteria into small, crushed cabinets which leaked. Not that anything biological was going to survive the heat or the fires that followed. The air-filtration units ceased functioning as superheated gasses were pushed through them, but they held structurally and automatically sealed to avoid contamination.

  The station was safe, but that really did not make much difference to Edwin Montcairn. ‘This is sabotage! I want the people responsible rounded up and shot!’ It was not very Christian and it definitely did not sound like the teachings of Joshua, but no one was going to tell Montcairn that.

  ‘W-we have all the security personnel we can get in touch with out looking for whoever is d-doing this, sir,’ the shift leader stated. He got paid the big bucks to take the heat when things went wrong, so he was facing most of Montcairn’s wrath. Of course, no one actually paid the staff…

  ‘What’s the situation in the hangar bay?’

  ‘We don’t know. We’ve lost all communications beyond bulkhead two, and–’

  ‘Well get it back!’ Montcairn roared.

  ‘With respect, sir, how? The workshops and parts stores are behind bulkhead two, which we still believe may be in zero atmosphere. We don’t have the tools, we don’t have the people, and we don’t know whether it’s safe to send them in there to make repairs.’

  The punch Montcairn threw would, probably, have hurt if the man had understood the mechanics of fighting in microgravity. As it was, he just turned on the spot due to the shift in momentum, and had just managed to get himself righted again in time to see the shift leader pushing off for one of the hatches. ‘Get back here!’

  ‘You know so much about this place,’ the shift leader said, ‘you fix it.’

  ~~~

  ‘I believe I detected some disharmony in paradise,’ Jackson said as they cleared the control room and entered the computer bay beside it.

  Fox sealed the hatch behind him. ‘Montcairn doesn’t seem like a people person. It’s best to keep your voice down. That wall is more solid than the ones around the control room, but they might hear us if we’re too loud.’

  Mariel drifted her way to a rack where she could hold on and turned to face them. ‘Montcairn doesn’t like it when things go wrong, I suspect. When he’s in control, he’s all sweetness, light, and veiled threats. When that control goes… Well, the man seems to be trying to destroy the world which killed his wife and daughter. I’m no psychiatrist, but that strikes me as meaningful.’

  ‘Yeah, so let’s give him another headache. Jackson, I need you to find the communications system and start broadcasting something.’

  Jackson, now looking paler than he had, raised an eyebrow. ‘Something?’

  ‘I don’t really care what it is, but it should be loud. Maybe something to warn anyone incoming about the stealth systems on the ghost ships. Make sure someone receiving it can figure out where it’s coming from. Oh, and it might be worth saying that not everyone here is an armed, fanatical nutjob. Most of the people here are just idiots persuaded to go somewhere where they could have a better life. They’re not getting it.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘Then what do we do?’ Mariel asked.

  Fox pulled her duffel out from behind one of the racks. ‘Then, we wait. Hold this position for as long as we need to and wait for someone to come out here and rescue us. I’ve got food packs and water. I’m going to plug mysel
f in to top off my batteries now. We’ll worry about sleep when we need to.’

  ‘When was the last time you ran a sleep cycle?’ Jackson asked as he pulled his way between racks, searching.

  ‘Too long ago, but I’m not noticeably suffering yet. We’ll manage.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound like a great plan,’ Mariel pointed out.

  ‘No,’ Fox agreed, ‘but it’s simple, amenable to change, and it’s what we’ve got.’

  The Philip Sheridan, 28th August.

  It was not long after midnight, maybe ten minutes, when Terri and Kit were asked to come to the control room of the Philip Sheridan. Arnold had given few details, just that they were picking up an unusual communication.

  Terri saw it as soon as she shuffled her way into the room up a ladder which she traversed more by pulling herself along than climbing: her normal fifty-eight kilos felt more like three. Up on one of the screens lining the walls, text was scrolling and Terri tried her best to read it as she made her way over to the gimballed chair where the captain was sitting.

  Kit, of course, had a fully robotic body and the perception speed of an AI working for her. ‘They’re alive. Definitely Jackson and Fox, but I would estimate that Mariel is also.’

  Arnold looked around. ‘You’re sure of that, Kit?’

  ‘The technical information is beyond Fox, but the tactical suggestions are not something Jackson would come up with.’

  Terri grinned. ‘Trust Papa. He gets himself hijacked, but he’s worked out how they did it while it was happening. You need to disable your transponder units, Captain, and have them physically disconnected from your computers.’

  ‘Is it even possible to hack the computers through the transponder?’ Arnold asked.

  ‘If Papa says that’s how it was done, then yes, it’s possible. I seem to recall him complaining about that standard when it was written, but I was a bit young to understand what it was he was complaining about.’

  ‘Huh. Engineering, get that transponder disconnected. Fast as you can. Relay the same to the other ships. You believe this tactical analysis is Captain Meridian’s work, Kit?’

  ‘It’s not Papa’s,’ Terri said with a laugh in her voice. ‘He has ideas for weapons that can take someone’s head off at five kilometres, but if you ask him to use one…’

  ‘From the notes,’ Kit said, ‘Fox has observed one or more of these “ghost ships.” I should take any advice she gives and consider it very carefully.’

  Nodding, Arnold consulted his virtual displays. ‘We’ve made course adjustments toward the signal source. We’re eighty-three minutes out.’ He paused, considering. ‘Have interceptors ready to deploy in one hour. We’ll decelerate behind them and they’ll clear through before we arrive. We’ll set up a second wave to go in with us. Let the assault troops know our ETA and have them ready.’

  ‘You should brief them on the possible non-combatants,’ Kit suggested.

  ‘They’ll be briefed,’ Arnold said grimly, ‘but in this kind of operation, everyone is a combatant until proven otherwise.’

  ~~~

  ‘Heatbloom! Positive one five five by negative one six seven. Repeat, plus one fifty-five by minus one sixty-seven. Range is approximately three thousand.’ The speaker was one of two sensor operators. As Terri glanced his way, his colleague began to work feverishly at her console. ‘Probably a reactor coming online,’ the male officer went on. ‘At a guess, they’re powering weapons.’

  ‘Broadcast the usual warning,’ Arnold said. ‘ECM active.’ Then he turned his attention to the pair of sensor operators. ‘Kadashi, don’t let me down.’

  ‘I’ve got a lock, sir,’ the female sensor officer, presumably Kadashi, replied. ‘Captain Meridian was right about the stealth, but I think I have it. Range confirmed at two nine eight nine point four kilometres.’

  ‘Good. Batteries one through five, prepare to fire on target. Eleven through twenty, ready on point-defence. Six through ten, remain on standby. Miss Martins, Kit, I suggest you get strapped in. There are seats against the back wall.’

  ‘EM spike,’ the male sensor guy announced as Terri clicked the buckles in place on her harness.

  ‘Reading… fourteen-centimetre, unpowered projectile,’ Kadashi said. ‘Trajectory suggests it’s heading for us.’

  ‘Return fire,’ Arnold ordered. ‘Point-defence turrets, fire when ready. Let’s get the interceptors engaged.’

  It was all rather… anticlimactic. Quiet. With the orders given, there was little talk on the flight deck. Kadashi and her colleague announced further projectiles being launched, but Kadashi began to add that the trajectory was off after the first couple. The large screens showed the incomings as tracks moving in on the Philip Sheridan and then vanished as the point-defence batteries took them out, but there was no noise from the weapons, only the hum of the engines vibrating through the hull and the rather calm, clipped chatter of people doing their job. At some point, communications announced that the John S. Mosby was engaging a second target and the data appeared on a secondary screen.

  ‘Explosion detected,’ the second sensor operator announced. ‘I think their reactor’s down.’

  ‘Any more targets?’ Arnold asked.

  ‘Nothing yet, sir.’

  ‘Prepare for attitude change and deployment of assault ships. Let’s get this thing done.’

  Eden Station.

  ‘The UNTPP ships have begun broadcasting a “We are boarding you, stand down” message,’ Kit said.

  ‘And the control room crew don’t know about it?’ Fox asked.

  ‘I’ve blocked all communications outside this room.’

  ‘And I’m a little amazed no one’s thought to come in here to check. This is the main communications hub.’

  ‘If what we heard continued,’ Mariel said, ‘I’d imagine Montcairn is having to run operations himself. Considering how he took the death of his family, I doubt he has excellent crisis-management skills.’

  ‘Huh. Point.’ Fox paused a second. ‘Kit, can you push that warning out through the station’s PA system?’

  ‘Yes. It won’t get everywhere since you blew up some of the cabling, but I can route it.’

  ‘Was that a bit of sarcasm in there?’

  Kit’s avatar smiled sweetly. ‘I have no idea what you mean.’

  ‘Right. Do it, then I’m going to unplug.’

  Jackson looked around at Fox and frowned. ‘What are you planning to do?’

  ‘I don’t want Montcairn slipping away into the crowd,’ Fox replied. ‘I’m going to hunt him down before he has a chance to.’

  ‘And capture him?’

  Fox’s grin was malicious. ‘Don’t worry, Jackson. I’m not going to kill him unless I really have to. I want him to live a long life, in a hole on the Moon.’

  ~~~

  Fox dropped through the hatch into the command centre, her rifle scanning around as she went. Perhaps it should not have come as a surprise to find only three people left at their positions: Kit and Jackson had basically made the room less than useless over the past hour or so.

  One of them, a woman, looked around at Fox with eyes which spoke of fear, weariness, and resignation. ‘I didn’t think you people would get in so fast,’ she shouted over the message being blasted out of the room’s speakers.

  ‘They haven’t,’ Fox replied. ‘I’m ex-UNTPP. Your boss kidnapped a couple of my friends and got me as a surprise bonus. I want him. Where’s Montcairn?’

  The woman’s face twisted in hatred. ‘You did all this? You killed… all those people?’

  The anger actually looked genuine; maybe the woman was not all bad… ‘The ones stuck in the beehive you people built? There’s nothing wrong with them. They’re probably happier now you’re not piping doom and gloom videos in there.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We faked the alarms. Where’s Montcairn?’

  The relief on the woman’s face suggested there was something more personal than simple loss of lif
e involved in her reaction. A lover among the capsules? Family? Whatever, she seemed to have no great love for Montcairn. ‘He went looking for Joshua. I think he’s got some sort of escape capsule or bolthole. Somewhere he thinks he can go to stay away from the cops. With the networks down, we can’t track him, but…’

  ‘But?’

  ‘Montcairn’s an asshole, but Joshua… Joshua’s either the real deal or he’s really deluded. If the world’s falling apart, he’ll go to the chapel.’

  Fox nodded and started to turn, catching herself and looking back. ‘Stay here. When the cops come in, don’t resist. I have no idea what happens next with all of you, but if you cooperate… Things will be better than if you don’t.’ She pushed off for the hatch.

  ‘Thanks,’ the woman said from behind her.

  ‘No problem,’ Fox replied. No. If anyone was going to have a problem, it was Montcairn.

  The Philip Sheridan.

  ‘The hangar bay is ours,’ Arnold said. ‘We’ve a couple of interceptor frames covering it and we’ve put troops in. They hit some resistance, but nothing we’d consider a serious threat.’ The captain’s lips curved slightly. ‘Those new rifles MarTech Defense Technologies supplied are very effective against basic ballistic suits.’

  ‘Fox tested the prototype as a pistol,’ Terri said. Now that the situation was contained within the asteroid base, which was now surrounded by three cruisers, Terri and Kit had moved back up to the captain’s chair. A third ghost ship had made itself known, but it had fallen foul of the main gun on one of the other cruisers, which had split it open like an egg. Things definitely seemed to be going the UNTPP’s way. ‘And the micromissile launcher is based on technology developed for her current sidearm.’

  ‘Huh. Well, the midsection was breached through airlocks. Someone seems to have persuaded the main computer that there was a major decompression incident in there and all the bulkheads are closed. Lots of scared, confused people, but very few security personnel. And they gave up as soon as they saw our people.’

  ‘I’d imagine we can thank Kit for the fake air leak.’

  Arnold glanced at Kit. Kit shrugged. ‘I can be in nine places at once. One of them is generally Fox’s second processor. We make a good team.’