Dark Run

by Mike Brooks

  ‘You said to wake you when we came out of the jump,’ Sara said, pointing at the terminal in the corner of the room. ‘It just pinged at me, so I think we’re . . . oh.’ The Hrozan trailed off as Jenna rolled out of bed, then belatedly remembered that she’d stripped off her jumpsuit before she’d gotten in. She covered her embarrassment as best she could by reaching for it casually – she had underwear on, damn it! – and pretending she wasn’t embarrassed at all.

  She checked her wrist chrono.‘Nineteen-hour jump. Sounds about right.’ A quick zip-up and she was once more decent – albeit conscious that her underclothes hadn’t been washed – and ready to face the world.

  Whichever world that happened to be.

  ‘There’s no inhabited systems within nineteen hours of Perun,’ Sara offered from her seat on the floor. ‘I might not have left the system before but I know that much; it’s at least four days’ travel.’

  ‘Then with any luck, we’re in the Olorun system,’ Jenna muttered, crossing to the terminal and tapping it. Before she’d fallen into an exhausted slumber she’d been keeping watch to allow Sara to sleep first, and she’d used that time to thoroughly poke around the systems of the Early Dawn – and by extension, those of the Half Light, the carrier ship they were currently riding inside. Their cabin’s terminal was linked to the mainframe in the bridge, and while it might not have had admin access eighteen hours ago it most certainly did now. What was more, the same linking protocols which, among other things, enabled the Heim drives of the two crafts to be (clumsily) synchronised had given her a pathway to access the larger craft’s systems. There weren’t even any software defences in place, but then who would anticipate needing to defend a slicing attack from their own shuttle?

  When I get back to the Keiko, that’s the first thing I’m setting up.

  The nav data flashed up at her request. Jenna was no pilot, but while a veteran stardog might have committed up to a dozen regularly used jump coordinates to memory or be able to work out roughly what part of the galaxy they were in from the pattern of the numbers thrown out by the nav system, most people would be blind without the computer’s assistance. She ignored the meaningless stream of figures and focused on the annotated diagram.

  ‘On target!’ she muttered, unconsciously giving it the same emphasis as Chiquita Martinez, everbeaming hostess of the popular Serenitan game show of the same title. She looked over at Sara and inclined her head toward the display. ‘Approaching the fourth planet of the Olorun system. Did you fit the tracker?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s ready whenever we want it,’ Sara replied, patting her bag. The device would now be snugly attached to the internal coils of Early Dawn’s main transmitter array. Originally it had been intended not only to pinpoint the shuttle’s location when activated but also piggyback Jenna in to take control of whatever systems she could, but she now had a far better vantage point.

  Of course, it came at the cost of being within the reach of a bunch of very unsavoury people, but she was trying not to think about that.

  ‘Wonderful.’ She sat down in the chair in front of the terminal, thinking. ‘I guess we wait, then.’

  ‘For what?’ Sara asked.

  Jenna looked at her and shrugged. ‘Whatever seems like a good idea. I’m making this up as I go, you know.’

  ‘You’re doing an amazing job,’ Sara said earnestly. ‘Do they teach all GIA operatives to be so self-reliant?’

  ‘Probably,’ Jenna muttered. She felt bad continually lying to Sara, but what other option did she have? Admit that she and the rest of the Keiko’s crew were a group of chancers who were duping the Europans into clearing up their own mess for them? No, there was nothing to do but play the role she’d been assigned to the best of her ability, and hope to hell that Drift, Rourke and the rest would be following. Preferably with some sort of backup.

  Time dragged on. They’d come out of the Alcubierre jump virtually on top of the gas-giant fourth planet, far closer than Jenna would have expected – presumably the Half Light’s crew were running scared of pursuit and didn’t want to get caught in the open if they could help it – and it quickly became clear that their destination was not going to be the isolated, mid-system asteroid they’d thought.

  ‘We’re heading for the ring system,’ she said after a while, checking the nav display.

  ‘We are?’ Sara came to look over her shoulder, although there was little to see.

  ‘This course won’t intersect any of the moons,’ Jenna replied, tracing their approach with one finger to show the Hrozan, ‘and we can’t land on the planet, it’s gas. Wherever we’re going must be in the rings.’

  ‘That tracker had better work,’ Sara muttered. ‘I don’t fancy anyone’s chances of finding us in there otherwise.’

  The rings grew larger. Even shut in the Half Light’s cargo hold and only able to watch what was going on through the nav display, it still took Jenna’s breath away to see a structure many times wider than her home planet stretching away across the sky. She chewed on a ration bar, one of the stock she and Sara had swiped from the galley: they’d taken a chance that no one would notice, on the basis that the piecemeal ‘crew’ would have other things on their mind and probably wouldn’t be spending long in the shuttle anyway. Besides, they hadn’t brought any food with them, not having expected to be on the Early Dawn for more than a couple of minutes.

  ‘There,’ Sara said after a while of them silently watching the almost hypnotic data returns, most of it a shimmering mess as the Half Light’s sensors reported a plane of particles so small as to be indistinguishable from each other. The Hrozan reached across and pointed towards a speck which was starting to stand out against the background noise.

  ‘I think you’re right,’ Jenna nodded. The speck grew into a dot, then gradually swelled into something much larger. Before long their objective was filling the screen – an irregularly shaped lump which resembled nothing so much as a cratered potato spinning gently through its ice-and-rubble-strewn surroundings, except that potatoes didn’t usually have hundred-metre-high, atmosphere-tight docking doors installed in one of their sides. Jenna pulled the nav data back and scanned through the rest of the Half Light’s read-outs, trying to make sense of what was happening simply through the activity taking place on its main computer. However, things became very clear when abrupt deceleration nearly pulled her off her chair.

  ‘Jesus!’ she muttered. ‘I guess the normal pilot’s not on board . . . Ah, they’re going to deploy the mag-anchor.’ She pointed, suddenly realising what one series of rapidly declining numbers meant. ‘There must be a docking plate on the surface.’

  ‘So they’ll be coming on board?’ Sara asked, a note of worry creeping back into her voice.

  ‘I reckon.’ Jenna left the terminal and went to check the lock on the cabin door to make sure her programming was still functioning. She needn’t have worried; the ability to open from the outside had been deactivated when she and Sara had settled down for the ‘night’, and no one would be getting in now without explosives or a cutting torch. Nonetheless, she felt her heart rate start to rise. This was about to get very real indeed.

  The main terminal pinged. Sara looked up at her. ‘Main hatch has been activated.’

  ‘Okay.’ Jenna breathed out and tried to retain her air of calm. ‘So we sit quiet.’

  She tried to picture the crew moving through the Early Dawn, working out how long it would take them to get to the cockpit and down to the engine room. She felt the vibration of the engines start up a little before she’d expected, and then a jolt as the mags disconnected and they rose up off the deck of the Half Light’s cargo hold. The shuttle jerked forwards almost before they’d got any clearance, and both of them tumbled sideways.

  ‘What the hell . . .?’ Jenna scrambled upright, fighting against the acceleration, and slapped the switch which controlled the tinting on the porthole. The viewport shifted from opaque to transparent just in time for her to see the doors of the Half
Light flash by, followed by another momentary lack of gravity as the Heim fields were caught out by the speed the shuttle was travelling at. Then they were out and into the veritable blizzard of ice and dust particles which made up the majority of the ring structure, the gravity reasserting itself and dumping her down on her backside. ‘Who taught these clowns how to fly?!’ she hissed, remembering at the last moment to keep her voice down.

  ‘Something’s spooked them!’ Sara offered. The Hrozan picked herself up off the floor, an expression of hope creeping over her face. ‘Check the scopes!’

  Jenna pulled herself up on the edge of the desk and swept through the read-outs, scanning their surroundings. The Early Dawn’s sensors weren’t powerful: the Half Light’s were much higher spec and she still had access to them thanks to her piggybacked jack-in, but the main ship’s systems were starting to power down now the shuttle was clear of its bay. However, just before they went dark she caught sight of a small anomaly, nearly lost in the readings of the giant planet, which might just have been another ship. Or possibly two.

  ‘Oh, thank God. Thank God, thank God,’ Sara breathed. She grabbed Jenna by the shoulder, so hard that Jenna nearly reached up to peel the other girl’s fingers away. ‘They came after us!’

  ‘Yeah, but these bastards have spotted them,’ Jenna pointed out grimly, ‘and our lot weren’t expecting to have to hunt through a planetary ring.’ She looked out of the viewport again and saw the dark brown, nearly black surface of the asteroid blurring beneath them. ‘We need to attract their attention somehow so they know where to look.’

  ‘Can we do that?’ Sara asked.

  Jenna shrugged. ‘That’s what the tracker’s for. Besides, once we’re inside I should be able to slice into the central systems and we could broadcast what we like.’ She grimaced. ‘Of course, I won’t have a continent’s worth of proxy options so it’ll be fairly clear where it’s coming from, and then it’s just down to whether we can keep Kelsier’s thugs out. Also, we need to be able to convince our crews that we’re not being forced to lure them into a trap, and it’ll have to be a short message so we can get it off before anyone can cut the signal.’

  Something flashed on the terminal as the Early Dawn’s systems linked with that of the asteroid now they were approaching the docking bay. The huge metal doors came into sight through the viewport, the surface of the asteroid rolling across the sky as the shuttle aligned itself with the internal gravity so everyone wouldn’t suddenly find themselves upside down when the Heim drives synced. Jenna followed the signal and logged it on the terminal, tracking the link codes to find a way into the asteroid’s systems. The big rock had a tighter security system than the Half Light . . . but it still wasn’t expecting an attack from within.

  ‘What languages do you speak?’ Sara asked suddenly. The question was so unexpected that Jenna sat blinking at the display, her train of thought abruptly derailed.

  ‘Huh?’

  The shuttle was now pointing at the asteroid, but the access doors were so large the edges of them were still just visible from the viewport and they were starting to slide open. The Early Dawn started to edge forwards before it probably should have done, and a proximity alert flashed up on the display.

  ‘Languages,’ Sara repeated. ‘We need to get a message out, right? What about if we put it in a different language?’

  ‘I just speak English,’ Jenna admitted. ‘Well, and a little bit of Spanish, but so does a third of the galaxy. And my grandmother taught me how to swear in Gaelic – my family’s from Ireland way back – but a bunch of Gaelic swearwords won’t help us. Besides, none of my crew can speak it.’ She looked up. ‘You?’

  ‘Pretty much the same,’ Sara replied, looking a little shame-faced. ‘You know, schools offer optional courses on Our Historic Languages, Czech and Slovak and that, but hardly anyone ever does them.’

  The Early Dawn was passing through the doors. Jenna caught a glimpse of a huge hanger bay cut into the naked rock, enormous fans perhaps half the size of the Jonah in the roof to pump atmosphere in and out as required, then she activated the tinting again just in case there was anyone with a vantage point to see in and wonder who the two nervous-looking girls they’d just caught a fleeting glimpse of were.

  ‘We could try pig Latin, I guess,’ Sara suggested. The gravity fluctuation beneath them was less obvious this time, merely a fleeting impression of added weight as the Heim fields overlapped for a microsecond. ‘Omecay inway?’

  Jenna glared at her. ‘That’s not helping.’

  ‘Well, sorry,’ Sara humphed. ‘I’m just a surveillance tech from Hroza Major, you’re the one who’s been around the galaxy and has a crew that speaks every language under the suns.’ She shrugged. ‘Although I guess we don’t know what languages the people on here speak anyway.’

  Jenna’s eyes widened. Of course, the main languages of the galaxy – English, Spanish, Arabic, Mandarin and so on – were common enough that most people who’d travelled around would be likely to have at least a basic grounding in them, and a lot of the others had virtually died out.

  But not all.

  She got up and grabbed the startled Sara in a hug. ‘You’re a genius!’

  ‘Excuse me?’ Sara extricated herself and pulled back, confusion writ large on her face. ‘What?’

  ‘I know how to do it!’ Jenna beamed, then sobered slightly. ‘Well, probably. I think it’s our best shot at getting a message out which the people looking for us should understand and the people in here with us almost certainly won’t, anyway.’

  ‘I’m not following, I’m afraid,’ Sara admitted, looking a little uncertain. Jenna was about to explain, but then there was another jolt as the Early Dawn set down on the deck, and seconds later the residual thrum of the engines died away. They sat quietly and watched the display, waiting for the signal which would show the main hatch being opened.

  ‘There we go,’ Jenna muttered as it finally flashed up. Her stomach was starting to churn and her palms felt damp with sweat as she contemplated what she was about to try. Of course, she could just sit back, not attract any attention and hope Drift, Rourke and co. would come to the rescue, but there couldn’t be a rescue if no one knew where they were.

  Besides, she was part of a crew, and every member of a crew needed to pull their weight.

  ‘Okay,’ she said, flexing her fingers and looking at the screen. ‘I’m going to be slicing into systems I’ve never seen before via a non-hardlined link, and trying to establish and maintain control against a hostile resistance while also making sure that no one can override the programming blocks I’ve put in place to get back into this shuttle and come shoot us. Does that make any sense?’

  ‘Not really,’ Sara admitted.

  ‘Did it sound impressive?’

  ‘Yeah, pretty much.’

  ‘Good enough.’ Jenna breathed out and eyeballed the display, then carefully lowered her fingers onto the control panel.

  ‘I need a pilot hat . . .’

  MESSAGE IN THE VOID

  In the cold depths of the Olorun system, over the nominally north pole of a ringed, creamy-yellow gas giant which was unnamed so far as anyone within a few light years was aware, two interstellarcapable ships hung in space bound together by a docking link. One was a freighter, a StarCorp Kenya model running under the name of the Keiko, the shell of which must have been three decades old although the thrusters and Alcubierre ring had likely been either repaired or replaced since then. The other was Europan Commonwealth military vessel Draco: significantly newer, slightly smaller and with noticeably more guns. Guns which were, in fact, the current main topic of discussion.

  ‘The plan has changed,’ Captain Rybak stated firmly. She’d turned out to be young, especially by the standards of what Drift would have expected for the commanding officer of a Europan counter-terrorism force, and commanded her bridge with the sort of forceful personality one might expect from a precocious talent in a high-stakes environment. Rourke had de
alt with her one-to-one while in Glass City, and words like ‘stubborn’ and ‘mule-headed’ had featured prominently in her descriptions of the Europan captain.

  ‘That is not an acceptable solution,’ Rourke repeated, a faint tilting of her head and narrowing of her eyes the only signs of her dwindling patience: signs just noticeable to Drift, but far too subtle for someone unfamiliar with her to pick up on. Drift was increasingly glad they’d left Apirana on the Keiko. They’d barely been able to restrain the towering Maori from taking revenge for Micah’s death by beating the life out of the man he’d knocked out in the marketplace, and when Apirana had heard that the Early Dawn had lifted off with Jenna still on board his rage had turned positively incandescent.

  ‘Look, Agent,’ Rybak said, addressing Rourke, ‘we haven’t been able to locate the ship since we came out of the jump. We don’t even know if we’re in the right place, but even if we are, our cover must be blown by now. If we’d come out hot on their tail and still had a chance of taking this base by surprise, I’d be prepared to commit troops to an assault. As it is, I’d be very surprised if our target doesn’t know we’re coming and has had time to prepare, and I’m not going to send my men and women into a death trap. Even if we can find this rumoured asteroid, and that’s a big “if” with the tracker beacon not deployed on the Early Dawn, we won’t be able to open the door. We just blow the damn thing up.’

  ‘You have one ship, and we have no idea how big the asteroid could be,’ Rourke pointed out. ‘This won’t be like shooting up an enemy ship, Captain. I’ve seen smuggler bases like this before; it could be a hundred times your size. Anything solid enough to be habitable inside is going to be pretty resilient to firepower, so you might be able to blow in some windows if they have any, but they’ll just sit tight behind airlocks in the middle. You’d need heavy-duty mining lasers to even make a real dent in that rock, and in the meantime they’re almost certainly going to have defensive gun emplacements to shoot back at you.’