by Kalina, Mark
The skylane they flew in was marked mostly by the pattern of other aircars, though once in a while they flew past shimmering holographic adverts aimed at the air traffic. Below was the sprawl of Yuro IV's New Capital City, not nearly as photogenic here on the city's fringe as it was in the city's core, among the kilometer high showcase towers that flanked the city's orbital elevator. Most of the buildings below were 20 stories or less, and drab, though to Zandy's eyes they at least did not have the pre-fab, low-tech look of a residence zone. Out this far from the city core, the streets were full of ground vehicles, darting along below the elevated tubes of mag-lev train lines.
It wasn't a pretty city, Zandy thought, not compared to some she had seen, but it looked vibrant enough. Yuro IV, Zandy mused, must be just barely large enough to warrant the investment of an orbital elevator. It reminded her of New Ionia, though the towers were smaller and fewer here; not as elegant, though more colorful. Only the silver thread rising up into the sky really looked the same. But Yuro IV wasn't large enough to need residence zones... This wasn't a raw frontier world, but still, there wasn't enough population to require massive government-built holding zones to keep the unproductive, and Zandy wondered idly what her life might have been like if she had been born here, on Yuro IV, instead of on the densely populated core world of New Ionia.
No one spoke, and the whine of the aircar's lift fans filled Zandy's mind. She tried to get herself ready, but there was an unreality to all this. Her hand touched the grip of her needler and she tried to remember her sidearm training, but it was hard to focus.
The Conquering Sun had been her first assignment out of the Fleet Academy. Her fellow interceptor pilots, Pixie, the rest of the crew --even Captain Ari-Kani-- they had been all the family she really had. And now all of them were gone.
Given the size of the Hegemony, there was no guarantee that she'd ever see her Academy classmates again. And she had no wish to try to go back to New Ionia, to the people who had once been her family.
What was she doing here? What was she even doing alive... if she even was alive? It had been a long time since she'd had that thought. Were daemons really alive? Her biosim avatar, her new one, was almost biologically alive; the analog bio-mechanical processes by which it operated were almost like biological life. But the avatar wasn't her.
With a mental sigh, Zandy broke away from the futile train of thought she'd started. Answers were elusive, but she was a member of the Fleet, and there were fellow Fleet officers next to her, expecting her to do her part. That would have to be enough, for now.
---
"A Coalition computer system?"
"A Coalition data structure, Captain. Both the system that initiated the detonation command and the inner data structure of the detonator," said Ylayn. There was no playfulness in her voice now, Nas noticed.
"...Fuck... me..." said Nas.
"Could it just be some freelancers using Coalition equipment and software?" asked Warez.
"I thought so at first, but the way the data moved, the way it was all structured... and the attack codes stored in that little system," Ylayn shook her head. One of her cat ears twitched. "No," she said. "It's not just Coalition codes. The way the data was going back and forth, all the security subroutines... The guy who hired us was a Coalition agent. And he's got a whole team of other Coalition agents down there on Yuro IV."
"You are very sure about this?" asked Nas, quietly.
"Very sure, Captain. I had a lot of subjective time to look at the data structures. They started out as Coalition military codes, like the sort you can buy sometimes, from some of the Coaly data-mongers. But these have been worked over by a big team of high-grade data warfare specialists. It's... too formal, too organized and redundant, to be a freelancer's work. This is Coalition issue. At a guess, for some special operations type deal."
"Fuck," said Warez.
"So that's what we're up against?" said Senny, "Coalition special operations?"
"Right," said Nas.
"What now?" asked Xulios, the gunner.
"Now we get into a lower orbit," Nas said, sliding into his command pod and plugging himself in to the Whisperknife's piloting systems.
"You're going to try to hit a Coalition special operations team?" asked the gunner.
"Yup," said Nas, "them being the fuckers who set us up and tried to kill us. Nobody gets away with that if I know the 'who' and the 'where.'"
"But..."
"No buts. We get a rep for walking away from this sort of thing, we lose face with the Brotherhoods forever. Oh, sure, we can explain. We can say, 'oh, it was Coalition special operations...'" Nas' voice was momentarily hectoring. "But every other Brotherhood 'runner is going to know we got played, and we had a chance to get even, and we backed down. Fuck that.
"Besides, they don't expect us, and they're not going to have a lot on the ground down there, on a Hegemony world. And when we pull this off, no one who gets word of this is going to want to mess with us again."
"Very risky, though, Captain," said Warez.
Nas looked at Ylayn, sleekly lowering herself into her command pod in anticipation of acceleration. She looked back at him, said nothing.
"Risky, yes. Crazy, no," Nas said. "It's like telestraal. You use the time you have with no hesitation, use the fractions of seconds that the other side ignores, and you can do things that seem impossible. We can pull this off. If I thought we couldn't, I wouldn't do it.
"And those fuckers have it more than coming to them," Nas went on. "For one thing, I don't like working for the Coalition. If there's anything worse than the Hegemony, it's the Coalies. And for another, nobody double crosses me and walks. Not if I know where they are. And I know.
"And one more thing. When we do pull this off, the Brotherhoods are going to hear our names and give homage. You all think about that," Nas finished with a hard smile.
From his command pod, Nas tracked his gaze across his crew, projecting their faces on his display one after another. He could see fear in some faces. Eagerness in a few, Ylayn, for one. But all of them were ready to follow him.
"Now, all of you," he said, "shut up, get into your 'pods and get ready. We're dropping orbit. Once we get to low orbit, get the atmospheric shuttle ready. We're going downtown."
---
"Pyer Beck" (he was almost used to thinking of himself by that meaningless name now) gave the autopilot a maximum-priority command and sat back in the pilot's seat as the aircar interacted with the central traffic control system, routing through the air traffic above New Capital City towards his destination. He could have piloted himself, but that would have taken his attention away from watching, through his visor display, as his team's position indicators converged on the target site.
Using his own team this way was a constant source of anxiety. His gut feeling was against it. But, rationally, this was the right move. The local agent couldn't be trusted with this, except in an utmost emergency. And his people could.
In a way he had been lucky. There were only a few private commercial hyper-bandwidth uplink in Yuro IV's New Capital City. Most of the others were operated by the local government, and he was fairly certain that if the fugitives had tried for those they would have been intercepted.
The fugitive Hegemonic Fleet officers had apparently figured out the same thing, and, as he had hoped, had picked the one of the few private sites that boasted a data service capable of a hyper-bandwidth data link.
But since there were only a few private uplink sites, Pyer had been ready. Hacking into the control systems of the uplink facilities would have been difficult, but all of the facilities had reservation computers that were deliberately run as separate systems, isolated from the control systems as a security measure. On one hand, that security measure had worked; Pyer would not have been able to breach the defenses of the uplink control computers without setting off alarms. On the other hand, breaching the defenses of the reservations computers had been easy.
His local
agent had given him the patterns for the data implant codes of the swift-ship captain he was after; as soon as she and her two comrades had signed onto the queue to use one of the uplink centers, Pyer had known within seconds where they were heading and when they planned to use the uplink.
Even now they must be approaching the site, headed for the facility at which they would leave their counterfeit bodies behind and escape...
Except, of course, that Pyer's team of elite commandoes would be waiting for them.
Thankfully, there was enough time to get most of his people to the target site. That had been a concern; the commercial uplink facilities couldn't be used without reservations, but if the reservations had come too close to the scheduled uplink window, Pyer might have had only a single commando in place to try to stop his quarry. So that was lucky too. Well, it was about time there was some good luck on this operation. Pyer didn't like counting on luck; that was the hallmark of amateurs. But when it came his way, he would not hesitate to use it.
---
Ylayn blinked as her implants pinged her with a pre-coded signal. Somewhere in the sprawl of Yuro IV's New Capital City, the Coalition special operations network she was monitoring was active again.
Ylayn rolled over in her lavish hotel bed and reached out for pers-comp, closing her eyes as she unspooled a data cable from the little portable computer and plugging it in to one of the small sockets in the back of her neck. Patterns of data unfolded in her mind.
The Coalition system was sending out signals to its nodes, interfacing with a planetary navigation system, getting directions and planning multiple routes. There were five mobile nodes, all converging on a particular spot in the New Capital City below. A reflexive cross-indexing gave her the location: a place called the Ki-Leng Multi-Emporium, North Atrium. And at least five Coalition data signals, each one probably a single agent, were converging on the location.
Ylayn triggered a comm-signal, sending her words directly to the Captain's implant.
"We've got the location, Captain."
"Time to move," came the Captain's subvocalized response. "Get us the traffic clearance, Ylayn."
"Right," Ylayn said, and triggered a program she had prepared on the shuttle flight down from the Whisperknife. The Captain had expected that they'd have to move fast, if and when the Coalition agents gave away a location where they could be reached. So Ylayn had gone to work on the local air traffic control. As usual, the key to defeating a powerful government system was to go around, go with, work within. The traffic control system would have been fiendishly hard to hack in a way that compromised the system's safety or primary function. But tagging their rented aircar with the codes of a sky ambulance? That had been comparatively easy. And it would let them zoom through traffic at maximum speed while the traffic control system routed other vehicles around their path, helping them instead of hindering. Of course, as soon as an oversight routine noticed them, there would be sharp questions and demands for authentication headed their way. But the infiltration team of the Whisperknife wasn't planning on staying on Yuro IV long enough for that to be a problem.
The Captain and the rest of the team were piling in to the aircar as Ylayn ran up to the hotel's rooftop landing garage. The rented aircar stood out from the sleek skimmers and lavish limo-cruisers that usually parked here. It was a big vehicle, an eight-seater with a half dozen oversized lift fans and an oversized power-pack. It had been built to serve as a high speed courier vehicle, making maximum speed deliveries in large urban centers. The dealer who had rented it said it was capable of about nine tenths of the local speed of sound, more than 900 kilometers per hour; very fast for a civilian aircar, despite its bulky, brutal looks.
Ylayn jumped into the open side door and grabbed a seat, strapping herself in.
"Weapons check," Nas said, from the pilot's seat up front, and Ylayn checked that her laser pistol was secure in its shoulder holster under her short cloak. Quickly she initiated an uplink to the weapon's computer, checking the low power electro-stun and lethal full power settings. The power clip read 99.98%.
"Jesus, Ylayn," said Hyuer, watching as she leaned back in the seat, "you'd think you'd want to be dressed for something like this."
"I am dressed," Ylayn said. Her half-cloak, coming down to her waist, was a nano-weave capable of displaying moving patterns. Right now it was set to create a golden shimmer that flowed in reaction to her movements, hinting at the shape of the body beneath it. For the rest, she wore a decorated combat injector bracelet, heavy-duty boots that came to her mid-calf, and a thin halter and briefs of glossy black polycarbonate cloth. Her short, soft fur did nothing to hide the shape of her body. As a finishing touch, she had attached a decorative tail made of smart-fiber to the back of her briefs. It would flick back and forth in a pattern dictated by her heart rate.
"Meow," she added conversationally, and laughed.
18
The North Atrium of the Ki-Leng Multi-Emporium was pleasant enough, Nas thought, if one ignored the constant signs of the Hegemony's dominance of this world. There were blooming flowers, and even bright-leafed trees, artfully arranged in massive, ornate stone planters. The bright vegetation matched attractive abstract color patterns that crawled across the atrium's high, transparent ceiling. And there wasn't much overt Hegemony propaganda. There was some, holographic portraits of a few of the previous Hegemons and the like; but more often it was subtle things that sent the same message: recruitment holos for the local System Defense Forces, or adverts for a hyper-bandwidth uplink and avatar rental service; the sort of thing only Hegemonic daemons could make use of... and a reminder to any humans who saw it who their ultimate masters really were.
The wide, enclosed space of the mall was like a garden, and pleasantly cooler than the hot, equatorial air outside. That was a minor convenience, allowing Nas to wear his short cloak over his laser without attracting attention for being overdressed. He walked alone, in contact with the rest of his team via encrypted data link. Getting the hand lasers through the mostly symbolic local security had been no trouble at all. Of course, that would apply just as much to the Coalition special operations agents he was hunting.
Three of his infiltration team, led by Gira, one of his lieutenants, was covering the far end of the atrium mall. He could see her from here; she was gangly and tall, and her bald, tattooed head stood out from the crowd. Bringing Gira along was a calculated risk, Nas thought. She was very capable, but young: a wild-eyed woman who was short on subtlety and long on ferocity. But her instincts were good for this sort of thing, and despite her love of violence, she would follow his orders without hesitation.
Ylayn and Hyuer had the nearer end of the mall. Hyuer was one of his best. But come to think of it, Ylayn stood out too. There were a few Modifieds in the crowd, but he was sure a scantily dressed cat-girl would be getting looks. For now, that was OK. Nothing about his team's outward appearance, however notable, gave away what they really were.
The five of them were slowly moving towards the center, scanning for anyone sending a signal on the Coalition info-net that Ylayn had hacked.
Nas strolled in the middle, close enough to coordinate the two groups. Two of his men were still with the aircar, ready to fly at a moment's notice; it was likely that Nas and his team would be leaving even faster than they arrived.
Once Nas, or any of his people, found one of the enemy agents, they'd try to follow him or her to the rest of them. And then Nas and his team would kill them all; a simple, fitting message about what happened to people who hired his ship and then tried to double-cross him.
It was Gira who saw the man first-- the same tall man, the one who had hired him on Perihelas IV. Nas was watching through her uplink interface, walking slowly along the atrium mall, pausing at store fronts to close his eyes and check the data feeds being coordinated by Ylayn: tactical schematic data feeds and sensory feeds from his people.
"Target!" sent Nas, locking on to the man's image and sending it into the
data feeds of his crew with a sudden, savage intensity. He couldn't see the man from where he stood, but the tactical overlay showed him the location and Nas moved, breaking into a fast walk as his augmentation went live, implanted reservoirs releasing carefully tailored neuro-chemical combat drugs into his blood stream. Everything seemed to slow down as his movements took on an almost liquid grace.
Gira's implanted augmentations were going live as well, and her reaction was smooth and lightning fast. A twitch of her shoulders spun her half-cloak clear of her holster. Her laser was in her hand in a fraction of a second. She seemed to move with slow-motion grace while actually moving almost faster than an un-augmented eye could track. A fat, well dressed young woman stepped into the line of fire, oblivious, unaware of Gira or the tall man. For a fraction of a second, it seemed that Gira might shoot anyway, but instead she hesitated and Nas felt a hot spike of indignation at the sheer, perverse fucking bad luck of it.
The tall man didn't hesitate at all. His draw was fast in the way only someone with substantial augmentation of his own could manage. Three rapid laser flashes strobe-lit the atrium mall.
Gira dropped soundlessly, leaving a mist of vaporized blood as a laser pulse caught her at eye level and blew out the back of her head. Her data feed went dead.
"Fuck!" Nas hissed, breaking into a run. The tall man's other shots had gone into the crowd, one pulse striking a store-front, shattering the clear polycarbonate window, the other pulse amputating a bystander's arm. People in the crowd began to scream.
For an instant Nas could see the tall man, moving purposefully through the crowd. He was moving fast, getting ahead of the wave of panic and confusion caused by his own shots. Gira's body lay on the decorative tile floor of the mall. A young man rolled on the ground, screaming and clutching at the stump of his left arm.
Nas drew his laser without conscious thought, lining up on the target with the fluid precision of a third-stage Telestraal adept, but the tall man, the enemy, caught the flicker of Nas' draw out of the corner of his eye and dove forward, twisting mid-air to bring his own weapon up. Nas fired, lighting up the space around him with reflections of his laser's flash, but the man's spinning evasion was deceptively fast and Nas' pulse only struck the man's cloak, igniting the dark fabric with a burst of saturated light.