Chapter 18
Magnus closed his eyes and linked into his virtual cockpit. Display screens and controls came into being all around him.
He turned to a display on his left and reviewed the status of his launch decoys. The Iridar had dropped five of them as it descended over the continent. Each drone now awaited his command in distant parts of the land mass. The devices would simulate a takeoff of his ship and hopefully distract any waiting UNSF trap to the wrong vector.
Magnus activated the drones and sent them off. At the same time, he brought the Iridar’s engines to full power and prepared for his own takeoff. He routed power to temporary storage pools for more drones, the EM warfare pod, and weapons.
The core of the Iridar held its greatest miracle: the gravity spinner. Although the spinner took most of the energy consumed by the ship, it was well worth it. The spinner allowed generation of artificial gravity during voyages, as well as faster-than-light travel. Magnus started the spinner last. He locked down the ship and brought the Iridar up from the planet by using the spinner to cause it to “fall” upward. The ship’s thrusters kicked in, adding to the speed. He couldn’t fully engage the spinner so close to the planet without causing vast destruction.
As an afterthought, Magnus turned to a new virtual panel and created a new account on the ship’s system. He left a pointer to the flight information console. If Shiny found his way in, he could monitor their progress through that. Magnus thought it might help to keep the alien calm during their escape.
He watched on several displays as the ship made its way up through the atmosphere. Several ghost images of the Iridar climbed up from the planet. Magnus saw the ones generated from his launch drones as well as several other electromagnetic fakes thrown up by the EM module. The module scrambled many useful frequencies to confuse things for the enemy, as well as watching and interpreting the planetscape for signs of other ships and facilities.
Magnus looked at a control on one of the virtual boards before him. It activated at his thought. One of the launch drones exploded. The screens lit up with the EM pulse of its destruction, playing havoc with Magnus’s readings. He launched two other EM bombs to add to the noise. He wanted to blind as many satellites as possible to cover their escape route.
The Iridar left the atmospheric envelope of the planet. Magnus cut the thrusters to preserve fuel and let the spinner accelerate the ship. He dropped off some missiles in low orbit. In a few minutes they’d activate and move to kill a group of satellites over a different part of the planet. It would look like they were trying to blind another part of the network. The ship operated very stealthily, but it never hurt to overlap the protection. Magnus wrapped their escape in deception after deception. If someone could figure out their route, he hoped it would be many days from now.
He relaxed a notch and watched the displays for a while. As he’d hoped, they hadn’t had to use any of the crash pods. They were a last resort for when a spinner failed. The UNSF had weapons that would disable a spinner, and the resulting g-forces could smash a crew around inside their vessel.
Magnus wondered about Shiny. He checked the alien on a surveillance viewer to make sure things looked normal. The creature seemed quiescent.
The mercenary looked over the screens as the Iridar moved farther out. The planet behind him remained noisy. He selected a frequency from the comm display and packaged a message. His equipment would make the transmission look like noise; only someone searching for the agreed-upon pattern would be able to recognize and descramble it.
“Hawk, I’m leaving the target system. I’m golden. We’ll get back to you in a few weeks,” Magnus sent.
“This is Hawk. I read you. Noisy, though. Hah, your noise coder must be workin’ too well.”
“I’m surprised to get a realtime link with you, Hawk,” Magnus said.
“Hello to you too, Vulture,” Henman replied. “Yeah, well, my ship’s been dispatched toward target system. Something about some smugglers. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”
“We’re out now. But A and B are dead. As you know, we blew the approach so it’s noisy on the way out.”
“Shit, sorry to hear that. You guys had a rough ride. The Unies want you bad, though, whatever you did. They’re throwing a lot of hardware your way.”
“Well, we’re a little more golden than I can express. I’ll have to lie low for a while. We’ll figure out a way to get you your cut, just like always. Hey, they may have gotten a few traces of us back there. If you can snoop around and make some of it go away, it would help.”
“Sorry, no way. Not on this one. If they got anything on you, it’ll be impossible for me to make it disappear. Not without giving myself away. It’s one thing to clean logs that no one looks at anyway or to make a random security pic go away, but this is different.”
“I understand, Hawk.”
“So have you spaced your VIP yet?”
“No, not this one. VIP’s the real deal, very capable. I think there’s a lot of potential.”
Henman laughed. “What, you’ve fallen in love with your passenger, have you now? C’mon, Vulture, keep your head for god’s sake. She’s just some spoiled brat who you’re hot for.”
Magnus frowned. Henman was being a little too specific. Even though he believed no one could listen in, he preferred being more nebulous while in the thick of it.
“Seriously, VIP’s working out well. Held it together after we lost A and B. Don’t worry… there’s only a few of us to split the load with.”
“I suppose. I really hope this one doesn’t bite you, though. You’re so damn trusting. I’ve tried to set you straight a hundred times. You’re gonna get us screwed if you’re not careful. And I don’t mean by that eye candy you hired, either.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be in touch.”
Magnus cut the connection. He felt anger rising in him at the way that Henman assumed things about his judgement. He changed course to avoid any chance that their conversation would give away his escape vector.
A calmer part of himself considered Henman’s accusation. Had he really let his primitive drives take over when it came to Telisa? He did have some kind of impulse to protect her that wasn’t fully logical.
He also found Telisa’s presence to be somewhat distracting at times. During training he remained as professional as possible, but he found it difficult to ignore her youthful attractiveness. Grappling proved to be the most frustrating, when he could feel her entire body struggling against him.
Magnus let out a sigh and ripped his thoughts away from the grappling. They’d made it out of the system, so his next task would be cleaning up Telisa’s link.
He considered the source of the link spy program. He decided that Jack might have been behind it just as easily as any active UNSF agency. Magnus had been aware that they were monitoring her link for hours after the first meeting, just in case she had decided to run to the authorities. But he hadn’t known of an invasive modification to her link at that time.
Magnus had already isolated the entire link. Now he copied over its storage to the Iridar’s computers and sterilized the original. He performed a hardware scan to make sure that the link hadn’t been modified except for its programming. Everything checked out. He still needed to install a fresh link kernel and start everything back up. Telisa would have to set up a lot of things, but at least she’d have her link back soon.
He set a dissection routine to work on the program to see what it could find out. It quickly found a catalog of the visual records it had been storing. He realized that he could find out how long they’d been recording without waiting for the routine to complete. He could just browse through them and see when they started.
Images of Telisa’s recorded sight flashed through his mind’s eye. Magnus stopped the progression periodically, trying to determine how long the link had been active. He caught a flash of the redly glowing caverns, a vision of himself standing in a corridor. He flipped t
hrough more recordings.
The next hop stopped. The image showed Telisa standing naked before the narrow mirror in her ship’s quarters. Magnus blinked and moved forward again. He felt a familiar desire rising but shoved it back. It would be despicable to spy on her this way.
He thought about what Henman had said. If Telisa had a hidden agenda, this would be the way to find out. But it didn’t make sense; if she worked for an agency, they wouldn’t have the program hidden from her and she wouldn’t have brought it up to Magnus. She must be unaware of whoever had tried to use her vision against her.
He found that the images started after a few days into space on the Iridar. He decided that made sense; presumably she could be monitored any of a number of other ways while on civilized planets. He archived the recordings and left them for Telisa to see, then turned off the virtual displays and sat for a moment in darkness.
“We’ve dodged some bullets, haven’t we?” he told himself.
Magnus wondered how many more were headed his way.
The Trilisk Ruins Page 30