Ephialtes (Ephialtes Trilogy Book 1)

by Parker, Gavin E

  He rolled over in bed again and looked at the clock. It was 04:20. He tried to clear his mind of all thought, but the Otus incident and Sherman’s threats kept pushing back into his consciousness.

  “Try to get to sleep, hun,” Zelman called over her shoulder.

  “Are you awake?” said White.

  “No, I’m fast asleep,” replied Zelman.

  “I’m sorry if I woke you,” said White.

  “It’s okay,” said Zelman, sleepily. She lazily groped behind herself, eventually finding White’s hand. White grasped her hand in his, and gently rubbed his thumb against her finger. He remembered holding the hands of his parents when he was a little boy, and how that made him feel safe and protected. He glanced over at Zelman in the half-light. She seemed to be sleeping again now. He looked up at the ceiling and tried to put all thoughts of Otus and Sherman and Cortes out of his mind. He tried to concentrate on Zelman’s breathing beside him and the feel of her hand in his.

  He lay like that for a long while, but still he couldn’t sleep.

  C H A P T E R 2 3

  The Enemy Within

  Askel knew she had the software systems on Ephialtes locked down. She also knew there was a saboteur on board. Deductive logic told her that much. What she didn’t know was what the saboteur might do next. He or she might only have the software trick, and that had been taken care of. But maybe they were more resourceful than that. Ephialtes was a precision instrument. Someone with the time or inclination might be able to, literally or otherwise, throw a spanner in the works.

  Askel’s work took her all over the ship. She was constantly engaged with its various systems. She was vigilant for any changes. She had asked Andrews for the psych evaluations of all the commanders aboard the ship. Commanders were evaluated every six months. She could find no aberrations. Meades and Steiner had suffered head traumas but both had been passed fit for duty. It had been a stipulation that all commanders on this mission should have combat experience. Askel wondered if any had been traumatised by it, or maybe bore a grudge against the government that had sent them into battle.

  She noticed the maintenance crews were reporting higher than usual instances of mechanical failures on the command drones. At least two had leaked coolant, and another had a faulty gyroscope. She had been part of the division that designed the command drones and she knew that failures of this nature should be exceptionally rare. Commanders had been given leave to visit the dropships to run simulations directly from their command drones. Most days commanders could be found in their dropships training for the mission ahead.

  Apart from the commanders the only people who had come to Ephialtes via the shuttle and Otus were six Ephialtes crewmembers. None of them were dropship maintenance crew. To Askel it seemed there was a strong probability that the saboteur was a commander. Any other Ephialtes crewmembers would need special clearance to access the hangar deck. All the dropship maintenance crews who had access were already on Ephialtes before the shuttle docked. The saboteur had to be a commander.

  Commanders did not have designated dropships of their own; they would be assigned ships for each mission. Askel looked at the logs for the dropships where faults had been reported. It seemed like some commanders had favourites. She crossed referenced the command drones that had reported failures with the commanders who had used them. That gave her a list of eight commanders. These were her prime suspects. She noted with interest that amongst the eight were Steiner and Meades. She decided to read more deeply into their records.

  Commander Alan Meades had served in the Asian theatre. He had been on sixteen combat missions, two of them protracted and bloody affairs. He had an exemplary record and was the youngest serving commander in World War IV. He had captured a missile base single-handedly, losing five of his drones in the process and coming very close to being killed himself. His psych evaluations were all good. Even after the missile base incident he had been assessed positively. His command drone had taken a small-bore artillery shell directly to the torso. He had been knocked unconscious momentarily but went on to complete his mission. He sounded like a war hero, in the mould of Bobby Karjalainen. Askel found it hard to believe he might be the saboteur, but she had to keep him on the list. Everyone stayed in the frame until they could be absolutely exonerated.

  Steiner too had suffered a head injury on the battlefield. His occurred as he had tried to rescue a fallen comrade. Interesting, Askel thought; more traumatic. Is that the sort of thing that would turn a soldier against his own people? Seeing a friend die? Maybe. Steiner’s injuries had been more severe, too. He had been hospitalised and had required surgery. But again, he had a blemish free record and no problems with any of his psych evaluations.

  Askel didn’t know what to make of it. She felt confident the saboteur was one of her eight. Was the head injury thing a red herring? What about the others? All had served on the battlefield and had been a part of the violence of war. Most had been in fairly routine battles, with massive superiority over their enemies. Maybe that in itself could be traumatising, thought Askel. But she still liked Meades or Steiner for the sab. They had been in heavy action close-up, and had physically suffered for it.

  Askel knocked gingerly on Commodore Lucero’s door.

  “Come,” said the voice from within. Askel entered. Lucero was at her terminal with a stack of papers on the side of her desk. She looked up. “Lund!” she said. “Sit down. How are you?” She gestured towards her bed.

  “I’m good,” said Askel, sitting down. “How’d you like the ship we built you?”

  “Pretty good,” said Lucero.

  “Everything alright?”

  “I think so. Shouldn’t it be?”

  “Well,” said Askel, “she was never designed to be out here. I just wondered about your opinion, as a user.”

  “A user,” said Lucero, “I like that.”

  Askel looked embarrassed. “Well, I mean, as a designer you design things to the best of your abilities and try to anticipate how things are going to be used. But it’s the users who will judge in the end if your designs are successful. I’m a designer, and I’m happy with the design of the ship. But you’re the commodore. What do you think?”

  “Seems pretty good to me. We were floating around Earth for a few months getting used to her. In a while we’ll be floating around Mars, which adds up to the same thing. And in the meantime, thanks to your fancy engine, we’re floating between Earth and Mars, which is pretty similar, too. It’s all good.”

  Askel nodded. “Okay. No problems then, nothing unusual?”

  Lucero turned her chair around from the console to face Askel on the bed. “What is this?” she said. “Is something wrong?”

  Lucero hadn’t been on the shuttle or Otus. Askel was as close to certain she could trust her. “Maybe,” she said.

  “Maybe what? Something may be wrong?”

  Askel hesitated. “The ship’s fine. The design is good, the build is good. But there may still be a problem.”

  “What is it, Lund?” said Lucero. “You can tell me straight out. No riddles, okay?”

  “It’s . . .” Askel stopped. Lucero waited. “I think there is someone on board trying to sabotage the mission.”

  Lucero looked at her. “You think?”

  “Well, I’m pretty sure. Listen, Otus was deliberately destroyed. It wasn’t an accident. Whoever did it tried to do the same thing to Ephialtes. And they’re almost certainly still on board.”

  “Okay,” said Lucero. “What are we going to do about it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Askel. “They got to Otus through her software systems. I’ve locked all that right down on this ship. I mean, you can never lock something up one hundred percent watertight, but as far as possible I think I have secured the software systems. But if the person who tampered with the software is still on board they can continue to hamper the mission by other means.”

  “What sort of other means?”

  “Physical means. V
iolence. Insurrection. Who knows? Whoever it was had no qualms about taking out a capital ship and her entire crew, so who knows what they might be capable of?”

  Lucero thought. “And you knew about this before we set off?”

  Askel shrugged. “I don’t know about it even now, not for sure. All I’m saying is don’t trust anyone, and if you notice anything odd, however small or apparently insignificant, let me know.”

  “Okay,” said Lucero. “What happens if we don’t find them?”

  “I don’t know,” said Askel. “Let’s hope we do.”

  C H A P T E R 2 4

  Secession

  The deadline passed. The monies were transferred. It was the final bow tying up Martian independence. The USAN’s financial authorities working in tandem with National Cybersecurity had tried to freeze Martian assets. Kostovich was ahead of them every step of the way, not least because he knew exactly what they were doing. Through his backdoor he had daily briefings on exactly what they were trying to do and how they were trying to do it. Even without that information Kostovich was always going to beat them.

  He circumvented the USAN’s measures in the middle of the night. Shareholders of Venkdt Corporation woke up to find themselves not just divested of a proportional amount of their shares but appropriately compensated with cash in their bank accounts. Literally overnight, without a shot being fired or a brick being thrown, in fact with no physical clash whatsoever, Venkdt Mars Corp had wrested itself free from the parent company. Now Mars was truly independent.

  All the companies that recently formed on Mars were Martian. Venkdt Mars Corp was now fully Martian. Hjälp Teknik remained a public company traded on stock exchanges of Earth, but accounted for only a small portion of the Martian economy. Charles Venkdt had often said he welcomed foreign investment in the new Mars and there it was already.

  In a matter of months Mars had gone from being a colonial outpost with a ramshackle garrison, half-heartedly enforcing laws from a hundred and forty million miles away, to a new nation, a new planet, with its own fully independent economy and military. It had its own locally elected government and a president with a huge mandate from the Martian people. Charles Venkdt, like many of his fellow countrymen, believed there was a golden future ahead of them. They were sitting on huge resources which they could extract and sell to their solar neighbour. Not only that but they were right next door to the asteroid belt. The asteroid belt was immensely rich with resources which the Martians could exploit for themselves and trade with others. They were right at the frontier of human experience, forging ahead into the solar system, a few short years from conquering the asteroid belt. Who knew where they could go from there? With a big enough population on Mars and with the wealth they could extract from the natural resources around them maybe even terraforming would become a possibility. The great dry oceans of Mars might once again heave with water. Maybe one day Martian children would play in the open air. It seemed the possibilities were endless. The Martian future was bright indeed.

  Charles Venkdt liked to read. He had read many books about the founding of the USAN. About how people had crossed oceans, spending long months in relatively unsophisticated craft then landing in a hostile environment. How they had overcome many trials and false starts in order to gain a foothold in an unforgiving new world. Those first settlers would hardly believe what the world they were founding would go on to become. Venkdt saw the early Martians in the same light. Similarly, they had travelled immense distances in barely suitable craft and had faced extreme difficulties in surviving in a hostile and unfamiliar world. They too had triumphed. They had adapted, using their technological knowledge and sheer will to prevail over the environment. He expected that they in their turn were building a future unimaginable to them. Technologies would develop allowing further and faster travel. Mankind would expand beyond the solar system, again facing challenges of distance and environment. Through enduring hardship and by adapting and overcoming all challenges it would prevail once more.

  So the cycle would repeat.

  Where might it end? Maybe never. Maybe the only limit was the edge of the universe itself.

  Elspeth had planned a special stream celebrating the final plank of Martian independence being laid in place. She had expected to be covering parties, like those for the election. Maybe she would do some vox pops and some pieces to camera with madly celebrating Martians behind her. But the transfer of the monies passed largely unremarked. To the bulk of Martians independence had already arrived. They had voted for it and they had received it. They had voted for their president, Charles Venkdt. Martian independence was old news. Some money got moved around in some bank accounts somewhere. So what?

  Elspeth still did her piece. Ratings were better now, following the interviews with Bobby Karjalainen and President Venkdt. But there was not much she could do to make a change in balance sheets seem exciting. Elections, competitions such as they were, with winners and losers and all the rest of it, made for good entertainment. Numbers moving around? Less so.

  She tried to jazz up the story with some graphics. She depicted great streams of money shooting through space from Mars to Earth, with the little flag flying over Mars in her graphic changing colour. It was pretty tame stuff, and was not popular.

  Elspeth wondered what she might cover next. The election and Martian independence had been exciting but it was pretty much all over now. She knew the story of the money transfers was dull but she was still surprised at how low her stream had rated on the aggregators. A few months earlier Martian independence seemed radical and exciting. Now it was just a fact of life, no more remarkable than the sun rising in the morning.

  She had always wanted to be a correspondent covering political and business stories and she knew those were not the most glamorous or popular, but after the heady days of her two big interviews she had come to like the idea of being prominent. She had an ‘in’ with the president now; that might be useful. She knew that the Martian economy would undergo many changes in the coming years. It was exciting to her. Her challenge was to make it exciting to the audience, and she was already discovering how difficult it was to enthuse them.

  Venkdt had just stepped out of the shower. He decided to log into his aggregator to catch the news as he dressed. Since the interview he had added Elspeth as one of his favourites, and he noticed her report on the transfer of monies to Earth. He selected it and screened it on the wall of his bedroom. Visually the report was not particularly interesting but Venkdt listened as he selected clothes from his wardrobe and rubbed himself down with a towel.

  In a way he was glad that there hadn’t been much excitement about the news. It was right because this was just a formal detail and something that people didn’t really need to trouble themselves with. He knew that when people got excited they were volatile. The time for that had passed.

  Once he was dressed Venkdt moved to his breakfast room. A drone bought him coffee, toast and jam. As he spread jam on the toast he wondered about what the day might hold for him. He had meetings with the senate - they were still thrashing out amendments to the constitution. He wanted to catch up with Kostovich at some point to thank him for all his help with the money transfers and the armaments. When he finished breakfast he decided to call Christina.

  “Hi, Dad,” she said.

  “Hey, kid,” said Venkdt, “did you catch any of the bulletins this morning?”

  “I didn’t. Is something up?”

  “No, no, they’re just talking about the money. It all went through, Kostovich got them all paid off.”

  “That’s good, Dad.”

  “I think so,” said Venkdt. “So that’s it now, all done. Venkdt no longer owns Venkdt Mars and the constitution - which is pretty good anyway, thanks for that - is shaping up nicely, too. We’re kicking a few more things around later on. So it’s all done now, the major stuff. We are an independent, self-determining economy.”

  “Congratulations, Dad, I’m glad it all work
ed out for you.”

  “Not just for me, for us. All of us Martians. This is just the very beginning, for all of us.”

  “Okay, Dad,” said Christina, with the slightest hint of weariness in her voice. “Listen, I’m going to be late for work, I’ll call you tonight, okay?”

  “Sure, kid,” said Venkdt, and Christina was gone.

  The younger generation, he thought, just took all this for granted. They didn’t appreciate that everything they had, everything their world was built upon, had been put there by hard work by those who had gone before. The systems that maintained their world were not part of natural law, but were governed by the laws of man. Without the supremacy of law, with all held equally before it, the system would come crashing down and the world would revert to a feudal state.

  Before he arranged for his car to pick him up he called his PA and asked her to set a meeting with Kostovich for later that afternoon.

  It was never good to be called urgently to the president’s office. Farrell felt an odd sick feeling in the pit of his stomach as he tried to rack his brains for any lapses or failures his department may have made. He knew that Mars was a top priority at the moment and he also knew that Venkdt’s deadline for the transfers had passed overnight. Immediately after taking the call he contacted his most trusted deputies and got them to prepare reports on what had happened. Not only did he need paperwork that covered his ass, he needed it to look like it hadn’t been quickly created for that specific purpose.

  National Cybersecurity had been tasked with freezing Martian assets. Obviously, they had failed. Farrell kept running through his mind how and when had they been asked to do that. How specifically had the task been framed? How often had the department of foreign affairs requested reports to be made to them? And wasn’t defence supposed to be involved too? Maybe some of the blame should be on them. He had an underling looking into all these questions but they were against the clock. It would only take him minutes to get to the New White House. The reports could be sent through to his comdev so they had to be concise, and he had to be able to internalise them before he met with the president.