Merchants in Freedom

by Richard Tongue

  “Could we get into that ocean?” Winter asked.

  “Possibly we could crack a hole with a missile or a shaped charge,” the veteran replied. “We’ve got the stuff in inventory to do it, but we don’t have the equipment to conduct any serious exploration.”

  “We could probably modify one of our probes for the job,” Bianchi said. “Given a little time, anyway. Do you want me to consult Lieutenant Moore? Get her engineering teams on it?”

  “Not at this time,” Winter said. “Not unless we see something down there worth looking at. What about life?”

  “Uncertain, but it matches a lot of other worlds we’ve discovered that have life underwater. You’re not thinking about some sort of alien race, are you? In that sort of environment…”

  “There’s something down there, Major, and one way or another, I think we need to know what, and soon,” Winter replied. He stabbed a control, and said, “Bridge to Hangar Deck. Get me Mendoza.”

  “Mendoza here, Commander.”

  “I’ve got a mission for you. Strictly volunteer, high risk.”

  “Sounds like fun. What’s the job?”

  “You’re going to try and hack into the Tyrant command facility on the orbital station, a close-in pass. That’s just the cover story, though. Your real mission is to distract the enemy for long enough to allow us to execute a fast flyby of the planet and set up for a firing run. Anything you can get out of that pass is optional. Once you get clear, head down to the planet and see if you can work out just what the Tyrants are so interested in down there.”

  There was a pause, and Mendoza asked, “Are there any rescue options, sir? Should this go wrong…”

  “I’m afraid not, Tech, but we’ll do everything we can, naturally. You’ve just got to make the firing pass look convincing, and if our attack run goes as we’re hoping, they’ll have enough distractions that you should have an easy strike at the enemy base. This is an intelligence-gathering mission, and that means bringing any intelligence you gather home in one piece. We’ve got to know what they’re doing here, and we’ve got to know the dimensional frequency of their hyperspace beacon. Without that, we lose the war.”

  “I understand, Commander. We’ll do everything we can.” There was a soft chuckle, and she added, “If I’m following your battle plan, sir, then I’d better be the one to wish you luck. You’re going to need it more than we will, I think.”

  “Let’s wish each other luck, Mendoza. You have launch clearance on request. Just remember that this needs to be obvious, but not too obvious. We can’t risk them getting too suspicious.”

  “Aye, sir. We’ll make it happen. See you later. Out.”

  Winter looked down at the communications panel for a moment, then turned to Sabatini, and said, “Set up our flyby, Specialist. We’ll be commencing the run as soon as you’re ready. How long before our estimated contact?”

  “Firing range in twenty-nine minutes, sir,” the helmsman said. “Assuming they don’t do anything while we’re en route.”

  Nodding, Winter said, “Bianchi, you have the deck. The rest of the fleet will be here any time now. I think I’d better break this to them in person.” Looking up the enemy fleet, he added, “Secure from battle stations, but maintain alert status. We’ll go back to combat-ready six minutes before battle. Then we’ll send those bastards straight to hell. Or die trying.”

  Chapter 5

  “This is suicide,” Volkov grumbled, manning the flight engineering station, his hands dancing across the power distribution controls in a bid to speed the shuttle to its destination. “We’re out here on our own, completely on our own, and there’s no way back. Any moment now, we’re going to be in the middle of a firefight, and one stray maser blast will send us right to hell.” Glaring at Ortiz, he added, “Some of us faster than others.”

  “Just relax, buddy,” the lackadaisical pilot replied. “You need to work on your own personal sense of happiness. See, look at me. I’m sitting here, watching the stars dance past, looking at that beautiful blue marble down there, soaking in the atmosphere. You’ve got to take time to smell the roses. That’s what gives life real meaning. What do you say, Tech?”

  Mendoza shook her head, and said, “I say that if you put the two of you together, we might end up with one semi-competent crewmen.”

  “If you felt that way,” Volkov replied, “then why did you choose us in the first place? It’s never that hard to find people willing to throw themselves into the fire for honor and glory.”

  “Maybe I don’t have much imagination.” Ortiz chuckled, and she continued, “Or maybe I just consider you both known quantities, and I need someone I can trust to get us through this nightmare in one piece.” She turned back to the sensor station at the rear of the cabin, and said, “Singh, much as I hope you are enjoying the entertainment we’re providing for you up here, have you managed to get any sort of insight into the situation we’re blindly throwing ourselves into?”

  “I’m working on it,” the technician replied, frowning as he peered at his monitors. “The enemy ships haven’t changed formation yet, but they’re powering up their perimeter weapons systems. I can’t see any sort of orbital defense network…”

  “Which means we might actually survive this attack,” Volkov quipped.

  “But that doesn’t mean they don’t have a few surprises up their sleeve.” Singh paused, then added, “They must suspect that we’re executing a feint, or they’d have done something to respond to our moves. They haven’t altered course to counter Xenophon yet, either. They’re just sitting there.”

  “There’s got to be something we can do to get their attention,” Mendoza said. “Nick, we’re going for a ten thousand mile miss right now, right? Could we alter that, go into a collision course with the platform?”

  “Collision course?” the engineer exclaimed. “Are you insane?”

  “I don’t have to be, as long as the Tyrants think I am,” Mendoza replied. “We can adjust our flight path to make it look as though we’re unmanned, a projectile. If I was launching something like that, I’d have designed it to look manned to throw off the enemy. This is simply reversing the process. We crank up to maximum possible acceleration, burn through the formation and go right into them.”

  “And get smashed to pieces,” Volkov replied.

  Shaking her head, she said, “Trust me, the Tyrants won’t let that happen. If they react in time, then they’ll throw everything they’ve got at us, but as we’re not pressing the attack, we can evade their approach vector. If they wait until the last minute, then they’ll either move the station on her thrusters or we can fire our steering jets as the final second.”

  “Or we crash right into it,” Singh warned.

  “In which case, hey, mission accomplished,” Mendoza said. “We all knew there was a risk that we wouldn’t come back from this. It certainly doesn’t match any definition of ‘safe’ that I am familiar with. So we’re taking a bigger risk. Nick, can you make the course change?”

  “Sure,” the pilot replied. “That’s going to make our landing a lot more interesting, though. We’ll have to shed a lot more velocity in the atmosphere than I’d expected.” He grinned, then added, “Sounds like fun!”

  “Fun,” Volkov muttered. “Great. I’d better check the hull sensors. We’re going to be asking a lot more of the shuttle than it’s really designed to give.” He reached for his controls, and said, “I’m going to funnel all the power I can find to the engines. There’s no safety margin on this.”

  “Just make sure we don’t burn out,” Mendoza replied. “And save something for the communicators. I still want to try a hack on the way past, when we reach closest approach. Even if I can only get some sort of idea of how they’re running the network, it might be useful later on.” She reached for her controls, then turned to Ortiz, and added, “Make it happen, Nick.”

  “Running to overload,” the pilot replied, flexing his fingers as he worked the controls, the engine roaring i
n the rear of the shuttle as it burst to maximum acceleration, throwing them onto their new trajectory. Singh altered the sensor settings, focusing the whole weight of their inputs onto the area directly ahead, getting the best possible picture of the Tyrant force they were diving towards.

  It was immediately obvious that they had been there for a long time, perhaps locked in the same formation for months. Their crew had one advantage over that of Xenophon. No boredom, no impatience, no desire for something new and different to experience. Just the same cold, soulless existence, day after day, regardless of what they themselves thought about it. Not that individual thoughts were a feature of their life.

  As the shuttle sped towards its destiny, she tried to ponder what it would be like to be a part of such a network, interlinked with thousands, perhaps millions of people, spread out across the light-years. Some of the more advanced scientists in computer design had theorized that such a network might be possible, one day, though there were several fundamental breakthroughs needed to make it work.

  How had the Tyrants pulled it off? They’d been more advanced than Earth, certainly, by both skimming off the best scientists and researchers available and providing them with essentially unlimited funding to work on whatever they pleased. Not to mention disregarding anything that even remotely looked like a moral code, allowing them to conduct whatever crazed research they wished, regardless of the effect it might have on their test subjects. Though she still thought there were fundamental questions there.

  How did they complete research that was at least a century away on Earth, while they were fleeing through the stars, racing into the void to escape the nascent Terran battle fleet making its way to wipe them from the face of Mars. She’d had a look at some of the records that had been recovered from the surface, previously highly classified due to the horrific nature of the finds and the suspicion, now confirmed, that some had escaped. They were certainly working along these lines, but there’d been no indication that they were even close.

  And there was another issue. It didn’t seem to fit their mentality. The Tyrants had left Earth as the environment and political situation had started to decay, escaping what they believed would be the collapse of civilization, or at the very least a dark age. They’d done so to preserve their lives, and maintain the supremacy they had begun to count on. Those same records had revealed plans for the conquest and administration of Earth as a slave world, deliberately regressed to a primitive state to support their distant rulers.

  That suggested a ruling caste. She might imagine that the Tyrants would have locked their slaves into the sort of eternal hell the network represented, but that they would lock themselves into it didn’t seem to make even the slightest sense. Not unless something else had happened. There was a missing piece of the puzzle, a large one, and somehow, she knew that unlocking it was the key to winning the war.

  “Three minutes to combat range,” Singh warned. “They’re warning up their lasers, ma’am. I’d say we’re going to be coming under heavy attack as soon as they draw a bead.” Shaking his head, he added, “They still haven’t changed their position, though.”

  “Could they be under repair?” Volkov asked. “Maybe they aren’t moving because they can’t. Hell, they might even be mothballed.”

  “That’s a nice idea, but they wouldn’t leave mothballed ships this close to one of our outposts,” Mendoza replied. “Too much chance that we’d find them and come and take a closer look. If our engineering teams could take one of their ships intact…”

  “Don’t get ideas,” the engineer protested.”

  “All of the ships look externally intact,” Singh reported. “If they were under repair, I’d expect to see signs of it. They’re just…” He paused, then said, “Wait one. Power buildup on the nearest three ships.”

  “Helm, stand by for an evasive course the moment I give the word,” Mendoza ordered, bringing up the hacking programs and loading them into the communications system. “We need to make this as tight as possible. The closer we are, the more data I might be able to snatch out of their database.”

  “Change to target aspect!” Singh yelled, his voice triumphant. “They’re on the move, heading right for us, moving to block our path to the station. Looks like they’re turning broadside to give more of their weapons a firing solution.” His hands danced across the controls, and he added, “The rest of the fleet is moving into position to counter our formation. They’ve only left one behind for Xenophon. It’s working!”

  “Not a moment too soon,” Volkov said. “Nick, get us…”

  “Closer!” Mendoza ordered. “Get us as close as you can, and throw in a nice, tight evasive course. I don’t want any of their shots to get anywhere near us, but we’ve got to make this look convincing. If their formation is even remotely intact, then they’ll be able to move around to block Xenophon. They’ve got the big guns. We’ve got to give them every possible chance to make use of them.”

  “Aye, ma’am,” Ortiz said, the smile across his face growing even wider. “This is going to be nice and interesting. Vik, I’ll need precision control on the thrusters more than I’m going to need acceleration.”

  “Precision control, aye,” the engineer replied. “You’ve got it. Disengaging safety overrides. What few of them we have left. Less than ninety seconds to firing range.”

  “They’re moving into a wedge,” Ortiz said. “Classic and obvious.”

  “Can you counter it?” Mendoza asked.

  “Come on, have a little faith,” the pilot replied, throwing the shuttle into a series of quick rolls. “Got to get the feel of the fine thrusters, then I’ll make this baby dance across the stars.”

  “Just get us past them in one piece,” she replied. Her hands danced across the controls of her station as she started her hack, trying to find a way into the guts of the enemy system, a way to penetrate their security and steal anything that might be hidden within. She didn’t expect to succeed. That wasn’t the point. All of this continued the deception she’d been running since they left, creating the appearance of danger where there was none, trying to convince the enemy that they should throw everything they had against the shuttle, regardless of the potential consequences.

  Thus far, it was working beautifully. Almost better than she could have hoped. The Tyrants might have been a little tardy, but they were reacting precisely as she wanted. Which in itself was somewhat suspicious, but from everything she could see on the sensor monitors, it all hung together as a convincing and coherent response to their attack profile.

  She continued her work, struggling to force a path through the firewall, skipping through the outer layers of security with practiced ease before running head on into the tougher protection within, the enemy network, the minds of those permanently interfaced with the system, working to keep her out.

  Given time, given more processing power, she might still have been able to force a path through, but she had neither. She glanced up at the viewscreen, watching as the first wave of enemy ships swept into position, the sky already illuminated as bursts of crimson flame raced past them, early shots that were trying to sight them in, perfect their aim, and perhaps discourage the shuttle from continuing what looked suspiciously like a suicide run. That was a tactic they’d believe. Right out of the Tyrants’ playbook.

  And then, despite all of her expectations, she was in. Right into the depths of the system, with access levels that she could barely dream of. Not into the command networks, but into the archives, the records. She started to dive into the data, rummaging through the sequences, but it was almost as if information was flooding towards her, as though someone on the crew was trying to tell her something.

  Maybe, just maybe, that network worked both ways. Perhaps it was possible for someone locked into the cybernetic hell of a Tyrant ship to transmit out, if they could retain at least a trace of their original purpose.

  She looked over the files, and frowned as she recognized the structure. They were
logs, logs of a ship from Earth, recently. Logs of the Pericles. The ship that had been sent out this way, and presumably lost with all hands. As soon as the last of the data from that ship had been logged, the communication dropped, the firewalls firming up to prevent any further access.

  They’d said what they wanted to say. She looked up at the viewscreen again, knowing inside herself that her attempts to hack into the enemy systems were over, at least for a time, and that the new focus had to be on living through the rest of the firing pass. As they swept into range, Ortiz sent the shuttle swerving from side to side, any thought of faking a suicide run now abandoned in the pursuit of simple survival, of finding a path through the formation. The Tyrants had left their move late, and they were paying the price for their tardiness, leaving sufficient spaces in their firing pattern for Ortiz to pick a path.

  “Damn, that was close,” Singh said, shaking his head.

  “Almost there,” Ortiz replied, his eyes locked on the viewscreen, his fingers making pinpoint adjustments to their flight path. The Tyrants were moving now, moving away, realizing that they had been fooled and permitting the shuttle to escape in order to concentrate on the incoming fleet.

  “We’re through!” Volkov yelled, as the last enemy ship slid past. “I can’t quite believe it!”

  “Did you ever doubt?” Ortiz replied. He looked up at a monitor, and added, “We are moving a little faster than I’d like, though. We’ll be hitting the upper atmosphere in about five minutes. Better strap yourselves in. This could get rough.”

  “It’ll get rougher,” Singh replied. “I’ve got new contacts from the rear. Drones. Heading right for us, and capable of atmospheric descent. This battle isn’t over yet. Not by a long shot.”

  Chapter 6

  Xenophon raced over the icy landscape below, a faint glow from her heat shield as she sped around the circumference of the planet, racing to gain the maximum possible advantage from the gravity well without sacrificing so much speed that they’d drop below escape velocity. At the helm, Sabatini nimbly worked the controls, the only evidence of the tension she was facing the look of grim determination on her face, the sweat building up on her forehead.