A Check for a Billion

by Vasily Mahanenko

  “What is that thing doing here? He can’t join my team!”

  “Don’t stick your nose into matters no one asked you about. Gloom is coming with me.”

  Tryd’s scowl grew fiercer, he took a step forward and almost buried his snout in my helmet.

  “Watch your words, pup.”

  “Watch your snout, mongrel.” I did not intend on backing down. Having assumed the obligations of an officer of the pirate Brotherhood, I was going to do this job right — right down to insisting on my authority over the mercenary pirate.

  “Mongrel?!” the fox flared up. I was starting to think that this time I had gone too far and there was about to be a slaughter here when the Delvian turned to Gloom: “Give it here.”

  “From now until eternity doth us part?”

  “Shut yer gob and give me that damn badge before I change my mind!”

  “Welcome to the Brotherhood 2.0, second deputy Tryd.” Gloom tossed him the metal disc and the Delvian snatched it out of midair with quick swipe of his paw. The same icon appeared on his chest and over his head, except with extra officer chevrons. Tryd had found a way to pull rank at last, becoming one of my three superiors.

  “You’ll still answer to me for the ‘mongrel’ comment,” the Delvian threatened and turned back to Gloom.

  “What is the plan?”

  “It hasn’t changed. The major and I will land planetside, while you and the lieutenant seize the cruiser. The captain wants to see you, Tryd. As soon as you get that ship.”

  And not a word about keeping his paws off of me. Why that sly little jerk! The Delvian nodded, confirming that he had heard the order, after which Gloom presented our plan to the rest of the team. Judging by how Tryd’s jaw opened further and further, this was one of those cases where we had truly cooked up a miracle. Then again, is there anyone in Galactogon who can boast that he spent two days crawling into every nook and cranny of the standard command center template — besides me?

  Half an hour later we were at the far edge of the Barxes system, scouting out the lay of the land as it were. Liberium had spared no expense in the task of securing their interests. The Grand Arbiter and orbital stations were only the beginning. Several destroyers maintained a constant watch, circling from one planet to another. Vargen did not trust the locals and had arranged human security to guard his fleet’s harbor. Ten of the cruisers were currently in system, including Inevitable. Like I figured, the players needed a rest after a hard day’s work and most of them had popped out to meatspace, leaving skeleton crews on board the ships. My hands were itching to call Gammon and offer him a nice piece of business, but I restrained myself. Until proven otherwise, Vargen isn’t responsible for his officer’s actions. At the moment, only Aalor is guilty, and I intend to punish him.

  “Here they are,” said Gloom, pointing to the frigate that had popped in not far from us. “Let’s go, Surgeon.

  The plan had us splitting up. Eunice and the pirates remained on the orbship, and the Pyrrhenian and I headed for Barxes. How Gloom was going to land us on the planet remained a mystery to me, but his confidence reassured me.

  “We’re going to fly up to the hull and do as follows…” Having made sure that none of Tryd’s warriors could hear us, Gloom began explaining how we were going to get on Barxes. This was a secure planet with very tight customs controls. Even my status as a ‘friend of the guild’ did not allow me to enter Liberium’s headquarters without prior permission from a senior officer. However, what Gloom proposed dashed my notions of security systems entirely. And indeed, how had the Pyrrhenian pirate show up on Belket so quickly? Why didn’t I consider how he’d done it earlier?

  Brainiac jettisoned us both into space, and the frigate patiently waited for us to attach ourselves to its hull — and then abruptly set in motion. Ahead of us, customs was just finishing up an inspection of a transport ship.

  We couldn’t hear the radio chatter, but Gloom’s explanation meant that I roughly knew what was being said. The gist of it was always the same.

  Dispatcher: “Frigate X, you are prohibited from entering the Barxes system. Depart immediately or you will be attacked.”

  Infiltrators: “We request emergency assistance! We have no energy left on board! A bloody battle with the Zatrathi/pirates/space gods has left us in this deplorable state. All our reserves are exhausted and we merely request that you sell us some elo so that we can be on our way.”

  All of this is punctuated by radio noise and interference, as if the transmitter is running on its last bits of juice. While the dispatcher figures out a way to deal with this force majeure situation, the frigate, on the sly, drifts as close as possible to the ship that is undergoing inspection right at that moment. The grim guards threaten the ship with volleys of EM fire, the frigate freezes in fear, and we make our move. Detaching from the hull we set up personal reflectors and drift towards the vessel that’s just passed inspection. And that’s it. We cut a hole in the hull, tumble inside, quickly patch up the leak behind us and wait for landing. No one’s ever going to check the same ship twice.

  And no one checked this time either. The price we paid was a rough thrashing as we came in for landing. The transport was carrying inert elo, so the captain didn’t bother to be gentle on landing. The cargo hold’s doors swung open and robots rushed inside to unload the containers. Nobody paid attention to the two shadows darting out the side exit.

  “Over here.” I projected the local map and pointed to a site a few kilometers from the spaceport.

  “Those are the maintenance facilities. Are you sure?” Gloom squinted doubtfully at my map, looked over at the spaceport and then back again. “That far?”

  “That’s nothing. The second entrance to the collector is located around here.” I poked ten kilometers further ahead. “Just trust me. I know what I’m doing.”

  “Lead the way then. First time I’ll be breaking into a command center from underground.”

  “Oh, so you’ve broken into command centers before?”

  “Sure. Several times. Our captain loves his capers. Back in the day, we’d mount a raid once every week, sometimes even more. That’s why I asked him to oversee you. I haven’t been on a job in three years. I sure do miss a good gunfight. But the captain is busy with the new Brotherhood and hasn’t the time to go a-raiding.”

  It took us a long time to reach the location we needed. We couldn’t use our hoverboards and so we were forced to jog the distance. During the marathon, I had to swap powercells twice. In this mode, the armor suit guzzled a lot of power.

  “Here!” An empty hangar stood over the entrance to the collector. Time had not been kind to its doors and the magnetic lock no longer actually kept the place locked so much as shut. Besides that, a rusty old chain wrapped around the handles was the only other form of security. In effect, it looked like the two doors were propping each other shut and barely coping with the task of keeping the passage closed.

  It wasn’t difficult to get inside. We simply cut a hole in the wall nearby. If you ask me, such a careless attitude to the condition of one’s property stressed me out and made me suspicious and even a little paranoid. I couldn’t help feel a jolt of pride for my foresight once we were inside. Gloom climbed in behind me, looked around skeptically and wanted to say something, but then faltered, noticing what the hangar’s doors looked like on the inside. All he managed was a meaningful grunt. I think those outwardly-dilapidated doors could withstand a direct blow from an assault mech. The fragility and disrepair of the hangar’s facade was an illusion. On the inside, the doors were reinforced, armored, wired with an alarm and booby-trapped with enough explosives to bring down the entire hangar. Liberium had tried to convince any trespasser that this hangar was entirely uninteresting, yet they also set up a nice security system to deal with any doubters. Gloom took out a gadget that puffed green smoke into the hangar and immediately several red laser beams appeared — the security system wasn’t just on the doors but everywhere around us too.r />
  “Follow me.” Feeling himself in his element, Gloom now took charge. I didn’t argue — I didn’t have much experience for terrestrial ops. Billowing green smoke ahead of himself, the Pyrrhenian led me to the center of the hangar. Here we discovered a spiral staircase going down. The passage was locked with a lock and chain, but, now understanding the security principles used in this place, we acted differently. Without touching the red lines, we flew over the grid of lasers, dropping directly into the stairwell from above. At the same time, Gloom categorically forbade me from stepping on the steps. He didn’t like something about them. Holding onto the railing we hovered down on our suits’ thrusters, honing our fine maneuvering skills. Having gone around once in the spiral, I discovered that the pirate had been right to be cautious — every fifth step was booby-trapped with explosives.

  After several more turns, we found ourselves at the bottom of the stairwell. Here I was stumped — there were neither passages, nor gratings, nor secret levers. Gloom hovered a few centimeters over the floor, scanning the space. Suddenly he said, “Follow me” and turned off his jetpack.

  A moment — and Wit-Verr’s deputy disappeared into the floor, falling through it, like a hologram. I didn’t have to be told twice and plunged like a stone after him. The floor really turned out to be false. The spiral staircase ended, turning into an ordinary escape ladder, but anyone who didn’t know this and set foot on the false floor would go plummeting ten meters into a giant shredding machine. I managed to activate my engines a meter above the terrible maw, capable of shredding even my armor to bits.

  “That way!” The ladder ended in the grate to the collector. At long last, I was in my element. There hadn’t been any lasers, holograms or shredders in the command center template I had explored. Nor were there shafts as deep as this one. But there was a spillway — the same one as here, which we now entered. The greenish slush probably smelled bad, but my armor suit spared me the local odors. Gloom stuck his blaster into the slush, pulled it out and, making sure that this wasn’t acid, dived in headlong. I had to suppress my feeling of revulsion before following the pirate. It’s not every day that you have to wade chest-deep through who-knows-what. We traveled the rest of the way in complete silence. I did not want to speak. A single thought tormented me — is this stuff going to wash out of my gear?

  “We’re in position,” said Gloom in a whisper and looked around the corner. The pump room was empty. There were bags of some kind of loose material leaned against the far wall, and following the traces on the floor, it became clear that it was a powder that was being dumped down the drain. It was the same stuff that gave the sludge its rich green color — the sludge that leaked out of the pipes in the wall was actually quite gray.

  “You’re quite a sight.” The pirate clicked his tongue and produced from his inventory the last item that I expected to see in Galactogon. I don’t know where Gloom found a pressure washer, but I sure was grateful for it. The green sludge dried very quickly, leaving thick, hard-to-erase stains. “Stand still!”

  A powerful blast of water passed down my armor suit from top to bottom, rinsing off the crud. My stealth cloak helped here — as soon as I became completely transparent, the wash was done. The Pyrrhenian handed me the washer and we repeated the operation. Only with a different target.

  “Our boys will know what to do with this.” Gloom returned the pressure washer to his inventory and picked up one of the bags of green additive. After a little thought, I copied him. What if this is something valuable that I don’t know about? The snake might figure it out.

  A single door led us into a narrow corridor filled with pipes. The maintenance floor, the lowest floor in the base. The reactor that powered the entire command center was housed here, as well as several warehouses, a sewage system and an elevator shaft leading upward. There were no stairs.

  “Engineers! Take the one on the right!” Gloom whispered, merging with the corridor’s shadows. The two engineers were arguing quite loudly, waving their hands and constantly insisting that the other was wrong. The gist of their dispute became clear after a couple sentences. These two old friends were falling out over a woman. A short sprint, a shot in the forearm and their two bodies slumped to the floor. It doesn’t do to kill bystanders — if they’re bound to the planetary spirit and you’re still around when they respawn, it’ll be the same as triggering the alarm. Let them sleep on their quarrel for a couple hours.

  Having dragged the bodies into the back room, Gloom examined the elevator with interest.

  “Going up?”

  “No.” Here was the trick in the entire plan that I had kept secret so zealously. Getting into a command center is only half the battle. The second part is much more important and difficult. And there was no point in going up to the main control room. Instead, I pointed to the hall with the reactor: “That way.”

  My remote terminal had quickly become one of my favorite items in Galactogon. After my manipulators of course. The reactor was on the same circuit as the control unit, and I wasn’t about to fight my way through waves of defenders.

  “Are you planning on breaking it from here?”

  “No, not break it,” I corrected. “That trick’s been tried before and I imagine there’s some decent defense for it. Hacking the Arbiter management system won’t work. Especially so when it comes to the orbital stations. We need to find some other way.”

  Having made sure that Brainiac had entered the network, I pressed a few buttons, turning off the power to the control room’s speakers and spoke into the microphone:

  “Cruiser Inevitable, this is ground control. Prepare for inspection. You have been randomly selected for a complete ship scan. We would like to make sure that you have no prohibited items on board. Please follow course 3-5-2.”

  “Ground control, this is Inevitable. The captain is not on board. We request that you delay the scanning procedure.”

  “Cruiser Inevitable, refusal to comply is a violation of a direct order from the planetary customs agency. You are hereby issued a yellow-level citation. I repeat — follow course 3-5-2 and prepare your ship for inspection. If you refuse again, your citation will be escalated to level red and you will be attacked!”

  “Did you rehearse that in your spare time?” Gloom grunted as soon as I finished transmitting. As I figured, no one dared argue with the locals. Inevitable requested permission to redeploy and set into motion. Course 3-5-2 would lead them beyond Liberium’s hi-sec space into the general system. A change in the cruiser’s ownership here would be noticed but not punished by the Arbiter.

  “Cruiser Inevitable, prepare to be boarded by customs agents. Airlock one.”

  “Ground, we are ready to receive the inspection team. We would like to formally notify you that a complaint has been filed about your actions. We consider this to be a violation of our space-lease agreement!”

  “Your complaint has been received. The customs ship has been highlighted! Time to docking — ten seconds.” I turned off the transmitter and dialed my wife: “Eunice, head for Inevitable’s first airlock. The bridge is right around the corner from there. You have two minutes!”

  “Got it! Wish us luck!” came the reply.

  I changed the orbship’s transponder, turning it into a frigate, and, as I expected, the command center around us resounded with the shriek of a siren. The locals had updated their IT firmware making it impossible to infiltrate them without being detected. We were instantly identified and disconnected. The fatal mistake was that they left us alive.

  My shoulder-mounted blasters snapped out, locked and loaded, and a burst of plasma blasted the reactor to pieces — depowering the command center. There were backup systems somewhere on the second level, but it would take time for them to be turned on, for the power to be restored fully and for the transmitters to contact the Arbiter or the orbital stations. That should buy us enough time.

  “We’re in position! Tryd’s inside. Badger’s in the ship’s network. He’s deactivate
d their self-destruct systems. We have contact! Brainiac’s been hooked up!”

  “Commencing hacking procedure. Time to completion: 45 seconds.”

  The loading bar on one of the screens was moving so slowly that I wanted to push it. The emergency lighting came on around us — the spaceport personnel seemed to be responding pretty quickly. They had already supplied power to our sector. The elevator buzzed to life — an assault group was coming down our way. That or some engineers to examine the power plant. A pair of shots ruined the elevator doors, ensuring that we were safe from that approach.

  “The vessel’s security key has been cracked. Captain, whom shall I designate as the cruiser’s owner?”

  “Tryd. Eunice, get out of there! It’s about to get hot!”

  Liberium’s other cruisers had realized that something strange was going on. They released a swarm of fighters that surrounded Inevitable but were powerless to influence the takeover happening onboard. The new captain ordered the computer to calculate a hyperjump. Forty seconds! Why that’s even faster than Brainiac can do it!