“Then you might as well warn them a fight’s brewing so they can adjust their plans. Now make that call or get off my ship.”
“Am I getting off the fast way, or the slow way?”
“That would be your decision now, wouldn’t it?”
The broker closed her eyes and gave him a bitter sigh. “Very well.”
“Dismissed.”
Shade was obviously furious, but she left to call her superiors. He figured she would spin matters to make her look innocent, and that he was out of control, but those were the risks you took when you got into bed with these Other Governmental Agency types. Oh well. He had needed the money. Starships weren’t cheap.
“Castillo, Hilker,” he pinged his XO and the ship’s cargomaster. He waited until he got confirmations that both were listening. “That bogey is closing and I don’t particularly feel like moving.”
“We gunning up, Cap?” Castillo asked.
“Break out the good stuff, gentlemen. Let’s get this lady ready for a fight.”
Chapter 32
Inside the pod, Jane checked her monitors. The systems were all green. Their course and speed were good, leading them toward one of the orbital farms at an oblique angle. It would take a few hours before they’d be able to catch a ride into Big Town.
That was if they even made it that far.
The pods were uncomfortably tight, even for Jane, who wasn’t very big. She couldn’t imagine how claustrophobic it had to be for poor Bushey, who was a large fellow. You had to lie flat, your hands in front of you, with almost no room to bend or stretch. And the pods smelled old. The air was too sharp and had a faint tinge of rubber.
They didn’t have much cargo area but all of it was full. Bushey carried various explosives. Katze had her guns. And Jane had brought her little platoon of warriors. If they made it to Big Town, and that was a pretty good-sized if, at least they would be ready for anything.
She’d been looking at the readouts she’d received from Jacky’s brain and the sensors she’d placed there to gage any growth in his old controls. Whatever the Warlord had introduced was growing at an alarming rate. Normally such things would take two weeks. But this, well, it might finish before they even arrived. If that happened, it was going to make her task much harder.
The three pods sped silently along, separated by only a few kilometers. “Status,” she asked over her short-range net.
“Green,” Bushey said.
“Green,” Katze said.
“Good. Let’s run through the plan again.”
Katze groaned, but they all brought up the view of the orbitals on their displays and walked through the plan, each narrating their parts and the various contingencies. And when they finished, they walked through it again.
When they completed the second walkthrough, Bushey said, “After we rescue Chief’s ass, I’m going to kick it up and down Big Town. Eleven klicks one way, eleven klicks back. Then I’m going swimming in that pool.”
“Good luck with that,” Katze said. “Did you bring a suit?”
“Suit? I’m going au naturale. You coming with?”
“Um, I think I’ll do a few holes of Swindle golf,” Katze said. “On the ninth hole I think you get to putt from the back of a caliban.”
“Swimming, golf, barbeque. It’s a party.”
“This is kind of a special treat for me, Specter,” Katze said, changing the subject. “These pods were built on my home planet.”
Jane already knew that, but she said, “Oh, that’s nice.”
“Yeah. And we quit using them like thirty years ago because the ride sucks.”
Bushey laughed. “I always wondered how you people were crazy enough to try and ninja aboard ships like this. So I figured what the hell, let’s try it.”
“It wasn’t a bad idea…Not a good one either. But not all bad.”
“Well, I owe Tui big time. He’s saved my life more times than I can count. After this? We’re square.”
Jane had never been one for banter. She lived inside her own head far too much for that. Oddly enough, her best conversations were usually with Jackson over comms while he was working and she was on the ship. “You two should sleep. I’ll keep watch for the first cycle.”
Once they were quiet, she brought up the images of the agriculture orbitals and the schedules of shipments, looking for anything they’d missed, crowded into a pod, her weapon pressing into her back, her little platoon of warriors silently sleeping around her.
She ran Jacky’s numbers again and hoped her projections of the wetware growth were wrong.
* * *
Sentinel Seventy-Nine suddenly registered a blip on its radar. Then three blips. Then two. Two small objects moving fast. The sentinel calculated the direction and speed of the objects and determined they were on a course that would take them very close to Big Town, which automatically triggered a level-one alarm.
And then the blips vanished.
The sentinel went through its automated routines trying to reacquire the objects but failed. The objects could be echoes or potential stealth objects, but they were more likely garbage jettisoned from a ship, or the uncatalogued remains of an old satellite, but any of those could endanger the delicate farms. The automatic routine kicked the alarm up a point, and this triggered a message to be sent to the other two sentinels in that grid.
All three sentinels searched. One acquired an object, then lost it. However, a second sighting meant they weren’t echoes. There was at least one unidentified object, and so another workflow was triggered. This time a message was sent to a human.
A light blinked on one of the monitoring displays of the security station on the Little Leon asteroid. The security tech on watch was bored and tired. She’d been up for twenty hours, half of which had been outside, repairing a communications antenna and wrestling with a tether that would not stay put and kept getting tangled. She’d come back in, exhausted, but it was her watch, and she wasn’t going to beg for help from the others. To keep herself from falling totally asleep, she’d been watching the news about the wing race coming up on Big Town.
The one pundit was such an idiot. The tech leaned back in her chair, shook her head at the nonsense coming out of the pundit’s mouth, and then saw the blinking alert light. She read the alert, but knew it was probably nothing. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to send a bot to take a closer look.
* * *
Jane and the others had slipped well into Big Town’s territorial space. By this point they were all wide awake, alert, and watching their displays. Making such a crossing was illegal, and while stealth pods were normally used for smuggling, they could also be one hell of a weapon. One filled with rocks and sent at this velocity could mess up a fragile orbital. So whether it was criminal enterprise or war, Big Town would be perfectly within their rights to incinerate them. But Warlord would have to find them first, and Jane didn’t think that would happen, not just yet.
And then Bushey came over the net.
“I’ve got a problem.”
Jane searched her scanners for a bogey but didn’t see anything. Had he heard something over the communication channels they’d been monitoring that she hadn’t? “What is it?”
“Something’s wrong with my second heat sink.”
“Flux reading?” Jane asked.
“It’s leaking. I’m at forty Celsius right now. No. Wait. Forty-one.”
“That’s balmy beach weather,” Jane said, but silently cursed to herself. “Think of palm trees.”
“Forty-three, forty-four.” Bushey was usually such a clown, that him sounding calm somehow made things worse. There would be no stealth if they couldn’t keep their exteriors cold. Heat shone like a lightbulb on infrared scanners in space.
“We’re still a long way from our destination.” The pods’ heat sinks were the only thing keeping them from being detected. Waste heat would make them glow like a beacon in the coldness of space. But if the pod temperature got too high for too long, it would c
ook its passenger. “Hold on, maybe it will stabilize.”
A beat passed.
“Internal temperature in the pod is now at forty-six.”
“Have you tried shunting it into the third sink?” Katze asked.
“Tried. No go,” Bushey replied. “Tried sealing. That didn’t work either.”
They waited.
“Forty-six,” he said.
“There you go,” Jane said.
Another beat.
“Whoa. Fifty. Fifty-four. You know I’m the one carrying the explosives, right?”
If he jettisoned that heat sink, it would show up on every sensor from here to Big Town. But if he didn’t, Bushey himself would show up as one big firework. Probably shortly after he roasted to death.
“Seventy. Who inspected this damn pod?” Bushey asked.
“Chief Hilker’s guy, Roderick Su.”
“Well, then he didn’t sabotage it on purpose because I still owe him money from poker night. Nevertheless, it’s getting mighty painful in here.”
Jane flipped over to the diagnostic tab for Bushey’s pod. She could see the failed component, but it was a hardware issue, not a software problem. There was nothing she could do from here. Bushey was in a suit, which would help resist the temperature swings, but not for that long. He’d be steamed like a dumpling.
“Get rid of it,” Jane ordered. “Jettison the heat.”
“That’ll endanger both of you and the mission. Hang on, Specter. I’ll be fine.”
More time passed. Bushey quit giving them temperature updates, though Jane could see them still climbing on her display. It had to be like an oven in there. He was risking his life to protect them.
“Bushey? You still there?” Katze asked nervously.
There was no response. He was too stubborn and had probably passed out from heat exhaustion. Jane might not be able to fix the problem, but she could order the pod to jettison its heat. “Bushey, if you can hear me, hang on.”
The words came back slurred. “No. Don’t risk it. I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not.” A moment later a bright white signature appeared on her scanner. It traveled forward at the same speed they did, then sped away at a perpendicular angle. “And there goes our nice little space flare for everyone to see.”
The internal temp in Bushey’s pod dropped dramatically, but she knew the Warlord’s sentinels would zoom in on the sink and try to diagnose what it was. Within seconds they would compute likely scenarios for how it had gotten there, one of which would be accurate. The AIs would then start a search pattern for whatever had jettisoned it. So a course correction was in order. If she could get far enough away, they just might avoid detection.
“Course change,” she said. “Yaw three right. Vector 45. Then resume.”
When Bushey didn’t immediately respond, she set the new course for him. The three pods used cold exhaust to alter their direction of travel.
Katze said, “Quadrant five. Something coming our way.”
Jane switched. And there was the signature of an interceptor bot. “Where did you come from?”
“It just appeared.”
“How could it just appear? It would have needed to launch and accelerate.”
“Not if it has been shadowing our path for a while. Waiting for us to reveal ourselves.”
How could it have known their trajectory? The surface of the pods was made of a special material that didn’t reflect light. That made hardly any signature at all. Someone must have made them a while ago.
“It’s coming in hot,” Katze warned.
“Deploying countermeasures.” Jane triggered the routine. A small amount of excess heat was shunted into several rods on the outer shell. Then those were flung in different directions.
“Interceptor firing.”
Jane watched the missile launch on her display. Six bright lines streaking through space. They were hundreds of kilometers away, but that wasn’t very far at these speeds.
“So what did I miss?” Bushey asked, sounding groggy. Then he must have seen the missiles. “Oh, shanks.”
Seconds ticked by. It was now a game of hoping the interceptor hadn’t acquired the inner pods.
“They’re not taking the bait,” Bushey said. “I was trying to take one for the team. You should have let me go.”
“Leaving someone behind is what got us in this mess to begin with,” Katze said.
“Wait.” The missiles proceeded on the same line. One that would lead them right to the three pods. “Wait,” Jane said again, even though there was really nothing else they could do.
And then the decoy rods fired their hot thrusters. Suddenly the missiles veered away, following the bogus pods. Jane held her breath, waiting for the interceptor to shoot more. But nothing came.
The decoys accelerated and began evasive maneuvers. Normal pods wouldn’t have that, but these were souped-up smuggling pods. And smugglers needed to outrun their pursuit.
One missile exploded before impact. But two others found their marks. The third decoy raced away into space, a missile hot on its tail. The other two missiles turned to join the fray. Jane was impressed with the last pod, but it ran out of fuel. A few minutes later, it was struck as well.
“How did you know that would work?” Bushey asked.
“They’re using the missile design we smuggled them on the last trip,” Jane said, feeling a little proud of herself. “I know exactly what they’re programmed to look for and what they wouldn’t be able to resist.”
“What if they’d been using some other design?”
“Then that would have been unfortunate for us.”
“Well, that gives me all sorts of confidence,” Bushey said.
“We should go dark,” Jane suggested. Not because she was worried about Big Town’s weak sensor net picking up their close-range comms, but because she really didn’t want to talk right then. That had been too close and Jane didn’t want them to hear the fear in her voice.
The interceptor was moving toward the debris, so it could gather them for further analysis. All the while, Janey, Bushey, and Katze silently sped toward the orbitals.
If they’d had windows, Swindle would be directly below them. The display was breathtaking, but probably nothing compared to the real view. Jane was okay with that though. The world made more sense when viewed electronically. She sent the command for the pods to decelerate and alter course again. It was time to stow away on something heading for Big Town.
There was a dropship heading for Swindle. Gremlins were moving three other transports around the farm. Another waiting to dock. One leaving.
And that’s when Jane saw the security ships and interceptor bots. They were everywhere. Especially around the agricultural orbitals. The missile strike on the mystery craft had raised some alarms.
“Somebody’s stirred up the anthill,” Bushey said. “There’s no way we’re getting on a food transport now.”
“No.” Jane was looking for something else. Not plan B or C, but plan D. And then she spotted something that would work. “There. Ten o’clock. Negative three. Bearing away.”
It was a garbage truck. Basically a simple bot that roamed around picking up trash. Nothing so deadly in space as trash. The drones kept the area around the orbitals clear, mostly by redirecting junk on a trajectory where it would burn up in the atmosphere, but they also had a bay for stowing anything that was of interest or potentially valuable. Best of all, the simple drone’s firewalls were made of cheese.
Opportunity favors the prepared, was something the captain liked to say, but it was a concept Jane lived by.
Long ago, she’d made it her practice to run a series of specific routines every time she gained access to any system. It didn’t matter how small. It didn’t matter where. Because of this she’d amassed security IDs from thousands of people on multiple worlds. She had mined hundreds of systems. Much of it was aged but data was data.
Jane hadn’t been able to break into all of Warlo
rd’s systems, but the security had been lax on a few, so she’d cracked them while they’d been docked out of habit. Now she brought up the Big Town records and searched for sanitation workers. There were two hundred. She narrowed the list down to five who were listed as technicians, then selected one named Atticus Wall, simply because she liked the name. It took her less than thirty seconds to use Wall’s manual override codes to have the truck maneuvering in their direction. Climbing all over its hull were trash monkeys, meter-long bots with multiple arms that worked tirelessly to spot and then steer garbage into the truck’s maw.
“Okay, our pods are now interesting space junk to be collected.” Jane checked to make sure her suit was good and all her equipment was still buckled on. It was difficult because there was so little room to move.
This part was unnerving. Space walking scared the hell out of her. The captain had taught her the mandatory minimum to be a member of his crew, and Jackson had coached her a lot, but Jane had never taken to it. She preferred to stay in the safety of her lair, and let her bots do the physical stuff.
“Get ready. Check your hatch.”
“Ready,” Katze said.
“It’s stuck!” Bushey grunted in exertion. “The damn hatch—I’m going to kill whoever purchased this stinking piece of Hana— Going to manual.”
The garbage truck came closer. Closer. Jane’s display showed two pods green, one red.
“Bushey, get moving. Three, two, one. Go!” Jane opened the pod.
Bailing out was white-knuckle terror. Nothing was as frightening as the vast eternal black before her. Then she was out of the pod and flying toward the truck, going unbelievably fast. But speed was relative, because so was the garbage truck, matching them, as per her commands. She tried to remember what Jackson had shown her, but the suit was programmed for this. She just needed to relax and let it do its job.
Jane zipped across space, pouches full of bots, tailed by her menagerie of bigger bots who wouldn’t fit in a pocket. The suit told her when she was in range and when to fire the grapple to latch on. If she missed, she’d pass the truck and float off into space. Having not done the error calcs in advance she wasn’t sure how long it would take her to die, whether she’d hit atmo first or run out of air…Probably atmo, because Big Town was in a relatively low orbit.
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