Scat spoke above the low-toned murmur.
‘Bing, bring up the local target.’
‘Certainly, Scat.’ Bing leaned across Matheson and issued a simple command to the computer. It responded by projecting a 2-D schematic of the Lynthax Tower in Tremont, the capital city of G-eo, onto the forward monitor.
‘Expand to show the whole city.
It expanded.
‘Do we have a hologram projection?’ Scat asked.
‘We do.’
Up it came on the briefing bench on the far side of the cabin.
Scat got up and looked down at it.
‘Ask Goosen to come in. We’ll be making the assault in a few minutes. Then upload all of this into the shuttle’s NavCom and mark the Lynthax Tower as the prime target. The secondary target is the geothermal power station.’
He pointed to a small low-rise building at the edge of town, which, unlike Go Down, was open to the air in a semiarid region of the planet. They were to proceed onto the secondary target if, for some reason, they could not get close to the Tower.
Bing made a note, returned to the console, played with the link between the command cabin and the number three shuttle, and then left to collect Goosen, who was taking a nap in the conference room.
When he finally appeared, Goosen was even less well dressed than he had been on Trevon. His sandy hair was in tangles, the bald spot at the back of his head was uncovered. He was wearing an unevenly buttoned plaid shirt, its front panels hanging down outside of his trousers. The flies on his trousers were at half-mast, and the legs were around four inches too short.
‘Where on earth did you find that wardrobe, Birdie?’ Scat asked.
‘The Commander made a donation,’ Goosen muttered, grumpily, still shaking himself from his sleep and looking around in the hope of finding coffee. He saw Matheson’s mug and took it. Matheson made to object, but once he saw the size of Goosen’s fists he thought better of it.
As Goosen sipped at the lukewarm coffee, Scat brought him up to date.
‘We’re in G-eo orbit and once we reach the far side, we’ll launch the shuttle. This time I don’t go with you. We don’t know a lot about this place, so we need someone up here who can make decisions. So, as I can’t fly the shuttle yet, and you can, just about, you’re needed down there. So’s Bing. It’s a two-man show, so you’ll get all the glory. The Tower here is the main target; the geo-thermal station over there is the secondary.
‘Oh, and like in Go Down, we’re phoning in a bomb hoax. We’ll be adding it to the data stream.’
‘Well thanks, Scat,’ Goosen replied, only slightly less tetchily now he could taste the sugar in the coffee. ‘We’ll be off then.’
99
The view from space was spectacular.
There were no clouds or atmospheric disturbance of any kind so the V4’s downward-looking radar and standard HD cameras could record the entire nighttime attack at an enhanced magnification, and with such clarity, that it would have a CIA specialist gushing with joy.
Li had his bugcam on board the shuttle. Chan had done a deal with Scat. They would share the different media recordings for their own purposes once the mission was over.
On board the shuttle, Goosen tried to swat the bugcam out of the way, and cursed Li out aloud. It was supposed to stay below knee-level and track the attack through the forward and downward-looking section of the cabin, but it was flitting about, occasionally obscuring Goosen’s view of the heads-up display.
Bing was calmly following their downward progress on the light-tug remote’s flip-up screen. They had just emerged from re-entry and were now skimming the desert on their way to Tremont. The rear-view camera showed a hint of desert dust wafting up into the shuttle’s wake, the dust particles reflecting the local star light.
‘1 minute,’ Goosen observed.
‘OK.’
‘30 seconds’
No reply
‘10 seconds. Pulling up.’
The shuttle stood on its rear end as Goosen pulled the shuttle into a steep climb to reach 1500 metres. He quickly levelled out and hovered above the Lynthax Tower that was in the centre of the tightly packed Tremont downtown.
‘OK, I get it Birdie. We’re here. No need for the aero-dramatics.’
Goosen looked across. Bing was in the seat next to him, now that there was just the two of them.
‘Well?’ he asked.
‘It’s drawing power. Almost ready. A few seconds more. That’s it. Launching now!’
‘Crickes!’ Goosen exclaimed.
Goosen had known what to expect, but G-eo was so energy-conscious and the night so black, the blue-black energy surge filled the cabin.
‘It’s a direct hit. We should be leaving already.’
‘Roger that!’
Goosen spun the shuttle around and pulled hard, the shuttle burning fuel at an alarming rate as it clawed its way back into space.
Behind them, the Lynthax Tower blinked dark, then, one by one, and as the shuttle exited the troposphere, several floors of the building burst into flame.
Just as the shuttle made its V4 approach, Scat sent a message to one of the local media stations, repeating their goals. He then gave Chan permission to stream a specially prepared and approved 30-minute news-piece into space, one that included the never-seen-before footage of the hijacking of the V4, the assault on Trevon and the follow-up assault on G-eo.
It promised more to come.
100
‘It’s a farking disaster!’ Petroff muttered as he walked through the small lobby leading into his office. ‘An unmitigated, farking disaster!’
‘Sir?’ Rogers asked.
‘Nothing, nothing,’ Petroff replied. Then more softly, under his breath, looking at his desk covered in water, ‘Farking nothing!’
The place was in a mess. The elevators were out, the lights were out, and everything electrical was burned out. Along with a small security detail, he had taken a soft-track up onto the environmental roof above the Lynthax Centre and then made his way on foot down to his office on the 120th floor. He was sweating through his shirt, and his legs ached.
He walked stiffly back out to the corridor. Further along, he could see his men wandering from room to room. Above him, the sprinklers continued to leak water; splat, splat, onto a squidgy carpet. The air was thick with burned plastic, wiring, and paper and was saturated with moisture.
Nothing electrical worked any more. Even the databanks on the 130th floor were fried. Worse, there was no neuralnet and no companynet—just publicnet and frigging radio!
‘By Jeeze, someone is going to pay for this!’
His graf pinged. It was an incoming message from Cotton. He threw up a projection.
‘You may want to drop the projection, Jack,’ Cotton said by way of hello. ‘For your ears only. We’ve commandeered the publicnet for a few hours, so it’s secure.’
Petroff dropped the projection, connected his earpiece, spun around and walked back into his office. He shooed Rogers and his colleague away as he wondered how Cotton could have secured the publicnet so quickly.
‘And?’ he asked.
‘It was Scat.’
Petroff stopped in his tracks.
‘You’re farking kidding me!’
‘What would be the point?’ Cotton asked. ‘We don’t have the time for pissing about. He’s also taken the V4.’
Petroff sat down onto his chair, oblivious to its dampness.
‘You understand he now has the V4?’ Cotton asked.
Again, no reply. Petroff’s mind was racing.
‘Call me back when you’re ready to talk,’ Cotton continued.
‘How the fark did he get to the V4?’ Petroff asked, still not quite believing it. It’s our most valuable vessel! He reached for a remote on the desk to turn on the news, then threw it against the wall when it occurred to him the TV wouldn’t work.
‘He hijacked it. He’s also released the prisoners, and made friends wi
th some Asian Bloc journalists. We’ve just finished reviewing a statement he made through the spaceport video exchange.’
‘How long ago?’ How on earth did this wooden-top stop the video exchange from telling me about this?
‘A couple of hours. We’ve kept it under wraps, but the networks will hear of it soon, I’ve no doubt.’
You mean you’ll be releasing it soon.
‘Where is he now?’
‘No idea,’ Cotton replied, adding: ‘They went ftl. But we’ve sent messages to the buoys asking Earth to up the cruiser patrols along the channels, and our boys are prepping a starflyer to serve as our ground comms to the local satellites. We also need to let the other worlds know what’s going on so.’
Petroff’s mind raced a little more.
Why the blazes didn’t this jerk have Scat arrested before the Booni news conference? He had served him up as a patsy for Booni’s assassination—not to piss him off and push him into the rebellion. Just what was this guy thinking?
Unless it was politics as usual.
‘Petroff, are you still there?’ Cotton asked.
“Yes. I’m thinking.’
‘Well, we’re doing that as well. It looks as though Scat is on the warpath, and now he’s got an LM equipped with military-grade SG, he could be anywhere by now.’
‘G-eo,’ Petroff replied.
‘G-eo?’
‘Yes. He’ll want to keep going. G-eo is nearest. It’s also a Lynthax world.’
‘What makes you think he’s headed for a Lynthax world?’
‘His sense of fair play!’
Petroff cut the link with Cotton, not caring overly much whether he was finished or not. That bastard had screwed him over, somehow, and for some reason, but he wasn’t going to let him do that a second time.
He needed to protect his company’s assets, but he didn’t have much to work with. None of the company’s starflyers was equipped with military-grade SG, and the Lynthax frigate was protecting the Thing on Prebos—on orders from corporate.
Well bollocks to that: he would pull it. The frigate was his ship, despite the Outer Rim Force listing it as one of their Reserve assets. And in any case, were Scat to be left free to create as much havoc elsewhere as he had just done here, the company would be in dire straights before too long. Then that Thing would drop right to the back of the file. And he could not have that. It was his baby.
He ran a card over the lock on the drawer in his desk and looked down at his Hoover files. They appeared dry. He reached inside and picked up a disc. Yes, still dry.
Well, these files, and that Thing on Prebos, were his hammer on the glass ceiling, and this attempt at rebellion wasn’t going to get in his way.
He walked along the corridor to the transportation office and peered through the door to study the scorched chart on the back wall. A corporate starflyer was available. It was N’bomal’s, but what the heck! He would take it and explain later.
‘Rogers! Call the soft-track back to the roof. We’re off to the spaceport.’
It took only two hours for Petroff to reach Prebos, even without the military-grade SG. He simply broke the rules, completing the trip in just four jumps, ignoring his pilot’s advice to at least stick to the channel.
They jumped into space, a thousand klicks to the aft of his beloved Venture Raider, without warning and risking a violent reaction. But the frigate remained embarrassingly quiet. Petroff’s frustration finally erupted into unfiltered anger. He put a call through to the ship’s commander using his direct line.
‘Abel, bring the ship to battle stations and prepare a jump to G-eo. Then fire the officer of the watch!’
Abel sprang from his bed and rubbed his face free of sleep.
‘Yes, sir. We weren’t expecting you.’
‘That’s obvious. Now get me on board. We have a rebellion to put down.’
101
Who would have thought it? For a ship that had attacked two New Worlds in the course of three hours, and was preparing to attack a third, the V4 was surprisingly quiet. Scat had expected significantly more chaos. Instead, the place was calm.
Newly recruited rebels, all of them ex-Trevon cops, hunkered down over consoles, familiarizing themselves with the V4’s software. The original V4 crew sat on the floor beneath the forward screen, under guard and waiting to answer the next question or call for assistance. Across the command cabin floor, Goosen and Bing prodded and probed the hologram, discussing their next target. Further afield, small groups of rebels patrolled the ship looking for more armaments and useful supplies.
But they did so very quietly, in stark contrast to the screaming and hollering that had accompanied the initial hijack. It was as though everyone was now embarrassed by the emotions that had been on display in the first hour, and were dialing them back, absorbing the magnitude of what they had just done.
Even the 240 or so prisoners were quiet, resigned to Scat’s promise of a short detention, at least until the night’s operations were complete; and the politicos had come to understand they were superfluous to the evening’s activities, so had backed away, allowing Scat to focus on the job at hand. That is, with the exception of Marvin: out of sheer curiosity, he loitered in the command cabin, occasionally looking over Goosen’s shoulder at the comms monitor.
Scat could now hear a pin drop. It wasn’t how he imagined it would be—it was too quiet—but at least Li’s bugcam had stopped flitting about. Li and Chan had gone; maybe they were walking around with one of the patrols—he didn’t care: he had other things on his mind; they were about to attack Lynthax House on Ashmore.
They were currently knocking out the Ashmore buoy network. It was their next target by virtue of its location along the Outer-Rim. Only no one on board the V4, save the original flight crew, and probably a prisoner or two, really knew much about the place, and they weren’t offering anything up, unless Scat asked them direct questions at the point of a gun.
In Scat’s rush to hit as many planets as possible in the course of a single night, they were planning their next hit just as they completed the previous one, relying on surprise and a general deficit of ORF defense capabilities to make up for a lack of detailed planning. Only they had just discovered that Lynthax House was going to be a difficult target and, in working it out, they were burning through a valuable resource—time.
Lynthax House was deep inside Prospect City’s huge dome, which provided it with protection against Ashmore’s howling winds, just as the environmental shield over Go Down City protected its inhabitants from cold snaps and arctic blizzards. But that’s where the similarity ended. Whereas the rooftop of the Lynthax Centre connected with Go Down’s environment shield, Lynthax House didn’t connect with the dome; the building topped-off several hundred metres below it.
That presented the rebels with three problems: they were less certain the light-tug would lock on to the building; the shuttle itself would take a battering during its approach, and it would be a bitch to keep it steady when it was time to deploy the light-tug. They had yet to come up with a solution that dealt with all three, despite several simulations.
‘Worth moving on?’ Scat asked, breaking the silence. Several heads came up and then returned to their screens. He was talking to Goosen.
‘How long do we have?’ Goosen replied, still looking directly at the hologram.
‘For here? Maybe another 90 minutes. Beyond that we lose night time over Constitution; it’ll have to be a daytime raid.’
Goosen knew what he meant by that. The Venture Raider was the ever-present bogeyman, lurking in the shadows around the room, waiting to pounce if forgotten. No one knew where it was. It had been protecting the company’s most valuable asset, the mining operations on Prebos, making sure it was isolated from Trevon’s increasingly volatile politics. But it could be anywhere now. Their intelligence was threadbare, hearsay. So, they all kept the Venture Raider at the front of their minds; there was no need to mention it again.
/> ‘Sir,’ said one of the ex-cops. Scat knew his name; it was on the tip of his tongue. ‘Someone is mucking around with the Far Dark Light fuel reserves.’
Scat looked across at Matheson, the V4’s original second in command. The man’s head dipped between his knees to avoid Scat’s stare.
‘What kind of “mucking around”?’ he asked.
‘We’re bleeding fuel into the skin of the ship—lots of it.’
Scat got up, walked across the cabin and prodded Matheson with his foot. When he spoke his tone was even, but menacing.
‘You said comms could only be accessed from here, the shuttles and the flux-drive rooms.’
Matheson felt his heart race. He should have mentioned the medical centre, but hadn’t. He had hoped for it to matter hours ago, when the situation was more fluid. He had hoped someone in the accommodation section would use their initiative to help save the ship. But not now: not after such a delay. Since then he hadn’t dared mention it; he could still see the commander’s vacant eyes staring at the afterlife.
‘Answer up, Matheson.’
‘The medical centre has access to the ship’s basic programmes, but that isn’t the same as access to communications,’ he lied, surprising himself at how credible it was. ‘You were very specific at the time.’
‘Sir! The accommodation video feed has also gone down.’
Scat looked across at the man who was giving him the bad news, and remembered his name. It was Tyson; Goosen had told him he used to work in the control centre at police headquarters, as a comms expert. He nodded his thanks and headed for the door.
‘Matheson, this is going to cost you,’ he said without looking at him. ‘Birdie, drop what you’re doing and come with me. Bring one of the reserve teams. Bing, get Welks to help you shut off the bleed. And I don’t care how much you need to hurt Matheson—get his full cooperation, this time.’
102
Scat stood in front of the locked fire door, bracing himself for whatever was on the far side. The doors had remained closed since releasing the officers who had agreed to join them. Since then, everyone else was free to roam their section of the ring, with a rebel team watching over each fire door.