I released her, rolled to my feet and sprinted through the gas, hurdling the inert bodies left in Jack and Uhlstan’s wake. I caught up as they were closing the airlock doors, obliging a last-second leap through the narrowing iris. I hit the floor hard, shouting with pain and snorting blood.
Jack was on the comm ordering Lucy to power up for a maximum burn. Mina stood to one side, regarding me with an expression entirely lacking any gratitude or appreciation, eyes dark with distrust and scrutiny. I noticed her hands were shaking.
“Good eyes, man,” Uhlstan said with a grin, leaning down to offer a spade-like hand. I gripped it and he hauled me upright.
“Yeah,” Jack agreed as the inner door opened, his gaze every bit as suspicious as Mina’s. “Very good eyes.”
Chapter 3
“The Exocore Malthus II,” Mina said, the ship schematic Mr Gold had supplied rotating in the command core’s central holo display. “Self-contained, deep-belt ore processing vessel. She’s getting on a bit now, built by Exocore when the war started heating up. They were worried about future access to the orbital processing stations. Largely automated, as you’d expect, crew of twenty engineers plus ten security, on account of the precious metals I assume. She’s capable of processing a thousand m-type asteroids a year.”
“That’s a lot of metal,” Markov commented. He hung above the holo, hands and feet clamped onto the same perch, resembling a pale wingless bat.
“Estimated to produce five tons of precious metals per calendar year,” Mina confirmed. “No way to value it without knowing the composition, but her last reported yield amounted to over one billion UA in gold alone.”
“Bulky cargo to shift,” I commented. “This tub got enough power for that?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Jack said. “We’re not going for the cargo.”
Mina thumbed an icon on her smart and the image shifted, zeroing in on a section of the hab-cluster, the schematic showing a spacious office with a small red box highlighted on the wall. “Captain’s suite,” Mina said. “What we want is in the wall-safe.”
Jack angled his head at me in expectation of the question. I chose to disappoint him. “Sure you can trust this data? That was a hardcore CAOS law-squad back on Celestia. How d’you know they didn’t get to Mr Gold too, mess with it somehow?”
“It checks out,” Mina said. Her face had a drawn look, forehead creased and cheekbones a little hollow, as if she was fighting a migraine. “Corroborates with other sources in all salient particulars.”
“That’s reassuring.”
“She says it checks out,” Jack said softly. “So it checks out. She is never wrong about intel and you owe her your respect.”
I spread my hands in apology. “Just exercising the caution of an experienced man. That’s why I’m here, right? My experience. Begs the question, what d’you need it for?”
The holo expanded, pulling back to show the Malthus II surrounded by a cloud of small pulsing specks of light. “Defensive net,” Mina said. “She’s covered at all times by two hundred and twenty armed bots, semi-autonomous and programmed with a cooperative combat algorithm. We need you to punch a hole with that suit of yours.”
“Specifics,” I said.
She zoomed in on one of the bots, revealing an insectoid beast festooned with mini-guns, missile launchers and an impressive sensor array. Its speed and manoeuvrability put it only slightly behind the Pendragon, plus it had two hundred and nineteen friends to play with. “My fee just went up,” I said.
“You negotiated your fee with Shadrak,” Jack said in a low voice. “Half a million in folding green. Don’t try to fuck me boy. You’re not my type.”
“You hired me for a micro-grav combat role, not a suicide run.”
“Actually,” Markov said in the peculiar lilt of the Voidborn. “We have a way to obviate the risk factor.” He held up his own smart, displaying a scrolling block of code.
“A hack?” I asked.
“Quite so. We substitute the net’s algorithm for our own, half the bots will perceive the other half as an enemy force. Divide and conquer.”
“But you have to get close enough to upload it,” Mina added. “Hence you and your suit.” She ran a simulation, the specks of light swirling around like angry wasps as the Dead Reckoning burned in to latch onto the Malthus II’s hab-cluster.
“Uhlstan and me will take care of on board security,” Jack said. “Get to the captain’s quarters and retrieve the safe. Lucy will get us clear before they can reconfigure their bots, and the nearest CAOS Security squadron is seventy-two hours away at full burn.”
Chalk up another hit for the Colonel, I thought. It had taken months of work to relay the information about the safe’s contents to a few choice criminal contacts in a manner that wouldn’t arouse suspicion, knowing Jack couldn’t resist it. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line an enterprising soul had evidently seen fit to let Fugitives Retrieval in on it. Just like the war, nothing ever goes the way it’s supposed to.
I let my eyes wander over the Malthus II, picking out the comms relay situated some three hundred metres from the intended entry point for the Dead Reckoning, my Primary Mission Objective. “Half a million,” I said to Jack, deciding complete indifference would be out of character. “Chicken-feed compared to what’s in that safe, right? Auction price of twenty mill twelve years ago. Must be worth even more now.”
“The contents of the safe are not your concern,” he replied. “Do a good job and I’ll think about putting you on retainer. But don’t test me further, boy.”
I grinned. “I’m all about the work, cap’n.”
*
It was a forty-eight hour haul to the interception point. I spent most of the time in the Dead Reckoning’s cargo hold running combat sims in the only immersion couch. Using the Pendragon’s standard rig produced a success rate little better than fifty percent, but with its enhanced stealth gear the odds were markedly more in my favour, not that I let Jack or the others know. The more risky the proposition appeared, the more value they placed on my continued good health.
“You seem to die a lot,” Lucy observed as I emerged from another session. She was replaying the latest sim on the holo, clearly unimpressed by my combat acumen. In truth, micro-grav combat was never my forte. I’d done it more than a few times in the war but only in extremis, and just once in a exo-suit. Back on Red Station the Colonel had put me through a high-intensity crash course in the Pendragon, but my scores had been only little better than average.
You should’ve found a marine for this, I’d told him.
We tried. None were a close enough match to Maddux’s biometrics or had your experience with this kind of work. Meaning none were former spec-ops with a proven facility for killing in cold blood. This kind of work.
“Always program your sims harder than they need to be,” I told Lucy, floating free of the restraints and removing the headset. “Makes the real thing easy in comparison.”
“Mind if I try?” she asked, propelling towards the couch. I managed not to stare as she wriggled into place.
“Help yourself.”
“He’s not sure about you, y’know,” she said, reaching for the headset. “Heard him telling mom. What you did on Celestia, way too sharp for hired muscle.”
“Began my career on the Slab. Can’t spot a Demon there, you don’t live long.”
“Never been there. Way he talks about it, sounds like a shit-hole.”
“Depends which half you live on.” I tapped at the couch’s controls. “Any preference for the difficulty setting?”
“Crank it to maximum, war hero. Wanna give this suit of yours a decent workout.”
I watched the stats scrolling as the sim ran, the visual relay leaving me in no doubt about her piloting skills, wearing the suit like a second skin as she pulled high-g turns and blasted bots in a graceful dance of economic burns and judicious targeting. Fortunate neurons for sure.
“That’s your hardest setting?” she s
coffed as she emerged. “Should’ve been with us on the Morningstar job…“
“Lucy!” Mina was floating near the entrance, a deep frown on her face. “Braking burn prep is overdue.”
Lucy turned to me with a comical cross-eyed gurn then propelled towards the tubeway. “Coming, mother dear.”
Mina lingered for a moment, frown just as deep. “One wrong glance in her direction…”
“…and I’m dead,” I said. “Yeah, I get it.”
She blinked and swallowed another threat. “Go see Markov,” she said, turning away. “He’ll brief you on the upload gear.”
*
“Looks like a harpoon,” I commented, taking the device from Markov’s spindly hand. His workspace was a spherical cabin near the engine compartment, the walls covered in sticky-pads holding a thousand or more tools, each within easy reach of his extended limbs.
“Based on a Mark Four Plasma Shrike,” he told me, a long finger tracing along the device to a honeycomb section just behind the warhead, fashioned from one of the cannon-shells supplied by fake Manahi. “Depleted uranium tip gets it through the armour then five hundred micro bots emerge in a swarm. Only needs one to find a data-node and upload the hack. Once it’s in, it’ll spread to the rest of the net.”
“How long?”
“One point six eight seconds, give or take.” He reached for his smart and called up the holo of the security bot. “A hit anywhere in the central body should do. The speed is less than half that of a standard shrike so you’ll need to get close, three hundred metres should do it. I’ve got four of these ready in case the first run is a bust.”
“I’ll only need one, but thanks.”
He nodded and turned to a work bench, his leg extending to pluck a tiny welding laser from the wall with unnervingly prehensile toes, his hands fixing a mag-lens over his brow, left eye bulging in the glass as he peered at the device fixed to the bench. It was some kind of sonic array, narrow beam sound-boosters arranged in a cage, all pointing inward to deliver a concentrated blast at whatever would be placed inside. Safe cracker, I decided. One of the more professional armed robbery crews to work the Yin-side banks had used something similar, though nowhere near as sophisticated. Useful if you wanted to bust a safe and preserve what was inside. But Maddux wouldn’t know that and he was just about smart enough not to ask the question, besides their robbery was immaterial to my mission and there was zero likelihood they would enjoy the fruits of their labour in any case.
“Pretty impressive hack job you did back on Celestia,” I said.
“Not really, their safeguards are an outdated joke. Cut straight through to the mainframe with an old algorithm from the war. Used it to crack the doors on a Fed Sec gunboat at Rand Station.”
This was a surprise, most crew-clans had stayed out of the war, keen to rise above the petty concerns of the Earth-born and those who choose to shackle themselves to orbit. “I was at Rand Station,” I said, which was true. A fortunate coincidence had placed me and Maddux in the same battle. It really wasn’t that surprising since the assault on the UN’s orbiting financial hub had been a maximum effort affair. We’d won, after a fashion, but the casualty rate made it a one-time thing. It had also been enough to convince former marine corporal Maddux that the experience of warfare had nothing more to offer by way of longevity or financial gain.
“Quite a party,” Markov said, not looking up from the bench as he played the laser’s hair-thin beam over a join on the frame.
“Thought Belters were pacifists,” I commented.
“Popular myth. We’re just overly polite, and some of us appreciate the benefits of a decent profit margin.”
“What unit were you?”
“Officially we were the Auxiliary Battle Squadron, but really we were privateers, freelance crews recruited from the long-haul trade routes, plus a few Voidborn like me. CAOS would pay us a prize fee for every UNOIF vessel we captured, half for any we destroyed. That’s where I joined up with Jack. When the war ended the prize-money dried up of course, but that wasn’t any reason to stop.”
There was a shift in the background hum from the plasma relays, Lucy powering down the fusion generator in preparation for the braking burn. Only three hours to go.
“I’d best run another pre-flight,” I said, twisting towards the door.
“Don’t forget your ordnance.” Markov handed me the cradle holding my new missiles. “Need any help loading up, let me know.”
“Thanks.” You’ll be particulate matter soon, my Belter friend, I thought as he turned back to his work, mag-lens back in place and his long features rapt, completely absorbed. Another consequence of a decent profit margin.
Chapter 4
“All set?” Mina asked in my earphones.
I placed the neural interface on my forehead, checked the diagnostic reads a final time and flexed the Pendragon’s arms. “All boards reading green,” I replied.
“Good. Standby, two minutes to launch.”
The ship’s internal comms gave me a vid-feed of the cargo bay where Jack and Uhlstan were checking their weapons: squat Ruger M-90 carbines suited to close-quarters combat. Uhlstan also had his Ithaca strapped to his back whilst Jack wore a sword-size combat knife on his thigh. They were clad in high-grade body armour and respirators, the plan being to advance behind a cloud of tear gas, thermal imagers providing an edge in the confusion.
“Don’t hang around out there when the bots start fighting each other,” Lucy told me. I could see her strapped into the pilot’s station in the core, neural interface on her forehead, hands moving smoothly over her holo-board. “Wouldn’t want to leave you behind.”
“Sixty seconds,” Mina said.
“Maddux,” Jack said, looking directly into the camera and speaking in slow deliberate tones. “Do not abuse my trust.”
“All about the work, cap’n. Ahoy and avast.”
“Twenty seconds…”
I had one last item to check, an internal addition to the starboard plasma nacelle, cylindrical in shape and forty centimetres long. The casing was lead-titanium composite meaning its rad signature was only a tenth of what it should have been, any excess would be taken for slightly elevated energy loss, well within parameters for a suit of this mark. All readings came back as normal but I couldn’t help the faint upswell of discomfort as I watched it spin in the display.
“Five, four, three, two…”
I disengaged the mag-clamps holding the suit to the deck, floating free for the final second before the airlock doors opened and the decompression took me out.
“Net configuration conforms to the expected pattern,” Mina reported via the comms laser. “You are free to engage.”
Even at four klicks distance the Malthus II was an impressive sight, brightly lit from end to end, a dim orange glow emerging from the massive processing tube as the smelting plant did its work. There were some asteroid fragments floating about but nothing the Pendragon’s nav couldn’t handle. I used up about half the CO2 reserve to get within striking distance, short bursts along an irregular approach vector, targeting icons continually sprouting on the heads-up as the suit detected more and more bots.
“Unidentified vessel, this is Exocore Security aboard the Malthus II. State your designation and purpose.” First hail from the Malthus II, relayed via the comms laser.
“Malthus II, this is deep-belt salvage vessel Dead Reckoning,” Mina responded. “We are licensed to operate in this area. I’m transmitting our ident codes now.”
“Wait one, Dead Reckoning. Please initiate full braking burn while we check these out.”
“Oh screw you,” Mina said, every bit the world-weary freelancer. “Exocore may have millions to spend on fuel, but I don’t. Our vector is well clear of your sky and you know it.”
There was a pause and another voice came on the line, female, clipped to military precision, faint West African accent. “Not clear enough for my liking, Dead Reckoning. Burn to a full stop now. This is not a s
uggestion and I’ll remind you we have authority to employ lethal force.”
That’s no rent-a-cop, I decided. Who’s really running security here?
“Maddux!” Mina said urgently, switching frequencies.
“Fifteen seconds to target,” I replied, the threat icon of the bot I’d chosen growing ever larger in the heads-up.
“Comply now or you will be fired upon,” the African woman stated.
“OK, OK,” Mina responded. “Don’t get your panties in a bunch, sister. Disengaging secondary thrusters now.” A click as she switched frequencies. “Jack, this is starting to smell wrong.”
Last-minute caution. Not good. “Ten seconds to target,” I said.
“I’m pretty sure we don’t have ten seconds,” Mina responded. “Jack, we should abort…“
Shit. I engaged the plasma thrusters and accelerated towards the target bot, spraying lidar beams in a random pattern, multiple warning signals merging into a scream as the heads-up blazed red and the bots began their algorithmic dance. The target bot was now fully aware of my presence so attaching Markov’s shrike was out of the question. I blasted it with a heat seeker from six hundred metres, overwhelming its defensive sensors with a tight-focused EMP. A brief yellow flash illuminating tumbling debris and it was gone.
The closest bots swarmed towards me, weapons active, the tell-tale yellow flares of multiple missile launches dancing across my field of vision. I waited until they were six seconds from impact, fired the plasma thrusters at maximum for a full two seconds then activated the stealth mode. The missile trails intersected less than fifty metres away, proximity fuses igniting a split second later, the momentum from the plasma burst carrying me free of the blast radius, but only just.
I kept drifting, watching the bots commence their search pattern, waiting until one came close enough. It braked to a halt less than a hundred metres away, turning with sensors blaring, provoking an electronic hiss in my ears as the beams swept over the Pendragon’s invisible carapace. The bot finished its scan then angled itself for a return to its allotted patrol zone. I disengaged stealth mode and let fly with Markov’s shrike. The bot’s sensors blared a warning but it had no time for a counter, the depleted uranium tip punching through the armored core to deliver its cargo. I judged Markov had been a little conservative in his estimate from the way the bot instantly turned and blasted its nearest comrade to pieces in a hail of mini-gun fire. Soon the space around the Malthus II was lit by multiple explosions and streaking missiles as the defensive net turned on itself.