Aneka Jansen 6: The Lowest Depths of Shame (28 page)

‘Who are you, lady?’ the man asked.

‘Don’t you recognise her?’ Daniella replied. ‘That’s Aneka Jansen.’

Aneka shrugged as she turned toward the door. ‘I changed my hair. Two minutes, then you follow.’ Silently she added, ‘Signal Gwy. Make sure you include the mines in the data.’

‘Done,’ Al replied. ‘Alarms are sounding in the northern part of the station. We can expect a warm welcome.’

‘I figured, put the shield up, no cloak.’ She stepped out into the corridor, saw two Marines running toward her, and cut across them with a stream of needles. Beyond, in the entrance and the corridor behind it, more men were running toward her. One stopped to drop to his knee and take aim. Aneka did not wait for him, raising her left hand pistol and firing it. One round, aimed at the floor in the middle of the entrance hall. Superheated, ionised gas blossomed out in an explosion of light and sound, and then cold air rushed in through the shattered doorway.

‘That is one way to open the door,’ Al commented. ‘I am detecting around thirty identity transponders in the corridor beyond.’

Aneka started forward, firing plasma rounds into the mass of men as she went. Laser beams lanced out at her, many of them missing, some splashing harmlessly against the force screen surrounding her. There were screams. Al patched through the radio chatter from the Marines, and Aneka heard orders being shouted as the AI decrypted the signals.

‘What’s she using?’

‘I don’t know but it’s lethal!’

‘It’s one woman, shoot her!’

‘The rifles are having no effect!’

‘Grenade!’

Aneka saw the weapon arcing toward her, raised her right hand pistol, and fired, shooting it out of the air.

‘Oh f–’ There was the roar of detonation and a backwash of heat as the grenade blasted through the troops.

Her left pistol dry, Aneka moved to one side of the hall using the lull the explosion had caused to switch out the magazine. ‘How are we doing?’ she asked.

‘The drones are approximately thirty seconds out. The prisoners should be leaving in about sixty seconds if they follow your instructions. There are troops coming this way from the factory, but our reinforcements should be able to handle those. We need to clear another fifty-two metres of corridor to be sure the prisoners are safe.’

‘I love having you on hand for this. Let’s get started.’

Stepping out of cover, Aneka began to advance. Her pistols fired as she identified targets through the smoke and men fell, chests ripped open by a hail of needles. Beams lanced out at her, hindered by the smoke, but still hitting more in the confined space and closer range.

‘Shielding at ninety per cent,’ Al announced after a couple of seconds.

‘Let me know when it gets to fifty.’

‘They will still be in little danger of penetrating at that point.’

Aneka fired, taking out a pair of men standing too close together. ‘Yeah, but fifty sounds like a nice number. How much further?’

‘Thirty-eight metres.’

‘Any heavy weapons?’

‘Not here. They are bringing something up from the factory.’

‘Let the drones handle that.’ She kept moving and firing. It was not exactly challenging work. Her pistols were more than a match for the armour the Marines were wearing and she never missed. They could fire all they liked, but all they did was cause pretty light shows on her force screen.

‘Retreat to position beta.’ The order came through the radio channel the Marines were using and the men ahead of her began an ordered, but rapid, retreat around the corner.

‘They will be waiting for us,’ Al said. ‘Concentrating their fire in the hope of breaking through.’

‘Would it work?’ Aneka asked, more from curiosity than any desire to find out. She was swapping magazines again.

‘That would depend upon how many rifles they can bring to bear.’

‘Yeah, well, not going to give them the chance.’ She put her hand and pistol around the corner, the camera under the barrel showing her the ranked troops waiting for her twenty metres down, near where she had come in. Five rounds fired down the corridor and she pulled back just before explosions shattered the silence and the wall of heat roared past her.

She paused, taking a few seconds to swap out the empty mag. ‘Any sign of life down there?’

‘I am detecting no transponders,’ Al stated.

‘Time to leave then.’ She turned and ran back down the corridor.

There were five transport pods on the ground inside the ring of mines. The ex-prisoners were struggling toward them as best they could over rough ground in the cold covered by five massive robots. Each was modelled after a Xinti war chassis, large, heavily built, very powerful, and armed with a scaled-up version of Ella’s antimatter rifle. They stood in a line between the pods and the troops trying to get up from the factory, throwing out blasts of anti-protons which exploded into annihilating energy on contact with men, machines, or the ground.

Aneka began helping the prisoners, carrying the weaker ones to the pods and pushing them inside as the others hurried as best they could. With the last of the people loaded onto one of the transports, Aneka turned, drawing her pistols again.

‘All right, clear out. Ella, pick up when you’re ready. Call in the strike.’

Gwy materialised out of thin air over their heads, turret guns opening up on the troops below as the robots retreated to a pod to leave.

‘I’ll call it in when you’re aboard,’ Ella’s voice replied, sounding tense.

‘Now, love. We’ll have plenty of time to get clear and I don’t want anyone escaping the system.’

‘Okay… prepare for a very hot extraction.’

~~~

‘The surface facility is under attack, sir,’ someone said and the Captain of one of the cruisers in orbit over Eshebbon turned, looking at the displays beside his command chair.

‘Let’s get ready to respond. Power to the main guns, and…’

A shudder ran through the ship as though something had grabbed it and pulled, jerking it out of its normal flight path.

‘What in Vashma’s name was that?’

‘We’re reading… unusual gravimetric distortions about two thousand metres off the port side… I’ve never seen… Gopi! Ships!’

Something very large, bristling with weapons, emerged from nowhere. One second there was nothing, and then there was a vessel, a warship, and it was not alone. Two more of the huge ships appeared even as swarms of far smaller vessels began to deploy from the first one.

‘Never mind the surface,’ the Captain yelled. ‘Get me firing solutions on those ships!’

‘Missiles launched!’

‘We’re having trouble getting weapons lock on anything. They’re jamming our active systems.’

‘They’re firing on us!’

And that was when one-hundred gigajoules of gamma radiation tore through the cruiser’s hull as if it were tissue paper.

~~~

Aneka stood on the virtual flight deck and watched as four ten-kilotonne, antimatter-catalysed fusion warheads impacted the facility she had just left. Glare filters cut in, reducing the light to something you could actually look at, but that just made the devastation more obvious. A huge ball of energy was expanding out from the impact points of the missiles, reducing everything in its path to vapour.

‘Good riddance to it,’ Ella said as Gwy climbed away from the explosion.

‘“I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,”’ Aneka said, her voice soft.

‘Sorry?’

‘It’s something the guy who set off the first nuclear bomb on Old Earth is supposed to have said. A quote from a religious text. I’ve never really seen a full-scale nuclear explosion before. It’s… kind of beautiful.’

‘If you don’t think about what it’s doing.’

Aneka turned and looked out into space. ‘Are we clear?’

‘The drone warships from Shadataga have eliminated the heavy warships in orbit,’ Gwy told them. ‘Several of the frigates have escaped. Apparently they realised their position was hopeless.’

‘Okay, well… Let’s rendezvous with the Hyde and get out of here. I kind of wish they had just blown up the system. I never want to see that planet again.’

‘Then can I have a hug?’ Ella asked. ‘A real one, with real bodies?’

Aneka gave a soft snort of a laugh. ‘Then you can have a hug. A real one, with real bodies, and kissing. There’s going to be kissing too.’

Shadataga, 14.3.531 FSC.

Aneka opened her eyes and looked up at the ceiling of the apartment’s bedroom. After the events of the last few weeks, she had decided to run a sleep cycle beside Ella, in bed, in the quiet, ‘to let her systems have a chance to recuperate.’ Al had pointed out that it was unnecessary, but she had said it was and he had not argued further. There was one system she had which needed to rest now and then: sometimes what you really needed was just to turn everything off for a while, to not feel anything. This was one of those times.

The victims of Eshebbon’s second attempt to create the ultimate viral weapon were on the station at Wormhole Junction, in the hospital facility. None of them seemed to be suffering ill effects beyond slight malnutrition, dehydration, and sleep deprivation, but the AIs wanted to keep them under observation for a day or two while their bodies were repaired.

Aneka had walked through the sickbay area checking on them before flying back to Shadataga, and that had been when she had heard the little group of Torem talking. They watched her walking past and one said something with a tone which suggested awe. She knew no Torem, but aboard the station Al had access to the linguistic libraries the AIs had collected. It meant the translation came after she had walked past them and she had no desire to turn back.

‘Vashma sent an angel to liberate us,’ he had said. ‘An Angel of Death.’

It had echoed with the way she was feeling, and shutting down for eight hours had been her way of avoiding worrying over it. Now it came back and she closed her eyes again, her left fist tightening against her thigh…

‘Nnn…’ The groan from her right told her Ella was awake. ‘You up… no… good…’

Hands slid over Aneka’s skin, arms circled her waist, and a warm body slid up against her side. Lips touched her neck just under her ear.

‘I kind of miss having you sleep with me,’ Ella whispered. ‘It’s nice waking up next to you. Especially the waking up bit. I am going to make you moan like a whore at an orgy.’

Aneka giggled. Even when the world seemed dark, you could always count on Ella to brighten it up.

~~~

‘So what happens now?’ Aneka asked. ‘Pierce has lost his viral weapon, but he’s still got control of the Navy, the FSA, and most of New Earth, and the rest of the Jenlay worlds will follow their lead.’

‘An accurate assessment,’ Winter said, her eyes on the display table which had a schematic of the Joval system hovering over it. ‘Currently, he won’t know what happened on Eshebbon. We’re quite sure nothing got out from the FTL relay, so the first he’s going to know of what we did is when one of those frigates gets back to New Earth which will be… the twenty-second.’

‘So everything goes on as normal until then?’

‘Yes, though I’m preparing for when it does. He is likely to panic, or at least get very annoyed. I suspect he may decide to plant further evidence of Herosian attacks and move for a large-scale Navy deployment. I am busy arranging for strategic releases of information around that time which will discredit him. The last thing he needs right now is for people to start hearing the truth.’

‘Will that work?’ Sharissa asked. ‘He’s done a pretty thorough information management job so far.’

‘Oh, I’m going to make sure he can’t stop this going out.
Everywhere
is going to start getting this data. I already have probes transmitting it to media hub stations in the Rim. It will take days for that to filter through to the core worlds, but when it does he’ll be faced with a tidal wave of facts.’ The AI looked at Aneka. ‘I need you on New Earth. Elaine and Janine will need some backup when they arrest Pierce.’

Ella stepped closer to Aneka and took her arm. She had a fierce sort of ‘I will not be left behind’ look on her face. A little way off, Cassandra was looking the same.

‘All right,’ Aneka said. ‘I need to speak to War about an idea Al and I had. We’ve got a couple of days to see if it’ll work so we might as well give it a go.’

20.3.531 FSC.

Ella shifted the muzzle of her rifle and squeezed the trigger, and the last of the holographic enemies disintegrated in a flurry of pixels. And silence fell as the set dissolved around them.

‘It works,’ Ella said after a second. ‘I’m… uh… kind of shocked at how well it works.’

Aneka, Cassandra, and Ella had ended up back-to-back in the simulated courtyard at the centre of the room while squads of holographic soldiers charged in at them from four entry points. They had tried it with Al’s drone, but the numbers had been too much and coordinating their response had been too difficult. Up to a certain threat level four was good, but beyond that it worked best if Al handed out targets from his list of up to a hundred individual tracked threats, and the three women carried out his instructions. Aneka still had overall tactical command, but she left it to her AI to decide what needed taking out to get there and…

‘Yes,’ Aneka agreed, ‘it works. Cassandra? How are you feeling about this? It’s maybe less natural for you…’

‘I am feeling… rather elated,’ Casandra replied, looking more shocked than excited. ‘The new fire control software works very effectively. I just need to give it directions and make sure my body is pointing in the right direction. I… I suppose I should feel like I’ve handed over control of some of myself to Al, but I just feel like… like I can go into a situation where this is needed and feel less like a fifth wheel.’

‘You were never that,’ Al said into their heads. ‘I feel more comfortable having you in combat situations with us like this, so I am happy. Ella is about to collapse from adrenaline overdose, however. I suggest we break to let her come down before her head explodes.’

‘My head is not going to explode,’ Ella replied. ‘Even if I do feel so wired it’s untrue.’

Aneka gave her a grimace which was half-grin. ‘Better get your drone mobile, Al. When she gets like this there’s only one cure.’