Dark Run (36 page)

‘I think you’re right,’ Jenna nodded. The speck grew into a dot, then gradually swelled into something much larger. Before long their objective was filling the screen – an irregularly shaped lump which resembled nothing so much as a cratered potato spinning gently through its ice-and-rubble-strewn surroundings, except that potatoes didn’t usually have hundred-metre-high, atmosphere-tight docking doors installed in one of their sides. Jenna pulled the nav data back and scanned through the rest of the
Half Light
’s read-outs, trying to make sense of what was happening simply through the activity taking place on its main computer. However, things became very clear when abrupt deceleration nearly pulled her off her chair.

‘Jesus!’ she muttered. ‘I guess the normal pilot’s not on board . . . Ah, they’re going to deploy the mag-anchor.’ She pointed, suddenly realising what one series of rapidly declining numbers meant. ‘There must be a docking plate on the surface.’

‘So they’ll be coming on board?’ Sara asked, a note of worry creeping back into her voice.

‘I reckon.’ Jenna left the terminal and went to check the lock on the cabin door to make sure her programming was still functioning. She needn’t have worried; the ability to open from the outside had been deactivated when she and Sara had settled down for the ‘night’, and no one would be getting in now without explosives or a cutting torch. Nonetheless, she felt her heart rate start to rise. This was about to get very real indeed.

The main terminal
pinged
. Sara looked up at her. ‘Main hatch has been activated.’

‘Okay.’ Jenna breathed out and tried to retain her air of calm. ‘So we sit quiet.’

She tried to picture the crew moving through the
Early Dawn
, working out how long it would take them to get to the cockpit and down to the engine room. She felt the vibration of the engines start up a little before she’d expected, and then a jolt as the mags disconnected and they rose up off the deck of the
Half Light
’s cargo hold. The shuttle jerked forwards almost before they’d got any clearance, and both of them tumbled sideways.

‘What the hell . . .?’ Jenna scrambled upright, fighting against the acceleration, and slapped the switch which controlled the tinting on the porthole. The viewport shifted from opaque to transparent just in time for her to see the doors of the
Half Light
flash by, followed by another momentary lack of gravity as the Heim fields were caught out by the speed the shuttle was travelling at. Then they were out and into the veritable blizzard of ice and dust particles which made up the majority of the ring structure, the gravity reasserting itself and dumping her down on her backside. ‘Who taught these clowns how to fly?!’ she hissed, remembering at the last moment to keep her voice down.

‘Something’s spooked them!’ Sara offered. The Hrozan picked herself up off the floor, an expression of hope creeping over her face. ‘Check the scopes!’

Jenna pulled herself up on the edge of the desk and swept through the read-outs, scanning their surroundings. The
Early Dawn
’s sensors weren’t powerful: the
Half Light
’s were much higher spec and she still had access to them thanks to her piggybacked jack-in, but the main ship’s systems were starting to power down now the shuttle was clear of its bay. However, just before they went dark she caught sight of a small anomaly, nearly lost in the readings of the giant planet, which might just have been another ship. Or possibly two.

‘Oh, thank God. Thank God, thank God,’ Sara breathed. She grabbed Jenna by the shoulder, so hard that Jenna nearly reached up to peel the other girl’s fingers away. ‘They came after us!’

‘Yeah, but these bastards have spotted them,’ Jenna pointed out grimly, ‘and our lot weren’t expecting to have to hunt through a planetary ring.’ She looked out of the viewport again and saw the dark brown, nearly black surface of the asteroid blurring beneath them. ‘We need to attract their attention somehow so they know where to look.’

‘Can we do that?’ Sara asked.

Jenna shrugged. ‘That’s what the tracker’s for. Besides, once we’re inside I should be able to slice into the central systems and we could broadcast what we like.’ She grimaced. ‘Of course, I won’t have a continent’s worth of proxy options so it’ll be fairly clear where it’s coming from, and then it’s just down to whether we can keep Kelsier’s thugs out. Also, we need to be able to convince our crews that we’re not being forced to lure them into a trap, and it’ll have to be a short message so we can get it off before anyone can cut the signal.’

Something flashed on the terminal as the
Early Dawn
’s systems linked with that of the asteroid now they were approaching the docking bay. The huge metal doors came into sight through the viewport, the surface of the asteroid rolling across the sky as the shuttle aligned itself with the internal gravity so everyone wouldn’t suddenly find themselves upside down when the Heim drives synced. Jenna followed the signal and logged it on the terminal, tracking the link codes to find a way into the asteroid’s systems. The big rock had a tighter security system than the
Half Light
. . . but it still wasn’t expecting an attack from within.

‘What languages do you speak?’ Sara asked suddenly. The question was so unexpected that Jenna sat blinking at the display, her train of thought abruptly derailed.

‘Huh?’

The shuttle was now pointing at the asteroid, but the access doors were so large the edges of them were still just visible from the viewport and they were starting to slide open. The
Early Dawn
started to edge forwards before it probably should have done, and a proximity alert flashed up on the display.

‘Languages,’ Sara repeated. ‘We need to get a message out, right? What about if we put it in a different language?’

‘I just speak English,’ Jenna admitted. ‘Well, and a little bit of Spanish, but so does a third of the galaxy. And my grandmother taught me how to swear in Gaelic – my family’s from Ireland way back – but a bunch of Gaelic swearwords won’t help us. Besides, none of my crew can speak it.’ She looked up. ‘You?’

‘Pretty much the same,’ Sara replied, looking a little shame-faced. ‘You know, schools offer optional courses on Our Historic Languages, Czech and Slovak and that, but hardly anyone ever
does
them.’

The
Early Dawn
was passing through the doors. Jenna caught a glimpse of a huge hanger bay cut into the naked rock, enormous fans perhaps half the size of the
Jonah
in the roof to pump atmosphere in and out as required, then she activated the tinting again just in case there was anyone with a vantage point to see in and wonder who the two nervous-looking girls they’d just caught a fleeting glimpse of were.

‘We could try pig Latin, I guess,’ Sara suggested. The gravity fluctuation beneath them was less obvious this time, merely a fleeting impression of added weight as the Heim fields overlapped for a microsecond. ‘
Omecay inway?
’

Jenna glared at her. ‘That’s not helping.’

‘Well, sorry,’ Sara humphed. ‘I’m just a surveillance tech from Hroza Major, you’re the one who’s been around the galaxy and has a crew that speaks every language under the suns.’ She shrugged. ‘Although I guess we don’t know what languages the people on here speak anyway.’

Jenna’s eyes widened. Of course, the main languages of the galaxy – English, Spanish, Arabic, Mandarin and so on – were common enough that most people who’d travelled around would be likely to have at least a basic grounding in them, and a lot of the others had virtually died out.

But not all.

She got up and grabbed the startled Sara in a hug. ‘You’re a genius!’

‘Excuse me?’ Sara extricated herself and pulled back, confusion writ large on her face. ‘What?’

‘I know how to do it!’ Jenna beamed, then sobered slightly. ‘Well, probably. I think it’s our best shot at getting a message out which the people looking for us
should
understand and the people in here with us almost certainly won’t, anyway.’

‘I’m not following, I’m afraid,’ Sara admitted, looking a little uncertain. Jenna was about to explain, but then there was another jolt as the
Early Dawn
set down on the deck, and seconds later the residual thrum of the engines died away. They sat quietly and watched the display, waiting for the signal which would show the main hatch being opened.

‘There we go,’ Jenna muttered as it finally flashed up. Her stomach was starting to churn and her palms felt damp with sweat as she contemplated what she was about to try. Of course, she could just sit back, not attract any attention and hope Drift, Rourke and co. would come to the rescue, but there couldn’t be a rescue if no one knew where they were.

Besides, she was part of a crew, and every member of a crew needed to pull their weight.

‘Okay,’ she said, flexing her fingers and looking at the screen. ‘I’m going to be slicing into systems I’ve never seen before via a non-hardlined link, and trying to establish and maintain control against a hostile resistance while also making sure that no one can override the programming blocks I’ve put in place to get back into this shuttle and come shoot us. Does that make any sense?’

‘Not really,’ Sara admitted.

‘Did it sound impressive?’

‘Yeah, pretty much.’

‘Good enough.’ Jenna breathed out and eyeballed the display, then carefully lowered her fingers onto the control panel.

‘I need a pilot hat . . .’

In the cold depths of the Olorun system, over the nominally north pole of a ringed, creamy-yellow gas giant which was unnamed so far as anyone within a few light years was aware, two interstellarcapable ships hung in space bound together by a docking link. One was a freighter, a StarCorp
Kenya
model running under the name of the
Keiko
, the shell of which must have been three decades old although the thrusters and Alcubierre ring had likely been either repaired or replaced since then. The other was Europan Commonwealth military vessel
Draco
: significantly newer, slightly smaller and with noticeably more guns. Guns which were, in fact, the current main topic of discussion.

‘The plan has changed,’ Captain Rybak stated firmly. She’d turned out to be young, especially by the standards of what Drift would have expected for the commanding officer of a Europan counter-terrorism force, and commanded her bridge with the sort of forceful personality one might expect from a precocious talent in a high-stakes environment. Rourke had dealt with her one-to-one while in Glass City, and words like ‘stubborn’ and ‘mule-headed’ had featured prominently in her descriptions of the Europan captain.

‘That is not an acceptable solution,’ Rourke repeated, a faint tilting of her head and narrowing of her eyes the only signs of her dwindling patience: signs just noticeable to Drift, but far too subtle for someone unfamiliar with her to pick up on. Drift was increasingly glad they’d left Apirana on the
Keiko.
They’d barely been able to restrain the towering Maori from taking revenge for Micah’s death by beating the life out of the man he’d knocked out in the marketplace, and when Apirana had heard that the
Early Dawn
had lifted off with Jenna still on board his rage had turned positively incandescent.

‘Look, Agent,’ Rybak said, addressing Rourke, ‘we haven’t been able to locate the ship since we came out of the jump. We don’t even know if we’re in the right place, but even if we are, our cover must be blown by now. If we’d come out hot on their tail and still had a chance of taking this base by surprise, I’d be prepared to commit troops to an assault. As it is, I’d be very surprised if our target doesn’t know we’re coming and has had time to prepare, and I’m not going to send my men and women into a death trap. Even if we can find this rumoured asteroid, and that’s a big “if” with the tracker beacon not deployed on the
Early Dawn
, we won’t be able to open the door. We just blow the damn thing up.’

‘You have one ship, and we have no idea how big the asteroid could be,’ Rourke pointed out. ‘This won’t be like shooting up an enemy ship, Captain. I’ve seen smuggler bases like this before; it could be a hundred times your size. Anything solid enough to be habitable inside is going to be pretty resilient to firepower, so you might be able to blow in some windows if they have any, but they’ll just sit tight behind airlocks in the middle. You’d need heavy-duty mining lasers to even make a real dent in that rock, and in the meantime they’re almost certainly going to have defensive gun emplacements to shoot back at you.’

Rybak glowered at her. ‘You’re not convincing me that an assault on foot makes any more sense, Agent. If they can shoot us when we’re shooting them, they can shoot down any assault shuttle we send in, especially since we
can’t open the door
.’

‘Not if they don’t realise it’s coming,’ Rourke argued. ‘We can set the
Jonah
to silent running and ghost in—’

‘Silent running?’ Rybak snorted. ‘There’s no way you could set that up from far enough out to avoid detection!’

‘I have faith in Jenna,’ Rourke replied firmly. ‘She’ll get the tracker working. Then we just line the approach up.’

‘“Just line the approach up.”’ Rybak shook her head disbelievingly. ‘Even powered down and on radio silence, they’ll pick you up the moment you fire manoeuvring thrusters. So unless you have a pilot who can plot the approach trajectory from
outside sensor range
without needing to make any course adjustments—’

‘Yeah.’ Jia Chang didn’t even look up.

Rybak blinked. ‘What, you think that’s easy?’

‘Easy? No.’ Now Jia did look up, meeting Rybak’s eyes with a challenging stare. ‘If it was easy, anyone could do it.’

Rybak looked questioningly at Rourke, the
Is she for real?
query plain in her dark brown eyes. Rourke just shrugged.

‘I have a specialist crew. They come with certain . . . idiosyncracies.’

Rybak sighed. ‘Fine. Assuming your
expert
pilot is capable of what she says, I still don’t see how you’re planning to get inside without the piggy-backed access to the central control systems your slicer was supposed to provide.’