Dyson's Drop (11 page)

‘I told you, I’m not
usingjust
a bubble. Now shut up. ‘

Alisk moved swiftly and, Anneke had to admit, skilfully, avoiding areas with a congestion of surveillance fields. Overlapping areas were notoriously difficult to negotiate unseen, since tiny discrepancies showed up in the differential responses.

As Alisk moved, she continuously checked her wristdisplay. Although standard operating procedure, there was an added urgency to the girl’s movements that puzzled and alarmed Anneke.

After following Alisk for fifteen minutes and, on one occasion, hiding with her while agents perfunctorily patrolled the corridors discussing the scores of their bodyball teams, they reached a cargo elevator. Instead of entering it, which would have set off alarms, Alisk opened an automatic maintenance hatch on the side of the shaft. Anneke noted that precise holes had been lasered through it. It had already been opened and ‘neutralised’ so it would not raise any alarms or software back in Control.

Once inside, Alisk put her lips to Anneke’s ear and whispered, ‘The hard part is over but there’s one more blockage.’

Anneke nodded. Alisk removed her neutralisers from the hatch and, to Anneke’s surprise, started descending the shaft, rather than climbing up it.

Anneke had not realised there was a ‘down’ to go to. RIM’s detention level was deep; which was why people called it the ‘bowels’ or ‘dungeons’ of RIM.

Several minutes later, after leaving the shaft, they came to a lower chamber with a small hole cut in the floor. It looked too tight for either woman to squeeze through.

But Alisk did not immediately climb through. After consulting her schematic, she ramped up the field strength of the ‘bubble’ and deployed a camouflage field, combining a hologram, across the hole, making it disappear. Somebody must be passing beneath the hole soon.

Alisk put her finger to her lips, a signal whose meaning had never changed across the galaxy of humankind worlds.

They didn’t have to wait long.

Within two minutes, Alpha Force padded past beneath them. Anneke had an unobstructed view of them through the one-way camouflage field.

Through their hand signals, Anneke identified the group as Quesadan, which helped explain Alisk’s intel. She also noted the armoured field livery of Myoto and almost smiled. Another of the mole’s nasty little subterfuges. Kill Anneke and blame Myoto for it. A nice, simple plan.

As soon as they were gone - Anneke assumed they were the ‘blockage’ - Alisk deactivated her camouflager and squeezed through the hole.

After waiting for Alisk to secure the area, Anneke followed suit. They exited the RIM tunnels at a run. The only sign of the intruders were the remains of a security team, fallen prey to the Quesadan hit squad.

An hour later the women were well away from RIM headquarters, having exited by a superseded datacrystals conduit Alisk had burned through. Alisk had prepared a safe house with stores of fresh clothing and other necessities.

Anneke sprang the moment Alisk handed her a false datapass and security wafer.

Alisk did not put up any resistance. Pinned to the ground in an unbreakable hold that could become lethal, Alisk stared back at Anneke nonchalantly.

‘He said you would do this,’ she gurgled.

Anneke tightened her chokehold. ‘Who said?’ Alisk’s face bulged. She tried to reply, but Anneke’s grip was too tight. Anneke eased the pressure.

‘Lob Lotang.’

‘He sent you?’

Alisk grimaced and drew in a deep breath, then nodded.

‘Why?’ asked Anneke.

‘He wants to help you. Now get off me. We’ve helped you. We saved your life.’

Anneke was undecided. ‘Why else?’

‘He wants to stay alive.’

Ah. So that was it. Anneke released the woman. Alisk sat up, and rubbed her throat, but she did not seem angry.

Anneke nodded. ‘Now self-interest I understand.’

‘Lob believes you’re putting together a team. He wants in. Obviously, he can’t come himself or be seen to be involved.’

‘How about you?’

Alisk looked pensive for a split second. ‘We had a public falling out and he sent someone to kill me.’

‘Ah, a set-up,’ Anneke said. ‘Some poor mere who you subsequently lobotomised?’

‘No one who didn’t deserve to die,’ Alisk said.

‘Lob can be of help. He has resources. Contacts. He knows where bodies are buried.’

‘As long as I don’t try to kill Nathaniel Brown.’ Again the girl nodded. ‘Yes, until Lob finds a way to neutralise the slave narcotic Brown has infected him with. Then, as far as he’s concerned, it’s open season on Mr Brown.’

‘Lotang used Quesadan contacts to find out about the hit squad?’

‘Yes. Brown sent them to kill you. Seems ten years on Urkor doing hard coding wasn’t enough.’

‘He must hate me real bad.’

‘He’s not the only one.’ Alisk’s eyes flashed, but she showed no other sign of her intense dislike for Anneke. After all, Anneke had been the unwilling agent, by which the mole had infected Lotang in the first place, making him a slave.

‘I had no choice,’ said Anneke.

‘I don’t care.’

‘Well, glad we got that out of the way. Now maybe you can tell me how I’m supposed to trust you.’

‘Lotang said this would be a problem.’

‘How prescient of him.’

‘I’ll take the oath.’ Anneke blinked. ‘What?’

‘The Sentinel oath. I’ll take it.’ Alisk looked like she had a bad taste in her mouth. ‘Take it or leave it.’ Anneke thought. Having access to Lotang’s resources would be an immense boon, not one she could easily turn down, but letting this viper into her nest seemed insane. Yet the Sentinel oath was unbreakable, a deep mental conditioning no one in the last thousand years of history had forsworn.

Finally, she nodded. ‘Let’s do it. We’ll need a notary.’

They found one on the outskirts of the Draco Quarter. It was still open despite the late hour. In a back room, a Sentinel - enveloped and cloaked (no one had ever seen a Sentinel in the flesh; they were rumoured to be unhuman) - witnessed the oath, sprayed Alisk with a mild soporific and subjected her to the conditioning. Anneke, who was waiting outside, wasn’t allowed to watch. An hour later she took possession of legal documents attesting to Alisk’s oath and checked the tiny brand that Alisk bore on her ear, sealing the contract. The brand of the two intersecting olive branches.

‘Happy now?’ asked Alisk, rubbing the brand, which would reappear even if the marking was removed, or the ear removed and regrown.

‘No. But welcome to the team. Let’s go.’

It was interesting to watch Fat Fraddo fall in love. Alisk of course paid him no heed. Her heart was given to another as thoroughly as her word had now been given to Anneke by the oath. But that didn’t stop Fraddo swooning every time Alisk walked into the room.

‘Nice place you have here,’ said Alisk, checking out the underground chamber Fraddo had donated to Anneke and outfitted at his own expense. It buzzed with activity, mainly due to Anneke’s rescue.

‘I think you can stand down some of these people, Fraddo,’ said Anneke.

Despite his instant obsession with Alisk, Fat Fraddo was pleased to see Anneke. He’d been worried about her and Fat Fraddo rarely worried about anyone but himself.

Eyeing Alisk, he knew that maybe he’d have to start worrying about her, too. What was happening to him? Was he becoming sentimental? He did not have time to think more about it however, for at that moment several alarms went off.

Fraddo, belying his great bulk, moved rapidly. In seconds he’d ascertained the danger and had displayed a snoop schematic on the master holoscreen.

The underground chamber was surrounded.

‘I guess we upset the Quesadan hit squad more than I thought,’ said Alisk, checking the charge on her laser. Knowing the battle dynamics of an enclosed combat zone she searched for blast deflectors and usable obstructions around the unfamiliar room.

‘I thought you said this place was untraceable,’ Anneke said to Fraddo.

Fraddo expelled a deep breath, causing his belly to ripple. ‘They must have tagged you, then deduced our whereabouts. This place is too well shielded to be found except by accident, but it does create a blind spot if you know what you’re looking for, and where.’ Anneke spun round and trained her gun on Alisk.

‘You did this.’

Alisk stared calmly back. ‘I took an oath.’ Anneke’s jaw tightened. Had the girl betrayed her?

The oath bound her to Anneke from the moment of the oath taking, that’s what she had assumed. What if Alisk had contracted with Quesada to lead them here
bifOrehanrP.
That might constitute a loophole, though she suspected that in the eyes of a Sentinel it would appear flimsy. And would be lethal. For Alisk.

Alisk, though, continued to stare right back at her, unabashed. Her expression clearly said, ‘This wasn’t me’.

Anneke lowered her weapon. ‘Spiffie,’ she muttered.

Everyone in the chamber was armed and ready.

Blast deflectors rose from the floor and dropped from the ceiling, affording some protection. Dampening fields would also slow - but not stop - weapons not attuned to the same field harmonics, which Fraddo’s team’s weapons were.

Seconds ticked by as the master screen showed the attackers taking up strategic positions, and the air in the room grew tense, electric. The techies Fraddo had hired and
indebted
were not trained fighters. Anneke saw more than one gun hand trembling.

The pulsing forms on the master holoscreen, representing the attackers as wireframes, had stopped moving. They were ready to attack.

BLACK back-pedalled so fast his thoughts were a blur. Barely escaping undetected, he returned to his quarters sweating and out of breath. An internal investigation had been launched already (the infiltrators, of course, had not been caught). Black knew that it would quickly become apparent that the ‘Myotan’ hit squad had had inside help. Talk of a high level mole would resurface. Worse, Rench would find it hard to keep his job, since the brazen breakout had occurred on his team’s watch when he had just dismantled the task force to find the mole.

However, none of this infuriated Black.

No. He was enraged because Anneke had not only escaped, she had escaped because of him.

A cursory examination of the breakout revealed to Black that Anneke’s liberators had known about the Myotan assassins and taken advantage of the surveillance suppression he had put in place.

Black had enabled his enemy’s escape.

He gritted his teeth, feeling physically ill, but with an effort pushed his sentiments aside. Perhaps, as the Envoy said, he would need his nemesis to fulfil his own destiny, fate’s manoeuvrings being opaque to the human eye.

So be it, then.

Right now, he had to save Rench. The fool, in retrospect, had moved too precipitously in firing old hands, promoting new ones ahead of their superiors, and in dismissing the task force. He had, in a short time, alienated almost everyone.

There would be a putsch. No mistake.

Black must head that off, must ensure that his puppet - or the man who would be in due course - remained in office, where Black needed him to build an even bigger, more
time(),
fiasco.

Keeping Rench in office would take some doing.

Black made a long-distance
n-space
call. When he’d finished, he quickly showered and changed, then presented himself at Rench’s office.

‘Where have you been, dammit?’ snarled Rench, red-faced and sweaty. His collar was undone and his uniform looked as if he had slept in it.

‘Sorry, sir. Took two grams of
n-doze.
The alarm didn’t wake me straight away.’

‘Well, this is a pretty mess, and no mistake,’ said the commander, staring at readouts on his desk’s multiscreen. He appeared lost, shipwrecked. ‘What am I going to do, Black?’

‘Let’s take it one step at a time, sir.’

Light years away, a black stealth vessel slid into a blind orbit around the rich fat world of Heliopolis. The ship featured radiation-binding nanocoating, a repulse field to cancel out its mass and a sticking field anchoring it to an uninhabited island. Eight hundred kilometres below, the lights of the southern continent glittered like stars; the largest cluster, north of centre, its fabulous jewel. Dozens of space elevators girdled the equator, reaching hundreds of kilometres into space, the conurbation known as Aurora. This was the financial and software centre for the galaxy, and had been since Earth was the capital of the Old Empire.

The vessel hung in field-anchored orbit for thirty Terran minutes, undetected by those below, before a dozen attack shuttles dropped from its lower bay, darting away from the mother ship. Each took a different trajectory.

In the main shuttle, plunging towards the centre of Aurora, stood the Envoy, cowled and cloaked as ever, none of the crew aware of their captain’s true nature.

The ship dropped like a stone, barely powered, making its field signature harder to pick up. By the time the field came back on, the shuttle had entered the upper boundaries of the Auroran traffic sphere. As it did so, it was pinged several times by the automatic traffic intelligence system. The shuttle returned a valid ID and the traffic AI turned its attention elsewhere.