Shell Game, page 22
part #15 of The Last Hunter Series
“Do we send our cutter over to the flagship and wait for Derek and Vassen to be ready to be picked up?”
“We’ll need to have them in close, but a lot of this will depend on how quickly they can get their hands on the equipment they need. They’re going to have to play everything by ear. Meanwhile, I think we need to pay some attention to the ships that are coming in. If they decide to intervene in what’s going on, that could prove problematic.”
Tina turned to face him. “What do you have in mind? Remember that we have a spy ship, not a warship. She’s armed, but all it will take is one good hit, and this ship is toast with us in it.”
He nodded. “You’re not wrong, but we’ll still have to take a chance if we want to give Derek and Vassen as much of an opportunity as we can. It also means that we’re going to have to reveal that we have the ability to move deeper in the system at a faster-than-light pace, at least if anyone’s paying attention.”
Both of her eyebrows rose. “The asteroid belt is pretty deep in the system, and I’m not sure that the skip drive will be stable here. That’s what you have in mind, right?”
“It is, but we’ll get as far away from what’s going on here as we can before we utilize those systems. The incoming ships are still a few hours away, and we’ll just have to leave our people here to settle things. Hopefully, they’ll be able to get everything taken care of long before those other ships become a problem, but I’m not counting on that.”
“How are we going to do this then?”
“An ambush. If they’re paying attention, they’ll be able to see something going on, but they’ve never encountered a skip drive before. That means they won’t know what’s happening even if their hyperspace detectors pick something up. We won’t be able to use the independent quantum drive until we get further out, but we should be able to get enough distance between us and the star to engage it and pop out in their midst. When we do so, we can launch the small antimatter missiles and attempt to disable all the warships. It may take popping in a couple of times to make that happen, but so long as we can reload and they can’t see us to shoot back, we have an opportunity to make this work in our favor.”
“Risky,” she said with a shake of her head. “I can’t say that I’m happy with that even though I understand the necessity.”
“It is, but it will keep those other warships from being able to come after our people. The fighters and cutters are invisible to their scanners, but we need to be absolutely sure they can get away cleanly. If one of our ships is damaged, it might be detectable, so I’m not going to take chances.”
“What about Lisa and the people back on that station? We have her ship. How is she going to get out?”
“Send her a message through the probe network that we established. If she can get a ride with Patrick, that would make our lives easier. If we have to, we can come back into the system and pick her up, but that would delay our arrival. I’m not sure what they’re working on right now, but if they could expedite their departure, that would be helpful.”
He rose to his feet. “I’m headed for the bridge. I’ll send the professor back to give you a hand.”
“I’m not sure that anything I’m doing right now needs assistance, but I’d be happy for the company.”
Jack went up the corridor and onto the bridge. Professor Prescott stood from the control couch when he saw him enter. “I assume that we’re about to get busy. How can I help?”
“If you could go back and assist Tina if she needs anything, that would be helpful. I’m going to have to focus on what I’m doing here, and I think solitude would work better for me.”
“Whatever you need,” the older man said. “If you change your mind, give me a call, and I’ll come back and help you.”
Once the professor had left, Jack settled in behind the controls and took a moment to look at the situation as it was laid out by the passive scanners. The fighters were getting close to engaging the ships here, but it didn’t look as if any of the Tardan warships had realized that this was more than an engineering casualty of some kind. That was good.
Jack engaged the antigravity drive and began moving them away from the area. He’d wait until the fighters launched their attacks before he engaged the skip drive. There was no need to give anyone a heads-up that something was coming and ruin what was shaping up to be an epic ambush. Since none of the fighters had to worry about being detected as they made their approach, they could line up their shots perfectly, and the first clue that the Tardans would have that something had gone seriously awry would be when the antimatter missiles exploded against their hulls.
It took five minutes for that to occur, and it looked like the fighters had timed their shots to get all the explosions to happen within a couple of seconds of each other. Their surprise was total, and all the ships were quickly disabled. Follow-up shots wrecked the warships even further, and they began exploding. All except the flagship, of course.
Satisfied that things were going as well as they could be, Jack engaged the skip drive and began heading directly toward the incoming ships and their protective Locust guards. Specter was invisible to their scanners, but that didn’t mean her approach would go unnoticed. All it would take was someone watching their hyperspace detector to realize something strange was happening.
Unlike the fighters, he didn’t have nearly as many missiles laid up and ready to fire. They also had the small antiproton beam weapons, which would finish off the ships they were dealing with. He would cause some havoc, but he wouldn’t be able to actually end any of the ships he was firing at. He’d have to be satisfied with disabling them.
They wouldn’t be able to detect the fighting before he got to them. That was one of the benefits of being able to travel faster than the speed of light. When he made it to the area ahead of the Tardan formation, he activated the mine laying function that Lisa had built into the ship. The antimatter mines she’d prepared were very similar to the sensor buoys that she dropped, and while they wouldn’t be mobile, they could certainly blow up anything that came too close. That would be a very good distraction for what came next.
He unloaded every mine she had prepared and then headed into the enemy’s midst on his regular drive. He hadn’t lost his touch because he threaded right through their formation and came out behind them without hitting anything. That had been a risky maneuver, so his relief was real.
Lisa had taken the opportunity to outfit Specter with antimatter missiles much like the ones used by the fighters. The controls were easy enough to use, and he quickly assigned targets to each of the missiles. He slowed his ship and brought all their engineering sections into view.
As soon as the antimatter mines began going off, he fired his missiles at as many of the enemy ships as he could. There would undoubtedly be some duplication of effort because he wasn’t going to wait around and find out who got blown up. The chances of him running into one of his own mines were too high.
He swerved to avoid the mines and to take stock of the effectiveness of his attack. As he had guessed, he hadn’t destroyed very many of the ships, but he’d disabled at least two-thirds of them. Now, the Locusts were swarming around, looking for enemies to shoot at. That would definitely keep them occupied for the time being.
With that accomplished, he headed out of the system. He’d jump when he could and return to the area where Amanda would be waiting. There was always the chance that she had just gotten the signal that Tina had sent earlier, but if his calculations were correct, she would still be there.
To his satisfaction, Hunter and Aries were, in fact, waiting for him when he jumped. He quickly signaled for the professor to return to the bridge and opened a channel to Hunter. Moments later, Amanda appeared on the screen.
“What’s going on, sir,” she asked.
“Things are heating up in the system. I need you to send a cutter over to pick me up immediately.”
“I’ll have one on the way momentarily. Do we need to jump further into the system and engage the enemy?”
“Probably, but let’s get me back aboard before we start down that path. It looks like we’re about done here in DuPont. I still hope that things turn out the way we’d like, but I’m beginning to suspect we might not get what we came for.”
She looked disappointed, and he didn’t blame her. “I see. We’ll talk about it when you get back aboard, sir. Hunter out.”
Once the professor stepped onto the bridge, Jack turned control of the ship over to him. “I’ll leave you and Tina to figure out what’s best for you to do next. It would probably be most effective for you to go in and make sure that Derek and Vassen get out safely. We’ll still have to exfiltrate the fighters and the cutters that were supporting them, but if they get their hands on the master control codes, we’ll need to get them out of the system as quickly as possible.”
“Understood.”
Jack headed for where the cutter would dock. He really hoped he was wrong, and they got their hands on the master control codes. He wasn’t going to hold his breath, but stranger things had happened. Whatever the case, things were moving here that would push them into the endgame. It was time to wrap up operations at DuPont.
30
Lisa sat at an outdoor café in one of the food courts aboard the station. She had her tablet out and was doing work on it that any passerby would mistake as going over office reports and such. In reality, she had subprocesses running on her tablet that were exploring the local network to make certain there was nothing there that would trigger an alarm if she started getting down to her real business.
If an alarm had been raised because the head of the secret police and the system governor had been kidnapped, it hadn’t bled over into the general population yet. No one seemed to be running around like chickens with their heads cut off—not that she knew anything about that kind of thing—and the security personnel didn’t seem overly concerned either. In all, it looked like an average day.
When the waiter stopped by to refill her coffee, she took a few moments to sip the delicious brew and consider the strange dichotomy of living a normal life while still being a criminal buried in work that would get her arrested if anyone even suspected what she was up to.
That was one of the things that she intended to look at first off once she was connected to the network for real. If they really hadn’t figured out that Garibaldi and Albertson were gone, that gave them a slightly wider window to operate.
She chuckled a little at her friend’s dry comment. I feel the same way. Part of me suspects this is just them keeping operational security on a disaster of epic proportions, but it doesn’t feel as if they know yet. How could that be?
Unwholesome desires? What exactly have you been reading lately? It sounds like something out of a Gothic novel. The man is a dirtbag. Frankly, I’m not going to lose a moment’s worth of sleep when Patrick offs him.
You’re making a mistake in how you’re thinking about this. It doesn’t matter who she is. No one deserves to be treated like that, and it’s abhorrent to me no matter what else she’s done. She’ll pay for her sins, too, but that particular set of circumstances isn’t something I would wish on my worst enemy.
Her tablet chirped, and she checked one of the subroutines and determined that there weren’t any elevated security programs running on this public network. Oh, there was something monitoring everything that was taking place, but it was easily bypassed. In fact, she’d already done so just so that she could get a good look at the network itself.
With the way clear, she began setting up a series of bouncing signal re-transmitters that would keep anyone from being able to trace her back without triggering some of her own alarms. It certainly wasn’t as good as something she’d rig up for a more permanent setup, but it would work just fine for the time she was expecting to be in public.
The login information and network details given to her by Governor Albertson were automatically suspect, so she probed the entire setup as if she were breaking in with no login credentials at all. After all, why trust that someone had given her clean login information when she could get in herself and figure it out without taking a chance?
The network information that Albertson had given her did lead to a government facility, though because it was on the station, it was a little harder to pin down precisely where that fit in geographically. She didn’t even bother nailing down the details rather than probing the login portal and bypassing it as soon as she was able to find suitable weaknesses and hack her way past the firewalls.
What she found on the other side was indeed a government network, and it even seemed to be connected to the executive branch. That meant that it had its own set of security protocols and guardians that she then proceeded to bypass or lockout. Only once she was certain she had everything secure did she clone the administrator account and begin digging around to get the information she wanted.
Once she had relative confidence that she had not set off any alarms, she narrowed down her search to the computer Albertson had indicated. She double-checked the login information that the governor had given her and verified that the credentials did exist. They weren’t even trapped. She had to admit that surprised her a little because she fully expected the high-ranking member of the Poseidon Group to betray them at the earliest opportunity.
She used Patrick’s program to worm her way in and then began copying files out. She kept a close eye on the network monitors and erased all details of how much data was being pulled even as she did it.
Locating the files relating to the secret police prison station wasn’t that difficult, but she cast her net much more widely. She wanted everything, and she was willing to take the time to get it.
She was about three-quarters of the way through when one of her other security programs chimed for her attention. An alert had just gone out on the security network that there had been a breach at Garibaldi’s residence and that he and Governor Albertson were missing. That had taken longer than she’d expected, but she wasn’t going to complain, as it made her job much easier.
Rather than rushing through to finish what she was doing, she methodically continued copying files. Rushing is where most people make mistakes. If they were in a hurry, they’d be more likely to forget something or do something incorrectly, and that would draw attention to themselves. It was much better to move deliberately and get the job done.
The security level inside the computers she was working on became elevated at about the same time she was finishing. It was too late, as she was already in and done. She took her time backing out of the system and erasing every single indicator that she’d ever been there. If they never had reason to suspect an intrusion, they wouldn’t go looking through the files to see what she’d stolen.
With her work done, she shut down her tablet and ordered a refill of her coffee. She figured another fifteen minutes would be sufficient to make sure that her departure didn’t look out of the ordinary.
That gave her an opportunity to watch a squad of security officers jog past, headed toward the lift leading to Garibaldi’s residence. She wondered what they’d think. Would they be able to figure out how the intrusion had taken place? Probably. There were only so many ways to get in and out. Yet that wouldn’t give them enough information to figure out who had done it, though why it had been done was probably more readily apparent.
Are you ready to go? If you’d like to try one of their pastries, I could take one or two with us.
She chuckled internally. You’ve got it.
She waved the waiter back over to get a to-go coffee and two pastries. She figured that Patrick had more than earned one of his own, though as a gourmand, he might not approve of their way of fixing it. Even so, her tastes were much more plebeian, and she would eat his if he didn’t want it.
I figure bringing that kind of information up in public is bad. The chances of someone looking over my shoulder and seeing something they shouldn’t are a little higher than I would like. Right now, I’m just another citizen out doing what citizens do. Let’s not complicate matters by introducing elements of risk that we don’t have to.
Those are definitely two things we need to work on, but even if we don’t have our ship right at hand, we have Patrick’s. We know that it’s just as effective at sneaking up into places as Specter is, so let’s not get too worried about that. So far as breaking the prisoners out, what makes you think we’re not going for the one?
