Shell Game, page 24
part #15 of The Last Hunter Series
In any case, she was a genius in every meaning of the word when it came to hacking and computers, and she’d been that way before he’d given her access to the program and knowledge of how the kingdom hardware and programming language worked. With Regex’s assistance, the additional technology and programming capabilities expanded her capabilities even further.
In fact, the symbiote was a genius of his species from what he’d been able to learn. The medical records he’d pilfered when he had done his research on Lisa indicated that Regex was significantly larger than any of the other Tardan symbiotes that had been studied. His mental capacity and storage room for information were already leaps and bounds greater than what another Tardan could do, not even counting the skills that meshed so well with Lisa’s.
As the two of them shared a nervous system, Lisa had access to the greater computational power and memory that Regex could provide, and while she might not be able to see exactly how quickly she could come to a solution when a problem came up, Patrick had noticed immediately. There would not be another human that could outdo her in anything she chose to apply herself to when it came to computers and programming. That just wasn’t going to be possible.
It was what made him consider her offer to join him in corporate espionage so attractive. His life had been focused on spying on others and killing enemies of the state before he’d fled to the Confederation. Once he’d arrived here, he had spied on various people in order to learn the things he needed to know and to acquire funds. When it came to getting rich, he’d been very successful. After a certain point, it was only keeping score. He had many times the amount of money he needed to live whatever life he wanted.
It wasn’t enough. He wanted a challenge in his life, and killing people wasn’t providing that. Sure, there were innumerable people in the universe who deserved to die, and he had no compunctions about sending them on their way. Take Garibaldi, for example. The man was odious and had done horrific things, so he had no worries that Lisa would be angry with him for killing the guy. She might not want to do it herself, but she wasn’t going to object when he took out the trash.
When she’d offered him the opportunity to join her in stealing secrets from companies for profit, the idea had intrigued him, but not because he needed more money. The challenge of it would be something completely different than anything he’d done before, and when one was over two hundred years old, that sort of thing was very attractive.
Only, to make that happen, they needed to both defeat the invasion and overthrow the Poseidon Group. The latter wasn’t nearly as much of a problem as the former, but now that the kingdom was going to find out that the Confederation existed, they were on a tight timetable. The technological level of the kingdom was markedly higher than that of the Confederation, and that polity was bigger as well. That meant they only had a certain amount of time that could be devoted to preparing for another invasion.
He turned left at a corridor and went into a larger maintenance area. As soon as he passed through a set of double doors using the key card he’d stolen from one of the previous maintenance areas—which he used his program to upgrade to full access to every conceivable location he might need access to—he was in a different environment entirely.
This area was devoted to the equipment that made everything else work. Everyone who lived aboard the station took things for granted, but it took a lot of hard work behind the scenes for their lives to be so carefree. He was here for one thing that would help him in his job of disposing of Garibaldi’s body: the furnace used to destroy trash on a massive scale.
It wasn’t like one would envision on a planet where intense heat was used to burn everything up, though there was certainly an aspect of that. In space, everything that could be recycled was. That went for trash as well, though dead bodies certainly weren’t trash.
The specific furnace he was looking for was the one used for the disposal of medical waste and other contaminated biologicals. There wasn’t ground to bury the dead in, and in this case, all bodies were incinerated. In most cases, this was done under controlled circumstances where the ashes could be returned to their loved ones, but not in all situations. For those other kinds of bodies, they were simply destroyed in the place that happened to be his destination.
When he opened the double doors leading into that specific section of the maintenance area, he was disappointed to see that there were a few workers doing something to one of the larger pieces of machinery. They both looked over at him and frowned. The smaller of the two—a thin man with a balding head going gray—straightened up and walked over toward him.
“Hey, can I help you?”
“I certainly hope so,” Patrick said with a smile. “I’ve gotten myself turned around. I’m trying to find the laundry area.”
The man’s frown vanished, and he laughed. “I think you’re about as far away from the laundry as you could possibly get, friend. This is the contaminated biological disposal area. How did you manage to get so turned around?”
“I have no idea. I was thinking about something, and the next thing I knew, I was in an area that I didn’t recognize. I’m lucky I found you, or I have been wandering around for another half hour trying to figure out how to get back out of this area.”
The larger of the two men slowly walked up behind his friend and put his hands on his hips. “Laundry, huh? You really are off course. What I’d like to know is how somebody who works in the laundry managed to get through those doors. This area is restricted for a reason.”
The skinnier man frowned again. “Yeah, that’s right. It shouldn’t have let you in. Not unless you have access to levels higher than the laundry. Do you? That sounds weird.”
Patrick shrugged and reached into his pocket. “I did get my badge updated recently. Maybe they made a mistake when they were doing it. Here, look at this.”
He brought up an aerosol spray and shot the skinny man straight in the face with the liquid. He pivoted before the larger man could react and sprayed him as well.
The two men gasped and clawed at their faces and then collapsed. They wouldn’t be harmed in the long run. He needed to set them up somewhere where they wouldn’t be in any kind of distress, but he needed to wait for the knockout gas to dissipate some. It was mostly concentrated in a way that allowed it to be absorbed through the skin, but there were secondary aspects that could be inhaled, and he didn’t need to be inhibited at a time like this.
After about sixty seconds, it was safe enough to drag the men off to the side of the room and prop them up so they wouldn’t be seen by anyone coming into the area without a little searching. Both of them were breathing fine, and they would wake up on their own within about two hours.
If this had been a different kind of mission and he hadn’t been working with Lisa, he might have considered killing the two, but there was no call for that. By the time anyone in a position of authority learned what had happened, he would be off the station and out of their reach. A little bit of work by Lisa would obscure any view of him with the laundry cart, too.
With the two bystanders taken care of, he pulled the laundry cart up to the furnace and found a pair of heavy gloves to open the hatch. There was a table nearby that had rollers, and he hoisted Garibaldi out of the laundry basket and laid him on the cold metal. A few moments later, he had him pushed up to the entrance and raised one end of the table to allow Garibaldi’s slide in. It took a little effort on his part to make that happen, but the corpulent man’s corpse did finally go through the hatch and into the furnace.
Patrick closed the hatch before the stench got too bad, grabbed the laundry cart, and headed back to where Lisa was waiting. They’d gather up their remaining prisoner and get off this station in the next couple of hours. He didn’t anticipate too many problems making that happen, but it was better to get started early in case unforeseen complications intruded.
As soon as he was out of the maintenance area, he was again whistling and in a fine humor. This part of the mission had gone well enough, and he was looking forward to what came next.
33
Jack stepped onto Hunter’s bridge and stopped next to Amanda’s command chair. She didn’t make to rise for him and that was good. This was her ship, and just because the admiral came onto the bridge didn’t mean that she needed to hand over command.
“What’s the situation?” he asked.
“The fighters tore up that one group pretty badly, according to the data Tina sent over,” she said with a grin. “They didn’t attempt to destroy any vessels outright, but a number of them are crippled. The Locusts are swarming around the area, looking for anything to attack, but they haven’t found our people. Forces inside the asteroid belt are coming out to assist the damaged vessels, and it looks like they’re moving to a war footing. If they get a target, they’ll go for it. We should give them one.”
“I was thinking that very same thing,” he answered with a smile. “We don’t have the master control codes until Derek gets back to us, but as soon as Specter picks him up, he’ll make his way back to Aries. Then we’ll find out if this was all worth it.”
“You don’t think it was?”
He waggled his hand in a gesture of uncertainty. “Something feels off. The invasion commander wouldn’t be swapping off with a patrol coming back in. If we were looking at the right ship, then it would be staying here at DuPont rather than leaving. The behavior doesn’t match what I expected, and that makes me worried. It’s entirely possible that the control codes we stole are only for this group of Locusts. Even the ones that are coming in with the patrol might not respond to them.”
“And what do we do about that?”
“We get our people out of here and isolate the system. If we can deal a lot of damage to them without taking any in return, I don’t have any objections to thinning their ranks but that has to be a secondary priority. We need to preserve our combat strength for the invasion group that’s headed for Earth on the chance that we won’t be able to command them.”
Amanda’s expression soured. “That’s definitely not what I wanted to hear. Even so, I’ve been working with John Stanley and his people, and we’ve come up with some options that we think will allow us to give the Locusts a bloody nose without putting ourselves too far behind the eight ball. Since we’ve got Aries to work with, that gives us a lot of options.”
“Such as,” he asked with a raised eyebrow.
“The first step will be trying to lure them out to where we can use faster-than-light travel, but they can’t. That kind of mobility will allow us to stay out of their weapons’ range while still punching holes through them. We’ve got a lot of missiles, and even though we don’t have any resupply, we can certainly thin their numbers judiciously. We also have the new hyperdrive-capable antimatter missiles. Those would really put a hurt on somebody.”
Jack shook his head. “We have an extremely limited number of those, and I want to save them for the final confrontation. When push comes to shove, that’s where we need to be our best. This is a sideshow. So long as we destroy the gates, we’ve trapped the Locusts here for at least a number of months. By then, the fight for Earth will be over one way or the other.”
“Understood, sir,” she said. “I suggest we use our independent quantum drive to jump in close to the ships that we ambushed and start heading for them at full speed. We’ll still be hours away from them, and that will give the Locusts a chance to try and interpose themselves between us and their masters. They don’t have any idea of our variant methods of moving around, and by the time they figure it out, they’ll be down a lot of ships.”
“That’s a good plan, so let’s kick this off the right way. I want you to take Hunter and destroy the gates leading out of the system before we even start. Let’s leave Aries here to wait for her commanding officer. As long as they know what we’re up to, we don’t have to reveal the second ship until it’s time to drop the hammer on them. Depending on how we go about luring them, it should be possible to capture a bunch of Locusts between the two battleships and turn that area into a killing ground.”
Her smile turned vulpine. “I like the sound of that! No worries, sir. I’ll get together with Aries over the comm, and we will settle the details of what we intend to do. It shouldn’t take more than ten minutes for us to fully inform them of our plans and then begin the execution. I can’t promise that we’ll destroy all the enemy forces present in the system—or even most of them—but they’re going to remember our names. We’ll see to that.”
“That works. I’ll leave you to it, though I’ll be watching closely from the flag bridge. Once it comes time for Aries and Hunter to work together, I’ll resume fleet command and direct the two ships in a strategic sense. Be ready for those orders, and modify your plans as needed.”
“Understood, sir.”
“Give them hell, Amanda,” he said as he turned toward the hatch.
He headed toward the flag bridge at a steady but quick pace. It never did well for a commander to look rushed, but there was a battle in the offing, and he needed to be ready.
As he walked onto the flag bridge, his staff was already working with their counterparts aboard both Aries and here on Hunter. The plans that Amanda had formulated must’ve already been sent to them and now they were finalizing everything.
When push came to shove, he would be calling the shots even though he wasn’t the one fighting the ship. It was his job to make sure that the two vessels worked well together, and this was something that he didn’t have a ton of experience with, so he was grateful for all the help he had.
“Report,” he said as he sat behind his console.
“We’ve finalized the battle plans, sir,” one of his people said. “Aries will remain here until Admiral Calvo arrives. Once he does, they will jump in closer and be ready to come to our aid when the time is right. Since everything will be moving at faster-than-light speeds, he won’t know exactly what we’re doing until he gets there, but they’ve worked out some time beats that should be appropriate for this battle. It’s guesswork and we’ll have to adjust on the fly, but I think it’s solid.”
“Then let’s be about it. Send the order, and let’s take those gates out of commission.”
His people returned to their tasks, and the universe twitched as Hunter vaulted out of the system and reappeared elsewhere, only to do so again and pop out near one of the gates leading out of DuPont. Destroying it was a matter of a few seconds with the lasers, and then they were off to repeat the process until DuPont was isolated.
With that task accomplished, Amanda jumped the ship deep into the system and appeared outside where a normal ship would be able to use their independent quantum drive or hyperdrive. Then she started in at normal speed.
No, scratch that. She was going at about two-thirds of their top speed. She was trolling them. Perfect.
It took a while for their arrival to register on their enemies, but they stopped searching for their attackers and turned to race out toward the battleship. While their fighters had damaged the Tardan military vessels, the sheer number of Locusts that were still attached to those ships was significant.
There were also a large number of Locusts coming out from the inner system, and they hadn’t detected them yet. Until they did, he would be uncertain what their response would be. If he was in command of those ships, he would hold them back. That didn’t seem to be how the Tardan military thought, but he still felt there was maybe a forty percent chance they would be ordered to turn around and not present themselves to danger.
The Tardans did not disappoint. When the second group of Locusts detected them, they immediately changed course for Hunter. Even though he waited more than enough time for countermanding orders to be sent, they didn’t change course.
Then Amanda displayed why she was a genius when it came to tactical matters. She brought the ship slowly around and began running away from the Locusts at a slightly higher speed than she’d initially come in with. That would lengthen the amount of time it took for them to catch up with the battleship, and it would present their rear to them. That would make them think that Hunter was afraid.
There couldn’t be anything further from the truth.
All that remained now was to see how far they could draw the enemy before Aries dropped in to say hello. If things worked out, it would be a bloodbath. If things turned out badly for his ships, they could always engage their hyperdrives and get away from the enemy before they could act. This was a time to cull the Locusts, and he hoped it wouldn’t go to waste.
34
Lisa had been impressed with the efficiency with which Patrick had gotten them out of the station. He hadn’t seemed rushed, but they’d moved as a group to quickly evacuate using a rented cutter. Where he’d gotten the money for that or the identification to pass for a local that was able to rent such a thing, she didn’t know, but it was a lot easier than going out the way they’d come in.
Since Admiral Romanoff and the rest had taken the cutter she’d used to get to the station, this only made sense. It also made loading Governor Anderson’s unconscious body somewhat easier. They’d packed her in a large trunk and put a supplementary oxygen bottle on her to make sure she was able to breathe in the tight confines.
The group drew absolutely no attention as they climbed aboard the cutter after loading their one large piece of luggage and departed. Unlike one of the stealth cutters, though, it would be tracked, so they left along their flight plan and didn’t deviate until they had completely left the station behind.
