A Taste Of Despair (The Humal Sequence) (22 page)

If they ever succeeded at getting rid of Walsh and his kind the records would still remain. They would still be terrorists in the eyes of the Empire. Unless they could provide some proof of the alien invasion and the alteration of their records, they would forever be hunted as criminals. He wondered if any of the others had figured that out yet.

Probably not.
He reasoned.
They’re all still focused on the getting rid of, not the aftermath
.

It would be a shock when they did realize it, however. He would have to watch out for that. For now, though, what they needed was some successful step towards that getting rid of Walsh. A small step, something to give them hope that they might succeed. The twin missions he had outlined, of capturing one of the aliens and kidnapping a Humal expert, seemed impossible without careful planning and more resources.

So that was what he spent the days during the colony set up doing, planning and trying to identify ways to increase their chances of success.

By the time the last of the supplies were unloaded and they had said their goodbyes to the marooned colonists, he had a firm grasp on what needed to be done.

All he had to do now was pitch it to the others in detail and wait for the shouting to begin.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Marten Janes watched the sensor suite console with all the enthusiasm he could muster. Lately, his job as a maintenance technician had begun to grow stale. It was not that he did not enjoy fixing machines and electronics anymore, just that he was fixing the same things, over and over and over again.

When he had left his schooling behind and applied to a technical college it had seemed like a good move. He had the aptitude for engineering. As a child he was always taking things apart and, most of the time, he managed to put them back together again. So when the college accepted his application, a bright future in engineering beckoned.

However, somewhere along the myriad career paths that had presented themselves after graduating, he had made a bad turn. Instead of his hoped for research and development career, or even the life of a chief engineer on a starship, he had ended up being shunted into a maintenance role. By the time he realized that his current career path offered almost no chance of backtracking and starting over, it was too late.

Not that he minded fixing things. It was always gratifying to see something come back to life after failing in some manner. That much he enjoyed. But the assignment he had ended up in – maintenance technician contractor for the Naval facilities at Aurica – left a lot to be desired.

For a start the company he worked for was spineless and weak. The Navy said jump and they asked how high? The pay was not too bad, but the Navy personnel were, at least the ones he had dealings with, uniformly self-important and had a superior attitude that made him want to punch them right in the mouth.

They always wanted problems fixed yesterday, as well. Quite often, those were the exact words they used. Yesterday. The one time he’d made a joke about it had not gone down well. He’d commented that yesterday, the problem hadn’t existed, so he must have fixed it already, and that he’d send them the bill for that. Although he didn’t work directly for the Navy, the comment had gotten him transferred to the drone maintenance detail. Someone had put in a bad word for him. And so his once promising career got even worse.

The drones he maintained were all automated sensor units, designed to detect incoming vessels and provide an early warning system to the Naval facilities in system.

Aurica was an uninhabitable star system. None of its planets had anything like a breathable atmosphere, making it useless for colonization. However, its position relative to the Rim Territories and the Core made it an ideal spot to plant a military stronghold. From Aurica, ships could be at the Rim, or Sol in roughly equal amounts of time making it tactically desirable.

At first, the system had housed a Naval base and Survey Corps HQ. As colonization continued, the Corps HQ had been transferred to Navy control and turned into an officer training college. The Corps had moved further out, towards the Rim. Later still, a shipyard had been built, then a munitions factory on the airless fourth planet. The Naval base had grown, more ships and personnel.

Eventually the entire system had become a Fleet Headquarters, heavily guarded and with more security than even Earth itself had.

Any ship entering the system was immediately detected as it exited hyperspace. The tachyon and neutrino burst that accompanied emergence as hard to ignore as a stun grenade going off in your lap. There wasn’t an inch of the system that wasn’t covered by multiple sensors. But even that wasn’t enough for the Navy. Having covered the system in the kind of blanket surveillance that even the Empire’s top security operatives would be in awe of, the Navy were not satisfied.

What if, they thought, someone should decide to come out of hyperspace beyond the main planetary ring, beyond the edge of the system itself? And so the outer ring sensor drone suite was deployed. Coverage of such a vast area was impractical at best and downright ridiculous at worst. The cost was staggering. Thousands of drones, equipped with sensors to detect emergence and a transceiver to relay warnings back to the Naval HQ. The cost was, literally, astronomical and the Imperial coffers balked at it. So the drones were redesigned and made more cheaply. Eventually the expense came down enough to be approved and the whole project took off.

Years later the network of disposable drones was complete, providing coverage far out beyond the outer planets of the system. However, the cost cutting was not without its problems.

The drones failed all too regularly. At least one or two a week currently, requiring replacement. The maintenance crews went out in one of the many maintenance craft they had and simply pulled the faulty drone into one of the two bays aboard, then deployed the replacement from the other bay.

There was no attempt to repair the faulty drone. They simply brought it back to the Navy’s recycling facility and left it to them to figure out what had gone wrong. Typically the drone was stripped to the bones, individual components tested. Those that passed the tests were recycled into new drones. The rest was just so much scrap.

Maintenance tech.
Marten sneered to himself. Junk collector was more like it.
Go out, collect the garbage and dispose of it. And I thought my career couldn’t sink any lower.

A typical recovery mission had taken three weeks at the beginning, but the work wasn’t getting done. It took a long time to fly that far out in the system and back again. So eventually, and with tremendous reluctance, the Navy had begun to outfit the maintenance craft with Skip Drives. Recovery missions now took on the order of three days. One day to get there, one to recover the broken drone and deploy the new one, then a day back to base. Yet still the Navy grumbled at the time it all took.

Of course, the best part, as far as Marten was concerned, was just how totally pointless it all was. The Empire had no enemies. There was no alien threat waiting to pounce on unsuspecting humans. There were no planets threatening to secede from the Empire. No civil war. All there was were a few ill-equipped smugglers and pirates prowling the edges of colonized space. And even the dimmest of pirates knew better than to raid a Naval base.

So the sensor drone network was completely useless. Not once in its ten year deployment had it detected a spaceship. The best it had managed were a stray comet and the odd cosmic debris left over from the formation of the system.

Yet the Navy wanted it maintained, so here he was, sat staring at the sensor console on the maintenance craft as they approached yet another failed drone.

It looked intact from the outside, being little more than a twenty foot cylinder with sensors at one end and transceiver equipment at the other. It was tumbling end over end, however, as if it had been struck by something. As it rotated, he saw that the comms gear was damaged, which is why it had stopped sending data back to the base.

“How’s it look?” Edwards asked from the helm. He, Marten and Paulson were the only three on this mission. Normally there were four of them, but cutbacks had reduced that to three. A pilot, a tech and a specialist. Marten was the tech, Paulson the specialist. If Marten couldn’t get the drone into the bay using the remote arm, then Paulson would have to go out in a suit and do something. Exactly what was never specified. He had about as much chance of manhandling the twenty foot sensor drone into a bay as Marten had of getting a promotion. But those were the regulations, ridiculous though they were.

“Comms gear is wrecked,” Marten replied. “Looks like something hit it.”

Edwards shrugged. Like Marten and Paulson, he was also a technician, so he had some interest in what they were doing. But he’d managed to get trained in basic piloting skills. Marten himself had applied for that training, thinking it couldn’t hurt, and had been rejected. Clearly his personnel file had been marked in some way so as to prevent him ever getting anywhere now.

“Let’s get up close and get this over with.” Marten sighed.

Edwards nodded. “Better let our glorious leaders know that the fault is not due to anything sinister. Last thing we need is a destroyer appearing out of nowhere!”

It was a standing joke. One maintenance unit had failed to report in once they reached their target drone. The Navy had sent a destroyer out almost at once to see what was going on, fearing the worst. The crew responsible had been redeployed elsewhere. Elsewhere being another system entirely. There were rumors they had been imprisoned for not following regulations but Marten doubted that. Sacked, maybe. But they were civilians, not military. The military couldn’t imprison you for that, could they? Regardless, it became a joke almost everyone on the drone missions made when they reached their target. But, joke or not, everyone reported back almost as soon as they found the drone. The lesson had been learned.

Marten turned to the comms terminal, quickly re-reading through the prepared message he’d written during the outward journey, amending it to mention the comms damage and likely cause, then hit the transmit button.

“Done.” He told Edwards, then stood up. “I’ll go wrangle our drone.”

*****

The remote arm made light work of the multi-ton drone, grabbing it and wrestling it into bay two with ease. Once secured and the bay door closed, Marten turned his attention to deploying the new drone.

It took a little more time. The new drone, unlike the old one, was actually in working order, so he was careful not to snap off any of the antenna against the edge of the bay doors as he moved it out into space.

So intent was he on the deployment from bay one that he didn’t spare a glance back into bay two behind him through the operator’s booth windows that looked into both bays and out into space. If he had looked back, he would have seen the four spacesuit clad figures crawl out from the hole in the defunct drone, stand up, point at him, then amble over as if they had all the time in the world.

He wasn’t even aware when one of them pressed a circular transducer up against the booth window that was attached by a wire to his suit.

He was aware when the user spoke to him, however.

“You in the booth! Hands up or you’re dead!”

Marten spun to see the four Marines all pointing weapons at him. He put his hands up rapidly.

“Good boy! Now pressurize this bay and unlock the access hatch to the booth walkway. No funny business, or you’ll end up breathing vacuum.”

Marten did as he was told. Men with guns were not his favorite people to argue with. After he had done that, they made him place his hands on the booth glass. Two of them went to wait by the access hatch and the other two remained guarding him.

With the bay pressurized and the hatch unlocked, he realized he’d just handed the ship to the intruders.

*****

Aboard the
Ulysses
, Rames listened with satisfaction as Major Harvan reported the capture of the maintenance craft. The Major was a good man. His Marines, those that remained, could be a bit disrespectful, but they all did their jobs well.

“The vessels secure. They haven’t yet deployed the replacement drone. You can bring the ship in when you’re ready.” Harvan told him.

“Good work, Major.” He replied. “How many prisoners? Any casualties?”

“Three prisoners, no casualties.” The Major responded.

“All right! Keep it secure. We’ll be there presently.”

Rames broke the connection and turned to Veltin, once more at the helm. “Mr. Veltin. Get us there! Quiet like!”

“I feel I should point out my surname is actually O’Won, not Veltin, captain.” Veltin stated.

Rames shrugged. “Mr O’Won, then, if you please!”

Veltin nodded and began flipping switches and hitting buttons. The
Ulysses
had jumped to Aurica well short of the outer edge of the system. Aurica’s star was little more than a brighter light amongst the heavens, so far out had they emerged. From there they had steadily Skipped closer until, with a final Skip, they had pounced on the drone and, with a single plasma cannon blast, fried its circuitry with a near miss. The drone, being cheaply constructed, had not had the time to register the ships appearance and transmit a warning before it was rendered defunct by the magnetic surge generated by the plasma burst. It was hardly an EMP blast but, against the poorly defended drone, it worked admirably.