A Taste Of Despair (The Humal Sequence) (23 page)

The drone had then been unceremoniously gutted by the Marines as they made a hiding space for themselves aboard it. Replete with ample air supplies and with suits capable of handling their bodily wastes, they settled in to wait for the repair crew to show up.

The
Ulysses
had then slunk away back towards the depths of space, and finally, at a relatively safe distance, gone into silent lurk-mode, waiting.

Now, with the maintenance craft secured there was no one to sound the alarm. The
Ulysses
came to life quietly, its main drives firing briefly to send the customs vessel in on an intercept course with the maintenance craft.

On the
Ulysses
bridge, Rames turned to Hamilton, who had come aboard for the following part of the mission.

“Well, so far, so good.” Rames admitted. “I didn’t think we’d even get this far.”

“The sensor drones are cheap. Slow reaction times. The worst that could have happened was if they detected us and we had to jump away.” Hamilton replied.

“Hiding the Marines on the drone was risky. What if they’d simply ignored it and planted the new one?”

“Then we’d have come back, picked up the Marines and run away again. Stop being so negative.”

Rames scowled. “Someone has to see the risks involved in this crazy scheme.”

Hamilton smiled tolerantly but said nothing. Rames was still stuck in the “This is madness!” mentality. The reality was, the crazier the scheme, the more likely it was of success, purely because no one would anticipate it.

As
Ulysses
pulled up alongside the maintenance craft and extended its docking umbilical, Hamilton and Jones went down to the airlock to greet the returning Marines and their captives.

The three technicians looked very frightened. They had no idea what was going on, who had seized their vessel, or why. As per their orders, the Marines had kept them in isolation, one from the other, to enhance that concern. Their likenesses had already been transmitted to
Ulysses
and the three men had been thoroughly researched in the few minutes it took the
Ulysses
to rendezvous with the maintenance vessel.

The Marines escorted them to the brig and locked them in separate cells. A few minutes later, they removed Marten Janes from his cell and returned him to the airlock, where Jones and Hamilton waited.

“Marten Janes?” Hamilton extended a hand.

Somewhat bemused, and still frightened, Marten returned the handshake. “Yes?”

Hamilton had read the man’s file. He had an outstanding engineering education and record. Even allowing for his placement here in Aurica system, he had prospects. Right up until about eighteen months previously, when his private files were tagged with terms like ‘troublemaker’ and ‘no respect for authority’.

“I guess you pissed off the wrong people to cop a shitty assignment like this one, huh?”

Marten’s eyes widened. “I…uh..”

Hamilton smiled. “That’s okay. I don’t work for either the Navy or your company. You can speak your mind.”

Now it was Marten’s turn to smile. “Hmmm. I’ve been told that before. Look where it got me.”

“It got you railroaded into a dead-end assignment.” Hamilton pointed out. He’d seen files like Marten’s before. Upset the wrong person and you might as well kiss your hard work goodbye.

Hamilton held out a hand and Jones slapped a data pane into it. Hamilton glanced at it, then passed it to Marten Janes.

“I guess you haven’t seen the ‘official’ notations in your file. But I imagine you already know what they say.”

Marten glanced at the details on the pane, scrolling down through the comments. Along with the comments was the commentator’s identity. So Marten now knew who it was that had derailed his career.

“Son of a …!” Marten gritted his teeth as he saw the names listed.

“Let me guess?” Hamilton said. “Some of those were people you thought you could trust?”

Marten nodded, anger on his face. “Some of them, yes.” He handed the pane back to Hamilton. “What do you want from me? Who are you?”

Hamilton smiled. “Right now, who I am isn’t terribly important. As to what I want..” Hamilton glanced down at the data pane. “It says here you worked on the orbital munitions plant. In fact, it says you were a senior supervisor at one point.”

Marten nodded, not sure where it was all leading.

Hamilton smiled at him. “I think you and I need to have a chat about your future.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Twenty nine hours later, the maintenance craft emerged from its latest Skip and headed towards the drone recycling facility. Once there, Marten used the recovery arm to remove the broken drone from the bay and transfer it to the loading area.

Hamilton had told him some of the details of what was going on, but not the whole thing. But what he had told him was enough to convince him to get his own back at the people that had effectively killed his career.

It took a surprisingly long time for Marten to move the drone. There was an apparent malfunction with the arm which meant Specialist Paulson had to go out and make some modifications and adjustments to the arm.

Inside Paulson’s suit, Hamilton opened an inspection hatch here, an access panel there, and pretend to be fixing the perfectly functional arm.

At the same time as he was doing that a second suit clad figure, this time Tech Officer Williams from the
Ulysses
, ran a fiber optic link between the maintenance craft and the recycling facility, connecting in to one of the myriad of ports that surrounded the loading area’s personnel lock. Once done, he returned to the maintenance vessel whilst Hamilton continued to stall for time pretending to fix the recovery arm.

Marten, who had returned from the recovery arm operator’s booth, quickly established a secure link to the facility. He knew a lot of the access codes, but not all of them. However, between himself, Jones and Tech Officer Williams, the systems of the facility were soon wide open to them.

The next step was to access the facility’s comms array without triggering alarms. Again, between the three of them, it wasn’t much of an issue. The recycling facility was run by a civilian contractor. It had safeguards and plenty of security, but it was a low priority compared to, say, the shipyards or munitions depots. Accordingly, the three soon had access.

Once that had been accomplished, the harder work began. Comms links were established between the recycling facility and the centralized communications array in high orbit over Aurica Three. The array handled all the systems comms traffic. Once there, it was a surprisingly simple matter to overload the array with spurious signals, until eventually it was unable to process the multitude of messages and open lines that ran through it every second. In effect, it crashed, causing the comms system to default to its emergency status which relied on each facility only accepting incoming signals from known, trusted sources. Such sources, of course, namely being the other facilities in the system.

With the comms defaulted to emergency status, maintenance crews were routed to the array. More importantly, the heavily encrypted and authenticated military comms systems accepted incoming connections from other, similar high tier facilities without question. It took a bit of fiddling to bounce the signal from the recycling facility through progressively higher tier comms systems until finally the munitions factory accepted the incoming order as valid and began to process it. But it worked.

The next port of call, comms-wise, was the Small Craft Proving Hangar, a giant metal box that all kinds of small craft resided in whilst awaiting their turn to go through an automated flight plan and course to test their engines and navigation systems. It was harder to access the systems here, taking the three men almost an hour as they threaded their way carefully through one system after another until finally they gained access to the flight update and control sub-systems in the facility.

All the while, Hamilton offered excuses and apologies to the recycling facility as it grew increasingly irate at his inability to fix the arm and deliver the damaged drone.

By the time Jones had made a connection to the flight systems and uploaded the amended course data, they were suiting up their own experts on the recycling facility, determined to get the drone aboard and the maintenance craft away.

They were particularly unimpressed when, just as their own crew were ready to go and do battle with the arm, Hamilton announced that it was fixed. Marten had, by then returned to the booth and quickly dumped the drone in the facility’s loading area whilst Hamilton returned to the maintenance craft.

As the maintenance craft slowly pulled away, snapping the flimsy fiber optic link, the comms array came back on line, no longer being deluged by tens of thousands of false signals. Aurica’s entire comms network came back online, much to the relief of the military, who were screaming blue murder at the maintenance crews by then.

There were maintenance craft everywhere. Nobody wanted to be seen to be doing nothing, so at least half of them were simply flying about in an important manner, with no actual destination in mind. Against that backdrop, the craft occupied by Hamilton and his companions blended right in. The only difference was, they had a definite destination.

“I can’t believe we’re getting away with this.” Marten said in general. In addition to himself, Jones, Hamilton and Tech Officer Williams the bridge held LeGault, who was piloting and Private Alvin, who had offered to come along in case they had to ‘go board something’.

Hamilton grinned. “We’re in the heart of the military’s stronghold. They spent so much time and effort trying to stop undesirables getting in, but almost no effort in worrying about what might happen if they did gain access.”

Jones nodded. “I think I could have cracked some of these encryption codes myself, even without these guys help. Would have taken ten times as long though. Funny, I always imagined the military would run a tighter ship than this, so to speak.”

“The engineering codes helped out a lot.” Williams added. “Between Marten and myself we knew a surprisingly large number of them.”

“No one ever changes their passwords until they get hacked.” Jones pointed out.

“Whatever the reasons, good work you three!” Hamilton stated. The three men grinned at one another.

“We’re coming up on the munitions depot.” LeGault told them. “Which bay do you want me to go to?”

“Seventeen.” Jones replied. “That’s where our merchandise is waiting for us.”

“Got to love automated systems!” Alvin laughed.

The munitions depot was a huge orbital facility where stockpiles of weapons and ordnance were held until requisitioned by the various warships that made Aurica their home base. In this instance, the fake order they had sent was, apparently, from the battle-cruiser
Lei Gong
. It was unusual in the extreme that a maintenance craft was picking up the order, but the automated loading bots would not care about that. So long as the right vessel arrived to collect the order they would load it.

So once LeGault had parked the maintenance craft in the cavernous bay seventeen of the depot, the bots rolled into action. Hamilton and Alvin went down to the booth to watch the forty cylinders, each eight feet long by three feet in diameter, being loaded, twenty to each bay.

“Makes me wish I could wander out there and see what else is lying around.” Alvin commented.

Hamilton snorted. “That would set the alarms off, though I appreciate the sentiment.”

“Wouldn’t it have been better to get some more destructive ordnance?”

“Not really. Remember, we might have to use these on our own kind.”

Alvin nodded. “I guess. Just seems a waste now that we’re here, that’s all.”

Hamilton shrugged. “The bigger nukes and anti-matter warheads require higher authorization to be issued. The guys managed to spoof
Lei Gong’s
requisition code, but to get real ordnance requires authorization from Naval HQ. With the comms down, any order like that would have been held until authentication could be confirmed.”

Alvin sighed. “If you say so. I’m just a Marine. All I see is toys!” He gestured out at the depot.

Hamilton grinned and clapped the Marine on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. I’m sure we’ll all see more than enough action to satisfy us for the rest of our lives. This is just a shopping trip.

The shopping trip lasted approximately ten minutes. The robotic loaders were efficient and quick, stacking the cylinders neatly at precise intervals from one another with support material between to prevent them from falling over during transit.

Once loaded, the robots retreated away to their standby positions at the edge of the bay until the next loading order came through for them.

LeGault took them out carefully, mindful of his cargo’s volatile nature. In short order they were headed out and away from the depot.

Outside, chaos reigned. The course update that Jones had uploaded to the small craft in the proving hangar had wrought its damage. There were over a hundred shuttles, inspection pods, maintenance vessels and assault shuttles flying about in apparently random directions, completely ignoring the set course they were supposed to fly. The comms traffic surrounding the event was insane all by itself. People screaming at each other to get control of the situation.

Hamilton felt a brief moment of pity for the people who would probably be blamed for the mess. Technicians, programmers, maintenance crews. They would take the brunt of the blame and receive appropriate punishment. Demotions, reassignment and so on were the likely results of Jones’ tampering. Proof was not required in the current military mindset. If you were responsible for something, that made you to blame when things went wrong, regardless of lack of evidence. There would be many more disgruntled people like Marten Janes at Aurica soon, their records marred by the incident.

Eventually, of course, that proof would be forthcoming. Captured small craft would reveal their course update. It wouldn’t take the military long to figure out someone had tampered with the flight plans. In time they could probably trace it back all the way to the recycling depot. By the time they tried to find the crew of the maintenance vessel that had been unloading at the time, however, that ship, and those aboard it, would be long gone.

“Keep to the agreed flight path.” Jones warned LeGault. “Chances of a collision are small, but that route is guaranteed safe.”

LeGault nodded. “We’re threading a needle, I get it.” He glanced at Hamilton. “You want I should Skip out as soon as we’re clear of gravitational distortion, or keep flying on the same course a while?”

“Skip as soon as we’re safe to do so.” Hamilton replied. “There’s no reason for us to be flying out along this course other than to go fix a drone. That’s what we want them all to think, assuming anyone’s even paying attention in this madness! Not Skipping would look more suspicious than jumping as soon as. Nobody would want to stay amongst this mayhem any longer than they had to.”

LeGault nodded and returned to his controls.

“I have to say,” Jones began. “This has to rate as my biggest heist ever!”

Hamilton smiled. “This? This is just the warm up! We have to kidnap a scientist yet. From the heart of the Empire. I’m sure that will be much more challenging!”

Marten Janes looked up, puzzled. “Kidnap? You didn’t mention anything about kidnapping.”

Hamilton gestured for him to follow him. “Come on. Let’s go down to what is laughingly referred to as the mess on this tub and I’ll explain the rest of it to you. You’ve got some decisions to make.”

*****

Marten, not surprisingly, chose to remain with Hamilton and his crew and join in the fight against the aliens. His only real concern was for his family, and what would happen to them. Hamilton spelled it out for him as clearly as he could. Janes’ family would be fine, but Marten’s association with Hamilton and his ‘terror’ group would likely mean they would be under constant surveillance for the rest of their lives. Nothing obvious, and nothing intrusive, but from that point on everything they did would be monitored. Certain career options would be quietly blocked for them. Much as Marten’s own files had been marked as undesirable, so, too, would theirs be.

Marten wasn’t so happy about that. But he was even less happy about the prospect of his family being turned into hosts for aliens, or mindless automatons under alien control. Once the scale of the problem was revealed, he shrugged and said he couldn’t see why he shouldn’t help. It wasn’t quite that simple, or easy, and he had a lot of questions but, ultimately, he saw little alternative but to help them.