Aneka Jansen 5: The Greatest Heights of Honour (33 page)

The shuttle began reorienting itself as it passed through the doors. Aneka started moving across its hull, releasing and then reattaching the grapple to drag herself around toward the starboard side which seemed to be where the craft was going to dock. A glance back showed the doors closing behind them; there was no going back now, not that she planned to. Docking clamps reached out to lock the shuttle in place and a hard-walled tube began to extend from under the observation window. That was Aneka’s cue; she pushed off from the ship, gliding through empty space to land in the open end of the cylinder. There was a two-metre airlock section there which would be pressurised once a seal had been made, and that was her way in with minimal chance of detection. Still, a couple of minutes trapped in a couple of metres of airless tube felt like hours.

‘One-point-one-five atmospheres,’ Al said, ‘standard for a Herosian environment.’

As he said it, the inside door slid open and Aneka moved into the tube where she had more space to avoid anyone coming off the ship. She did not have to wait long either; a minute later a half-dozen Herosians walked off and straight past her as she stood against the wall.

‘This camouflage system is incredible,’ Aneka commented.

‘It helps that Herosians are arrogant enough to believe that no one could possibly find them here.’

‘Huh.’ Aneka fell into step behind the line, slipping through the door at the end of the tube and into a reception room where she came to a sudden stop at the sight waiting for her. The Herosians ignored it, filing past through a door on the left, but Aneka found herself unable to move.

Guarding the room was a robotic construct almost three metres in height. Everything from the digitigrade legs to the rather small, angular head. She had seen one of them before, in the museum in Yorkbridge. That one had been all polished metal and she had thought it looked kind of stupid, but this one, which was moving, still had a glossy feel to its blue-tinted armour. Maybe when the Xinti had gone to war they had not really cared about stealth. They
did
care about heavy armament; the thing was holding a massive, multi-barrelled rifle. But beyond the sheer physicality of it…

‘That’s not possible,’ Al said.

‘I think that’s my line,’ Aneka replied. ‘I’m supposed to say that and then you tell me it obviously is possible because it’s there.’

‘The Xinti are gone. And even if they still existed they would
never
be working with the Herosians.’

‘It does seem a little… No, actually it’s a
lot
out of character. I’ll accept “this doesn’t make sense.” Right now I need to make my legs move. How good are the senses on those things?’

‘Enhanced, wide-angle, multispectral vision, enhanced hearing, and a spherical lidar system. If you’re quiet, the suit’s camouflage should hide you, however.’

‘He’s going to notice when the door opens on its own.’

‘Not if the doors malfunction.’

The Xinti’s body tensed suddenly as all of the doors in the room slid open simultaneously. Aneka could tell the thing was on alert, which was not going to help, except that then the doors started closing and opening randomly, each making a hiss as it moved. Aneka slipped out in the direction the Herosians had gone, leaving a confused-looking Xinti behind her.

‘How can you tell it was confused?’ Al asked as she moved down the corridor.

‘Well… It was kind of… Just keep watch for any internal alert broadcasts, okay?’

‘I
am
picking up internal transmissions, but nothing indicating an alert. That guard has sent out a network message requesting a maintenance team. The networks are using Herosian military-grade encryption.’

‘Not Xinti?’

‘
Not
Xinti,’ Al confirmed.

Aneka spotted a door, tapped the button beside it, and found herself looking into what appeared to be a storage area. That would do. She slipped inside and closed the door behind her.

‘So we have a Xinti in a war body working with Herosians and using Herosian encryption to communicate?’ Aneka summed up.

The room was large enough that the crates in it did not take up too much of the space, despite there being a lot of them. Finding a place to hide for a few minutes while she prepared was not too hard. Slipping in behind a row of boxes, she took off her pack, deactivated her stealth systems, and got to work.

‘The situation appears rather more complex than we thought,’ Al agreed.

‘If you can listen in on their network, I don’t suppose you can hack it and get us a map?’ She took out her guns, putting them down on the deck where she could get at them easily, and then located the communicator.

‘That would require more transmission than I would like. We can no longer assume the staff here are unfamiliar with their technology, and we have to view them as… more competent than a typical Herosian. I would have been wary of such an attempt if all we were worried about was Herosian sensor operators.’

Aneka placed the cylindrical device on its end and activated it. ‘Well, we need a short-range link to this so I can talk to Ella and Gwy. As you said, this has got more complicated.’

‘Connection established. The unit is attempting to synchronise with Gwy.’

The gadget was a neutrino communicator, and it was another piece of ultra-high-tech magic. Aneka remembered her brother mentioning neutrinos; they were weird little particles which basically passed through everything. You could stand on a planet and have millions of the things fly through you every second and you would never know. Back then, detecting them required tonnes of industrial cleaning fluid in a deep mine. This thing could detect them through some interesting use of gravity and force field technology, which was useful since she would have had trouble lugging a salt mine around. The beam it produced was basically impossible to detect or intercept, but it was also point-to-point; right now the device was locating Gwy by dead reckoning combined with trial and error.

‘We have a link to Gwy,’ Al announced after another minute.

‘You made it.’ Ella’s voice, sounding relieved, came over the beam a second later.

‘I made it,’ Aneka replied. ‘I’m in a cargo hold near the hangar bay, but there’s a complication.’

‘What kind of complication?’

‘There was a guard in the reception room off the hangar. Ella, it was a Xinti war body. Just like the one in the museum, except less shiny.’

There was a pause, a long pause, and then, ‘Those things are basically robots. They could have captured some, replaced the Xinti brain with a normal computer…’

‘Yeah, but why? They are not very fond of the Xinti.
Especially
that form. There were probably more normal robots around they could use.’

‘Yes, but what I’m saying is that that thing doesn’t mean there are Xinti here.’

‘I agree with Ella,’ Gwy interjected. ‘This information indicates a necessity for additional caution, but of itself it does not indicate a Xinti presence.’

‘Well, we did think it was weird to see Xinti working with Herosians,’ Aneka replied. ‘I mean, that would be overcoming some major hate on both sides. Do we have any better data on my targets?’

‘Not really,’ Ella replied. ‘Everything I’ve come across is pointing the same way. Heat distribution suggests the primary power system is in the same area as you are now. All the communications emissions are coming out from the central section, so we still figure that’s where the main comms suite is located.’

‘I’m expecting you to find a high-end fusion reactor,’ Gwy said. ‘It is likely toward the core of the station, probably around twenty metres away toward the midsection.’

‘Okay,’ Aneka replied, ‘I’ll start there. I’ll get in touch again when I’ve loaded the virus.’

‘Be careful,’ Ella said. ‘Please.’

Aneka grinned, an act made a little difficult by her skintight suit of living metal. ‘I will be, love.’ She closed the connection and packed away the communicator, and then she checked one of the nearby crates since it was there.

‘Interesting,’ Al commented as Aneka looked at the contents.

‘Grenades,’ Aneka said and checked another crate, which contained rifles. ‘It’s a weapons store. Antimatter rifles?’

‘It would appear so. The small graphic on the grenades? That thing that looks like an atom in red, it’s the Federal radiation hazard symbol. They may be micro-nukes, or antimatter.’

Aneka slipped one of the mines out of her pack, primed it, and put it into the crate with the grenades. ‘Well if they’re nukes that probably won’t set them off, but if they’re antimatter…’

‘We won’t want to be here when the containment fails,’ Al finished for her.

Aneka grinned and got ready to go out. Her pistols went in camouflaged holsters strapped to her thighs. The all-around coverage would make it harder to get to them in a hurry, but it was better than having to get them from her pack. Then the pack went back onto her back and its stealth system was activated. With that done, she slipped back out of the hold and started down the corridor.

~~~

‘If there
are
Xinti aboard that station,’ Ella said, ‘what does that do to our probability of horrible death?’

Gwy appeared beside the flight chair, apparently hanging in space. ‘It would reduce our chance of success. I’m unsure what you would consider a horrible death, so I can’t evaluate that part of your query.’

‘I can’t really believe there are any. Not really. I mean, how could there be?’

Gwy managed to look thoughtful, despite having features composed entirely of obsidian. ‘The AIs in Negral, when they were still there, concluded that the chance of any Xinti surviving the war outside of that system was essentially nil. They have not revised that estimate.’

Ella looked out at the distant asteroid. ‘I could imagine one or two surviving, but not enough that they could have a guard standing around doing nothing. No… I think there’s something else going on.’ She frowned. ‘That doesn’t make me feel better.’

‘No,’ Gwy said, ‘me neither.’

~~~

‘This place is a ghost town.’

The corridors had been empty as they walked down them. There seemed to be no more guards about. Aneka had, in fact, seen no one for ten minutes.

‘There is a high level of automation on this station,’ Al replied. ‘Far more than one would expect on a Herosian facility.’

‘We’re getting that a lot lately. They’re obviously using Xinti tech to keep the crew requirements down, but why? Why bother? There are plenty of Herosians.’

‘Might I suggest that we don’t look a gift horse in the mouth?’

‘I’ve never met a gift horse with good teeth.’ Aneka stopped in front of the door she had found at the bottom of a ladder. ‘You said that atomic symbol meant “radiation hazard,” right?’

‘And the theory is that the reactor should be around about here. Radiation hazard would be a good thing.’

‘Not something you hear a lot. Can you hack the…?’

The door slid open and Al said, ‘It wasn’t locked. The security in this place is… Well, based on the assumption that no one can get in. Remind you of anything?’

Aneka slipped into the empty chamber. Empty aside from a huge, spherical fusion reactor anyway. ‘The Xinti tended to have weak internal security since they believed themselves superior, but that’s why I don’t think we’re dealing with Xinti here.’

‘I’m not following your logic,’ Al admitted.

Aneka took off her pack and fished a couple of mines out of it. ‘Where do we put these?’

‘I’d suggest the underside of the reactor containment vessel and that large pipe running along the floor on the far side. That should be one of the main power conduits.’

Setting off to place the mines, Aneka explained. ‘Xinti who survived the war should have learned from their mistakes. They might have been arrogant before they got their arses kicked, but they’re intelligent to the point of genius. They wouldn’t let themselves be caught in the same sort of trap. They would have improved on their own encryption systems, not be using Herosian ones. They would beef up their internal security, even if they thought it unlikely that anyone would find them.’ She paused to reach under the sphere to place a mine. ‘Frankly, I think they’d
assume
that someone would figure out they were based here and fortify it up to the eyeballs.’

‘Then what? Surely the Herosians would learn the same…’

‘People have an annoying habit of not learning from history, especially when it isn’t
their
history. However, I still think that someone is running things here. Not a Herosian. Someone brighter, better at long-term planning. A Jenlay or a Torem, maybe. Or it could be someone from outside the Federation territories. This Pinnacle bunch have been around a long time.’

‘They are a long way away. Beyond Old Earth, in fact.’

‘We don’t really know where they got themselves to during the Long Dark.’ Aneka placed the second mine, hiding it away on the underside of the power conduit. ‘Both armed?’

‘I’ve received handshake signals from both mines. We can detonate them whenever we wish.’

‘All right, now we need to find that communications centre.’ She walked back to her pack and slung it over her shoulders before heading for the door. ‘Any guesses?’

‘Up the ladder and turn right,’ Al replied. ‘Comms is supposed to be in the central section. We can move down there, start from the core systems and work out. Be careful, however, a lot of stations will put the primary control room in the core where it has maximum protection, and I don’t believe that area will be entirely unmanned.’

Aneka climbed the ladder and set off down the corridor. The construction in the station was not of Xinti design, which further cemented her thoughts on the mysterious power behind the Herosians. Actually, the use of more open frames in the bracing at the section joins tended to suggest Herosians had built the place. All the signs, not that there were many, were generalised Federation symbology. There was no actual lettering, just symbols. Some of the technology, like the reactor, was fairly advanced, more so than the general Herosian tech, but other parts seemed in line with the Federation standard. As with the cloaked frigates, the station seemed to have been built by someone with a fragmentary knowledge of higher technology.