Read Aneka Jansen 7: Hope Online

Authors: Niall Teasdale

Tags: #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Adventure, #Artificial Intelligence, #spaceships, #cyborg, #robot, #Aneka Jansen, #Pirates, #Espionage

Aneka Jansen 7: Hope (8 page)

BOOK: Aneka Jansen 7: Hope
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‘And where did this happen?’

‘A planet called Eshebbon. It’s of no use to you. It’s several hundred parsecs away, well outside your sphere of influence, and the site is still radioactive.’

‘Nowhere is outside our sphere of influence should we wish to involve ourselves. I find it difficult to believe that anyone would throw away a weapon of such utility.’

Ella shrugged. ‘Historically, bioweapons have always been problematic. Deployment is messy, they can backfire, and we really don’t need that kind of weapon. Perhaps we have a different viewpoint on warfare. If we encounter a species who won’t listen to reason, we remove them entirely and directly. Not that we’ve ever been required to enact the threat.’

‘You “remove” them?’

‘Our military strategist is very clear on the matter. Should it ever come to it, and she fervently hopes it never does, an enemy who refuses peace must be eliminated for the greater good, down to the last man. To show mercy to a species without mercy is to invite terrorism, insurgency, and a drawn-out war which threatens everyone else. Every system they inhabit is to be destroyed. They are to be hunted down and eradicated. It’s never happened because… Well, most species aren’t suicidal.’

Arundal waved a dismissive hand. ‘With that kind of power you would be ruling the galaxy by now.’

‘We aren’t interested in ruling the galaxy, Commander. We just want to learn from it.’

~~~

The Pinnacle, it seemed, were not interested in learning anything from the galaxy unless it had a military application. With the household asleep, Ella had connected into the local network and quickly found a map of the region which gave her a working route between the township she was in and the spaceport. However, she could have taken a more direct route were it not for the large regions marked as dangerous thanks to the silver webbing, and she had gone looking for information on the odd material.

It was organic and native to the planet, and it was more or less a monoculture. After it had evolved, more or less nothing else had. Almost everything which had existed prior to that had also been wiped out. Pinnacle scientists had established that it conducted electricity, but not especially well, and that it gave off low levels of radio waves. If touched, it was capable of electrocuting a victim, and large collections of it could emit high-energy static discharges which could disable someone getting too close. It grew quickly, but it was vulnerable to fire. Having established a threat potential, research had stopped. They knew what they needed to know.

Well, now Ella had everything she needed too. Once the party was out of the way and the house quiet, she would leave.

16.11.559 FSC.

There were eight additional people at the table tonight. All the men were in uniform. The women were in floor-length gowns, either strapless or with very thin straps. Ella had decided that this was the current fashion since she had seen the same sort of gown in the shops.

The uniforms were uninformative, but the ages suggested one officer senior to Commander Arundal and the rest probably juniors. They all seemed to be friends, which was somehow not what Ella was expecting. She had really thought that the primary purpose of the party was either social climbing or career advancement, but the atmosphere was too relaxed. The chatter at the table was social. There was a tendency for the men to drift off into work talk, but the two senior wives were there to redirect things.

‘Has anything come of our attempts to solve the Iyonvrie situation?’ one of the junior officers asked.

Arundal favoured him with a smile. ‘Your wife will be rolling her eyes, David, if you keep talking business.’

The young man’s wife grinned. ‘I’m used to it. And
everyone
is interested in Iyonvrie. One of the main holdouts on the current border?’

Arundal glanced at his superior and Ella saw the slight nod. Iyonvrie was apparently a security matter, but discussion was being allowed. It was being allowed in front of a slave. ‘We are progressing several plans to get around their technology.’

‘Antimatter bombs,’ one of the other, younger, officers said. Ella got the feeling it was speculation. ‘Their screens prevent nuclear weapons detonating, but they won’t stop an antimatter explosion.’

So this Iyonvrie had some form of strong nuclear force enhancement technology. It would render most nuclear weapons useless. Shadataga used similar fields when transporting radioactive materials and in some experiments to slow down the decay of short lifetime isotopes. Using antimatter to initiate a fusion weapon, or using pure antimatter as the explosives would get around the field, however. These people were talking about using weapons of
very
massive destruction against a world in order to conquer it. And they were doing it in front of a slave.

‘Your military science is up to scratch I see,’ the older officer said. ‘Such devices would do the job, but there are simpler means of bypassing their damper fields.’

‘Kinetic bombardment,’ someone suggested.

‘But that would require construction of larger gunships to be effective.’

‘The dreadnoughts would be sufficient.’

‘Not to be fully effective. We would need extra-long accelerators. The dreadnoughts would be far more effective with antimatter warheads.’

‘Gentlemen,’ Arundal said, ‘let us seek an unorthodox point of view in our deliberations. Ella, you say your people can eliminate their opposition with ease. How would you go about defeating the defences of Iyonvrie?’ Ella raised an eyebrow; it was an unexpected turn of events.

‘You’re asking a slave?’ one of the women asked.

‘Ella was convicted of bioterrorism and, by the mercy of Pinnacle Commander Lucifent himself, placed in slavery rather than being executed. Her culture, it seems, has some very powerful weapons and she does not seem unwilling to discuss them. Ella?’

‘We wouldn’t attack this planet you’re discussing with intent to capture it, sir,’ Ella replied. ‘Our weapons expert has, I believe, run simulations of weaponry with that objective, but they have never been built. I believe her favourite was a hypervelocity projectile. A reactionless drive capable of accelerating a large missile to near-light speed.’

The man favouring the kinetic impactors did not seem especially happy to have had his option confirmed. ‘You’re saying you could build that, but never have?’

‘There’s no point, sir. If a world does not wish to join us, then they simply don’t gain the benefit of our technology.’

‘And if they attack you?’ the senior officer asked. ‘You’re not saying you won’t defend yourself?’

‘No, sir. If they attack us and pose a meaningful threat, the response is something which was trialled once, several hundred parsecs away from here. We blow up their star.’

There was laughter around the room. To Ella, some of it seemed a little strained. ‘No one can blow up a star,’ one of the wives said. Her laughter had been particularly strained.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ Ella replied, ‘we can.’

‘This is fine dinner conversation,’ Mrs Arundal said into the silence. ‘Elisabeth, that
is
a new dress isn’t it?’

Ella stepped back a pace and watched as the conversation progressed. She had to wonder what Arundal was up to, him and the senior anyway. They had allowed that to continue for some reason, and engaging her in it seemed to indicate that it was meant for her. Had they been trying to scare her with their weaponry? Or trying to discover what might be used against them? The latter was hardly a secret and there was no known defence against War’s star killer. She was sure they were up to something, but discovering what it was was not a priority. When the house went dark tonight, she would be leaving and their schemes would mean nothing.

17.11.559 FSC.

Ella looked out across the spaceport landing pad towards a ship, a light transport vessel, which she was currently hoping was going to be her ticket off the planet. She was frowning.

Things were going just a little too well for her tastes. Getting out of the house had been simple and the township gate had been unguarded. Well, it was a civilian community on a planet the Pinnacle viewed as being under their control. There was no need for guards on the gates, but it just somehow felt out of character for the Pinnacle. Her collar was still about her neck, but inactive. She assumed that it could be tracked, but removing it seemed more likely to draw attention than keeping it on; she was still dressed in the manner of a slave.

She had made her way as quickly as she could to the port. She was still barefoot and she could not move on the actual roadways. The ground at the sides of the roads was rough, and she needed to stay away from the silver webbing, but there was room enough to move about unseen. So it had been well into the early hours when she got to the port and tapped into the computer network there looking for a ship she could use.

The transport ship was just out of an engine refit and was marked down for a test flight. No specific schedule had been assigned; it appeared that it would be run in when a suitable pilot was available. Well, as far as Ella was concerned, a suitable pilot had just been found, but she was worried that it all seemed just a little convenient. Still, Aneka had some phrase about horses given as gifts…

The airlock controls were not even locked, although that made a certain, perverse, sense. If you were there then you were allowed to be. No slave would make it to the port to find an unlocked ship, right? So why bother locking the door.

‘Who are you trying to convince, Ella?’ she muttered to herself as she made her way into the silent ship. It was small, and the engines were not powerful. It was going to take her a long time to get home. On the other hand, it did mean that pretty much all the flight systems were wrapped around the cockpit where she could have easy access, and that was going to be important. She spent ten minutes locating the power feeds into the communications array, and then another twenty carefully adjusting the audio filters to distort her voice and make it sound like the comms system was flaky. Satisfied, and with the sun starting to come up, she sat down in the control chair and began powering the engines.

‘Light transport vessel nine-six-seven-four to Ariadne control. Requesting clearance for lift-off for engine tests.’ She waited, hoping she was not going to have to try to make a run for it, because if that was the case, she was probably fucked.

‘LT-nine-six-seven-four, please hold for verification.’ Ella closed her eyes, but there seemed to be very little pause before she heard, ‘LT-nine-six-seven-four, you are cleared for lunar transition and return. Please note that your comms are coming through with some distortion.’

‘Noted, control. I’ll put it on the list for them to look at when I get back.’

There was no reply and Ella cut in the antigravity system and pushed off the ground on thrusters. She would do everything by the book, at least the book back home, until she got out to the local moon. Push the ship up into low orbit, do one circuit and then fire the engines for lunar transition. She was supposed to be testing the engines, so pushing the flight out a little would not be unusual. Yes, this was going to work.

Almost entirely out of interest, she actually did run the engine performance metrics as she powered the ship out of orbit. The sublight drive was a fusion torch variant and seemed efficient enough, if a little low in power for her current preferences. There seemed to be nothing wrong with the refit. Pinnacle engineers appeared to be proficient, though she had expected nothing less, even from people working on a fairly basic transport ship. A diagnostic sequence on the warp drive indicated that it was fully operational and Ella figured the time getting out to the moon would be best served by looking through navigation data for a destination planet.

As the ship injected into lunar orbit to swing around for the return journey, Ella clambered under the main console, located the comms system power feeds and yanked them out. She was about to get back up and fire the engines when the vessel gave a violent shudder and alarms began going off. The torch drive was offline and badly damaged from the readouts she was seeing. Something going wrong with the refit seemed unlikely given that the thing was not even running, but there was no indication of anything on sensors which might have attacked.

Warping in such close proximity to the moon was not exactly recommended, but she figured that it was the best option she had, and she was getting the engines ready when she heard a deep clang resonate through the hull. It sounded
a lot
like something had just attached itself to her ship. Internal sensors told her the airlock had been opened and she considered hiding somewhere, but there was not exactly much space to do that and she would almost certainly be found anyway.

Ella got to her feet and stepped around the flight chair. If someone came through the door, she
might
be able to overpower them. It just did not seem like a likely outcome.

And then someone did walk in, and the whole situation got that much stranger.

Hope of Sanctuary.

Captain Anastasia Kade was a very tall, long-haired platinum blonde with very long legs and an expansive chest. She was totally different from Aneka and also quite similar, which was not what had shocked Ella. She was, apparently, the leader of a bunch of pirates who had seen an easy target and gone for it. That was not that shocking either, though she
was
wondering what they were doing in the middle of a Pinnacle system.

No, the weird thing was all the anachronism. Kade’s crew were a mismatched bunch dressed in all manner of random garments and carrying weapons which belonged in previous times. They were all Human or of a Human subspecies, but that was about all you could say about them. That, and that they were pirates, for want of a better term. Clearly audacious pirates, but pirates all the same. Kade was dressed in a shirt-and-corset affair which exposed a lot of cleavage. She was in extremely tight, hip-hugging trousers and ankle-length, high-heeled boots. She carried a sword and a large handgun which looked like it fired actual explosively driven projectiles! Everything was just wrong, but strangely stereotypical.

BOOK: Aneka Jansen 7: Hope
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