Molehunt (27 page)

He heard them. Three, maybe four pursuers, moving with utmost stealth. This was good; it meant they were uncertain, unable to track him properly. His deflectors were doing their job, blurring his heat signature, messing up his neural emissions, even dampening the sound of his footsteps. They were also blocking planetary net traffic in the vicinity, which was to his advantage. The mercs had come after him underprepared.
An enemy without comm is a weaker enemy
.

His own sensors showed three blips nearby, a fourth hanging back.
Probably the real hit man with the biggest cannon. Well, I hate to disappoint you guys, but I don't plan to die today
.

Maximus dropped noiselessly to his knees, stretched out on the ground, and rolled beneath a hover vehicle. Inside the car's parking support field it was difficult to breathe, but he would be virtually invisible to trackers.

They came, three sets of boots, moving silently, expecting him to play the role of the hunted. The boots started to pass the car, and then something went wrong. Within seconds they had surrounded the car he was lying beneath and a sharp voice was barking down at him.

‘Either you're outta there by the time I count to three or we vaporise the whole friggin' thing. Me, I don't care, never liked this model hover car.'

Maximus didn't move. He would die either way. Here at least the dampening field might reduce some of the blast impact. Besides, he had until three. He started to sweat.

He had a surprise in return. Only problem was, while the surprise would kill the hunters it would almost certainly kill him, too. But at least he would die on his terms.

‘Three,' said the hunter. ‘Have it your way, Brown. I declare kill-rights in the name of Myoto Corporation.'

Maximus reversed the polarity of his personal field unit. For a moment a coherent field intersected with the parking field of the hover vehicle. Energies reversed, sending them back along the line of their charge track. The field lost coherence, expanded, and met with the stored energies of the hand weapons held by his pursuers. There would be three nasty explosions. Or maybe not. What happened to Maximus was also open to debate.

Covering his head, Maximus scrabbled aside. Three little blasts sounded like one, as did the three screams of the mortally wounded pursuers. Maximus rolled clear of the unsupported hover car just as it crashed to the ground. A messy-looking body was slumped on the plasteel ground beside him. Maximus squirmed around, craning his neck to scan the area behind the hover vehicle. The hemline of a blood red robe swished confidently towards him beyond the neighbouring vehicles.

He dived over the bonnet of the adjacent car, landing and twisting in one fluid move; then brought up his own needler, all the time listening to the swish-swish sound as it grew slowly louder.

‘Don't come any closer,' Maximus called out. The swishing stopped. ‘I appreciate you taking out the garbage for me.'

‘You are welcome, Mr Brown,' came a familiar hissing voice.

‘The head toll on me must be pretty hefty.'

‘One million credos.'

Maximus whistled. ‘Not bad. Is that dead or alive?'

‘A seven percent premium has been offered if you are returned still breathing.'

‘Hardly worth the effort.'

‘My thoughts also,' said the alien.

‘So how do you want to do this?'

‘Rites must be observed.'

‘Naturally.'

He zeroed the voice,
placed
it within the three dimensional map he mentally constructed of the parking lot space. As he spoke, Maximus started to stand, but it was a feint. No sooner had he shown the crown of his head than he dived to one side, firing as he fell. He hit the ground and then stumbled to his feet and crab-crawled as fast as he could between parked vehicles, keeping down. The alarm systems of several vehicles shrieked warnings of his proximity but he ignored them.

There was no return fire, but neither was there any scream. Did this alien scream? He didn't wait to find out. By his calculation he only had another forty minutes till he could call for reinforcements, and he did not plan to spend those forty minutes as an easy target, or risking a shootout.

Instead, he got out of there.

At the end of the line of parked hover cars he came up against a wall with a maintenance hatch. He burned off the lock with the pencil beam setting on his backup laser, and then scrambled along a maintenance tunnel, taking random turns. He continued until there were 150 metres and twelve minutes between himself and the parking lot and then he stopped long enough to call up a schematic of the maintenance network. A green pulsing blip on the screen showed his position. Unfortunately, it also showed four red entities swarming into the tunnels behind him. He figured these to be Myoto hunkies. The whereabouts of the Envoy-alien was unknown.

Maximus swore softly under his breath.

He scouted out an escape path, scrambled into a side tunnel, and became caught in a rat trap, an immobiliser field specifically designed to hold rodents. Once a rat entered the field they could not leave it. Maximus's foot was stuck inside the field. Ordinarily, a fit adult could wrench free, but there was nothing for him to get a purchase on, just smooth floor and curving walls. Perhaps it was also a burglar trap.

He spent several useless minutes trying to twist free. A glance at his screen told him he did not have much time left. The four red blips were within twenty metres of him.

It was time to get out, even if his position was broadcast – assuming his dampeners had stopped the Myotans from already doing this.

Maximus reset his laser to emit a coherent pulse, took aim at the wall where he calculated the immobiliser's chip-brain would be, and fired. The chip was distributed, and it took two more shots to deactivate its field. A chorus of yells nearby told him that the shots had been heard or the energy discharges picked up on sensors.

Too bad. Another seven minutes and he could call for assistance.

His left foot tingled where the immobiliser field had gripped it but otherwise he was unhurt. He hurried down the corridor, reached an intersection, and froze.

He had reached a dead end. For a second his mind went blank. Then he checked the maintenance schematic. No dead end showed. With a sinking feeling he ran a quick diagnostic on the device. Frigging hell! The bastards had scammed him. While he'd lain trapped and preoccupied in the immobiliser, they had contaminated his e-pad with a low-level virus that had overlaid a fake schematic of the tunnels on top of the real ones.

The dead end was real and solid.

No doubt they were congratulating themselves about it right now. Nice job, he had to admit. They had sited the trap in a section of reinforced support walls. It would take him ten minutes to burn a hole big enough for him to crawl through.

He didn't have ten minutes. He didn't even have one.

But he had the knowledge that they were probably feeling cocky, and that would be a dangerous way to feel.

T
HE colossal shape of the Orbital Engineering Platform looked like a giant cockroach, with great sprays of antennae and sensors projecting from one end while from its underbelly rows of massive jointed arms extended, waiting to embrace damaged starships. Its stealth mode momentarily destabilised, it loomed like a dark inkblot against the splash of a galactic star field, its lower edges etched in harsh sunlight.

Anneke located the suitcase probe and tractored it inside where it locked itself to the nearest bulkhead.

‘Well, that was fun,' it said.

‘Where's your sister?'

‘Please. Like we're related.' Anneke could swear it sniffed. ‘She's inside where she ought to be, doing what she ought to be doing. Unfortunately …'

The suitcase fell silent.

Anneke swivelled her head to look at it. ‘Unfortunately what?'

The suitcase made a
tsk-tsking
noise. ‘Well, it's not her fault, you know. She's an idiot studying to be a moron.
Very
primitive programming, if you ask me, not at all up to the task. Unlike
moi
.'

Exasperated, Anneke powered up one of her hand lasers and pointed it between the machine's stereo cameras.

‘All right, all right, no need for dramatics.'

‘I have a need for straight answers, so start answering. Now, about your sister?'

‘She stopped talking.'

‘She stopped talking?'

‘Do you hear an echo?'

‘Just like that? No warning?'

‘Nada. Zip. Zilch.'

Anneke contemplated this. There could be many reasons for the probe to cease communication. It might have been forced to shut down all transmissions, including its own energy signature, to avoid detection.

‘No self-destruct signal?'

‘She's got vacuum for brains. Sorry, vacuum is the conduit for virtual gravity communication within the MacroSpace structure of the multiverse. It serves a purpose and transmits it. She does not.'

‘I'll take that as a no.'

‘Not a peep.'

‘Now here's a question. I intimidated you with a laser pointed between the cameras. You can feel fear.'

‘It depends on your school of thought and semantic –' Anneke raised her laser again. ‘Well, yes,' said the suitcase.

‘Can your sister feel fear, too?'

‘Absolutely, totally and more intensely. She is built to be timid, hence the wisdom of using her in infiltration ventures. Send someone like myself in, being much bolder I would be likely to take a chance and get fried.'

‘Promises, promises. So, if she had hit a trap and got fried, you would have registered the energy spike?'

‘Yes.'

‘And if something had smashed her, there would have been a destruct pulse transmitted by her core circuits to tell you going in there was a bad idea.'

‘That is an inbuilt altruism function, designed to protect the more elite units from low-level threats.'

‘So she is intact but silent. That could mean that she is too frightened to transmit.'

‘Frightened? That's … That's not bad logic. I am impressed. You could have been an AI.'

‘Spare me.'

Anneke eyed the gigantic bulk of the Old Empire relic, noting the great wounds and ugly strips of repair metal covering its flank like scars. She guessed its age at around twelve hundred years. This thing had seen a lot of action. Distinctive circular meteorite impacts were scattered across it, craters in the metal.

‘Okay, I'm going aboard,' said Anneke. ‘I want you to monitor my comm signal.'

‘And what if you stop talking?'

‘Let's discuss that if it happens.'

‘Oh, very funny. But seriously?'

‘Stay here unless there is a clear and present danger. I may have to go silent if keeping comm open is a threat to remaining alive. Remember, no heroics. I want you intact to get me away from here.'

Being old doesn't always make people feeble, but it often makes them crabby about being disturbed. The same applies to ancient weapons systems with on-board intelligence.

The ancient weapons platform had defences, and those AI defences were quite sensible. Rather than denying entry to potential intruders, who might go away and fetch battleships, it allowed them in. Then it slammed the doors shut and disposed of them neatly, with a minimum of disturbance to the infrastructure.

Whatever was inside this particular platform was not obeying the rules. It was willing to break things and leave a serious mess behind as long as it killed the intruder. That meant that what was guarding the place now was a recent addition, probably installed by the mole. It made sense. If some authorised person came aboard, they would have studied the maintenance and usage manuals, and they would steer clear of all the standard traps and intrusion preventatives. What was guarding the platform now was designed to catch people who were authorised to be aboard.

On the other hand, Anneke was not authorised to be aboard so she was healthily paranoid about everything. This helped her to escape the first attack.