Slab City Blues - The Collected Stories: All Five Stories in One Volume (35 page)

I glanced back at the house. There may have been something to learn in Wallace’s part-shredded library but I knew there was no time to find it. Anyway, I had the answer I came for.
The cleansing
fire.

Chapter 22

Simon and Mr
Mac had used an amphibious microlight to get to Gruinard, all stealth materials and micro-jets. It sat bobbing on the swell just off the craggy northern flank of the island, requiring a short but bone-chilling swim. I was obliged to sit double with Mr Mac, wedged in behind him and shivering as Simon climbed into the pilot’s seat. “Got a mini-drone overhead,” Mr Mac said, holding up his smart. “Shows another squad sweeping the island from south to north.”

“Vargold’s being thorough,” I chattered.

“Let’s hope they didn’t think to bring any anti-aircraft stuff.” He raised his voice as Simon fired up the jets. “How’d he know where you were, anyway?”

“Wallace said he was a prisoner. Vargold probably gets an alert every time someone pays a visit.”

“You cut it pretty fine this time, Alex. Thirty seconds sooner and we’d have been out of position.”

“I had complete faith in your abilities.”

Simon completed his preflight and glanced over his shoulder. “Destination?”

I showed him a set of coordinates on my smart screen. “That’s out to sea,” he said, frowning.

“I have friends waiting.” I gave an annoyed grunt as Mr Mac shifted his weight. “Let’s go.”

We were in the air within the minute, skimming the surface at ten metres and throwing in the occasional jink to frustrate any optical tracking. The sky was fully dark by the time we reached the coordinates, Simon’s thermal imager picking up the tiny blinking spec of
Tethys’s
beacon. I placed a call to Phaedra. “Bring her up. We have a lot to talk about.”

“The whole world?” Phaedra squinted at me across the tactical display. “Seriously?”

“No,” I said. “Just this planet. The world’s a lot bigger than that now. It’s kind’ve the whole point.”

“How?”

“His shiny new interstellar space ark. Not sure of the details yet.”

“We need to call the UN. This just got way too big…”

“Uh, Phaedra, Erik,” one of the crew broke in, looking up from the main comms terminal. “Dunno if it’s relevant, but every news feed on the planet just went crazy. Something about an attempted assassination upside.”

“Play it,” I said, a hard knot of grim understanding forming in my gut.
We forced his
hand.

The tactical holo shimmered into the form of a CNN news anchor, face set in that earnest yet sombre mask they use when things really go to shit. “…reports from the Lorenzo City Primary Care facility confirm Mayor Arnaud is currently undergoing surgery. His condition is described as extremely serious and medics would not be drawn on his chances for survival. The Mayor’s name may not be familiar to many viewers but he’s a highly important figure in the orbiting community - a decorated war veteran, former police chief, and recently elected mayor of the most populace orbital habitat. More importantly, his attempted murder is being blamed on a Federal Security operative…”

A pause as the anchor put a finger to his ear-piece. “I’m told we now have footage of the event in question. Viewers are advised the content is graphic.”

The display shifted into a view of Arnaud at some ribbon cutting ceremony. One of the new Yang-side parks by the look of it. He was into the first few sentences of his speech when it happened, the view momentarily turned chaotic as whoever held the camera was jostled aside. Then screams and gunfire. The camera refocused, revealing Arnaud dangling as something large and hairy lifted him off the ground. Another of Vargold’s morphs, presumably not long out of corrective immersion. The view got shaky again as the gunfire intensified. The thing holding Arnaud had been about to close its jaws on his throat but the barrage of fire from the phalanx of bodyguards proved sufficient to shatter its skull.

The image froze on Arnaud’s prostrate form as the anchor’s voice-over resumed. “The mayor’s injuries are said to consist of compression trauma to the throat and multiple lacerations. Acting Lorenzo City Police Chief Sherrilynn Mordecai refused to comment on the assailant’s identity or motive, stating merely that the investigation is progressing at a very rapid pace. However, a spokesperson for the CAOS Central Governance Defence Ministry was quick to point out parallels with the murder of Astravista co-founder Craig Rybak at the hands of a man widely suspected of acting as an agent for UN Federal Security. Many commentators have also linked the assassination to the recent tragic demise of Chief Inspector Alexei McLeod, the Lorenzo City Detective who identified Rybak’s murderer. Inspector McLeod and several colleagues died in an as yet unexplained shuttle accident following the successful capture of notorious gangland figure…”

“Turn it off,” I said, punching Sherry’s personal ID into my smart.

“Hey,” Mr Mac said as the holo blinked off. “I didn’t get my mention. I’m notorious, apparently.”

I ignored him, watching the ‘message sent’ icon blinking and praying she saw some significance in my caller ID: Newface1.

She picked up after two full minutes, voice cautious. “Who is this?”

“Sherry…” I began.

“You fucking dick!”

I held the smart away, wincing at the volume.

“I knew you couldn’t be dead! I would’ve felt a whole lot better-”

“Listen! We don’t have time…”

“Fuck you! Is Joe there? I wanna swear at him too.”

I didn’t say anything for a second, hearing her anger leech away in a long sigh of realisation. “Joe’s gone,” I said. “Janet, Timor and Leyla are on Cerberus Station.”

“What the hell happened?”

“Vargold. It’s all him. Rybak, Joe, Arnaud. All of it.” I laid it out as quickly and clearly as I could, everything that happened from Rybak’s murder to my meeting with Wallace. “You have to call CAOS Military,” I said. “Get them to seize the
Jason
Alpha
.”

“Don’t you get it, Alex? As far as anyone up here is concerned, Fed Sec just tried to assassinate the man most likely to win the next presidential election. Everything’s in uproar or lock-down. Central Governance just went into emergency session and every hab’s alert status has been set to red. It’s likely they’ll vote to suspend helium 3 shipments within twenty-four hours, and you can guess what the UN’s reaction to that will be. CAOS Military won’t shift a single missile turret away from Earth just now, that’s even if I could get through to someone with high enough authority to give the order.”

“You need to try. Yell as loud as you can, to anyone who’ll listen. I’ll be in touch when I know more.”

I shut down the smart, reluctance battling necessity as I stared at the screen. “Don’t suppose the Aquatic League has a space program?” I asked Erik.

He gave an apologetic shrug. “Sorry. Guess no one felt the need.”

“Nearest launch-port is in London,” Mr Mac said. “But we’d need to hijack a shuttle, and make it past the UN security patrols, all now on a war readiness footing.”

I sighed and punched in another ID from memory. “Guess we’ll have to think of something else.” The call was answered within five seconds, no greeting, just expectant silence. “Captain Alexei McLeod,” I said, knowing voice recognition would confirm my ID. “Grey Wolf.”

The ship’s approach became audible only when it got within fifty metres, and even then it was little more than a slight whine above the bluster of the sea. Its presence became more obvious when the engines raised spume from the waves as it slowed to a hover barely ten feet above the Tethys. I looked up to regard a swirling smear in the sky, formless and impossible to define. After a brief pause, the smear flickered and faded, revealing a matte black hull configured into a sleek and familiar shape.
The design specs I brought back from Ceres. Guess they couldn’t resist
it.

A square of light appeared in the underside of the black shape before a rope ladder unfurled its way onto the upper hull of the
Tethys
. “You should head back to Salacia,” I told Phaedra, reaching out to snare the ladder. “Get your authorities to make some calls…”

“Forget it,” she said, hefting her gear. “You need soldiers. We’re it. And this is our planet.”

I glanced over to see Mr Mac giving Simon a questioning look. The mercenary replied with an expressionless nod. “Looks like he’s got a sentimental bone or two, after all,” Mr Mac said, turning back to me, face guarded. “Doesn’t mean I do.”

I took a firmer hold of the ladder and began to climb. “Well, that’s a big surprise.”

Chapter 23

The pilot was
blank faced as she nodded her head at the comms terminal. We’d burned clear of Earth orbit a few minutes back, slipping through an electro-magnetic haze of military scanners without a blip. A pair of cold blue eyes stared up at me from the holo with the laser-like focus I remembered. “Actually, it’s General these days,” he said in response to my terse greeting. “Central Command was very impressed by our last op.”

“Congratulations.”

“I seem to recall you promising to kill me if you saw me again.”

“Which I guess is why you sent the ship and didn’t feel the need to come along.”

“I have responsibilities, Captain. Covert Ops is now on stand-by to execute its war-plan. Something I’m keen to avoid, if possible.”

I glanced around at the ship’s interior, all curves and no hard edges or sharp angles. It made for an aesthetically pleasing but not necessarily comfortable environment. I wasn’t relishing the three hour journey to Cerberus. “You got any more of these?”

“Sadly no. She’s a prototype, still undergoing evaluation.”

“She got a name?”

“Covert Insertion and Extraction Vehicle Mark One.”

“Imaginative. I’m afraid she’ll get a few dings in the paintwork before this is over.”

“Understood. You have some form of plan, I assume?”

“Yeah. Stop Vargold’s ship by all means necessary. Any intel that might help would be appreciated.”

“We know Vargold left the Slab five hours before the assassination attempt on Arnaud, his shuttle’s flight-plan indicates a routine visit to Hephaestus. I had an agent on station there but they went dark shortly after his arrival. The last package I received confirmed the
Jason Alpha
was being prepped for an early maiden voyage.”

“So you’ve been watching him for a while now?”

“We watch everybody, you know that. Especially someone with his access and influence.”

“And yet you managed to miss his fiendish planet-destroying master plan.”

The General blinked and punched an icon on his own display. “All the intel we’ve gathered on the
Jason Alpha
and its capabilities,” he said as a package uploaded to my terminal. “Includes hacks for the on-board security systems, atmospheric controls and the main engines. You’ll need a hard-interface to upload it and Vargold’s security software is dynamic and partially AI-driven, so expect it to adapt quickly.”

“To come up with this contingency, you must’ve had your suspicions for a while.”

“Basic military strategy, Captain. Always have a contingency. Besides, it may have become necessary for CAOS Defence to co-opt the
Jason Alpha
in the event of another Fed Sec attack.” The display shifted to a tactical graphic showing the
Jason Alpha
on approach to Earth orbit. “I had our tactical people run some attack sims. It doesn’t look good.” He paused and when he spoke again I heard something I’d never expected to hear in his voice; uncertainty. “This is all I can do. CAOS Military will be unable to assist, they’re expecting a UN armada to come streaking out of Earth’s atmo any second. I’ve tried to persuade Central Command otherwise, but after Ceres they’re not in a trusting mood.”

“Then it’s lucky I’ve got my own army,” I said and killed the comms feed.

“
Scheisse,
” Kruger said, eyeing the tactical display with understandable trepidation. “More heavily defended than anything we faced in the war. Wouldn’t you say, Herr Oberst?”

I’d convened a council of war aboard the
Aguila
shortly after docking with Cerberus. Kruger had been elected to speak on behalf of those veterans with an interest in lending a hand, most having volunteered in response to Riviera’s request. He considered the display for a second, eyes tracking over the thick net of bots and the four Seraphim-class corvettes in close escort around the rectangular bulk of the
Jason Alpha
. “Vargold’s people,” Riviera said to me. “All mercenaries?”

“According to my intel,” I said. “Though we can bet there’s a few true believers amongst them. Lotta people with unresolved grudges out there.”

“Armament on the
Jason Alpha
itself?”

“Minimal. Long range optical scans indicate some ad hoc additions to the outer hull, cannon turrets for the most part, some chaff dispensers too.”

“Which raises the question,” Janet put in, “How exactly does Vargold intend to wipe out a planet with a lightly armed ship?”

“Perhaps he intends to crash it,” Kruger suggested. “A big beast like that would create an impressive crater and expel a large amount of matter into the atmosphere. Nuclear winter scenario.”

“It doesn’t have enough mass,” Lucy said. “No, he’s going to fry the place.”

She squirmed a little as all eyes turned to her. “How?” I asked.

Lucy laughed, as if the answer were obvious, then stopped when she realised it wasn’t, to us anyway. “The whole purpose of the Ad Astra project,” she began, “was to produce a propulsion system capable of traversing an interstellar distance within a typical human lifespan. The ship is basically a contained singularity event; a shit-load of mass condensed into a super-dense form in order to produce a miniature astrophysical jet. It’s the jet that provides the thrust. The great technological feat here is that Astravista found a way to contain and direct the jet. All down to magnetic fields apparently.”

“Contain and direct,” Riviera said. “Like a huge rocket nozzle.”

“Or the ultimate flamethrower,” I said. “Point the rear end at Earth and blast off. Destruction and ascension in one glorious moment.”

“He’d need to be within lunar orbit to do it,” Lucy said. “And have the ship pointed at Proxima, if he’s really interested in getting there.”

“Run the numbers. Find us a likely destination point based on its current velocity.”

Her fingers danced over the icons for a few minutes before the result flashed up on the holo. The
Jason Alpha
hovered over northern Europe, the most densely populated sector of the globe.
Happy accident or by design?
I decided it didn’t really matter.

“Just under eight hours from now,” Kruger said. “Not much time to prep an assault.”

“It’ll have to do,” I said. “Do you have any ordnance capable of stopping that thing?”

Mr Mac cut in before Kruger could reply, voice soft but intent, “Can we discuss the rather large invisible elephant standing in the corner?”

I met his gaze, for once finding no sign of humour. “Which is?”

He nodded at the planet on the holo. “Why exactly are
they
our responsibility?”

“If not ours, then whose?” Janet enquired, her dislike of Mr Mac now palpable in the narrow stare she fixed on him. “Or are you worried there’s no profit in stopping it?”

“I’m worried we’re all going to die trying to save a world that doesn’t give two shits about us, and never has. And what exactly did happen at Ceres, Alex? I think we have a right to know.”

“It’s not relevant…”

“Fuck that!” I’d never seen him actually angry before, face red, eyes wild and lips trembling. A near psychopathic rage was usually a pre-requisite for people in his line of work, but somehow I’d always thought him above such things.
Just another scumbag gangster after
all.

“What were they building there?” he demanded, rage subsiding but not by much. “Tell us why we need to risk our lives for a planet that wants us all dead?”

“What is he talking about?” Riviera asked.

“The ship that brought us here,” Mr Mac said. “It’s not an original design, is it, Alex? Want to tell them where it came from? What it was built for?”

My gaze tracked across all of them as I fumbled for the right words, but it was Lucy who spoke. “A fleet,” she said. “Fed Sec was building a fleet of stealth ships. They were gonna destroy CAOS and take back Earth-space. We stopped them.”

“Thank you for your honesty, my dear,” Mr Mac said. “Which brings me back to my original question.”

“They were gonna kill a shit-load of people,” Lucy said. “Not politicians or generals or rich bastards who own big corporations. Just people. That’s why we stopped them. That’s why I’m up for stopping Vargold.”

The silence stretched as I scanned their faces, seeing more sombre contemplation than reluctance. “I’m not conscripting anyone,” I said. “But I’m doing this. We didn’t win a war to become what we fought against.” I levelled my gaze at Mr Mac. “You want out, fine. Bribe yourself a place on a shuttle and go rebuild your empire. When this is done, I’ll start chasing you again and we can do our pointless dance until we’re both old or dead.”

His anger disappeared as he looked again at the holo, grinned and shrugged. “I’ll be expecting a full pardon when this is over.”

“Not in a million years.” I turned back to Kruger. “Ordnance?”

“We have a stockpile of fifty plasma shrikes,” he said. “They’re old and the targeting systems will need to be re-calibrated, but they’re in full working order. If we score hits with the whole load…” He shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Not enough,” Lucy said, running some more numbers. “Best-case scenario, you render the
Jason Alpha
sixty percent inoperable, and that leaves the propulsion system undamaged. You’ll need a nuke to stop her.”

“We don’t have a nuke,” Kruger said. “Given enough time we could convert one of our old fission reactors…”

“There is a nuke,” I said, meeting Lucy’s gaze. “Her engine, right?”

“Sure. Fuck up the magnetic containment fields and she’ll come apart like an egg the instant she powers up. The engine’s in the heart of the ship, though, so it can’t be done from outside.”

I turned to Riviera. “Boarding party.”

He shook his head. “The escort will take out any ship we have before it gets in range.”

“Any ship but one.”

“Even a stealth ship would be spotted, their defensive net is too tight. We would need to punch a hole.” I watched him study the display in silence for a long time, gaze losing focus as he ran multiple attack scenarios through the tactical computer that formed his brain. We’d had our differences over the years but I’d never discounted his abilities. When it came to micro-grav combat tactics he had no equal. “Can it be done?” I asked after a full minute had ticked by.

“
Si,
” he replied softly, fully focused gazed now fixed on the display. “But it will be messy.”

“Was it ever anything else?”