In Earth's Service (Mapped Space Book 2) Page 27

  I followed him to a bar overlooking the photonorama. He took a seat and ordered from the table top selector while I found a table from where I could watch him without being noticed. Once settled, he ran his fingers through the holographic image projected up from his staff, splicing together scenes for his datacast and occasionally recording a voice over. After two drinks, his report was stream-ready for couriers to distribute to audiences across Mapped Space. The reporter paid his tab and headed for the men’s room. I followed a few seconds later. Inside the sparkling clean washroom, only one sanitation booth was sealed. When he stepped out, I struck him in the stomach, finished him with an elbow strike to the head as he doubled over, then dragged his limp body back into the booth.

  “Only one occupant permitted at a time,” a synthesized female voice informed me politely as I relieved the reporter of his access chip, then flushed his personal identification and room key down the toilet. By the time he came to, the ship’s waste recycling system would have reconstituted them into useful byproducts making it impossible for him to verify his identity.

  I stepped out of the booth, watched as the door sealed him in, then bumped into a drunk on the way out, slipping my all-day Pleasure Pass into his pocket. Satisfied the ship believed it still knew my movements, I headed for the security checkpoint with the reporter’s data staff under my arm. It might have been an all-in-one holostudio, but its solid metal structure made it an effective close range weapon, one security scanners wouldn’t challenge. At the checkpoint, the guards barely looked at me, then I strolled to Constellation Hall.

  It was a circular edifice of refractive carbon and polysteel five levels high. On the podium, a well dressed bureaucrat droned on about the economic benefits to interstellar trade of viral self-propagating Society indemnified consignment contracts. I quickly realized that wasn’t why I was here, so I headed back to the foyer where small groups of congress attendees chatted quietly. I took a seat, pretending to work with the data staff while I studied the people drifting in and out of the session.

  Soon a pair of muscular, severe looking men appeared beyond the hall’s towering wall-windows, walking slowly around the outside of the building. They looked like Orie Mercs in plain clothes with a harder bearing than the toy soldiers at the arch scanner. Both men carefully scrutinized everyone, occasionally whispering into their palms as they followed their patrol route, eventually moving off behind the hall, only to reappear at their starting position several minutes later. When they’d almost completed their third circuit of the building, Julkka Olen appeared. He spoke briefly with them, then moved on past the hall’s entrance. I waited until he was almost out of sight, then shut down the data staff, slipped out through the main entrance and followed him at a distance. I hadn’t forgotten Olen had cracked my head open on Krailo-Nis, but contrary to what I’d told Jase, revenge wasn’t on my mind – what he was doing on the Aphrodite was.

  I tracked him across a crowded plaza to a cluster of conference rooms opposite the media center. He passed three unguarded venues, each with glowing signs indicating when breakout sessions were due to be held there, then stopped at the entrance to the fourth, the Vega Room. It had a blank sign and two plain clothed Ories out front and according to my sniffer, both had boarded the Merak Star at Acheron Station with Trask. After exchanging a few words with them, Olen went inside, leaving me in no doubt, whatever the game was, it was being played out in the Vega Room.

  I circled around the conference center, looking for a way in, but every entrance to the Vega Room was guarded. Not fancying my chances against Orie mercs with only a metal club for a weapon, I headed across to the media center. It was a rectangular structure with long rows of seats facing data screens crammed in side by side and surrounded by sonic nullifiers for privacy. The walls were filled with screens showing live feeds from Constellation Hall and empty conference rooms being prepped by bots for the afternoon sessions. Only the Vega Room was not shown.

  I picked a workstation, then found the Vega Room feed was inexplicably out of service. The precinct floor plan confirmed there were only three ways into Vega, all of which I knew were guarded. That left technical services, the communications nerve center, as my next stop. It was only two doors away, occupied by a bored uniformed ship’s cop and an overweight tech watching a multi-screen layout.

  “No one’s allowed in here,” the company cop said, waving me half heartedly away without even bothering to rise. Beyond him, the fat tech didn’t even glance over, but continued feeding an inedible slab of fried protein into his mouth as his eyes remained transfixed by his screens.

  “The media center people told me you could help me,” I said, closing the distance to the security officer before he even realized I’d ignored his instruction.

  “This is a secure area,” the guard said, finally starting to pay me some attention. “Get out now.”

  “The Procyon Room is dropping out. If it’s not back up soon, my editor’s going to have my head.”

  “Go through the help-bots,” the tech said without turning toward me. “They’ll lodge a service call if they can’t fix it.”

  I struck the guard in the forehead with the data staff, relieved him of his stun gun as he crumpled to the floor, then aimed the weapon at the technician’s round face. “But I don’t want to lodge a service call.” The tech’s eyes widened in surprise. “Activate the Vega Room feed,” I said, tapping the door’s control panel, locking us inside.

  He swallowed, glanced at a screen full of status indicators and said, “Vega’s on a security lock out. I’m not supposed to access it.”

  “I’m not supposed to shoot you in the head, but I will if you don’t give me access – now!”

  He glanced anxiously at the gun, put his oily meal down and worked his console until the Vega room feeds appeared on four screens in front of him. “That’s it. Anything else?”

  “Yeah, you’re in my seat.” I stunned him in the back, rolled his unconscious form onto the floor and sat in his place, resting the stunner on the console in front of me.

  The four screens before me displayed different perspectives of a group of men and women gathered around a circular conference table. The only person talking was an enormously fat man wearing a loose fitting suit that couldn’t hide the bulges of an exoskeleton hidden beneath his clothes. When he moved his arms, the exoskeleton appeared from beneath his sleeves or revealed supporting straps across his chest. Crowning his enormous body was a balding head with a thinning halo of silver hair and a chubby face above rolls of fat where his chin should have been. Most striking of all were his penetrating gray-green eyes, bristling with intelligence, and the unmistakable air of authority with which he spoke.

  Listening to Fatman were six groups of three, each dressed in the styles of their respective cultures. Three groups were from the Union while the remainder represented East and South Asia and the Caliphate. I recognized only one man at the table, Governor Metzler from Hardfall, who sat with one of the Union delegations. All were listening attentively, sometimes exchanging grave looks or nodding supportively while a few tried to mask their feelings.

  “I assure you ladies and gentleman,” Fatman said in a silky tone, “they will be caught completely by surprise. We will have the advantage.”

  “We appreciate your optimism, Mr. Chairman,” one of the East Asian men wearing a satin tunic said cautiously, “but how will our fleet penetrate the system defense perimeter?”

  I set my listener to analyze every accent, to identify the worlds from which they came, but I didn’t need my threading to tell the Chairman was a Union citizen and his East Asian colleague was from the PFA.

  “Vice Chancellor Liang, let me assure you, the outer perimeter defenses will not be a problem,” the Chairman said smoothly. “Our forces will never engage them.”

  “How is that possible?” a Hispanic woman with long dark hair asked. “We know their seeker drones are more than capable of destroying our long range weapons well before they
could reach the target. Any attack must be launched from orbit.”

  The Chairman gave her a patient look. “We came to the same conclusion, Minister Delgado. The time to target for an extra-system attack would eliminate any possibility of surprise.” He smiled wryly. “That is why we have developed an alternate strategy, one that gives us an advantage Earth Navy will not be expecting.”

  With the delegates hanging on his every word, he touched a control in the table, causing a holographic image of a long silver-gray ship to appear before them. She was bigger than a bulk carrier, had a row of cargo doors and docking ports along her sides and four large maneuvering engines astern, but she was no trade ship. She lacked offensive armament, yet bristled with point defenses and shield bubbles and was fitted with what looked like an oversized communications array amidships.

  My threading tried silhouette matching the ship, but failed to identify her against any active classes. It was only when the search turned to ships no longer in service that her profile was projected into my mind’s eye. She was an old Earth Navy depot ship, the last survivor of a decommissioned class no longer needed now that there were navy bases scattered across Mapped Space. She’d been designed to support fleet units far from home in the centuries following the Embargo, when Earth Navy had lacked bases outside the Solar System. More than two thousand meters in length, she’d once been a mobile naval base, one of the largest ships ever built for Earth Navy. The last of her kind had been sold for scrap years ago, yet somehow, she’d been saved from the wrecker’s yard.

  Behind her was an immense blue orb, a frozen world drifting at the edge of its system. Beyond the ice-giant was a red-orange river of super heated gas curving across the blackness of space toward a brilliant multicolored whirlpool. It was unmistakably the accretion disk swirling about Duranis-B, the white dwarf companion orbiting this system’s red giant, a supernova in the making.

  “This, ladies and gentleman, is our advantage,” the Chairman informed them as my listener got a read on his accent. It was affected and pretentious, but he couldn’t hide his colonial origins. He was from Ardenus, the same planet Governor Metzler came from, although his vocal tones suggested he’d spent much of his adult life on Earth.

  “How’s an old transport ship going to give us an advantage?” one of the Calies asked, clearly unconvinced.

  “It’s no mere transport ship, Doctor Sohrab,” the Chairman said, zooming the image toward her topsides. From a distance, what I’d assumed was a communications array was, on closer inspection, the alien-tech tower that had been loaded aboard the Merak Star. “This structure utilizes an alien technology that will allow us to bypass the outer perimeter defenses entirely.”

  “We never agreed to use any alien technology,” a man with a distantly North American accent said. “What is it?”

  “The technology is Hrane, Secretary Stilson,” the Chairman replied.

  “Did you steal it?” Stilson asked. “We don’t want trouble with the Tau Cetins. Earth Navy will be a big enough problem.” It was enough for my threading to conclude he was from New Liberty, a partially terraformed world thirty six light years from Earth. New Liberty was home to the single largest human population outside the Solar System and was only a thousand years away from becoming mankind’s first fully engineered homeworld.

  “We’ve stolen nothing,” the Chairman assured him. “We merely salvaged an artifact that was abandoned thousands of years ago. The former owners, the Hrane, have no cause for complaint, not that they know or care. That is the beauty of our situation.”

  “I’ve never heard of the Hrane,” a swarthy South Asian said. “Do we have diplomatic contact with them?”

  “No,” the Chairman replied. “According to our advisors, the Hrane last visited the Orion Arm centuries before we developed interstellar travel. They are mammals I believe, but that is the only similarity they have with us. I’m told we’d find their atmosphere rather toxic.”

  “If it’s still working after all that time, they might want it back,” Doctor Sohrab said warily. There was an eighty two percent chance he was from Qorveh, an agrarian colony in Core System space, one of the few Cali-founded worlds.

  “Whatever they once were, they’re now an inward looking, isolated species. A social transformation changed the focus of their culture, so much so that they rarely leave their homeworlds in the Carina Arm.” The Chairman shrugged indifferently. “Not every species are empire builders like us. What matters is they’re long gone and our salvage operation was … almost legal.”

  “So you’ve salvaged this alien technology without our consent and installed it aboard one of our ships without our knowledge,” the swarthy South Asian leader said. “Considering advanced alien technology is virtually unrecognizable to us, how do you propose to utilize this salvaged Hrane machine?”

  “Installed aboard one of my ships, free of charge,” the Chairman correctly acidly. From the look in his eyes, he’d always known it was going to come to this. Just as the ancient Greeks could never have repaired a thirty fifth century kaonic processor, we should never have been able to make use of Hrane technology, so steep was the slippery curve of advancing science. “And of course, we had help.”

  Mataron help!

  “From who?” the South Asian delegate asked.

  “Minister Shankar, there are some things I cannot discuss, even with this group,” the Chairman replied slowly. “Suffice it to say, we have friends willing to aid us, providing their assistance remains confidential.”

  I silently cursed his arrogance. The Matarons weren’t our friends and never would be. Any help they gave us would only ever be to their advantage, not ours!

  “So what does this technology do?” Secretary Stilson asked with less unease than Minister Shankar had shown.

  “It’s a quantum tunneler,” the Chairman said, clearly glad to get away from the subject of who was providing the technical expertise. “It tunnels through hyperspace.”

  “Hyperspace?” a quasi-Euro Union accented man sitting beside Governor Metzler spoke for the first time. “That’s an unproven theory.”

  “Unproven to us, but a known physical dimension beyond spacetime long accessible to the Hrane,” the Chairman explained. “You see, while the Hrane are far ahead of us, in galactic terms they are a mid level civilization. Their ships are slow compared to the Tau Cetins, but hyperspace gave them galactic reach.”

  The technician at my feet groaned and started to rise. I snatched the stunner off the console and shot him again, then gave the guard a second jolt for good measure.

  “Galactic reach?” Vice Chancellor Liang mused, wondering at the possibilities. “And we can use this technology ourselves?” My threading decided he was from Xin Guizhou, a PFA Core System world ninety eight light years from Earth.

  “We can use the salvaged technology,” the Chairman corrected, “but synthesizing it for large scale exploitation is far beyond our industrial capability, at least for now.”

  “How does it work?” the quasi-Euro asked.

  “It generates a micro-singularity, an extreme gravity point which pulls a sliver of our spacetime through hyperspace.”

  “Sounds like a black hole,” Minister Shankar said.

  “It’s a point of infinite density and zero volume,” the Chairman said, “which produces an effect similar to what a very small black hole would do.”

  “My dear Manning,” the quasi-Euro said in a recognizably Ardenan accent, “wormholes are extremely unstable and quite unsuitable for interstellar travel. To my knowledge, not a single civilization in the Orion Arm employs such technology.”

  “That is true, Senator Proche,” the Chairman conceded, “which is why we’ll be injecting exotic matter into the sliver to inflate and stabilize it, creating a bidirectional wormhole large enough and safe enough for our ships to use.”

  “The energy requirements must be incredible,” Shankar said thoughtfully.

  “They are, but thanks to our friends, we have su
fficient generating capacity.”

  That’s what the Kesarn siphons were for, to power the Hrane quantum tunneler! It would make the depot ship undetectable, because she was running on dark energy – the first human ship ever to do so!

  “And are our mysterious friends also providing us with exotic matter?” Minister Shankar asked. He was almost certainly from the Indian Republic world of Hindrati nearly two hundred light years from Earth.

  The Chairman nodded. “Enough for several strike missions. We are negotiating for more, but it is a difficult material to procure. For now, our entire stockpile is aboard that ship, heading to its assigned position.”

  “It doesn’t look underway,” Minister Delgado said, puzzled.

  “This is a live data stream from a camera drone, coming from the edge of the Duranis-B system. What you’re seeing occurred almost two hours ago, the time it took for the signal to reach us. Our ship will arrive at its assigned position an hour from now, at which time it will begin deploying the tunneler. This signal is currently encrypted, but soon we’ll open the feed to every news organization here.”

  “Is that wise?” Secretary Stilson asked, “considering the importance of security.”

  “Propaganda is also important, Mr. Secretary,” the Chairman replied. “I organized this trade congress specifically to lure every media organization in Mapped Space here. Soon, their ships will be racing each other back to the Core Systems, carrying news of our triumph to every human inhabited world.” Realization spread across their faces, then he motioned to someone off screen. “General Trask will now deliver the tactical briefing.”

  Domar Trask appeared wearing a dark blue uniform with a gold star on each collar – not a uniform I’d ever seen before. He nodded crisply to the assemblage then the holographic image of the modified depot ship was replaced by a view of a ringed gas giant distinguished by bands of brown, orange and white and orbited by dozens of moons of various sizes. It could have been any one of a thousand such planets in Mapped Space.