A Taste Of Despair (The Humal Sequence) (21 page)

The four of them settled back down in the tank.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The two ships divided their crews and undocked. The course for the ‘colony world’, as it had been decided to call it, was laid in and the ships jumped in good order. All without Hamilton and the others even getting out of the tank.

LeGault and Lewis flew the
Morebaeus
, whilst Veltin and Puckett had returned to the
Ulysses
to act as pilot and navigator once more.

Apart from Hamilton and his tank-mates, Lewis and LeGault, only Jones and Corporal Collins had chosen to remain aboard the
Morebaeus
. The latter said he wanted to inventory the freighter’s cargo supplies, to see what was important for their ‘colony’.

The hyper jump would take them a further twelve days in the
Morebaeus
.
Ulysses
would make it in eight.

The journey was uneventful. Hamilton spent it considering his plans for their capturing of one of Walsh’s people and the kidnap of the Humal expert from Mars. There were things they need to obtain first. But, for the most part, they were things they could obtain ‘en route’ to the missions.

Despite the critical shortage of personnel, he became more and more certain that both missions should be carried out more or less at the same time. He wasn’t sure why he thought this was a good idea, given their limited resources, but he had the feeling that it should be that way. A gut instinct told him so.

*****

Corporal Collins made his move on the last night in hyperspace. Although he had been cordial enough all along and had stuck to his task of doing an inventory, there was something about his willingness to be parted from his fellow Marines and do the task, entirely alone, that made Hamilton suspicious.

He and Klane had kept an eye on the Marine but hadn’t said anything to the others. It might have proved to be nothing more than Hamilton’s suspicious nature. There was no point in causing alarm when it wasn’t necessary. Besides which, the others weren’t particularly good at hiding their emotions and feelings. Collins would have likely detected they were on to him.

Hamilton and Rames had discussed the possibility of an attempted mutiny. It had seemed likely. They were, after all, going to maroon people on an uninhabited world. If the situation had been reversed he would have tried something. The fact that the four Marines had decided to join the leavers had set alarms off in both men’s heads.

Collins had, with access to the
Ulysses
arms locker, helped himself to a heavy duty stunner and a couple of gas and stun grenades.

The gas grenades he tossed in amongst the sleepers in the makeshift camp then, as they woke coughing and spluttering, he threw in a stun grenade. Although the cargo module was big, the effect was still deafeningly loud. Wearing a spacesuit borrowed from the
Morebaeus
’ own stores, he then waded in, firing the stunner at any sign of movement, downing anyone foolish enough to have tried to get away.

Looking around, he must have congratulated himself on the success of his simple plan. Everyone seemed to be accounted for, except….

That was when Klane had strode through the slowly dispersing gas cloud, wearing a small oxygen cylinder and mask, to kick him unceremoniously between the legs. Had she still been equipped with the military-grade prosthetics she’d had aboard the Hope’s Breath, Collins would have likely never had children again. As it was, her general size and strength were more than enough to double him up, whereupon a knee to his faceplate sent him over backwards, the plastic of the faceplate cracked. He started wheezing as the gas got to him.

By the time Hamilton found them, similarly equipped with a makeshift breathing system, Klane had bound and tied the Marine.

“How the hell can you see anything in this?” Hamilton coughed. His eyes were streaming from the gas effects.

Klane tapped her cybernetic eye. “I can switch between a variety of different wavelengths. This is as clear as day to me.” Her normal eye, however, was weeping just as much as his.

None of the others were seriously hurt, other than their pride. Collins had clearly been trying to capture them all, not harm anyone. The stunner wore off after ten minutes or so, the gas had long since dispersed by then so it was just a matter of bathing their eyes with saline to salve the irritation. In less than an hour everyone was recovered.

Suggestions as to what to do to Collins were varied and colorful. However, Hamilton and Klane were running the show, so Collins ended up securely bound and locked in one of the crew’s cabins. In his defense, Collins said he had just wanted to make sure his family were safe and wasn’t out to hurt anyone.

In the morning they would emerge from hyperspace and then they could see what had befallen the
Ulysses
.

*****

As it happened, the
Ulysses
had been just fine. All three of the Marines that had decided to be put off the ship had staged a mutiny, but with four other Marines on board and thanks to certain precautions taken by Rames and Major Harvan, the coup lasted precisely up until they realized their weapons had been disabled, at which time they surrendered. Harvan had removed components from the weapons making them unable to fire after he had discovered the armory missing the grenades that Collins had taken.

Since the entire plot seemed to have originated with the Marines – the civilians denying all knowledge of it – nobody else was locked up in the brig other than them whilst they waited for the
Morebaeus
to show up.

Once reunited, Collins was transferred to the
Ulysses
and then both ships headed to the world slated for the ‘base. Everyone used that term now. It made the notion of effectively marooning people more palatable.

Once in orbit, the process began of picking a spot for the ‘colonists’ to build their base. Charlton, Puckett and the two techs from the
Ulysses
were consulted, as was Corporal Collins. Lewis, being a planetologist, was helpful in pointing out obvious failures to the colonists, such as Puckett’s planned “riverside” idea. It looked ideal, until she pointed out that it was a flood-plain and they’d wake up one day to find themselves swimming.

Eventually, however, a spot was chosen and the work began of sorting out supplies to be shipped down to the planet for them. Prefab housing, food, equipment, defensive gear. All those things and more. All that a colony would ever need resided in the three huge cargo modules that the
Morebaeus
carried. The difficulty lay not in lacking what the colony needed, but in getting it from the modules to the planet’s surface.

The
Ulysses
had a decent sized shuttle, but it was not a cargo hauler by any stretch of the imagination. Each of the three modules had its own small loading hangar at the aft end of the ship, more than substantial enough to take the
Ulysses’
small shuttle.

The shuttle, however, only had small, human-sized entry ports, so much of the cargo had to be unpacked and carried aboard laboriously by hand, making the whole process drag on longer than it should have.

Alpha Centauri, the colony the supplies had originally been intended for some fifty years before, would have had a fleet of big cargo haulers to unload the modules. But they only had one small shuttle, so the process took much longer than they anticipated. Several days, in fact, with Puckett flying the shuttle on multiple trips each day.

The mutinous Marines had been taken down on one of the first trips, in order to start work on the base and to provide labor to unload the shuttle when it arrived. They had been issued with weapons for self-defense and the shuttle was heavily scanned each time it returned from the planet, just in case the Marines decided to try their hand at a take-over again. But it seemed as if they had learned their lesson.

The fusion generator that the
Morebaeus
’ original crew had set-up in the main module was not able to be dismantled. So the colony had to rely on wind and solar generators to provide their power requirements. The generators were highly efficient, however, so it was unlikely that the colony would ever be left without power. That, plus the addition of backup fossil-fuel generators, ensured the colony would never go dark. The two defecting engineers went down to oversee the set-up of the generators, not wanting to trust the Marines with the task.

Although the Marines saw to the loading of the shuttle, most of the others helped out in some ways, either helping to load, like Carl and Klane did, or assembling more specialized equipment that the colony would need, like Anderton, Lewis and Johnson.

Despite the relatively low capacity of the shuttle, soon the supplies began to pile up on the surface faster than the builders could make use of them. Charlton and Puckett said their farewells and joined their fellow exiles on the surface.

During the course of those days, Hamilton busied himself interrogating the
Ulysses’
database and planning for the missions to come. The database was comprehensive and, being military in nature, had plenty of detail which civilians would not have access to.

According to Rames, the database was last updated about five minutes before the
Ulysses
ripped itself free of the docking umbilical at Tantalus Station. The remote, automated update routine had been disabled to prevent Tantalus sending a database-wipe signal to the ship and the update routine had instead been applied to a faux-database set up by the
Ulysses
technicians. What they did have, however, was a comprehensive log of all the changes made to the database over time. This was a standard feature to enable corrupt or erroneous data to be purged from the database in the event of a problem. Rames had suggested it as a way of proving they weren’t actually terrorists but Hamilton had quickly disavowed him of that notion.

“Walsh is smart enough to know about that feature. I’m guessing he’s managed to alter the change logs so that everything appears normal. Only the log on the
Ulysses
will still have those changes noted and, not being rude, but who would you believe? The logs of thousands of databases across space, or the log of one ship that happened to belong to terrorists?”

Rames saw the logic, although it brought to the surface his anger at the situation again. He spent the rest of the day brooding irritably and snapping at people.

Whilst the database and its logs could not save them, it did prove, if only to them, that Walsh had manipulated the database fairly comprehensively.

Not only were they all now flagged as terrorists, but their entire histories had been altered to show them slowly joining the Righteous Flame movement at various points in time, how they had met each other, how cells had formed and broken over time, what atrocities they had taken part in and so on. The culmination was the bio-plague event on Sepharim Prime in which a whole city of sixty thousand inhabitants had been killed due to a bio agent placed in their water supply. There were other names linked to theirs that, presumably, were the actual terrorists responsible for the plague but everything had been woven together so skillfully and believably that they knew they would have no chance of convincing others of their innocence. Given sufficient time for people’s actual memories of Hamilton and the others to fade, there would be nothing to connect them to who they actually were.

Hamilton had, in his time, falsified records and planted evidence to incriminate others. Some of his work involved what were best described as revenge-oriented clients. So long as the vengeance was, to his mind, justified, he had no problem with it. The once or twice he had been hired purely by a jealous rival, with no real axe to grind against their target other than they were more successful, he had politely declined. Hamilton did his homework on his clients and their intended victims. If he felt it was justifiable, and traditional avenues of criminal proceedings had failed the client, he had no qualms about setting up people to take a fall.

Ironic that now I’m the victim of the same sorts of evidence tampering
. He thought.
He who lives by the sword…