A Taste Of Despair (The Humal Sequence) (37 page)

“Walsh, basically.” Hamilton said bluntly. The others looked confused and waved their guns about as if expecting the alien to appear again at any moment.

“If that was Walsh, have we captured him?” Jones frowned.

“No, just severed his comms link, most likely. What we have captured, however, is a controlled human. A drone, as Walsh referred to her. These others are drones, too.” Hamilton explained.

“So all we’ve done is to piss Walsh off?” Klane suggested.

“Definitely.” He agreed. “We need to get out of here right now!”

“I believe I’ll come with you, then.” Tane said. “My cover is blown and I’d rather not end up in the clutches of that creature.”

Hamilton nodded at the old man. “This will likely cause a massive response from Walsh. I’ve pissed him off and he’s desperate to know what happened in the war between his kind and the Humals. He won’t want to let either of us get away.”

“Well, we’re screwed then!” Jones stated. “I don’t like to be the bearer of bad news, but we have no way off planet!”

“We do seem to have entered the lion’s den without even a whip.” LeGault added.

“What do we do?” Klane scowled.

Everyone looked expectantly at Hamilton. For a few moments he scanned the worried faces, keeping his own face set in a deathly serious expression. To one side, he saw Tane smile.

He knows. He saw it in my mind
. He thought and his expression lightened.

The looks of hope in the eyes of the others was surprisingly pleasurable.

“Seriously? You all think I’d have dragged you in here on this crazy scheme with absolutely no idea of how to get away?” He asked them. “I don’t do one-way missions!”

Shaking his head, he dug inside a suit pocket and removed the tiny transmitter that he’d used to trigger the EMP blast in orbit. Flipping it over, he slid aside a small recessed panel in the back. Within, a countdown timer stood frozen.

Ninety minutes
. He noted.
They must be close
.

“What’s going on, then?” Klane demanded. “What’s the timer for?”

Hamilton pulled out the small data pane from another pocket and pulled up a map of the city. Ninety minutes was both not long, and too long, all at the same time. Walsh wouldn’t give them that much time, he was certain. Still, it could have been a far longer length of time.

“Hamilton!” Klane’s voice took on a warning tone he knew only too well.

He grinned. “What’s the important feature that defines a Skip Drive? Anyone?” He continued to prod at the city map. There was nowhere suitable for his purposes within Olympus itself. He expanded the map outwards, including the city’s surroundings.

“Skip Drive?” Klane scowled, confused.

“There’s no energy burst on emergence.” LeGault reminded them.

“Absolutely!” Hamilton agreed cheerfully. “So what was to stop us from Skipping straight here to Mars instead of doing all that sneaking around that we did?”

“We couldn’t do that!” Johnson frowned. “We’d have been detected immediately!”

“It would have been suicide!” Jones muttered.

Hamilton continued to scan the city’s surroundings. The road eastwards out of Olympus led to the next city along, Hyperion, some one hundred and fifty miles away. In between was nothing but a fused topsoil highway and a maglev rail line that ran alongside it. It would have to do.

“Why? What would have detected us?” Hamilton added, prodding at a point on the map some thirty miles away from Olympus.

“The sensor net, you idiot!” Klane actually gritted her teeth and balled her fists in frustration. If he didn’t spill the beans soon, she’d have him spilling teeth instead. He brought up the transmitter and used a finger nail to prod a small button in the recess at the back. The data pane displayed the message “handshaking” in flashing letters.

“So. If there was, say, a gap in the sensor net, we could have flown a ship right in here without anyone knowing?” He said. The pane and the transmitter finished their handshaking. He hit the button marked transmit on the pane.

“Of course we could have! But there wasn’t a gap, that’s why….” Klane trailed off, realization dawning in her expression. Her mouth fell open as she stared at him in disbelief.

He grinned at her. She closed her mouth and started to smile

“What!” Jones protested. “What did you do?”

Klane chuckled. “Sometimes, Hamilton, you are too clever for your own good!”

“What!” The combined voices of Jones, Carl, Johnson and LeGault demanded.

The pane beeped at him, displaying the message “transmission completed” for his consideration. He canceled it and put the pane away.

“Basically, the reason we didn’t fly in was because we’d be detected immediately.” He explained finally. “However, if there was some problem with the sensors, say, due to some idiot detonating an EMP warhead in orbit, then there’d be a gap, if only for a day or two, in the net’s coverage. A gap that another ship could make use of. A rescue ship, maybe!”

There was silence for a moment.

“You have a ship coming for us?” LeGault nodded appreciatively.

Klane however, swapped her grin for a scowl. She thumped him on the arm heavily. “Why the hell didn’t you include this in your briefing, you moron!”

“Ow!” He complained. “Go easy! I had my reasons!”

“They better be good ones!” She warned.

He nodded. “Look, when we were on Tantalus, the
Morebaeus
was left ‘unattended’ by any of us for days. I judged it reasonable that Walsh, once he knew we were there, would plant some sort of bug aboard. It’s the kind of thing he’d do. So it seemed a safe bet that he’d know our plans. That’s why I didn’t tell you anything. So that he would think he had us trapped here.”

Johnson went wide-eyed. “That’s why he showed up here! Just at the same time as we did!”

Hamilton nodded, recalling that the others had been semi-conscious thanks to Tane for most of the conversation with Walsh. “He knew we were coming here. Knew all our plans, or thought he did. He just didn’t think we had a way out.”

“So, who’s coming to get us?” Carl asked.

“Rames. The
Ulysses
and the
Morebaeus
basically jumped across the system when they left us. They’re on the other side of Sol. They’ve been waiting for the EM pulse to show up on their sensors so that they could begin their run in here.”

LeGault frowned. “Wait a minute! It’d take a day or more, even with a Skip drive to get from the edge of the system to here.”

Hamilton glanced at the timer on the transmitter. It had already begun counting down. “Eighty-five minutes, to be more precise.”

“That’s not possible!” The pilot shook his head.

Hamilton grinned again. “I didn’t say they were coming from the edge of the system.”

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

The Lagrange Five point of Mars was in advance of the planet’s orbit, sharing a common orbital path with the red planet. As with all Lagrange points, the various gravitational influences of Mars, Sol and others balanced out to zero at that point, effectively allowing anything located at that point to maintain its relative position without expenditure of fuel or power. It meant that whatever was located there maintained the exact same distance from Mars at all times.

Anything at all could have been put there – a shipyard, a refinery, or a factory – anything. But instead, given the vast amounts of damaged ships, goods and waste materials that the system produced as a whole, the Empire had decided to put a monstrous recycling facility there.

It seemed like an elegant solution to the powers that be. Anything put there remained with virtually zero effort or cost, awaiting a time to be reprocessed. It meant that all the waste of the entire system could simply be shipped there and essentially forgotten about. Waste went in and new, shiny materials came out.

Of course, as the sheer volume of broken vessels, industrial waste and Earth garbage increased, so the facility began to be unable to cope. A second facility was built, then a third, and a fourth, orbiting the ever increasing debris cloud.

As time went by, the edges of the cloud began to drift off into space. It had simply outgrown the L5 point’s area of gravitational stability. A small, low-power gravitic field generator was installed at the heart of the cloud, ostensibly to attract the wayward debris and keep it nice and tightly together. That worked rather better than those who had come up with the fix had in mind. The debris clumped together, rapidly entombing the generator until derelict ships, refuse and all the other disposed of waste for the system had formed a rough ball of thrown away material. That made it harder to recycle, so they tried to switch off the generator now that the material had aggregated. Unfortunately, the almost one kilometer of metal and other debris blocked the signal, so the generator remained on.

Somewhat embarrassed, the Empire sold the site to a private contractor and washed its hands of the whole thing.

The contractor persevered. Even though the ball of rubbish was harder to work, they still made plenty of money from the site. The ball of debris grew steadily until the contractor began to turn away fresh material. At which point another site was set up at the Trojan Lagrange point in Jovian orbit. That went much the same way, expanding until it could take no more. Then another site was built, and another and so on.

Those other sites did not make the same mistake of installing a gravitic generator to manage the wayward debris. They instead were more choosy about what they accepted and used other methods to martial the expanding clouds of rubbish.

But that first site, in Mars’ own orbit, remained. The four recycling plants were automated, with a veritable fleet of robotic “dustmen” craft to keep the plants supplied with material from the debris ball which, by then, was some four kilometers across. No new material was allowed in. The owners concentrated on disposing of what was already there. Estimates suggested that the facility had enough material to keep going for thirty years before it needed to worry about re-supply. So it was automated and left to itself.

*****

Aboard the
Ulysses
, Rames and his crew had watched the comings and goings of the fleet of rubbish collector craft with some concern initially, then boredom. Each ship seemed to have been assigned a spot which it pulled rubbish from, so once Veltin had moved the ship away from any of those, they were effectively in no danger of being mistaken for a derelict ship.

After dropping off Hamilton and his team, they had watched Sol for some time before spotting the recycling plant. The facility accepted no new rubbish. The only ships that visited it were automated collection vessels, there to collect the recycled materials for shipment to factories and manufacturing facilities. Sensor coverage was light, and mostly focused on craft arriving under normal power.

 After much argument and calculation, Veltin had Skipped the ship right in next to the debris ball. Rames still didn’t know how the man could seemingly perform such calculations in his head, but he did, for the most part and he was damned accurate.

They emerged from the Skip to within eighteen hundred meters of the edge of the debris, immediately went into low power lurk mode and edged closer to the debris using chemical thrusters.

There was no alarm. It was a rubbish facility, after all. Other sensors, from beyond the facility, regular swept the area, but since the
Ulysses
transponder was disabled and the ship on low power, any hits they received were likely thought of as just more rubbish from the facility.

When Hamilton detonated the EMP warhead, all hell broke loose in the system. Sensor sweeps went into overdrive. Military vessels converged like ants around sugar and comms traffic was phenomenal.

Nobody seemed to know what was going on, who had set of the EMP or why. So they concentrated on looking as busy as possible, searching for the ship responsible.

Across the system, tell-tale flashes of tachyon and neutrino bursts marked the Skipping of countless warships heading towards Mars, and also hundreds of civilian vessels fleeing for a safe harbor.

Mostly that safe harbor seemed to be Earth. The homeworld of man was a natural haven in times of crisis, it seemed. Martian orbit, by contrast, belonged to the military. All civilian shipping was suspended whilst the military ‘investigated’.

When Hamilton sent the signal for the pickup point from his data pane, they replied with the time it would take them to reach it. Ninety minutes. Twenty five of those minutes were spent waiting whilst Mars rotated sufficiently to allow a direct Skip into the dead-zone created by the EMP blast. The actual Skip would take a further forty minutes, then it was down to Major Harvan and the
Ulysses
shuttle to head to the surface to pick up the team. Twenty five minutes, they estimated.

Which meant that the
Ulysses
would arrive in Mars orbit, loiter long enough to drop off the shuttle, then Skip away again for twenty five minutes. Emerge, then return Skip to Mars to pick up the shuttle as it broke atmosphere.

It meant careful timing and a lot of luck.

*****

Hamilton and the others, meanwhile, had barely begun to lumber down the Institute’s stairs before the security came back on, detected them and promptly sounded an alarm.

“Great!” Klane muttered. “That’s all we need.”

Hamilton shrugged. “It was Walsh who shut it off in the first place. I’m surprised it took him this long to do it.”

“Maybe he’s not so all-powerful as he wants us to think.” Carl added. He had the ImpSec agent slung over one shoulder. Given his width, he didn’t need to hold her there much. She was bound hand and foot and had received a stunner blast for good measure. Walsh wasn’t going to be doing anything with her in the near future.

By the time they reached the ground floor the emergency shutters had closed over the main entrance. They ran towards the rear of the building, but fire shutters began to close that area off, methodically diverting them back towards the front of the building.

“It’s Walsh!” Hamilton muttered as they found themselves back at the main entry hall. “He wants us here.”

Klane looked out the tiny observation porthole in the shutter. “Yeah, I thought that was also too good to be true!”

“What is it?” Jones frowned.

Klane turned back to them. “Walsh has mobilized those army guys that were out front. He probably sent them here in the first place.”

“Great! So we’re trapped in here?” LeGault muttered.

“What about the roof? Can we get out the way we got in?” Johnson suggested.

Hamilton shook his head. “We don’t have the gear to climb up a narrow cable. Plus, those guys will have low-light optics. We’d be sitting targets.”

“Tane! Any other ways out of here?” Klane demanded.

The old man shook his head. “Just the normal entrances, I’m afraid.”

“Can’t you zap them?” Carl asked. “You know, like you did with us?”

The brief moment of hope died as the old man shook his head. “I’m afraid not. I have to be in close proximity to be able to do something like that. Plus, there are rather more of them than I could deal with, anyhow.”

“Do you think we could use bitch-Walsh there as a human shield, get them to let us pass by threatening her?” LeGault suggested.

“I doubt it.” Hamilton mulled. He reached into his suit pocket and removed the alien pistol. “I suppose I could cut our way through to the back with this. That would reduce casualties to a minimum.”

Klane was looking out the porthole again. “Too late for that. They’ve sent a couple of squads down either side of the building. People are going to get hurt no matter what. What the…!”

She turned away from the porthole and snatched the pistol from Hamilton’s grasp.

“Hey!” He protested.

“Thinking time’s over! Follow my lead!” She growled. Even through the nearly opaque faceplate of her suit, her cybernetic eye glared menacingly.

Turning to the shutter she thumbed the aperture down to a needle thin beam and made a quick, horseshoe-shaped door in the shutter. The beam, of course, obediently sliced through both the shutter and the heavy wooden door that fronted the building. The beam also lanced out beyond the doors, across the circular street that ran past the Institute and into the park beyond, slicing a tree in half along the way before slicing into the buildings on the far side of the park.

Inside the Institute, Klane thumbed the aperture to ‘wide’ and shot at the horseshoe shaped door she’d made.

Shutter and wooden door shot outwards explosively, striking the eight man squad that taken up station immediately at the edge of the road and sending them flying.

Klane strode out through the hole she’d made, leaving the others little choice but to follow her.

“Go!” Hamilton told them. “Shoot anybody!”

He pulled the ImpSec agent’s Laze pistol from his belt and brought up the rear. Klane was running this show and he felt a momentary relief that he wasn’t having to do everything.

That relief lasted until he darted through the hole in the door and stepped outside.

Klane had laid about her with the pistol. She had it on the wide setting, so much of the energy that resulted was kinetic in nature. She was blasting at the ground ahead of her and striding determinedly towards the park and the main concentration of soldiers. The shots that went into the ground erupted in violent bursts akin to explosions, the resulting shockwaves and shrapnel flattening the startled troops.

He heard noise from the alleys to either side of the Institute. Soldiers returning rapidly to the sounds of fighting from the front. Transferring the pistol quickly to his injured hand, he pulled a grenade and hurled it down one side, then did the same on the other. In the darkness of the alleys, it was doubtful the men even knew a grenade was amongst them until it went off with a blinding flash and deafening din. It was loud enough out the front of the building. In the cramped alleyway, the effect was magnified tremendously.

Turning back to the front, he saw why Klane had taken the initiative as she had.

In the park, the technicians were trying to rapidly prep one of the grav vehicles they’d brought in on a low-loader. It was a light vehicle, as battlefield hardware went, but if they got it up and running and manned by a competent crew…