Hegemony (24 page)

But she liked
this
game even more, she thought as she hooked her custom-built portable data unit into the temporary network that the repair crews had set up. She  plugged in; it was as trivial to get through the repair crew's security as it had been to penetrate the main access hatch lock set up by the rent-a-cop company which had been hired to prevent theft from the disabled ship. There, now she was in to the remnants of the ship's own computer system.

Behind her, the rest of the "caterers" were breaking down the zero-gee carts, taking out communication head-sets, data goggles, zero-gee maneuver harnesses and weapons. If only they had been able to smuggle in a suitcase nuke, this whole thing would have been so much simpler. But the security of the Jyu-Lau anchorage station had been too thorough. Ylayn thought that she could have penetrated it; the very size of the station and of the population it held made it vulnerable to her. But she admitted that it would have taken too much time. Sneaking in hand weapons was an order of magnitude easier.

So that left them with this plan. Across the ship, dozens of cameras came to silent life. Any ship had internal surveillance, if only to aid her own crew in spotting technical problems and directing maintenance. As expected, the cameras aboard the
Ulia's Flower
had been left in standby mode, still ready to mutely record any activity inside the ship. Of course the security company hired to guard the ship had set up their own network of sensors, to watch the repair staff and look for signs of pilferage or smuggling. Those sensors were part of a well secured network, totally isolated from any other computers; that would have been quite hard to penetrate. But no one had bothered securing or disabling the ship's own camera network. Now that network switched on, mindlessly tracking the comings and goings of every repair crew and every security guard currently aboard. To be sure, there were gaps in the coverage, but with the camera data displayed on an overlay of the ship's internal layout, those gaps were easy to fill in.

Ylayn pulled the data into her portable unit, covering her tracks reflexively; it would not matter for this job, but she had a professional interest in being neat. A tactical display program she had written days ago took the new data and plotted the probable positions of every repair crew member as a yellow dot on a deck map overlay of the freight-liner. Every security guard was a red dot. Where exact positions were uncertain, yellow or red-shaded volumes described the space where they were likely to be. A final command uploaded the tactical map to the head-sets and data goggles of her team.

There was a momentary pause, as each member of the team checked their weapons and tactical gear. Then a chorus of quiet words and nods. Ylayn put away her data unit and checked her pulse laser, making sure the weapon was set to stun and then dialing in an alternate, lethal setting: a ten centimeter horizontal track. A good compromise between penetration and lethality in case the electro-stun setting proved insufficient. Needless bloodshed wouldn't help the mission, and though some in the Brotherhoods took pride in the size of the capture bounty tagged to their identity, the
Whisperknife
's policy was that a large enough bounty was an invitation for betrayal even among the Brotherhoods.

Ylayn unzipped her jacket, exposing a zero-gee maneuver harness, and nodded to the others.

"Lets go," she said, and the dozen "caterers" split into pairs and pushed off, drifting deeper into the ship.

The Jyu-Lau Anchorage Station Proximate Traffic Control (PTC) command deck was teeming with communication officers, technicians and controllers. Not Hegemonic officers, of course; it was a civilian station. But even so, thought Section Supervisor Marcus Kanton, surely there was a military look to the neat gray uniforms and the neat rows of the command pods. Traffic control for the station was more than complex. There were twenty-two docking spires that radiated outward like elongated symmetrical thorns from the cylinder of the station's main hull, and over a hundred docking bays. Out past the spires, englobing the station, were forty orbital holding zones, precise spots in empty space where large ships were "parked" while their shuttles, some of those quite substantial ships in their own right, flew back and forth to the anchorage station with cargo, passengers and goods.

There were thirty actual controllers assigned to the PTC, handing off flights and sectors to each other with quick commands. The rest of the staff were communications and support techs, and section supervisors. There were five controllers in Kanton's section. Each time any of his people ordered a transfer or maneuver that deviated from a predicted plan, he had to evaluate and approve, or reject. His people were good, Kanton knew. Good enough that he didn't bother to actually watch them. He had configured his interface data flow to show him a series of graphs of their commands as compared to the predicted traffic patterns. When one of his people deviated from the predicted graph, he could shift his view to "look over the shoulder" of that controller. So far, he hadn't needed to do that this shift. His display was multi-tasking. The text-and-video of a popular novel took up the central VR space of the main data stream. The peripheral space of the VR was enough to show his controllers' traffic pattern graphs. A secondary VR data stream fed him a graphical model of the score spreads of this season's on-station sling-ball tournaments, and the current betting odds.

Once in a while, he would tap into a third data stream as well, a mild euphoric  signal that slightly stimulated the pleasure centers of his brain in time to an audio VR music stream.  It made the shift go by so much faster, made Kanton so much more chipper about his job. Prime quality stuff, he thought, as he tried to follow the exact pattern of the music, enjoying the sequence of slightly different triggers of his brain's "happiness" response.

None of his interface data streams were actually set to give him raw traffic data. The first hint Kanton had of trouble was a sharp deviation in the command traffic pattern of Controller-2nd-Class Yan Smit. Smit was new, but already a competent controller, Kanton knew; more than a thousand hours of experience logged. So Kanton ignored the first blip. The second drew his attention, but the euphoric music signal was getting to what had to be his favorite part (it was all, always, his favorite part) and the problem couldn't be that important anyway.

It wasn't until Smit sent out the emergency alarm that Kanton began to think there might be something wrong. The euphoria-music lost some of the hold over his mind, and training kicked in. Kanton switched his main data stream to match what Smit was getting. His mind filled with a view of one of the docking spines' cameras and a schematic of the local traffic pattern. Only then did he see the problem. Someone was moving the freight-liner
Ulia's Flower
. The ship's identity was tagged over the blip that showed her pulling away from the docking spire. The symbol was highlighted with several flashing warning flags, to boot.

"What am I looking at?" asked Kanton, feeding the question into Smit's interface.

"Sir," came Smit's voice, over the music, and Kanton belatedly realized the euphoric data stream was still playing. He shut it off, along with his book and the betting odds data. The sudden loss of pleasure stimulus made him feel instantly worse.

"Sir, we've got an unauthorized movement from berth 19-A:
Ulia's Flower
, a two point two megaton-rated freight-liner," came Smit's voice.

Kanton could now hear the ripple of replies from communications officers all around his pod, as they took calls about the moving ship. Probably everyone, every security and staff office, down the whole two-kilometer length of Spire 19 was calling in right now. What the hell was going on, on that ship?

Ylayn paused at the hatch to the huge ship's command deck. So far the mission had gone rather smoothly. According to her tactical program, her men had probably collected all of the off-shift work crews and all but one of the security teams. None of them had been ready for her, none had even had a chance to shoot back. She would deposit them into an escape pod, bound and drugged, and jettison them towards the station as soon as the ship was secured.

Now, her team was hovering all around the command deck hatch; above, to the sides, below. Weapons and computer interface gear were held ready.

"There's probably one in there," Ylayn said, taking the probably data from the tactical program. "I go first."

It took Ylayn less than half a minute to override the locked hatch.

"Ready... now," she said, and cued the command. The hatch slid open.

The pinprick of the combat injector felt cool through the fur at her neck, and everything grew slow, and calm. Ylayn hooked a foot around the edge of the hatch and launched herself into the compartment. Her eyes scanned likely cover, pulse laser ready.

A slow second passed... two...

The security man popped up fast from behind the cover of one of the command pods, raising his weapon. A mistake; he had moved too hard. The move had thrown him out of his cover. Reflexes learned in a gravity field, a detached part of Ylayn's mind mused. The captain had trained all of them in
telestraal
, the Hegemonic martial art of gun fighting. Ylayn was not quite an adept, not even of the first stage, and her body had only minimal augmentations to aid her. But her captain's training had been thorough. Her body had moved without conscious thought, passive interface link sending commands to her zero-gee harness. Just like in practice, the harness blasted out balanced jets of compressed gas, moving her sharply towards cover that her eyes had seen without bothering her conscious mind. Her pulse laser came up, balanced in spite of her movement, with the same practiced ease. The security man had done the ambushing, but she shot first.

The sizzling crack of the pulse laser was surprisingly loud in the large compartment. The flash of the laser striking its target was painfully bright for a fraction of a second. Set to stun, each micro-second pulse of the laser's energy converted a fraction of a millimeter of the target's surface to electro-conductive plasma; the frequency of the pulses was set precisely to interact with the victim's nervous system. A proper hit would freeze the voluntary muscles, dropping the target in convulsions and often causing unconsciousness.

Unless the target had a stun-suppressor, like this security guard did. In that case, the fine mesh of conductive wires woven into his clothes would disperse the electro-shock with only a slight tingle.

The guard fired back, the bright flash of his laser reflecting off every polished surface in the compartment.

Ylayn was already moving before the guard's weapon was fully leveled, arcing her body in free-fall so that no part of her body occupied her own center of mass. It was an instinctive reaction, a reflex drilled into her mind by the
telestraal
training.

The guard's laser pulse shattered the edge of the compartment hatch behind her, cutting through the metal in a short arc of sparks and molten droplets.

A thought into her data link switched her weapon's setting to kill. The guard fired again, just as her vector took her behind the cover of a command pod. Plastic and composite exploded like burning confetti where his pulse touched the pod's housing. The tiny fragments of debris traced thin lines of smoke though the compartment

Ylayn touched her feet to the deck, nudging herself up over the cover of the 'pod, her pulse laser extended, aiming for where her training told her the target would be. With her combat drug-boosted perception, she could see the man try to track her movement with his laser, but her weapon was already on target and she shot; the flash of her laser was like a strobe light.

She had aimed for the neck, but her aim was off and the laser's track lit across the man's arm at the shoulder. The laser cut too fast to cauterize. The man's face registered shock and confusion as his arm fell away. Then the man screamed and thrashed, legs kicking, remaining arm flailing. The force of his own motion set him spinning and spraying blood.

Ylayn blinked to clear her eyes from the bright flashes of laser fire. Her team swarmed into the room a few seconds later, flowing towards cover, scanning for more targets. There were none.

There was blood splashed across the main display, a fan of dark spots that spread surprisingly far, Ylayn thought. More blood drifted in little red globes through the compartment. The iron smell of it was quite strong, mixing with the smell of burned plastic. At least none of it had gotten in her fur.

"Shit," Ylayn said, then turning to her team and pointing to the screaming guard, "Secure the command net... and then get this fucker some wound sealant before he bleeds out." The guard might still survive, she thought.

Behind her, the rest of the team had spread out to man the crucial command pods as Ylayn plugged her portable computer unit into the ship's command security system. This would be the really hard part. She had to get her people into the crew log, so that they could command the ship. Failing that, she had to disable the entire command security system, so that anyone could. None of her team paid any attention to the blood  spattered across the bulkhead or drifting in small red globules through the compartment. For now, none of the team had bothered with the screaming man; the mission came way before saving an enemy and everyone had an immediate task to do.

The crew log proved easier than she thought. The old crew's command authority had been erased, but the core files were still there. There was good security on the files, she saw. Probably, it had been put in by the owner's agents on this station. But it wasn't
that
good; she had dealt with this design before, did so again. And now her team
were
the ship's proper crew.