In Earth's Service (Mapped Space Book 2) (33 page)

“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 w
e 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.”