Fox Hunt (Fox Meridian Book 1) (3 page)

There was a huge collection of displays, often showing video taken from the actual missions, of the history of lunar colonisation. That most often meant the history of the Shackleton crater area which had been viewed as the best target site for a colonisation effort since the early years of the century. The south pole of the Moon was actually inside the crater, which was over four kilometres deep. Light never reached the bottom, while there were peaks around the rim which were nearly always in light. It was almost the definition of an extreme environment, but people had landed there, dug tunnels into the surface near the edge, hunted water in the depths of the crater, and turned the place into the commercial centre it now was.

It was all terribly historic, and after an hour of it, Fox had come to the conclusion that seeing models of Chinese lunar shuttles she had seen a million times before was not doing anything for her. She went back to the main base and found the spa.

Tranquillity had been set up as a recreation centre. There was a domed structure up on the surface where you could sit and look up at a real view of Earth. Whether you got a good view depended on the relative position of the Sun and lunar administration limited the time anyone spent up there, especially during periods of high solar activity, because of the radiation, but there was something romantic about the place and it had been a popular honeymoon spot for decades. The facility management had, eventually, bowed to pressure and put in some private rooms to one side of the dome, primarily to avoid embarrassing other guests: the lure of making love with the entire world watching had been far too much for far too many.

Fox made do with a massage and the solarium fifty metres under the surface. She was already on medication to stave off any ill effects from the reduced gravity and did not want to be taking chelating agents for the radiation exposure as well. So she lay in the simulated sunlight, without the more dangerous wavelengths of course, and allowed a very well-trained android masseur to work synthetic hands over her muscles.

‘Madam is comfortable?’ The voice was a quality baritone, smooth and soft. The frame was sculpted, looking more like a mannequin than a human, but between the synthetic flesh hands and the voice, you could believe you were being worked on by a man.

‘Madam is fine. You have good hands.’

‘The Tranquillity Spa prides itself on quality of experience and I take pride in my work, whichever frame I happen to be assigned to for my shift.’

That was sort of interesting. ‘You’re an AI-four?’ Class 4 AIs, capable of truly independent thought, emotional responses, and creativity, were still relatively uncommon.

‘The Tranquillity Spa is an equal opportunities employer and class fours are more common on the Moon than you might expect to find on Earth. We have advantages here.’

‘No worries about the gravity or the radiation. Quite happy to swap bodies if required. And the lunar population is reputed to be more open to artificial life. Didn’t I hear something about them voting through regulations on artificial organics recently?’

‘The “Bioroid Act?” Yes. It gives the same rights as any other sentient to any artificially manufactured life form, assuming that it can be defined as sentient. It’s an extension of a similar law governing AIs.’

‘Very egalitarian, especially considering that that kind of thing is probably a decade away from being a real issue.’

The robot had a slight burr in its synthesis when it chuckled. ‘It is also a matter of selfishness. Humans find themselves rapidly displaced by synthetic life,
especially
when companies are allowed to cut corners when dealing with non-humans. Equality gives you organics a chance to compete.’

Fox chuckled in turn. ‘I hadn’t thought of it like that, but you’re right. Especially up here. I’ve got a class four sitting at home waiting for me to get back. I’m supposed to be testing it out as a personal assistant for MarTech, but then I got sent to the Moon before I could really get the hang of using a PA. Always just used a basic VA on my implant.’

‘I think,’ the masseur said, ‘that you will find the experience quite different, and far more beneficial. At some point it will become common practice for people to run fully sentient AIs on implants. The technology is not quite ready yet, but when it is I think you humans will wonder how you ever did without us.’

‘I already rely on my VA almost too much. I’m not sure what the added intelligence is going to do for me.’

‘I hope you enjoy finding out. If Madam would turn over, I shall employ my talented hands on her front.’

Fox turned. Looking up at the sculpted plastic mask with its illuminated blue eyes was not quite the same, but he did have talented hands.

Luna City.

Her feeling of relaxed contentedness lasted until Fox was stepping off the shuttle. Hepburn and Pierce were waiting for her in the arrivals lounge, in uniform and looking serious. She wondered vaguely why they had waited this long to tell her whatever they had to tell her.

‘Driscoll wanted to let you get your feet back in the city before we dumped this on you,’ Hepburn said as she walked toward them.

‘I was wondering. What’s going on?’

‘Ninety-eight minutes ago a group of armed men accompanied by military cyberframes invaded one of the office structures in quadrant two.’

Fox frowned. ‘They hit an office, on a Sunday?’

‘It has the access for New Moon Data Security’s vault in it,’ Pierce explained. ‘They have a deep shaft with a big storage vault at the bottom and they put data storage media down there. It’s write-only stuff, meant for
very
long-term storage of data large corporations and governments don’t want to lose.’

‘These guys are threatening to blow it up if their demands aren’t met,’ Hepburn went on. ‘Driscoll wants your help on assessing the situation and it’s been cleared past admin.’

‘Taking the term “practical exercise” a little too far, but sure, of course.’ Fox saw a notification of briefing data arriving from Pierce before she had even got the sentence out.

‘These guys seem like professionals,’ Hepburn said, ‘but they’re making political demands.’

‘Oh good,’ Fox replied as they set off into the city proper. ‘Professionals are so much easier to work with, but I hate the political cases.’

~~~

Fox walked among the figures of the four attackers as they made their way across the concourse outside the New Moon offices. Three men, one woman, all of them in fairly heavy combat suits. You could only determine the genders by looking at the hip movement when they walked. And they walked. There was no running, just determined, controlled motion.

‘These guys know what they’re doing,’ she said aloud. She was watching as two small, but very functional, combat drones provided the necessary shock, launching micromissiles at the reception frontage. ‘Security guard taken hostage?’

‘Killed,’ Driscoll replied. To Fox, his voice came out of nowhere: he was not in the simulation with her and had his attention focused on the live data feeds from the environment. ‘They don’t have hostages. Human ones anyway. They’ve cut all the security feeds in and out of the structure.’

‘A bunch like this isn’t going to be left blind… No, there, that’s what they’re using.’

Driscoll’s body appeared beside Fox. ‘You spotted something?’

Fox nodded and pointed at the view through the shattered window. She had frozen the playback to make it easier to see the figures within. Something vaguely circular and flattened was dropping from the back of one of the men. ‘That’s a Bosluis-class scout frame. Six legs and a pointed snout. They’ve got good stealth characteristics, excellent sensors.’

‘Armament?’

‘Not on those models, but they’ll put one of these Bumblebees somewhere at the back. Someone goes in the front, it’ll pop up and they’ll get a missile in the face.’ Sure enough, as the scene advanced again and the louse-like robot vanished into cover, one of the airborne robots dropped into concealment behind some seating at the back of the room. The team vanished into an elevator and the scene froze again. ‘Do we have anything else on them?’

‘Not from inside. They disabled all the network connectivity as soon as they got down to the next level. We don’t know where they are or what they’re doing. We got a video giving their demands.’ The scene around them collapsed leaving them standing in the police operations room where Driscoll was directing operations, but the virtual panel which appeared to display the video was still shared between their vision fields.

A hard-faced man, his hair shaved back to near-bald, appeared. He had hard grey-blue eyes, a hooked nose which had been broken more than once, and sharp-edged cheekbones. And Fox’s facial recognition software supplied a match before he started speaking, but she waited to hear what was said.

‘These are the demands of United Anarchy.’ He had an Afrikaans accent, which was getting to be rare these days. ‘We want the immediate release of all UA members in custody in Cold Harbour, free access to all secured data sites of the American, Canadian, Russian, and Chinese governments, and twenty million Canadian dollars to be paid into our designated accounts. We also want a shuttle made ready to return us to Earth. You have twenty-four hours to meet these demands.’

Fox let out a sharp laugh. ‘United Anarchy? Seriously?’

‘UA are known to pull operations like this,’ Driscoll said, not catching her scepticism. ‘I’d imagine you’re well aware of the kind of thing they get up to. We’re checking through their known members to see if we can identify–’

‘His name is Marick Kriel and he isn’t going to turn up on any of the watch lists for UA associates and members. He doesn’t believe in anarchy. He believes in cold, hard cash. Kriel is not doing this for UA.’

‘So this is a cover for straight extortion?’

‘Probably. How did he get this gear into the city?’

Driscoll gave a shrug. ‘I just have to deal with the fact he has it. I’ve let the regular LCSS handle that end of it.’

Fox frowned, not liking how this was all starting to look, but Driscoll did have something of a point. ‘Okay, let’s get some schematics and see if we can work out how to dig them out.’

12
^th
January.

Fox sat at one of the tables in the eatery with a cup of bad coffee in her hands and her eyes closed. The structural schematics of the vault floated in her vision field, but she was not happy. Someone had
really
screwed up when they had built the place and Kriel was benefiting from it.

‘Driscoll got word back from New Moon,’ Hepburn said. Fox did not open her eyes, but she did not complain when he sat down with her either. ‘They can’t raise the money. None of the governments are willing to open up their data or Cold Harbour either. They’ve got negotiators trying to work out how to approach Kriel about it.’

‘Go in direct. They built themselves a vault which has exactly one viable point of ingress and egress. We can’t get to him so if he wants to blow himself up with that data, there’s really nothing we can do about it. But Kriel isn’t going to kill himself over this. He’s no terrorist.’

‘He’s acting like one. I mean, if this is some sort of extortion racket, shouldn’t he be asking for something he’s likely to get?’

Fox opened her eyes and looked across at the pale, handsome face opposite her. Hepburn looked tired: there were bags shading in under his brown eyes and he was scrubbing at his close-cropped, light brown hair which, she had noticed, he tended to do when fatigue was starting to set in. ‘Have you slept any?’

‘No.’

‘Go get an hour under your belt. Sometime early they’ll want to send you in.’

Hepburn’s brow creased. ‘There’s no way we can get in there without him seeing us coming and blowing the place.’

‘Nope, but they’ll want to do something. Not a great start to Driscoll’s career.’

‘Huh.’ Hepburn got to his feet. ‘I’ll try to close my eyes for a bit.’

‘Good. You’re right, though. The ransom demand doesn’t make sense. Maybe he’s expecting to negotiate it down, but…’ Fox frowned and shrugged. ‘Go get some rest.’

Pushing aside the schematics, Fox pulled up the data she had on Kriel, some of it garnered from personal impressions and some supplied by the UN Trans-Planetary Police. She still had a few contacts there and the UNTPP was generally pretty open about sharing data with other agencies anyway. Even if her departure from them had not been on the best of terms, they kept their bridges intact where they could.

Kriel was on one of their watch lists and that did not surprise Fox in the least. She had met him on an op with America Special Forces. He had been contracted to assist in anti-drug activities in sub-Saharan Africa: he knew the territory, knew the people, and he had a strong, disciplined unit available for hire. The Army had hired him and he had done his job, but Fox had got the distinct impression that Kriel was always up for switching sides if the money told him to. He was a good tactician but not such a great strategist, so maybe he had come up with this idea and not thought it through… Somehow that was just not sitting right in Fox’s mind. Nothing in the updated data from the UNTPP suggested that Kriel had turned political and yet he had locked himself up in a bunker with one exit. It
was
a good plan for a terrorist with nothing to lose, but it was just plain dumb for a mercenary. There had to be a backup plan.

~~~

‘Pierce, what do you know about mining operations in the crater?’

Pierce was blinking rapidly as she tried to focus. ‘Wha– I was… Where am I? Mining?’

Fox leaned forward on the table Pierce had been lying on. ‘Sorry, you were asleep. Your husband is in mining, right? What do you, or he, know about the mining operations in Shackleton crater?’

‘Uh… They aren’t mining in–’

‘No, but they did some. Back when they were setting up the base, they knew there was a higher hydrogen signature in the crater.’

‘Oh! Oh, yeah. They thought it might be water ice so they did some exploratory mining. Turned out it wasn’t, but they managed to pull out some useful tritium and helium-three. Then the whole “international resource” thing put a stop to it and they’ve been waiting ever since to find out whether they could reopen it. Word is that they’ve found better sources for the helium anyway.’