Leviathan (Asher in Ordered Space Book 2) Page 7

  As he came to the edge of the breach, he peered around a boulder and saw that the interior of the settlement was in chaos. He could see the light tank, both tracks apparently disabled, firing on the sandbagged revetment in front of the administration building. Someone in that little fortification was firing back with what appeared to be a shoulder-mounted rocket. That tableau exploded in a bright flash as a rocket hit the front of the tank. Asher couldn’t see the APC that had followed the tank in, but a lot of Coin-Op mercs were running toward the west, the direction of the ore-processing facility, so maybe it was over that way.

  The dune truck had stopped just inside the breach and several mercs who must have been lying down in the bed stood and vaulted over the sides. Seeing nothing else he could effectively do with his handgun, Asher started firing at these operatives. He saw two go down, but he had no idea if he had hit either of them. As he tried to aim at a third man, his eyesight started to collapse in toward tunnel vision and his head began to swim. Before he realized what was happening, the gun slipped from his hand and he slumped froward, striking his head against the boulder. The last thought he had was that he must be going into hypovolemic shock, which meant he was losing blood somewhere. If he didn’t get help soon, he was going to die at the edge of the breach in Archon’s rampart.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Asher woke to a dim light floating fuzzily somewhere over his head. He lifted his right arm toward it, but he couldn’t get the muscles to obey him, and his arm flopped uselessly back to his side, striking something soft. A bed, he realized. He was lying in a bed. Had he been sleeping? He couldn’t quite remember how he had ended up there. He remembered a lot of dust, and a loud noise, and something kicking in his hand. A gun, he thought. My handgun.

  It all flooded back to him. He remembered the battle at the Archon settlement, the breaching of the rampart, and getting tossed off the wall by an explosion. He remembered the tank, the APC, and the dune truck going through the breach. He remembered them crisply, every detail of their armor clear in his mind. He remembered the tunnel vision, the black spots floating before his eyes, and the feeling of helplessness when his hand relaxed against his will, dropping the pistol.

  And now he was here, in a bed, with a soft light hanging above his head. He stared at the light for a moment, and then his eyes began to wander. Behind the light was a gray, metallic ceiling. He knew what that was; he had seen many of them before. That was a deckhead, so he was in a compartment on a ship. Once he had figured that out, everything began to make sense. He was lying in a recovery room on board a ship. Somehow, despite the chaos of the battle, someone had reached him in time to help, and he was now going to be OK. No matter what the problem had been—even if the pain in his back really had meant that his spine had been broken—he would be fine now. A modern medical bay could have all but reassembled him from constituent parts. His wounds, serious as they had been in a battlefield situation, would have been easily healed once he was aboard a state-of-the-art ship.

  Whose ship was it, though? The last he remembered hearing, the Hokozana ships in orbit of Lutetia had been engaged by an unknown force, presumably the ships that had landed the mercs who had attacked Archon. Who had been victorious in that encounter? Would the mercs, assuming they had won down on the planet, as they had appeared to be on their way to doing, have bothered to keep him alive and bring him back to one of their ships? He couldn’t see why, so this must be a Hokozana vessel. That was what he told himself anyway. There was only one way to find out, though, so he looked around until he spotted a bank of instruments to the right of his head. Right in the middle of the panel was a large, green call button. He fumbled his hand toward it, unable to make any large movements with either arm. Managing to get his index finger to the button, he pressed it.

  ***

  A medical robot responded to his call. It was a long arm suspended on a track that ran along the ceiling. It entered through a door somewhere down past Asher’s feet and swung its sensor pod over him. “How are you, Operative Asher?” it asked. Its voice was smooth and very human, a clear indicator of quality AI.

  “I’m OK. I can’t move my arms much.”

  The robot whirred and swung its pod over to inspect his right arm. It extruded a wand that touched his flesh just below the shoulder. “I am administering a muscle relaxant, a light stimulant, and a pain killer. You may feel light headed or hyperactive in a few minutes, but you should be able to move more freely. In about an hour, you will become very fatigued.”

  The drugs had an almost immediate effect. Asher was soon able to sit up and look around the compartment. He saw a footlocker in the corner. Presumably that stored his gear. He wondered if anyone had recovered his pulse rifle.

  The robot detected the direction of his gaze. “Your equipment is stored there. We had to cut the skinsuit to remove it, and it was destroyed, as were your underclothes. Your weapons have been serviced in the armament bay and restored to operating specs.”

  “Thank you,” said Asher, even though he knew he was just talking to a robot, and it didn’t really expect or care about his gratitude.

  “You are welcome,” said the AI. “I will leave you now, as others are on their way to see you.”

  Asher reached an arm out toward it, and it paused. “Wait. Where am I? I mean, what ship is this?” he asked.

  “You are aboard the Hokozana cruiser Dortmunder, in orbit of Dominion Two, in the Archibald system.”

  He thanked the robot again, and it left. He had never heard of the Dortmunder, but that was no surprise. There were hundreds of cruiser-class vessels in Fleet. What was surprising was that it was in-system. The last he had known, there were only the three Hokozana ships in Old Archie, but clearly that had changed. He consulted the system models he had downloaded before the mission, and found that Dominion Two was one of the two gas giants in the system. It was a pale green monster orbiting well beyond Lutetia. It wasn’t anywhere near the jumpgate, which was in its own astrocentric orbit halfway between Lutetia and Dominion One, the smaller, grayish gas giant that was Dominion Two’s nearest neighbor. It seemed strange that they would be in this out-of-the-way part of the system.

  ***

  Asher’s thoughts were interrupted by the compartment’s internal comm, which buzzed just a moment before the door—which had closed behind the medical robot—reopened. It admitted Asher’s boss, Drienner Marcolis. Just behind him was Chuck, her right arm heavily bandaged but otherwise not looking much the worse for wear. She gave him a tentative smile.

  “Donnie,” said Marcolis. “Good to see you are well. Well enough, anyway.” He smiled as though he had made a joke. “Well done down at Archon.”

  “Well enough, anyway?” Asher asked.

  Marcolis laughed at that. “You are alive, Chuck is alive, the Shamblers are alive, and the computer is safe. That is the best outcome we could have hoped for.”

  Asher thought about the two operatives who had stood with him on the rampart during the merc assault. “Morris? Bojorquez?”

  Marcolis’ smile slipped. “They…ah…”

  “They didn’t make it, Asher,” said Chuck. “We also lost Pieters, Banerjee, and about three quarters of the team. Most of the Coin-Ops are gone, as well, other than the ones who were with me and a couple who we found alive under the rubble of the ore processor. Archon settlement was a blood bath.”

  “Sergeant Gary?” Asher asked.

  “Dead, as far as I know,” said Chuck.

  “Most unfortunate,” said Marcolis. “Most unfortunate. However, it was due to their sacrifice that the assault was blunted before it could reach Chuck and her people in the lab. They had only to deal with one remaining crew of mercs, on foot. All the vehicles were destroyed or disabled during the assault on the settlement, as were most of the enemy operatives. In the end, only a few made it through to the mine.”

  Asher thought of the scared Security people on that rampart. Most of them had been lifted from a relatively easy life
as Fleet Security and dropped right into a warzone. It seemed unfair, in a way, that he, who regularly put his life on the line like this, should live while they, who had never been in combat before, should be the ones to die. “What happened at the lab?” he asked Chuck, in a attempt to get his mind off the dead.

  “May Roca saved us,” she answered. “She set a three-man squad up in a hide on the rim of the mine. Once the mercs had engaged with me and the others down at the mouth of the tunnel, they popped up and hit them from the rear. Took out five of them before they realized what was happening. We didn’t lose a single op.”

  Asher sighed. That was good news, but it didn’t lift his spirits much coming after word of so much death and destruction. “What now, then?” he asked. “And why Dominion Two?”

  Marcolis smiled again. “As to your second question, Donnie, we are here because when we chased the merc fleet, this is where they ran. You see, Dortmunder and its escort came though the jumpgate right in the middle of the battle, and discovered Dalian and the destroyers engaged with a force composed of numerous frigate-class ships, with one or two destroyer-class. We jumped in as soon as possible, and the merc fleet broke up. We pursued some of the stragglers here to Dominion Two, and what should we find but another jumpgate. A completely unregistered one. We sent Dalian and a strong a force through and are still waiting for them to return with word on what is on the other side.”

  Asher’s eyes widened. “An unregistered jumpgate? I’ve never heard of that.”

  “No one has. It seems to have been used by the non-corps for smuggling fission products they stole on Lutetia out into Ordered Space.”

  “But we don’t think they built it,” Chuck added.

  “Indeed not,” said Marcolis. “Building a jumpgate link is beyond a band of smugglers. Remember, they have to build two gates—one here and one in whatever system this connects to—and they have to keep all that secret. I don’t think even a megacorp could manage that. Word would leak out.”

  “So?” asked Asher. “Who did build it then?”

  “We assume it must have been whoever built the lab and the computer, and bioengineered the Shamblers.”

  “And us Cythrans,” said a new voice, through his neural net translator. Qwadaleemia was standing in the doorway. She had a long gash, sealed with a hardened gel, on her right leg and a patch over her left eye, which was half hidden behind her head appendages. He wasn’t sure, but he thought that one or two of that mass of tendrils might be a bit shorter than they had been as well.

  ***

  “Are you OK, Qwadie?” Asher asked.

  “I am well enough, Asher.” She waved her tendrils to convey that she appreciated his concern. “I hid in the concentrator building during the attack and I was protected by two of the Coin-Op operatives. An assault company passed directly in front of our position without seeing us. Like you, I was injured when a shell exploded nearby.” Her tendrils then all dropped down for a second in a gesture Asher’s neural net was unable to interpret. “Garueeria was killed,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” said Asher, and he was. He hadn’t know Garueeria well, and had thought her the most cold and distant of Qwadaleemia’s creche-mates, but she was still one of only a handful of living Cythrans. It was sad to hear of the death of one of the last members of a race he liked, and in the survival of which he personally had invested so much.

  “Who were they?” he asked no one in particular. He could tell that anger was clouding his voice.

  “Who?” asked Marcolis, his voice mellow and even.

  “The enemy mercs. Who were they and who hired them to attack us?”

  “We don’t have a good answer as to who hired them yet,” said Marcolis. “We suspected DiJeRiCo, but we have since learned that they are trying to route a battlefleet of their own to Archibald and Intel doesn’t believe they have been in contact with any merc corps. The mercs were from a corp called Valeria Victrix, who are part of the rabble on Deventer.”

  Asher had never heard of that particular merc corp before, but he had visited Deventer once and he knew the type. That planet was in an open system and its government had long ago declared that Deventer would remain neutral in any corp wars. It was one of the major centers of arms production in Ordered Space, with many weapons corps headquartered there. In fact, both of Asher’s own preferred guns—his DevCo pulse rifle and EOS semi-auto pistol—were manufactured there. In the spirit of encouraging one-stop shopping, the Deventer government had subsidized mercenary companies if they agreed to base themselves on the planet. There was a dynamic, rowdy crowd of operatives there, enlisting for fixed terms with one or another of the ever-changing merc corps. Asher had to admit that he had actually liked the place. When he had been cloistered on the Namib Orbital, he had seriously considered quitting Hokozana and heading to Deventer to find something interesting to do.

  “So, what now?” he asked again, because there was nothing much else he could think to say.

  “Now, we wait. Once we find out where this jumpgate goes, perhaps we can learn who is behind all of this. In the meantime, I think you may be usefully employed figuring out who the traitor in our midst is.” Marcolis grinned as Asher started a little in surprise. “Ah yes, Chuck told me of your suspicions, and they appear well-founded. Someone—perhaps in the Coin-Ops, perhaps with Meridian, is working with whoever was behind that bandit attack. That same entity may have been involved in the merc assault, too. We need to know if we have been compromised and if so, how badly.”

  “But surely, with most of the Coin-Ops dead…” Asher trailed off.

  To his surprise, it was Chuck who responded. “If the traitor is dead, then we have nothing to worry about. But we have to know, Asher.”

  Marcolis nodded at that. “Besides,” he said, “there are still a few living Coin-Ops and many of the Meridian people—who were mostly ensconced in safe points during the assault—made it through. If the traitor is alive, he can tell us who we are up against and what their motives are.” He paused and gave Asher a sly look from beneath his heavy eyelids. “I am assigning someone from Intel to the problem. You and Chuck are to assist him.”

  Asher almost groaned aloud, but caught himself. Somehow, he already knew who the man from Intel would be. Sure enough, once Asher was out of the recovery room two days later, he found himself working with Jaydrupar again.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Jaydrupar had evidently been busy over the past year. Asher had last seen him in a recovery room in the medical bay of the militarized research vessel Cormorant, after he had been injured by the wild native Cythrans in the forest of the Bone Trees during their second mission to Cierren Cythra. At that point, he had been a Three-Bar, and was used by Intel mainly to direct field missions related to their efforts to gather information about the Ferethers. Now, he had his star and was an Analyst First Class, with control over his own desk studying what the Intel people had taken to calling “The Cythran Question.” That made him an important cog in the effort to understand the Cythrans, the Ferethers, and the threat they posed.

  “I see you found the Cythrans again, Asher,” he said when they met in a conference room on Dortmunder’s main torus. “That is good, considering how you so unfortunately misplaced them the last time.” This sounded like a joke, but Jaydrupar wasn’t smiling.

  “They found me, actually.” Asher had come to respect Jaydrupar for his courage and quick thinking during their travails on Cierren Cythra, but he certainly didn’t like the man. “What’s their status after the destruction of Archon, by the way? Still subcontractors, or are they back to being lab subjects now?” The main reason he had decided to let the Cythrans go a year ago had been because he was uncomfortable about what the Intel and Research people might do to them. He had seen Jaydrupar kidnap a Ferether, which was a sentient being, even if it was an enemy. That hadn’t stopped a Research team led by Asher’s own father from studying it and eventually dissecting it. When Asher had been forced to turn the Cythran Mirane
eria over to Hokozana, he had been afraid that a similar fate was in store for her.

  “Oh, they’re subcontractors. They know a lot more about Ordered Space than they used to, and they have some idea how to use the Intercorp Courts, now. So they’ll work for us, and be paid like regular operatives. For now anyway.” Jaydrupar smirked at this final statement.

  “And us?” Asher asked, indicating Chuck, who had been sitting in uncomfortable silence though this exchange. “What are we going to do now, Sir?” He tried to add a bit of acid to the final word.

  “Let me show you,” said Jaydrupar. He lifted a remote that lay on the table between them and turned on a nearby monitor. A three-dimensional model of the Archon settlement and mine appeared on the screen. An area near the mine was indicated with a pulsing red light. “Do you know what that is?”

  Asher glanced at the image. “That’s the pass, and the mine field. Where the non-corps got in.”

  “Right,” said Jaydrupar, “and this is a model of the location that was kept in the storage of a recording system Sergeant Gary had installed there.”

  Asher turned from the monitor to look at Jaydrupar. “He was recording it? All of it?”

  “Yes,” said Jaydrupar. “And no.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that there is a three-hour gap in the record about two standard days before the non-corp attack. Before the gap, everything is as it should be. After the gap, the path through the minefield is marked with the bits of vegetation you saw four days later.”

  “So we have a time frame,” said Asher. “Have we narrowed down our pool of suspects yet?”

  Jaydrupar smiled. “Indeed, we have eliminated a number of persons whose whereabouts during that window we were able to establish with reasonable confidence. We have ‘narrowed the pool’ as you say to eight Coin-Op operatives, three Meridian operatives, and two of the three Cythrans. Narrowing it further may prove difficult, though.”