Molehunt (14 page)

Maximus could not believe his ears. ‘You did
what
?”

‘I flushed it.'

‘You flushed it?'

‘With the comm unit. That way you can –'

‘Track it. Good one, Esprin. Smart.' Maximus's
sarcasm went right over Esprin's head. ‘So what did this Arvakur do?'

‘He took me to the infirmary. He said I looked awful.'

Maximus shook his head. ‘If I don't recover that flask, you really
will
look awful.'

All day he trawled through the city, using his tracker to follow the flask as it slowly wound its way through the sewerage system. Near midnight, the tracker led him to a treatment plant south of the city. Security was not tight at the plant, but the complex was vast, covering two square kilometres. The smell was disgusting. A thermal converter with a dozen tanks and bunched piping turned sewage, carbon, rubber, grease and scraps into oil.

Before Maximus went into the plant he screwed in nose filters and pulled on a backpack containing a waterproof suit and breathing apparatus. He hoped he wouldn't be needing it.

Using another sticky field unit he climbed up the side of the main building and cautiously crossed the roof to a stairwell. His tracker told him the flask was directly below him, though it didn't give him a depth reading.

He vaporised the lock on the stairwell and padded down the stairs. The security cameras were easily neutralised and he didn't encounter any guards.

As he had feared, the flask was in a deep tank that oxygenated the effluent. He donned his suit and breather and reluctantly lowered himself into the muck. Luckily the flask's shape was easily distinguishable amongst the tank's sewage. Maximus saw it clearly through his multi-spectrum goggles.

Whereas retrieving the flask was easy, he ran into a problem when he surfaced. Three sanitary workers had congregated on the walkway above. Apparently he had triggered an alarm in the sewerage system, probably designed to detect large objects that could gum up the works.

Maximus remained below the surface; his goggles allowed him to make out the workers and pick up their conversation. One of them recommended they run the ‘masher'.

‘That'll grind it up and we can get back to the game.'

A second man agreed with him.

Finally, the third shrugged, giving in. ‘There'll be hell to pay in the morning if this goes wrong,' he said.

‘Ah, so what? Who else'd take this job?'

They all laughed. The first man went off to start the masher. Maximus knew he had only a few moments before he would be ground into tiny bits.

‘Well, nothing like the bold approach,' he said to himself, as he climbed out of the tank in full view of the two remaining men. They took one look at him, gasped, and ran off, shouting at the top of their lungs. By the time they returned with armed security, he was gone.

Maximus returned to his safe house and processed the data from the capsule Esprin had stolen. A small portion of data had been corrupted by its journey, but on the whole it was an overwhelming success. Esprin might just be allowed to live; with his pedigree, he had a lot to offer.

No silver lining was ever without a cloud, however. Kilroy ee'ed on a secure line that Anneke Long-shadow had dropped out of sight.

The investigation into Viktus's murder had turned up odd bits of data and just a day earlier Maximus had activated the ‘bomb' on Se'atma. It had gone off with a pleasant explosion in the local media, duly reporting that a teenager named Anneke Longshadow had been involved in illicit neurodrug trafficking, and killed her supplier in a drug dispute.

The discrediting of Anneke had begun. Good.

But now she had vanished off the radar. Bad.

Maximus didn't like it. He put a substantial reward out on the streets for any information relating to Anneke. Later that day he heard the Committee wanted to interview her again and that the zealous Arvakur had left for Se'atma Minor.

The noose was tightening around Anneke's neck.

A
NNEKE straightened her tunic and went in. The Committee for Ethics and Standards was composed of eight men and women seated around a horseshoe-shaped table. Another man, young and handsome and with the insignia of the Investigations Branch on his tunic, sat in the observer's chair in the corner. Anneke was told to sit down in the single chair that faced the committee.

A grey-haired man cleared his throat, formally opened the proceedings, and informed Anneke she could request counsel at any time.

‘Am I on trial?' she asked.

The committeeman shook his head. ‘This is a fact-finding meeting, Cadet Longshadow. However, the information you provide will be recorded and can, if deemed appropriate, be used against you in a court-martial.'

‘I understand,' said Anneke.

‘Good. Then proceedings will begin. Our task is to evaluate whether a breach of RIM code has occurred. A matter relevant to this is the recent demise of your uncle, Commander Viktus. Captain Arvakur will be observing on behalf of Investigations.'

The handsome man in the corner nodded and he and Anneke locked eyes for a moment.

‘Now, Cadet Longshadow, information has reached this committee that suggests you had reason to wish your uncle dead …'

The proceedings lasted all that day. Anneke answered questions as best she could, sometimes hotly denying their suggestions. At one point she fought back tears, calling the rumours disgusting, part of a campaign to discredit her. When questioned further she pointed out that she had come close to unmasking a mole inside RIM command and that they should authenticate her claim.

At this point a man who till then had said nothing asked her pointedly, ‘Cadet Longshadow, if the suggestions raised by this committee were true would it not be to your advantage to create just this kind of smokescreen?'

Anneke eyed the man for a moment, long enough to make him aware that he now registered on her personal radar. ‘Except that the information I passed on about the mole occurred some weeks ago.'

The man snorted. ‘Well, doesn't that make it all the more premeditated?'

‘If I am being accused . . !' she began but the moderator raised his hands for calm.

Anneke bit off her next words, simmering in silence. Her inquisitor sat back, as if he had pronounced sentence.

As the questioning continued Anneke consoled herself that the day was not a complete waste. Earlier that morning she had visited a little-known company called Enigma where she dropped off the mole's e-pad to a group of maverick code-breakers she had once worked with and whom her uncle trusted. One of the members was an Oracle robot that knew everything there was to know about code breaking and encryption. The robot was able to operate because the servo-sensor-relay that was in its metallic skull was within a few kilometres of the huge three-storey ‘brain'.

That night, exhausted by the committee's grilling, Anneke dragged herself out of RIM headquarters, intent on heading straight for Enigma, when a voice stopped her.

‘Cadet Longshadow. Got a minute?'

She turned to find Arvakur coming down the lobby steps. She appraised him. He was tall, one-ninety probably, lithe, athletic, with a cat's grace. But a big cat. There was something about his face that made her like him straightaway. It was open, and genuine. Maybe that was an advantage for a glorified cop.

‘Let's get a kaf. We need to talk.'

Anneke did not know if it was a request or an order. But she was too tired to take offence. Besides, a kaf sounded good. Arvakur led her to a small holein-the wall café that was open twenty-six hours a day. He ordered Ruvian kaf. She decided to have the same, not like her at all.

The pungent aromatic odour of the kaf made her think of deserts baked beneath a fierce sun. From the first sip she felt her tiredness slip away.

‘Good?' Arvakur asked, eyeing her.

‘Anything would be after today.'

‘You looked like you needed it. They gave you a pretty hard time in there.'

‘Worse than the usual low-life criminal who goes before them?'

Arvakur laughed. ‘Oh, much worse. They were talking about having you flogged in the back room.'

Anneke sniffed. ‘So what did you want to talk about?'

‘You.'

‘Is this social or professional?'

‘Both,' he said.

Anneke realised with surprise she was slightly disappointed. She had wanted him to lie and say ‘social, that's all' so she could pretend for a while. ‘Is that fifty-fifty?'

Arvakur smiled. He had a nice smile, too. ‘No. More like eighty-twenty.'

‘Which way?'

‘Eighty percent social. I just needed an excuse.'

She suddenly felt much better, though maybe that was just the kaf. ‘So you're not covertly trying to grill me or worm secrets out of me?' Anneke asked.

He put his hand on his heart, an old-fashioned gesture her uncle used, which oddly touched her. ‘I promise.'

In the next hour Arvakur skilfully extracted her story. She had never told it to anyone in its entirety, yet here she was, pouring her heart out to a total stranger with nice eyes.

Later, as they strolled down the main street, Anneke asked Arvakur if he had learnt anything new about her.

He nodded. ‘Nothing certain. I believe you are innocent in this matter. Just a feeling. Still, my feelings usually turn out to be true. And I also learnt that I want to see you again.'

He left her his universal ID email code and promised to call, for a movie or a moon-buggy session.

In a whirl of emotions, Anneke headed straight to Enigma, where the head geek, Josh, gave her the hard facts about the e-pad encryption. The Oracle robot sat in the corner of the room. It was a super-humanoid model, with full sensors inbuilt, along with radar and emergency jetpack outlets. The Oracle model appeared stronger than most robots, which were designed to be weaker than humans, like their more machine-like cousins, the droids.

‘Not much joy on this, Anneke,' Josh said, rubbing his red-rimmed eyes. ‘It had a built-in self-destruct program. We detected it, but there was no way to neutralise it. We got some fragments, though. You'll have to scan them yourself, unless you want to give us a list of keywords to parse it with.'

‘No, I'll do it. Just give me the main fragments.'

Oracle interrupted. ‘I have noted that among the words and fragments there are a number of specific relationships, words occurring in paired links. Recently I had a suspicious incident when my security was almost compromised, but before the hacker could escape I managed to infiltrate their files. The word “Cygnus” kept coming up in this context.'

Anneke sat up straight. ‘Cygnus?' she said. That had been the last word her uncle had said before he died. ‘What else?'

Josh looked at robot and his fellow geeks. ‘It was just a fragment, I'm afraid. We managed to come up with twelve different possibilities of what it might be. “Ajo rpo”. And it looks like there might be an “a” at the end. You want to hear the conjectures?'

She shook her head. She didn't need to. The ‘rp' was a distinct and not common combination of consonants. Putting that together with the other information, Anneke's highly trained brain shot out the answer almost immediately:
Majoris Corporata
.

My God. Was it possible?

Could there be an ancient and illegal combining of the Clans and Companies in a force that could rival RIM and the Sentinels put together? Such a force could destroy the balance of power in the galaxy.

But the cost!

Would the Clans and Companies really risk everything through such a move? Risk total annihilation? Risk the Old Empire dreadnoughts ascending into orbit about their worlds and utterly obliterating them?

Why? Why destroy the Pax Galactica? The Great Peace that had reigned for five hundred years?

Dumb question. When had conquest not seemed an expediently profitable and glorious path? When had megalomaniacs not shrugged off the downsides and pushed through dreams of conquest, forgetting that their prize was mastery over ruins?