HELLGATE #5: Flashpoint
Copyright byMel Keegan, 2011
All rights reserved.
This Smashwords edition published by DreamCraft, November 2011
ISBN: 978-0-9872328-1-6
This is a work of fiction. No characters or situations are intended to depict real persons, alive or dead. The locations are real places, however.
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Chapter One
Salvage tug Wastrel
Halfway, Freespace
From space the colony was a dazzle of lights, a storm of comm noise, a confusion of ships of every type, headed in every direction without order or reason. Neil Travers had seen a great many cities with congested skies, chaotic traffic lanes, but Halfway was a Tactical ATC officer’s nightmare.
For half an hour the Wastrel’s pilots held off, waiting for a clear approach lane, until Richard Vaurien’s patience had worn thin. He was leaning on the back of a vacant chair, cradling a coffee mug in both hands as he glared over Yuval Greenstein’s shoulder at the tangle of Halfway. Travers had watched his patience steadily erode as they waited for any semblance of order around the ramshackle space city.
A ship the size of the Wastrel would make her own traffic lanes as other craft hurried out of her path, but forcing a way in was a swift way to make the locals resent her presence. For the third time, Curtis Marin – in the copilot’s seat at Greenstein’s right hand – called Halfway’s rudimentary hangar authorities, and this time his voice was as harsh as his words were annoyed.
“Halfway control, this is the Wastrel – again. We’re coming in, in five, with or without a coherent syllable from you morons. We already scanned that monstrosity you call a rink, and we see three docking ports that’ll suit us just fine. If you’re even remotely bothered which one we use, or don’t, you better make some noise, because Rick Vaurien is ready to take his pick. And once this baby’s docked on, she’s not moving again till we bug out. If anyone is bothering to listen to this channel –”
So it took anger and harsh words to make the haphazard traffic control take an interest? Travers chuckled into his own coffee and traded rueful glances with Marin.
“Hold your water, Wastrel. Who the hell is this? Is Vaurien there?” The voice belonged to a woman, bass and husky.
“I’ve been waiting for a half hour,” Vaurien said in the direction of the nearest comm pickup. “You think I’ve got nothing better to do with my life than kill time looking at the most butt-ugly pile of scrap iron in the Deep Sky? What do you want, a docking application in triplicate?”
He was glaring at Halfway as he spoke, and Travers could only agree with the observation. The colony had to be the ugliest agglomeration of mismatched spare parts he had ever seen. Two potato-shaped minor planets had been blasted hollow and tethered together, end to end, by driving the bows of an asteroid miner into one of them, and the stern into the other. The engine deck was buried in the gray-brown rock; the drive engines had been torn out, but the two Prometheus generators were still online, powering most of Halfway. And they were misbehaving, Travers saw. He was watching the monitors on the engineer’s panel at his left hand. Storms of hard radiation showered constantly out of those generators, and Halfway’s careless tech crews preferred to throw up rad-shields rather than service the powerplant.
The miner had become a conduit between the shelled-out worldlets – a kilometer long and pocked with the craters of scores of docking ports. The Wastrel’s AI had scanned the whole unlikely mess from a safe distance, and reported around forty ships of every size and shape docked on. Some were enormous industrial hulls, and permanently docked. Their engines were shut down or even removed, and their cavernous hulls had long ago been gutted, converted to more living space for a colony which was not recognized as a colony, and yet continued to grow, to sprawl, even to thrive in its own way.
Up on top of the asteroid miner which had become the spine and conduit of Halfway were the three big docking pylons, loosely reserved for ships the size of the Wastrel. In fact, she was massive enough to dock on at the middle pylon and occlude the other two, and Vaurien was annoyed enough by now to do it.
The traffic controller with the whisky-hoarse voice cackled over the comm like a broody hen. “Damnit, Richard, you don’t seem to be mellowing with age, do you?”
He made a face, while Travers disguised a snort of humor. “Should I be? Do I know you, lady?”
“Dunno if you’d deign to remember me, but I know you,” she told him. “We dealt a few times, you knew me as Shiffiano … Marak City, a long time ago. Turns out I might owe you one, Vaurien. I was about to get shafted by a right, royal bastard. You busted up the deal before he could make a fool of me … so hold your water for one minute while I clear you an access lane – and for chrissakes use 27, not 26. You take the dock in the middle, and there’ll be a shitstorm when the Baishan gets home.”
“Well, thank you, ma’am,” Vaurien said acidly.
“Don’t mention it.” Shiffiano echoed his caustic tone of voice. “And while I’m doing you favors, you might want to look at your civvy comm band once in a while, if that sort of thing isn’t too mundane for you.”
The comm shut down with a muffled belch of static suppression and Marin glanced up at Vaurien. “She’s right. There’s a half dozen calls on hold, and you’re not going to like who’s calling. Thank gods Jazinsky isn’t up here.”
She was in the lab, as she had been since the Wastrel shipped out of Borushek eight days before, and to Travers’s eyes she was looking ragged around the edges. The work never stopped, never paused. She and Tully Ingersol were wrestling with elements of the same work which possessed Mark and Dario Sherratt. The Zunshu technology was not yielding up its magic without a battle, and the fight was taking its toll out of them all. Given two years or five, the best labs and computers in the colonies, and unlimited funding, it would still have been the project of a lifetime. But time was as much an enemy as the Zunshu or the DeepSky Fleet, and Barb Jazinsky knew it.
The queued calls all carried the same ID, and Travers groaned as he saw it. They were coming in from the Mako, which meant Sergei van Donne had not only made it to Halfway ahead of Harrison Shapiro’s covert mission, but he had his own interests here. And apparently he was prepared to draw a line in the sand and defend it.
The look on Vaurien’s face would have soured a pitcher of milk. “What the hell does he want?” He dropped a hand on the pilot’s beefy shoulder. “You heard the lady, Yuval. Dock us while I get a few more gray ones, wondering how Sergei’s trying to screw me this time.”
“You could always try asking the man,” Marin said with caustic humor. “Just be sure to chain down anything you don’t want to walk away on its own. I know he’s been angling for your technology for years.”
“He’s tried to kill me twice,” Vaurien muttered.
“Old scores to settle,” Travers said quietly. “Sergei is the kind to harbor grudges … speaking of which, Richard, don’t flatter yourself too much. It could be Curtis and me he wants this time. We hurt him a while ago, and he has to reckon we owe him the price of it.” He looked down into Marin’s hazel eyes as he spoke, saw them darken with memory.
The scene on the Oberon science platform, on the very fringes of the Rabelais Drift, haunted them both. Felix Cheng had died there – not blood kin to van Donne, but an old, trusted associate. And van Donne had walked away from the encounter with a bullet in him, a dislocated elbow, as well as deeper, keener wounds to his pride. He had been comprehensively beaten on Oberon, as he was beaten on the high slopes of Mont Katerine on Velcastra, and both times it had been Travers and Marin, on Vaurien’s or Shapiro’s business.
“Christ,” Vaurien muttered, “we don’t need the complication.” He passed a hand before his eyes, and gestured at Marin. “All right, put him on. I can always tell him where to go.”
The comm crackled and the AI, Etienne, played the last call in the queue. Sergei van Donne spoke with the same accent as Jazinsky, in a deeper voice issuing from a bigger chest. He was half Pakrani, taller and broader than Jazinsky, just as blond, with something of the same look about him. Framed in the threedee in the middle of the forward console, his face was a study in annoyance.
“You want to pick up, Vaurien? What, suddenly you’re not talking to me? After we fought together at Ulrand? I’m hurt.” The tone was taunting and the man’s angular, striking face hardened. “Pick up, Richard. I know what you want here – and you’re not going to get it. Not without me. And for one damn’ moment, it turns out we want the same deal.”
The threedee blanked, returning to the standby display of routine data, leaving Vaurien, Travers and Marin frowning at each other. “He wants the same deal?” Marin echoed. “He sure as hell isn’t here for the Fleet prisoners who’re standing on auction blocks round about now!”
“He … might be,” Vaurien mused. “Sergei will take a profit wherever he can find out, and he’ll double-cross anybody, anywhere. He has a history of it. So maybe he took a contract a couple of days ago. Maybe somebody hired a mercenary crew to go get their kid out of hell. We might be on the same side. In which case Sergei might also know a lot we don’t.” The French accent thickened with frustration. “He’s here ahead of us, he’ll have done his share of snooping already … and the prisoners are not the only reason we’re here.” He lifted a brow at Marin.
“Damn,” Marin whispered as he swiveled the copilot’s seat out from the console and stood. He gave Travers a dark look. “Boden Zwerner is the other reason we’re here … and van Donne’s wanted to put Zwerner in a hole in the ground for some time.”
“And here we are,” Travers finished. He finished his own coffee and held out his hand to take the empty mug from Vaurien. “You want a refill, while you talk to the man?”
“Yeah, why not?” Vaurien rubbed his face hard with both hands. “All right, Etienne, call the Mako. Tell van Donne I’m willing to talk.”
The autochef in the rear corner of the pilots’ cab was configured to suit humans, since the Resalq were not aboard. Travers was brimming the mugs when the AI whispered in its soft French accent, in a tone that soothed while the words stood a man’s hair on end.
“I am being probed,” it informed Vaurien. “A deep system scan has been launched from a location within Halfway.”
“You’re – what?” Vaurien was on his toes, fists clenched. “Are you reading van Donne, the Mako, on the other end of this probe?”
“No. The Mako is docked at Lock 19. The scan originates from a secured mainframe on Level 44, in the chassis previously identified as the Rotterdam Explorer. I am trying to establish the source, but Captain van Donne is not involved.”
“Zwerner,” Marin said in an acid undertone. “You could expect this, Richard. He has to know we’re here … he has to wonder why. Can’t blame the man for trying his luck with a probe. You’d do the same.”
“I would,” Vaurien agreed brashly, “and I’d expect him to cuss a blue streak about it, so you’ll forgive me if I do.”
The following diatribe was in the native French, and Travers chuckled as he picked up a word here and there. Before Vaurien was done the threedee shifted to blue-green, signaling an incoming call.
“Captain van Donne for you,” Etienne said calmly.
“And the probe?” Marin wondered.
“Still trying to identify the source,” the AI reported, “but I have discovered most of Halfway infested with similar security measures, all of them issuing from Level 44 in the remains of the Rotterdam Explorer. Whoever is trying to probe me has subjected all of the colony to the same treatment. We might not be a specific target. We are merely here.”