Revengers Read online

  *

  The dim light of a cool, orange star coated the lumpy asteroids, the distant planets, the listening outposts, and the ragged Glaber Hunter ships. This system stood at the edge of a ten-lightyear thick plan which constituted the border between the Glaber Territories and Tethyan space.

  Space shivered, then opened up into four wormholes in quick succession. They swept back to reveal a quartet of ships: Two sleek and smooth Solar Alliance cruisers, and two blocky Varanid cruisers.

  Before the wormholes had closed, eighteen Glaber Hunters swung to face them and began to accelerate sharply towards them. Weapons platforms in the asteroids took in formation through bulkwave response systems and turned to face the unannounced visitors.

  The nearest of the Hunters hailed the cruisers.

  The snarling face of its Glaber captain appeared on the display screens on each of the ships. “This is our space,” he growled. “Why are you here? What do you want?”

  One of the Varanid captains answered: “We are here on behalf of the Solar Alliance and the Varanid Republic. We will visit the planets Uruk and Kurkroth to investigate the recent Blank attacks.”

  When, after a few seconds delay, the Glaber received this announcement, he glared across a hundred thousand kilometres of space at his counterpart. “Didn't you get the news?” he growled. “There will not be an investigation, You may not bring a fleet of warships to a Glaber world. Leave now.”

  “You misunderstand me,” said the Varanid. “We are not asking permission. We are telling you what will happen, as a courtesy.” He looked to the side, to read something off a nearby screen. “'The scale of this atrocity and the refusal of the Glaber Territories to co-operate means we have no choice but to go in.'” He held eye contact with the Hunter's captain. “Here are your choices. You let us in, we do our work, and we leave. Or you hinder our investigation. Believe me, if you attack, we will retaliate. And we have a real fleet of warships on standby. We both know you have no hope of winning.”

  The Glaber snarled while listening.

  When it became evident that was all the reply he'd get, the Varanid went on: “We will give you a two-day grace period to contact your superiors and decide what to do. But remember, whatever happens, we will be going ahead with this mission.”

  Aboard the Hunter, the captain killed the signal. “Bulkwave, now!” he roared at a subordinate. “Get me the senior Hives.”

  The subordinate ran off.

  “You know what they'll say,” said another Glaber – his second-in-command, and nearly of equal rank.

  The captain grunted.

  “We're all going to die here, aren't we?” said his second-in-command.

  “We'll take them down with us,” growled the captain.

  For two days, the four cruisers floated together, their noses pointing outward in the pattern of points on a tetrahedron. Their shields were active. Their monopole cannons were charged. Hunter ships gathered around them. Neither side spoke to the other.

  As the second day drew to a close, the Glaber captain received a reply from his superiors over the bulkwave. He read it twice, growling softly to himself, and after a few minutes, turned as strode down the corridor.

  “You were right,” he told his second-in-command. “We're all going to die. Let's make sure they go down with us.” Unless the cowards are bluffing, he thought, and then snapped at the crew, “Hail the lead ship!”

  The Varanid captain was ready and waiting. He raised his great reptilian head. “Well?”

  “We won't change our minds due to threats,” said the Glaber. “If you try and invade our space, we will fire.”

  “Just try it, you carrion-eating rat,” snarled the Varanid.

  “Go home,” said the Glaber, and cut the channel. “Weapons status?”

  “Kinetics and lasers active and primed.”

  “Good. Concentrate fire on the first ship to attempt a jump. Focus on the monopole cannon.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Now's your chance to turn around, thought the captain.

  “One of the Varanid cruisers is preparing to jump.”

  The captain waited until the cruiser's shields dropped. With a growl, he gave the order: “Fire!”

  The cruiser's hull suddenly flared into a pattern of orange and white under the onslaught of lasers and kinetics. Space in front of it quivered as it tried to jump.

  The response was immediate. The other three cruisers fired monopole cannons. Silvery white threads leapt from them, piercing Glaber Hunters. The Hunters flared white hot. Metal, melting and then boiling, billowed out of them in glowing clouds. The gutted remnants of the ships burst open with nuclear flares.

  A wormhole opened briefly in front of the damaged cruiser then collapsed. The cruiser's nose burst open as uncontrolled energy flooded back in.

  “Target the other cruisers!” the Glaber captain ordered the fleet. Ahead of him, another two Hunters came apart under the power of the monopole cannons. On the screen in front of him, he saw the nose of another cruiser swing the face his ship. He lived long enough to see a silvery thread appear on its nose, before the floor erupted into superheated vapour beneath him.

  Chapter 13: Glaber Opera

  The Fire Strider descended through the orange-red atmosphere or Mars. The little Varanid ship aerobraked softly, shuddering occasionally under the force. It wasn't in the best of shape. Rurthk wondered how long it would hold up without Kaivon to fix it.

  Behind him, Eloise and Dr. Wolff stepped into the cockpit.

  “We're good to go,” said Eloise, sitting beside him. She checked her bag. “Now let's hurry. We've only got one shot at this for several weeks. I don't want to be late.”

  It had already taken weeks of research and calling on contacts they could trust to scrounge up all the gadgets and information they needed to get to the sole entrance to Mr. Chase's estate. Rurthk wasn't about to miss it either.

  He glanced at Eloise and gave a small chuckle. “I can barely recognise you, myself.”

  “Don't,” she said, folding her arms with a hint of pique. She'd adopted beige slacks and a dark top, and her hair was straight and black. She had no jewellery at all.

  “How about you, doctor?” said Rurthk. “Are you ready for your first field mission?”

  “Not at all,” said Wolff. “But since that isn't going to change, we may as well press ahead.”

  “At least you get to go,” said Rurthk. “I can't even step outside. I'm stuck in here, co-ordinating everything.”

  “He'll be drinking blood and singing along to Glaber opera at maximum volume,” Eloise told Wolff. Her gaze flicked to Rurthk and she grinned. “Remember?”

  “I think at least one of us has a problem with our hearing,” said Rurthk, concentrating on the console.

  Mars was somewhere where they had to be cautious. Enoch Chase, no doubt, was keeping an eye out for them. Eloise and Rurthk had been seen by dozens when they went to stop the Blanks. And Rurthk was conspicuous at the best at times, never mind at the start of a war with the Glaber. With Rurthk out of the game, Dr. Wolff had stepped up to take advantage of his relative anonymity and join Eloise in going to rescue Olivia.

  It would be fine, Rurthk thought, so long as everything went to plan and nobody unexpectedly shot at them.

  In other words, the plan was doomed.

  But as the veteran of close to a hundred plans that somehow worked out in the end, Rurthk wasn't too troubled by this fact. He guided the Fire Strider into the berth of a spaceport outside a small city on Tempe Terra.

  “Right,” said Eloise, standing up. “Let's go get our friend back.”

  *

  The street held a smattering of small buildings among various open areas. Across the intersection, automated smart matter cranes were assembling something out of Martian redbrick. Closer, the loading area was fenced in by a carbide mesh in a herringbone pattern. People lined up outside a gate. Eloise and Dr. Wolff lounged about opposite, watching them.

&n
bsp; The line moved slowly. At the front, someone leaned in, stared at a retinal scanner, then presented an ID card to a slot below it. The gate swung open. He stepped through. Another gate ahead of them opened, and he stepped inside.

  “So, what's the plan?” Wolff said. “You take the card, I take the eyes?”

  “If only it were that easy,” said Eloise. “What we could do with is some technical expertise. I never thought I'd miss Mero, but here we are …” She sighed and watched someone else join the back of the line. Then she leapt up. “Okay, let's go.”

  They joined the line. Eloise in front. Wolff glanced at the building site drones opposite. When the line had moved forward a little, he looked at it again.

  “Don't,” Eloise said softly.

  “Ah. Right,” said Wolff.

  After a moment, Eloise turned round to face Wolff, brushing against a short woman in a business suit ahead of her. “Oh, sorry,” she said offhand, then continued to Wolff in casual voice, “Have you seen the advert? About that new Petaur-designed shuttle?”

  “Ah, uh, yes,” said Wolff. “Very impressive.”

  Eloise grinned at him and patted her pocket before turning back.

  The short woman ahead of them reached the front of the line.

  “Get ready,” Eloise murmured to Wolff.

  The woman in front of them looked into the retinal scanner. It flashed green. The woman reached into her pocket and rooted around. After a moment, she tried another pocket. “Damnit,” she hissed, and tarted rifling through her other pockets. The retinal scanner emitted a warning bleep, and she looked into it again. She hurriedly checked all her pockets again.

  “Sorry,” she said to Eloise. “I must've …” She stepped out of line and started examining the floor.

  Eloise reached inside her own pocket and pressed something as she stepped up to the gate. There was a loud crash from across the street. Everyone in line turned to stare: One of the cranes assembling the building had crashed into another, tearing it apart and damaging the facade. A chunk of masonry toppled.

  “Now!” Eloise told Wolff. She held the woman's card to the reader. The gate matched it to the retinal scan it had last seen – and the gate opened. Eloise pulled Wolff through with her. They squeezed into the space between the two gates. Behind them, Wolff heard a second crash as the piece of masonry hit the ground. And then the gate ahead of them opened, and they were inside.

  They strode forward quickly. The area inside the fence was a flat concrete plain, with a few low buildings scattered about. Automated cargo shuttles were loaded by drones and checked by people in dirty blue coveralls.

  “If I'm right,” said Eloise, “this loading area belongs to Enoch Chase, and he trusts his own security measures, so we shouldn't face another barrier.”

  “And if you're not?” Wolff asked.

  “Then we're screwed.” Eloise paused and looked around. There was no itinerary for the shuttles. Most of them wouldn't go further than the local area. But … “This way,” she said.

  The shuttle was indistinguishable from the others. But inside, it was almost empty apart from a few alien artefacts.

  That was good. She'd heard Chase liked his museum collection, and was always adding to it. And alien artefacts were one of the very few things he couldn't make or grow on-site.

  She led Wolff along the side of a low warehouse, then came to a sudden halt. “Wait!” she said.

  “What?”

  “There.” Eloise nodded at a security camera that was centred on the shuttle.

  The shuttle's engine began to hum. It was about to take off.

  “I do hope you have a plan,” said Wolff.

  “Sort of,” said Eloise, grimacing. “You see that loading drone?”

  Wolff looked. “No,” he said, his heart sinking.

  “Yes,” Eloise said firmly.

  The drone was an open-topped box about four feet high, with robot arms on either end. It glided a few inches off the ground on effector fields. And it was about to head past the shuttle.

  “As soon as it comes level with us,” said Eloise.

  The shuttle's doors slid closed.

  The loading drone glided past them, and Eloise and Wolff ran alongside it at a crouch, trying to keep it between them and the camera. They crossed several metres to the shuttle, on the far side of the camera, and stopped there.

  Eloise already had a small device in her hand. Some favour she'd managed to call in. She waved it over the shuttle's doors. “Come on, come on,” she muttered.

  The doors didn't open.

  The shuttle started to rise off the ground.

  “Here,” said Eloise, scrambling around to the front of the shuttle. She waved the device at its nose. This time, something did open: A panel on the nose opened to reveal a small, empty chamber behind it.

  Wolff managed to leap in as the shuttle rose up. Eloise came after. She was just in time to grab the lip of the chamber, and Wolff helped haul her up. By the time she was inside, they were already ten metres in the air.

  The chamber was just about big enough to fit them both sitting down with the bag crushed between them. Its walls were a featureless black polymer. Eloise slid the panel shut, leaving them in darkness, and Wolff pulled a small lantern out of the bag.

  The shuttle hurtled through the sky to Enoch Chase's estate.

  Chapter 14: Fake

  Catherine – or Olivia – stepped into the empty museum once more. She sidled down silent corridors past ancient displays. The tools she'd taken from the workshop pressed against her thigh. She'd used them twice before, to take a model colony ship from its stand, and then to put it back again.

  In the weapons display, she moved quickly to check the stun prod was still there. It was. Satisfied, she sat cross-legged in front of the room's security system. She took her tools out carefully and lined them up to make sure they were all there, and then slid the panel off the wall with practised ease.

  She worked cautiously, making sure she disabled or rerouted every system which could trip her up before turning off the alarm system. When she was done, she double checked everything. Then she connected her tablet; it would alert her if it found any silent alarm.

  Everything was in place.

  She leapt up, brushed her hands on her trousers, and went to the pillar holding the stun prod. Carefully, she lifted the display case up. Her tablet was silent. She picked up the stun prod. Nothing went off.

  It didn't feel right. It was too light – it didn't seem to have as much heft as it should. She held it up to the light and examined the tip.

  It was a fake.

  “Damnit,” she hissed. For a few seconds, she stared at it, biting her lower lip. Then she looked around, half expecting some of her father's people to burst in through the doors and catch her in the act. But nothing happened.

  It was a fake, but when she'd examined the exhibit a few weeks ago, there had clearly been a real stun-prod in there. That meant someone had switched out the real stun prod after she'd started coming to the museum. Her father had anticipated her move and outplayed her. And he'd done so in a way which prevented any actual confrontation, a way which meant there didn't have to be any argument about her escape. That was so like him, she thought bitterly.

  She took a smart matter handkerchief from her line of tools and scrubbed her fingerprints off it. The systems inside mopped up every molecule of grease. Holding it in the handkerchief, she replaced it in the same orientation she'd found it. She put the display case back, reactivated the security system, put the panel back, collected her tools, and wiped everything down. And then, she gave the room one last look before turning away and slowly walking back to the shuttle.

  *

  The comms chimed, and Rurthk accepted the call.

  “We made it onto the shuttle,” said Eloise.

  “I knew you could do it. Who needs Mero?” said Rurthk. “And how are you holding up, Doctor?”

  “Well, Captain,” said Wolff, “it has just occur
red to me that if I have a heart attack here, there will be no one who could help me.”

  “That would also be true on the Outsider,” observed Rurthk.

  “Yes, but it seems much more likely now. On the plus side I've also realised that if we do meet an opponent who critically wounds Eloise and then spontaneously drops dead of his own accord before he can shoot me, I may come in useful.”

  “That's the spirit, doc. Stay positive.”

  “Right,” said Eloise. “Radio silence from here on out. If all goes well, we'll be back with Olivia. If it doesn't, you'll know when the ship gets impounded and a bunch of armed police turn up outside.”

  “Works for me,” said Rurthk. “Good luck.”

  “Thanks,” said Eloise.

  The channel cut off.

  Rurthk sat back. He checked planetary traffic, and he checked the news. The war was still going on – no change since this morning. He sat back in his chair. He drummed his fingers on the edge of the console.

  After a while, he stood up and went to the back of the ship. He returned with a couple of cartons of blood and a tablet.

  Slouching back in his chair, he spoke to the tablet in Glaber: “The Murder of Ururthta, Aria Seven. Volume: Maximum. Play.”

  The yowling orchestration began to rise, and Rurthk opened the first carton and took a long drink.

  Then the console chimed. The ship had picked up someone on the spaceport moving towards them. Annoyed at the interruption, Rurthk gestured impatiently to bring up the camera feed. His eyes widened. He silenced the tablet.

  Laodicean was floating outside the Fire Strider.

  *

  It was the sixth party in as many days, and Mero was beginning to feel it catching up with him. His own considerable health had sustained him for a while. A variety of drugs and quasi-legal nanotech rejuvenation systems had kept him going beyond that. But now he could feel the distant rumblings of a hidden but vast mass of exhaustion and nausea that refused to leave.