Chapter 22
Jane Pennington-Smythe watched the compilation vid with private satisfaction.
In the vid, a heavy military transport ground vehicle slid on the slushy road and slammed into the thick wall of a media-district building instead of stopping in front of it.
No matter. Everything else was going as she’d envisioned.
The ground team herded the sixty-one shivering detainees outside and into the vehicle’s hold. The CPS recovery team combed the building for everything of interest, including AI nodes, data hypercubes, and physical tech and records. After everyone was out, the cleanup team imploded the building.
Her trusted staff of nine made good use of the room’s sophisticated monitoring stations, each tracking their assigned mission components.
Members of her security team stood or leaned against the walls around the room.
One of them just exited with the automated food-and-beverage cart and a stack of empty mealpack containers for recycling.
Jane ignored the claustrophobic feeling that the room’s stuffy air brought and concentrated on watching the rest of the raid compilations and reading the lists of detainees confirmed so far.
Not as many of the specific names she’d been hoping to see, but she’d anticipated that some of the vermin would scuttle away. Besides, the operation was only two hours old, with more than a hundred primary targets yet to go. Plenty of time for follow-up opportunities.
The storm was an unanticipated chaos multiplier.
She’d given serious thought to delaying the raids, but the latest planetary weather predictions said the massive polar-fueled mid-continent cyclone was about to stall over the city.
Her operation could have possibly waited one day, but not five.
She’d worked too hard to synchronize the critical elements needed to excise the cancerous source of the Ayorinn Legacy for all time.
Boroslova, her chief aide and shielder, waved for attention. “Administrator, audio comm for you.”
Jane nodded and gestured toward the left side of her face, where she wore the high-security CPS earwire. “Route it live, please.”
Boroslova wouldn’t bother her with unimportant matters.
Jane barely subvocalized her name before a peevish voice interrupted her.
“This is CPS Marshal Hozhoon At’aq Temhathor.
I am in the CGC Frigate Anilashilah in Mabingion’s outer orbit.
Despite our valid Omni-class codes, the CGC Ridderth Base refuses to assign our shuttles a landing vector and pad.
The Base Subgeneral referred me to you. I demand immediate, priority clearance.
Not to mention a damn good explanation.”
Jane couldn’t imagine why a Marshal, one level down from the CPS’s top High Marshal, was showing up unannounced on her proverbial front doorstep. They had too many chaos factors already. She stalled for time.
“Respectful apologies, Marshal, but your arrival is unscheduled, and you are not transmitting an encrypted holo. Per security protocol, I am unable to comply until you transmit complete ship codes and confirm your CPS current authorization key response.”
Temhathor growled in her ear. “Again? What in the nineteen hells is goi—”
Jane disconnected the link before the Marshal could order her not to, then reconnected to subvocalize to Boroslova. “Follow the Code Omega Red security protocols to confirm the Marshal’s codes and keys. If they check out, I’ll speak with the Marshal again.”
Now she had about five minutes to figure out what the surprise visit would do to her operation.
So far, the simultaneous assaults had gone according to schedule, which included allowances for the Ridderth Police’s inability to show up anywhere on time.
Hujuru’s inspired idea to use a “rogue” spider mech as an excuse to move military equipment to within striking distance of key targets was paying off brilliantly.
Pairing CPS Minder Corps teams and superior military equipment with Ridderth Police to serve as ground troops kept the assault actions controlled and surgical rather than the inefficient, destructive orgies of excess the police favored.
Minder Corps staff completed the recovery and cleanup tasks with support from well-armed anti-riot squads on loan from the regular military.
The century cyclone’s snow both hindered and helped. Since she couldn’t supervise from the air, she and her staff had to rely on orbiting scanners and a hastily commandeered fleet of military surveillance drones to pierce the storm clouds and keep a collective eye on the city below.
The storm also forced her to invoke the “extraordinary need” clause to insist on priority routing for her equipment from the Ridderth government and traffic control system.
Otherwise, the TCS would have grounded everyone in favor of snow-movers and first-responder flights.
If need be, she was also prepared to take over the Ridderth Base’s military TCS and comms to keep the base command sidelined for the critical part of her operation.
On the plus side, the storm kept Ridderth politicians busy and kept most citizens bottled up.
Her targets were easier to contain, restrain, and transport.
As she’d planned, the comprehensive security monitoring she’d had installed throughout Ridderth’s updated Mabingion Planetary Council Headquarters made it an excellent temporary detention center.
Minder Corps interrogation specialists were already getting actionable results and adding to the secondary target list.
Which brought her back to her immediate problem. She’d never met the CPS Marshal in person, but rumors said Temhathor had a habit of showing up just in time to take credit for successes or distance the CPS from failures.
For all the extreme stress of the last few ten-days, Jane felt like she’d spent her whole life preparing for this mission.
Her training, expertise, and experience made her the best person — perhaps the only person — who could succeed.
The High Marshal’s top forecasters all agreed the future of civilization depended on eradicating the Ayorinn malignancy and that Ridderth held the key.
Temhathor simply didn’t have Jane’s array of skills. For the good of the galaxy, she couldn’t let his political ambitions get in the way of achieving her objective. The longer she could keep him out of her way, the more time she’d have to make the operation unstoppable.
She touched her earwire and subvocalized to Boroslova.
“Revised orders. If the Marshal’s codes confirm, advise him of the extremely hazardous local weather.
Suggest an alternate destination of Arazak.
If he insists on Ridderth Base, route his shuttles on the widest arc possible that avoids the storm bands.
Send them a Minder Corps escort squad if we have any left, or get Base Command to send one. ”
“Yes, sir,” replied Borosolova. If she had an opinion on Jane’s orders, neither her tone nor her expression gave it away. A priceless trait in an aide.
That gave her at least four more hours, and eight if the weather and military bureaucracy cooperated.
Her operation should be at the halfway point by the time Temhathor arrived.
As a bonus, the various groups and networks that smuggled people off the planet for a price would be clogged with customers by then.
She could show Temhathor a quick win. Maybe she would let him take credit for it while she closed in on the bigger prize.
Just to bolster her bets, though, she issued orders to wait two hours, then release an in-progress list of successfully raided targets and high-value detainees.
Plus a casualty list, which would be very low because of her battle plan.
No political opportunist was going to take credit for her accomplishments.
If her timing was accurate, Phase Three would pick up more targets from her priority list. Restraining and detaining both the escape organizers and their customers would snare two birds with one net.
Even better, the organizers might even lead the CPS to notorious fugitives they’d been after for years.
Another ping from Boroslova. “Gold team finally breached the defenses at Novo Granica Media, but they had to use the big beamers to get in. Unfortunately, what’s left of the building is empty, unless you count the roaming killbots and the motion-triggered self-destruct tech.”
Jane made herself take a deep, controlled breath in and slowly let it out.
One or two such failures could be attributed to coincidence or luck.
However, the fact that eight of her top-ten list of media company targets had already been vacated proved that luck had nothing to do with it.
More damning evidence that supposedly independent companies had a much closer relationship than they pretended.
Galactic peace depended on stopping them and their Ayorinn’s Legacy conspiracy once and for all. Jane sent a private-channel ping to Hujuru. “Your special team is green-go for all prioritized targets.”
“We’re ready. Launch in ten.” Hujuru’s enthusiasm came through loud and clear. She loved field work.
Jane sharpened her tone. “No bonuses if the targets aren’t capable of being interrogated.”
“Yes, sir,” Hujuru replied, then disconnected.
Money motivated Hujuru and her elite hunter team best, even if Jane couldn’t pay as much as the pharmas and corrupt politicians did. They’d have to accept that the rest of their reward was Jane’s convenient blindness regarding their lucrative private-sector freelancing.
A quick check of the newstrend summary showed raw vids and scattered reports from small media outfits, but none had yet commented on the scope or target pattern. Another reason to bless the howling storm.
From her chest pocket, she pulled a stay-awake tab from the packet and downed it with a couple of swallows from her water pouch.
She was glad she’d had the foresight to send her wife and the household security to a small military Air Division station on a southern-hemisphere continent. Raneel detested snow, and she worried.
Another of her staff sent an alert ping to her console. Per an intercepted communication, the Ridderth spaceport asked the city traffic control for a temporarily wider flight corridor to accommodate an unexpected surge of orbital launch requests.
Her plan anticipated it, but not so soon.
Eight days ago, she’d convinced the Base Subgeneral and the commander of the large military contingent on the Mabingion Space Station to stage flitters, shuttles, and corvettes to support a mock disaster drill that was scheduled to start in fifteen hours.
In the meantime, she couldn’t risk letting any of the core Ayorinn cancer metastasize and infect anywhere else.
She tapped her earwire to subvocalize to her whole team.
“Execute Task T-5.72 now. Tell Spaceport Launch we’re investigating a security breach.
Be vague. Give them a four-hour window, then keep stringing them along with more delays until I countermand.
Notify Mabingion TCS as a courtesy. Planetary TCS, too. ”
She selected the realtime composite feed from the overhead scanner drones covering Ridderth’s spaceport.
Dark shapes that looked like ants were actually behemoth-sized snow movers clearing launch pads.
Even as she watched, a shuttle lifted off, leaving the glowing red streak of the heat trail on the scanner’s image.
While she’d been planning to close down the commercial spaceport per her schedule, doing so early would be a public service. No one should be going anywhere in a century cyclone.