Chapter 26
The floor under Jane Pennington-Smythe’s feet swayed a little as she stepped through the doorway of the control cab of the military mobile ground command unit. The behemoth vehicle was now her new operations center.
Jane was just in time to see the unit’s five-meter-tall gimbaled and segmented treads crush a row of civilian ground vehicles in their path. The driver, standing instead of sitting, whooped in glee. The navigator, properly webbed into her side chair, rolled her eyes.
Jane’s senior aide, Boroslova, had selected the GCU crew from the regular military’s Ground Division.
The pilot’s antics were getting on everyone’s nerves, but he operated the transport-sized vehicle with skill.
It was better suited to broken-field terrain in a combat zone than to urban environments.
Howling storms didn’t faze it, but narrow city streets and sharp corners did.
Jane regretted the damage to the city’s infrastructure, but emergencies took precedence.
“Corporals,” said Jane, encompassing both operators with her glance.
A look of dismay flitted across the driver’s face as he eyed his chair, then stood at rigid attention. “Orders, sir?”
“Have you seen Subcommander Boroslova in the last fifteen minutes?”
They both shook their heads.
Jane nodded. “Carry on, then.” She tilted her chin toward the panoramic view through the cab’s bubble. “Don’t break any more of the city than you have to.”
She left, hoping her command visit would rein in the driver’s excess. She’d take any success she could get at this point.
The short walk to her command office took her past the tunnel-shaped kitchen, which smelled of burnt coffee and the ever-present mold of Ridderth. She’d never been in GCU before, and found it to be a curious mix of admiralty swank and utilitarian ugly.
She kept up the pretense of serene and confident control until she shut and sealed her office door.
Stumbling to a visitor chair, she sat without grace, fighting nausea and a flush of sweat.
Her head pounded. Jumper-rated energy chems jangled every nerve in her body.
She fumbled the protein paste tube out of her overcoat pocket and squeezed the nasty contents into her mouth.
Hopefully, that would make her stomach shut up.
The bad news had started soon after she’d ordered the closure of Ridderth’s spaceport.
The first catastrophe was when CPS Marshal Temhathor’s shuttle and three military escorts crashed in a frozen lagoon at the outskirts of Ridderth.
All four ships were a total loss and all sixty-seven service members died.
Only a forensic investigation would discover if it was the bad storm, bad piloting, or bad decisions that destroyed them.
The second blow was the stunning notice that the CPS was decommissioning all its bases on Mabingion.
The notice said that regular military ships were already in transit to ferry the vast majority of employees to their new duty stations on other planets.
Those ships would leave in seven days. A second wave of ships would arrive later to ferry equipment and move families and households.
She would like to think Temhathor had come to Mabingion to personally tell her about the CPS’s orders and what they planned to do with her command and staff.
Surely the CPS High Marshal would have given her that much courtesy.
By the time the official notice arrived an hour ago, rumors had spread faster than light that nearly a quarter of the CPS bases across the galaxy were under similar orders. Unlikely, but fears overpowered facts.
Jane hadn’t had time to chase the truth.
Within minutes of the official notice, multiple credible threat warnings indicated the Ridderth military base was a hot target.
She had immediately activated the GCU she’d commandeered several ten-days before on contingency, never imagining she’d actually need it.
Then the reports started rolling in. Instead of continuing with the critical operation, CPS employees were abandoning their assignments, presumably to go home and tell their families. All CPS offices were affected, but doubly so in Ridderth, which had the largest base by far.
She was dismayed by how many of her hand-picked Minder Corps staff left their raid teams. Fully two-thirds of her strike force had vanished.
In the meantime, the few that stayed on task were unable to keep the Ridderth police in line.
With superior military hardware in their hands and no one to stop them, the unleashed police were making the snow-besieged city look like a post-meteor strike.
She had reluctantly decided to ignore their excesses as long as they included her targets.
The needs of the galaxy superseded the structural integrity of one corrupt city if it destroyed Ayorinn’s Legacy.
She stood and walked unsteadily around her seen-better-days desk to sit in the fully adaptive and cushioned command chair.
The stress was getting to her, and thanks to the Jumper chems, she hadn’t slept in seventy-six hours.
But she knew the job was dangerous when she took responsibility for the real mission from the High Marshal.
After the operation was over, she planned to take Raneel on a long, well-deserved vacation to someplace warm and safe, where they wouldn’t need a contingent of thirty all-hours guards protecting them.
She applied an anti-nausea patch to her wrist, then took in several calming deep breaths before checking her reporting feeds again.
Disturbingly, there was an uptick in airborne military vehicle accidents in Ridderth, more than she would have expected during a snowstorm.
She sent a query to an agent to check military accident data for previous major weather events and compare it to this one.
Someone, perhaps the very competent Boroslava, had initiated the orders to close the other four spaceports to interstellar traffic.
Jane was very glad she’d told her patient, kind, and very loyal aide enough of the plan to carry on the eradication mission if something prevented Jane from continuing.
Sadly, Jane couldn’t ever tell her beloved wife Raneel, who was equally patient, kind, and loyal, but was a civilian.
Boroslava stepped into the office, her usually impassive face tight with suppressed tension. Jane didn’t need to be a minder to read the bad news written across her senior aide’s posture.
“Administrator,” Boroslava said softly. “In its complete and utter lack of wisdom, the Mabingion planetary operations office chose this exact day and time to take the Ridderth continental traffic control system offline for a cryptogon upgrade.”
Idiots. Jane pressed her trembling fingers against her throbbing temples. “Tell them to halt and roll back to the previous version immediately.”
“I already tried,” Boroslava replied. “They claim stopping now would keep the system offline even longer. Apparently, no one explicitly ordered them to delay, and their supervisor assumed the storm would lighten the traffic load. The planetary TCS is already slug-slow and failing. The Ridderth city TCS is handling the overflow for the moment, but we all know how glitchy it is. It won’t last.”
Jane straightened her spine, forcing past her bone-deep exhaustion. “Use my authority to order the Ridderth Military Base to take over. Their MilTCS is the largest and best on the planet.”
“That requires a manual handoff of all traffic, one vehicle at a time,” Boroslava cautioned. “The systems are entirely incompatible, and base staffing is currently below bare-bones.”
“Then order the military to conscript emergency staffing and get the job done,” Jane snapped, her patience fraying. “Do it before more accidents litter the city with wreckage.”
Boroslava hesitated, her gaze dropping to the half-empty tube of protein paste on the desk. “Administrator, do you need proper food? Or at least a nutrient drink? You’re pushing yourself into overload. The operation depends on your leadership, but you need a break.”
“Thank you for your concern, Subcommander, but I will be fine,” Jane said, smoothing her expression into a mask of polite determination. “The mission is too important to pause now.”
With a crisp nod, Boroslava exited. Jane turned her attention back to the glowing data streams on her console, intending to review the latest detention figures.
The text blurred into meaningless geometric shapes.
The aggressive rumble of the GCU’s engines wrapped around her like a heavy blanket.
She blinked, trying to force her eyes to focus...
“Administrator.” Jane jolted awake in the plush command chair, her heart hammering wildly against her ribs.
Boroslava stood in the doorway, her expression grim.
The wall display said thirty minutes had passed.
“We need you in the war room,” Boroslava said, using the staff’s dramatic moniker for the vehicle’s cramped conference space. “It’s critical.”
Jane pushed herself up, ignoring the sickening sway of the floor, and followed her aide down the narrow corridor. Inside the war room, her operations staff were crowded around the central holo-table, their faces pale in the blue light.
Linder, the team’s lead informatics specialist, looked up as she entered.
“Administrator, someone has breached the military TCS. Their supposedly impenetrable system is entirely compromised. The military has lost all control of air traffic, both military and civilian. Worse, the attackers exploited the same vulnerability to take over every other local MilTCS node on the planet.”