MIRIYA BREANNADOS WAS NOT A HAPPY WOMAN.
She was dirty, wet and tired and now it was dark and she had no idea what kind of creatures came out at night on this mudball. In the distance, the lights of Strad'ail'leevis's infamous prison shone, still an arn's hike down hilly terrain. More infuriatingly, Koiban seemed not to be affected by any of it at all.
They'd bailed out of the ship in a sensor-opaque pod as it had entered orbit, alerted by Crichton just before the escort ships had arrived. Then he'd activated an ionized cascade that effectively camouflaged any trails they might have left as they dropped.
How he knew, she couldn't imagine, but she was starting to take him far more seriously than she had been.
"That worked," Koiban had noted when they'd landed, "surprisingly well."
"You had to know there'd be treachery, come on," she'd said lamely, "that's a given."
"You have a point." He adjusted his gear, dropped the night-vision device over his eyes. The Warlord had supplied them with professional commando uniforms and equipment, scanned the terrain with an experienced eye. Strapped to their backs were rifles and a shock rod. Both had pistols. "I am still at a loss as to why I'm here."
Miriya was just a tad bitter. She tugged down her goggles and the night lit up.
"We're more expendable than his friends."
"You think so?" Koiban rolled his shoulders. "We may have done the same, in his position."
Miriya shook her red head.
"I wouldn't be in his position," she insisted, "I'd like to think I'm smarter than that!"
"Perhaps," he said noncommittally.
"Besides," Miriya sniffed, "you're here because your precious Warlord ordered you to come."
"He's not 'my' Warlord. Though I was ordered, yes."
"Does nothing get on your nerves?"
"Many things." He pointed to a vague trail through the trees before them, likely made by animals. Beyond that lay open land. "Though I command myself. I have worked very diligently on that."
"It's irritating," Miriya grumbled as she followed him down the trail.
They arrived at the outskirts of the prison just as Azure Meanings rose into the sky, casting its blue light over the landscape. The forests behind them crackled with the calls of nocturnal creatures. At the edge of the open area, deliberately swept clean of any plant life, leave just open dirt and few places to hide, they came to a halt. At the prison, small ships came and went.
Crouched at the edge, Miriya did a passive sensor sweep, so as not to set off any alarms, found a nothing of note on the plain at all. The prison had no sensor suites anywhere on its walls.
"Strange there's nothing." Koiban said over her shoulder. "The walls aren't tagged or mined."
"Yeah… it's too easy," she frowned. "Passive scan's got no real detail, but I think there's more to this open space than meets the eye." She pointed to a reading. "Getting subtle soil anomalies."
"Could be… yes, look at the regularity of those anomalies - subterranean sensor drones. They likely have all the sensitive scan platforms."
"Frell… makes sense." She eyed the walls. "Bit of a temptation, no sensors on the wall. Until you get to the outside. Then… just no good."
There was a hum and a roar as a supply transport took off. On Miriya's scanner, the anomalies in the soil stopped registering for a few moments then came back.
"All right… interesting…"
Koiban looked.
"Indeed."
They waited for another ship to go and saw a repeat of the register drop.
"Yes…" Koiban said, "I saw something similar on Shepheridahn." He pointed at the cycling rates on her scanner screen. "The Ashel had rather sensitive scan platforms. Whenever a ship left a port, the scanners were designed to cut their resolutions to avoid burnout from EMP leakage and harmonic overloads of ship engines. A savvy person might use that."
She looked at him with new eyes.
"Shepheridahn? You were there for that slaughter?"
"I was. I have no stories worth recounting. I was there in an attempt to help. I failed. We failed."
Fifteen cycles ago, the Ashel had been a technically advanced society, obsessed with the idea of immortality, of 'ascension' to some idea of 'higher being' and thus had unleashed a plague among themselves, a plague so broad and deadly, that it killed indiscriminately any species that came near their world. The Ashel it killed slowly and painfully and thus doomed, they had called the Peacekeepers in.
Koiban and his small contingent of healers had been on their homeworld trying to help when the Peacekeepers had begun bombarding the planet from orbit. He'd barely made it offworld. The Peacekeepers, after they'd destroyed the major population areas, went down to personally slaughter any who remained. Even though the Ashel themselves had commissioned the pogrom, it was still horrific. When it was done a cycle later, the Peacekeepers looted the world of what they liked and burned the planet to the mantle to make certain the plague never spread.
"There is nothing more to be said about it." He told her in no uncertain terms. Miriya regarded him for a moment and then shrugged.
"The cycling isn't very long," she noted. "It's already back to strength." She eyed the small port behind the walls. Heard another ship power up. "Gonna take a chance." She poised a finger over a control on her scanner.
When the ship took off, she jabbed it immediately, took a flash-scan, then returned it to passive mode. She switched over and reviewed the scan.
"You were right about the buried drones." She pointed at the readings. "Dozens of them."
He squinted at the readout.
"Nervandi-class Mobile Security Platforms. Heavily armed droids." He frowned. Interions had an almost inbred revulsion for military-grade artificial and machine intelligences. There was little merit in letting a machine do all your intellectual work for you. Some decisions had to be made by organics – and that included all life and death ones. Mindless killing machines offended many of his sensibilities.
"Yeah. Figures. There's no getting by them. If they are Nervandi-class, they'll fry us at the first step into that field."
"No animal carcasses," he noted, "they must have differentiators on them. Local fauna are safe from them."
"What do we do? Find something large enough and strap ourselves to their bellies?"
"Well, no." He eyed the expanse of the field, calculated in his head. "All we have to do is fool them into thinking that a ship is taking off - for as long as it takes us to get across that field, or that we're local fauna."
"You're farhbot. Utterly fralking insane. That has to be half a motra!"
"Not much of a runner, then?" He asked calmly. She stared at him in disbelief.
"There is no way to blind them for the time it would take," she insisted, "and I can run with the best of them."
"We cannot sit here forever." He told her. He wasn't exactly a 'man of action', but Koiban knew they had to do something. Miriya frowned and sat on the ground out of frustration. Koiban tried to steady his breathing and watched the prison, trying to think.
"We'd need something to blanket the field," he said thoughtfully, mostly to himself, "Something that will last for at least fifty microts."
"And not set off any of the alarms inside." Miriya added. She watched another prison ship leave, watched the readings dim, then strengthen. In the sky, she saw clouds rolling in, smelled the ozone that preceded a storm. "Now, this," she griped, as a drop of rain hit her nose, "for frell's sake." She reached behind her head and pulled a hood over. Koiban copied her. The rain began to fall in sheets.
He was drifting into irritation himself when thunder rumbled and then a lightning bolt at least a metra long turned night into day. On the scanner, the droids dimmed considerably.
"Can we use this?" Koiban asked, even as they droids came back to full power.
"They should compensate for weather," Miriya said. "They must have discriminatory capabilities, so they're not constantly jumping at natural phenomena…" Her eye caught the shock-rod on Koiban's back. Miriya took the rod from him, looked it over. He turned to her, curious, as she turned it over in her hands.
"What are the power packs like in one of these things?" she pried a cover off the rod and looked inside. "Relayed. Thought so." She started yanking them out, Koiban watching closely. "Sequential build-up with each one only having a limited charge. Nice! Static couplers – fine design."
To Koiban's questioning looks, she smiled.
"Sorry." She held up the business end of the rod. "To maximize power in these, they use limited charge, slave-linked power packs with static couplers – which can easily double the charge just by transference of charge through the packs - it sort of rotates through them and uses the static build-up to get the charge up really high. When it's high enough they just discharge through the tip of the rod. I can appreciate a nice design sense. It's quite clever."
"How does it help us?"
"These packs are just electrical coils, basically. Bottled lightning, so to speak." As she said it another bolt cracked through the sky. "They're really dense, so there's a lot of them." She began pulling the small connected disks from the rod, held them up. They made a long chain as she pulled them apart. "All they need is a spark."
"There's enough energy in that to shut down those droids?"
"Nope." She counted out the discs, came to sixty and cracked them apart at thirty each. "If they'll work like I think - like I hope - we wrap these around us and use the activator switches in the rod to set them off. It'll sting like all Hezmana, but it'll mask our signatures, as it were - we'll just be static fields from the storm passing over."
"That is a very risky supposition."
Miriya was coiling her thirty discs around herself.
"Look," she said, annoyed, "two days ago, I was having a rather nice time not having to give a frell about much," she cinched the discs on and began looking for the activator on the rod, "now I'm squatting in the rain on a mud-hole outside a prison planning to near-electrocute myself to help a damn Hezmana-spawned fool rescue some rich fekkik's she and spawn. I don't care about suppositions! We either do this, we drown in the deluge or we fry! Either way, I'm doing something!"
"Uh… what do we need do?" Koiban aped her, wrapping the discs around himself as she had done.
"Take this," she thrust a small needle-like device at him. It had a small cylinder at one end. "When I tell you, squeeze the cylinder as hard as you can and stick the needle end into any disc." She straightened. "We'll have to wait a few microts for the charge to cycle. Then run like Hezmana to that wall."
"A definite plan."
"It's going to hurt like a moithafreller while we wait." She squared herself. "A really large moithafreller."
"Understood." Koiban readied the needle in his hand.
"Stay ahead or behind me," Miriya added. "If we collide, the fields with interact and cook both us. We'll be dead before we finish skidding to a halt in that mire."
"Noted." Koiban began breathing deeply, trying to get himself ready. Miriya was bouncing slightly, trying to psych herself up.
"Koiban… I'm keeping a running tab that I'm going to present to Crichton when this is over." She huffed. "Remind me to put this on it."
"I will."
"On the next lightning flash…" Miriya readied herself, Koiban stepping away so they would not interact. Thunder boomed and then,
Night became day.
"Now!" she snapped, jamming the needle in and with a crack, she was suddenly surrounded by blue rings. With a grimace she immediately bolted off, Koiban doing likewise and hot on her heels. The pain was excruciating as the discs discharged though he did not let it slow him. They both skidded in the mud and came dangerously close once to colliding. Behind them, rising from the ground, droids shot up, but just spun in place. With a stagger and a wheeze, Miriya used the wall to stop her forward momentum. The discs crackled and died. A few microts behind her, Koiban skidded to a halt, panting hard. His discs lingered a microt longer and also died.
"Forgot…" Miriya said through gulps of air, "the bastards… had …pressure sensors! Fortunately… they couldn't …detect us. Don't …hear …anything like an …alarm."
"No, nor I." He spat. "That hurt rather a lot."
Miriya leaned against the wall and began pulling the spent discs off. She dropped them in a pile at her feet.
"I said. Not doing that again, so don't ask."
"Despite that, may I say that that was excellent!" Koiban was genuinely impressed. "Brilliant, in fact!"
"Thanks." She gasped, slowly getting her breathing under control, trying to rub the pain of the charge from her arms. "Wasn't lying when I told Crichton I was the frelling best."
"I can believe it." Koiban blew out a breath and wiped his face with the back of his hand. "I have not run that hard in a rather long time."
"Same. Something's gonna ache tomorrow." Miriya turned to examine the wall. "Just gotta get over this now."
"There must be a drainage system or something similar somewhere," Koiban said, trying to see in the gloom, "not that I'm all that enthused about crawling through a sewer…"
"Did my part," Miriya told him, "and no way I do a sewer."
They followed the wall down a way, came to a corner and cautiously peered around it. Miriya was watching her scanner. It was damned peculiar that there were no wall or ground sensors here. Were they that confident of their security?
"That has prospects," Koiban said softly. Miriya looked to see a small outbuilding attached to the wall. She pointed the scanner at it.
"Backup generator in there." She told him. She scrolled down the details. "It's a Freeson 950. They have large exhaust tubes… and there it is." She pointed past him to the back wall of the small room. They crept up to it. It had a fine mesh covering that appeared solid from a distance. "No sensors on it that I can scan. This Strad'ail'leevis must be seriously overconfident."
"Despots usually are," Koiban agreed. He searched his pack and found a small cutter. Fifty microts later, the mesh was cut and pulled back enough to let them squeeze through. They skirted the silent generator and found the access door, which Miriya very carefully opened and peered out. Their luck was holding. They were in a small closed off area shut off with another wall and a maintenance door, so they were likely a way away from the actual prison proper.
"We're in a maintenance area," she told her companion in a whisper, "scanner says no one for metras." She cast an eye around the wall out there. "No lights, either."
She stepped out quietly, slunk along a wall to the door. Koiban followed, doing the same. The maintenance door yielded with barely a creak and they were soon on the prison grounds.
"We're looking for the central tower annex," Koiban reminded her, slipping his goggles up as the prison lights were whiting them out. Miriya did likewise. A spire rose to their right and she indicated it. It was surrounded by light and drones flitted around it.
"Gonna assume that's it."
Koiban grabbed her arm and tugged her back.
"Careful! Guards!"
She shrank back as she spotted a trio of figures in the distance.
"Those aren't guards." Miriya told him, staring intently out into the compound. "I think we've already met them," her voice was low. The trio moved silently and they didn't seem to be going out of their way to hide themselves. They wore dark cloaks and silver masks.
"This is unfortunate," Koiban intoned, "those are our Se'em'aari friends."
"Here? How'd they follow us here?"
"I can't imagine, though I doubt they followed us."
"Frell! They're after Crichton." Miriya said with certainty. Why else would they be here?
"This definitely drops the Vorc into the fispy pen." Koiban told her.
"Or it could work for us," Miriya was watching them intently. "They're heading directly for the spire."
"Is that necessarily better?" He asked her.
"Probably not." Miriya agreed. "Our job was to find a way to disrupt the power or set up some chaos to let Crichton grab D'Strand'm'tah's women in the confusion."
Koiban was watching the Se'em'aari. Like wraiths, they vanished into the tower.
"Which they will very definitely cause."
Screams and shouts begin to echo from the tower almost immediately. Lights inside started going out. There was an ominous humming and clacking as pulse cannon began deploying themselves.
"Oh, frell." Miriya breathed, watching them do it.
"Indeed," Koiban agreed, pushing her along. "Run, please!"
They ran. Behind them, the cannons started destroying everything that moved.
