Cats Cradle Chapter 8
Mari was on the Nova’s bridge when the alarm went off. Half dozed, she shot awake launching out of the chair, near hitting her head off the ceiling.
“What the hell?” she asked no-one
“The Stargazer just went dark.” Desmond responded. “She sent out a single pulse of microwave radiation, then lost connection with our systems.”
“Shit. Powerful enough to be detected at range?”
“Most likely not. It appears to have been directed internally. The overspill was enough to be detected by our main sensor array, with secondary signals in the engine coils.”
Which was right above the shuttlebay.
“A power surge?”
“Possible. I can’t tell from sensor data. And I cannot get an answer from Cortana. She’s got power, but the connection’s down.”
“Fire risk?”
“None.”
Mari sighed. AI must’ve glitched or something and accidentally zapped herself. The downside of human-level AI’s was that they sometimes made human mistakes. She crossed the cabin to the comm’s station, silencing the alarm on her way. She pulled down the handset.
“Luka, Luka, you awake down there?”
“Yeah Captain,” he answered, taking a few moments “Just had something right royal weird happen down here.”
He sounded just a little bit annoyed. Mari thought she heard a panel slam.
“What?”
“Coupla our routers just died. Some sort of power surge down the ethernet cables zapped ‘em,”
Mari grimaced. If that AI goofed it up, she was paying for the hardware replacement.
“I could put her into Desmond’s backup switch, but I have to recut the cable and everything. Should have gone to fibre when we had the chance. Old piece ‘a Boskonian junk.” Another panel slam. Something clattered to the ground. “Fuck!. Everything’s shorted out back here. What the hell did she do to my gear, stick a sparkplug to it?”
“It seems like a microwave burst,” Mari answered. “I need you to go forward into the launch bay and make sure she didn’t zap herself by mistake.”
“Yes ma’am,”
In the hanger the Stargazer was still standing motionless as before. There was slight a smell of charred electronics inside, but no smoke in the air. He rapped on the cars windows
“Cortana, is everything all right?” he asked.
“Ahh, good to hear someone...” the AI answered. “ I had a few rough moments, but the worst parts are over.”
“What the hell did you do?”
“Quattro tried to hack me through the QED. I had to break the connection somehow, so I redirected my radio output onto some unshielded cable and destroyed the router,”
Luka looked cross. “Well you destroyed half the switchgear in the next room at the same time, ”
“Oops,” said Cortana. She wasn’t sorry. “I am running some systems diagnostics. I have lost my connection through the QED to Hedwig, and most of my network hardware has been damaged. I hope the QED itself is still okay. The one to Nehalennia appears to have been destroyed.”
“Damn,” said Luka.
Mari was busy on the bridge, working with Desmond to try get some signal out without being detected. A quick burst transmission to Butterscotch to let them know they’d just had a hardware failure, that they hadn’t be blown off the rock by a sneak attack.
The comm panel chirruped.
“Bridge, Luka. It’s a goddamn mess down here. Cortana was nearly hacked by our target, she blew out switches to break the link. I think I can patch everything in through Desmonds switch. Gimme five minutes to see if we can get our link to Hedwig back. Anything else... I dunno.”
“Get about it,” she ordered.
“Butterscotch has acknowledged.” Desmond interrupted her. “We are not aligned with Nehalennia at the moment. The directed transmission should be undetectable at current power levels.”
“Good,” she replied, “Now get Jet to the bridge. She needs to know about this.” A few moments went by.
“She’s on her way.”
They could hear Jet running, heavy metal feet thumping on the deckplates. It stopped for a second, followed by a heavy slam as she hit the top deck. The hatch near came off it’s hinges.
“What happened?”
“Jeez, somebody’s tense” Linda snarked.
“Cortana was nearly hacked,” Desmond explained. “She cut off her connection to Nehalennia before the attacker took full control. There was some collateral damage in our network equipment, but we still have connection to Butterscotch.”
“Chigusho,” Jet growled. “If they hacked Cortana, it won’t be long before they get the QED.” A pause. Jet thought. Jet searched for a justification she could write into a report. Bingo. “Get us in the air, we’re going now. Signal to Butterscotch; Showtime!”
“Butterscotch acknowledges.” Desmond said. “Twenty Five minutes until curtain up.”
“We can’t wait that long.”
“It’ll take at least five minutes to preflight,” Mari said. She could understand at least what had lit that fire under the cyber’s butt.
“Not good enough,” Jet barked at her. “If they’ve got the QED, it won’t take a genius to figure out who fucking put it there.”
And I’ll never forgive myself if Ford gets killed while we’re on this rock twiddling our thumbs and ticking boxes on checklist.
“We’ll go as fast as we can,” Mari said, keeping her voice calm. “Provided it doesn’t endanger this ship or it’s crew. It won’t do them any good if we blow up in mid air.”
For one brief moment, Jet looked ready to kill her. Jet looked ready to rip and tear her way to Nehalennia. Jet closed her eyes, taking a long breath in through her nose. She held it for a few pregnant moments. The whole body seemed to relax, a tension flowing out of her as she exhaled.
“You’re right,”she said, brushing some hair off her face. “You’re right. Just.... be quick.”
“We’ll try.”
The comm panel alarmed once more.
“Signal from Nehalennia.” Desmond reported, gravely. “It’s the emergency code. It is authentic.”
Jet went visibly green. “Fuck!,” She glanced to the speaker, almost wild-eyed with fear, then at Mari “I’ll be in the cargo bay. Get us moving.”
Mari keyed open the intercom. “This is the Captain. Take-off stations. Take-off stations. Now!”
“And this is why you should never be in love with your undercover agents,” Desmond sighed privately. “It always introduces complications.”
Jet had already disappeared below decks.
How dare they! How dare they! How dare they!
Naoko Sato was not in a good mood as she glared at the base map. She was sick with rage. She was shaking. She was panting through gritted teeth. Normally she never acquiesced to some of Quattros more esoteric requests, but in this case, she might make an exception.
Cally Auron had lied to her face. Cally Auron had officially made her enemies list.
There was something to be said for the deep-fat-fryer and homeostasis biomod method of enforcement. Picturing her revenge certainly helped stoke that fire in her belly.
“They’re not in the old habitat section,” the tech said. She was a vampire biomod, grey-skinned, fanged, sparkly and judging by the celery stalk she was munching on, vegetarian. “Of course, werewolves suck.”
“Hey watch it fang-girl,” a voice growled from across the control room.
“Knock it off,” Sato said, keeping her voice even “Just find them. They are heading down to the labs. ”
Illuminated solely by the glow from walls of monitors and consoles, Sato just stared. A few of the gothic-dressed crew kept their heads down. None of them had ever seen her this pissed off.
A small alarm announced itself in the silence that followed. Boop - Boop.
It went unheeded. Nobody dared say anything.
It announced itself again. Boop - Boop.
“We’ve got a ship coming into our sector,” the vampire said, tentatively “Coming in fast.”
“Great Justice?”
“No, It’s...” There was a pause as she checked her readouts. “It reads as one of ours. Type-204. Boskone-Two built. On a landing vector.”
“There’s nothing scheduled,” Sato said, momentarily putting Cally Auron to the back of her mind.
Either this was someone who had a problem with their ship, or someone who had a problem with them. And she couldn’t quite shake the notion that it was too much of a coincidence with that distress signal being broadcast.
“Nothing on my panel,” the vampire answered.
“Nope,” werewolf confirmed. “No type-204s for at least a month,”
“Hail them,” Sato ordered.
Linda was at the comms-station on the Nova’s bridge. Lights were on full. The ship was awake. Everyone was on edge. Days of waiting came down to these few minutes. The turbines where wailing below, warring with speakers playing Astronomy at full volume.
“Nehalennia is hailing us,” she said.
“Let them meet static,” Mari ordered. She sat back into her chair, resting her chin on her steepled hands.
Desmonds hologram was overseeing the whole affair in his tweed suit. “Sensors show their defense grid is still down,”
“Good. Slow us down. Let’s be friends. We’re all one happy bunch of evil Zwilniks.”
The pilot, a sweet strawberry blond by the name of Carrie rotated the thrusters to the reverse position, and pushed the throttles forward. The big fusion engines roared and blazed with brilliant arc-light.
“She’s coming into our perimeter, and slowing,” the vampire reported.
Sato sat down in her own chair, sighing deeply to herself. “Now this is damn peculiar.”
“Transponder details give her name as the Wilhelm Canaris,”
Sato looked to the werewolf. “Forward them to Quattro. See what she makes of them. Raven, keep trying the hail them.”
She had a very bad feeling about this. Cameras zoomed in on the approaching ship, looking somewhat like an airliner that’d been fused with the back end of a yacht. Running lights glowed an ominous red alongside the bright, sparking fusion engines.
The vampire keyed open a channel.“Wilhelm Canaris, Wilhelm Canaris, this is Nehalennia Control. Respond please...”
Cathy was banging on the walls of her prison. It was a desperate, near futile attempt to get free. The door was starting to give way. Just a few millimeters. She was panting, she was whimpering, she was desperate. Even if she was a copy, she just didn’t want to be erased like a defective tape.
The hardware around her began to him. She felt her skin begin to tingle. Energy tickled her air.
“Just a few more commands,” Quattro reassured her. “Then you can feel your mind just go away.”
“No!” Cathy screamed. “I won’t let you. I won’t let you!”
“You can’t stop me,” Quattro replied and smiled. “Just admit it and stop fighting.”
A new window popped up in front of her demanding her attention. She scowled at it for a moment. Her scowled morphed into a smirk... this might be interesting. Quattro got to work.
“It seems you’ll have to wait for a short while more.” Quattro said, sighing.
“We just received a text message, they say their engine coils are overloading their comm system.”
Sato raised an eyebrow. She turned to the werewolf. He glanced at his sensor readouts.
“Their coil emissions are normal.”
The intercom beeped, Quattro as fast as usual.
“Oh, Sato-chan,” she called out, gleefully, “It’s a fake.”
The penny dropped. The Canaris was a Trojan horse.
“Raise station alert! Get the defenses up now!” she snapped out. On the control screen she could see the alert racing outwards to the rest of the asteroid station, systems powering up and switching over. It lasted less than a moment.
Fractions of a second later the control screens exploded with activity, windows opening windows untill the entire screen was filled with useless garbage. Systems bogged down as memory was swallowed up by millions of processes spawning and respawning. Packets exploded across the network, routers and switches failing under the unexpected load. A moment later, each screen turned into a deathly blue.
“Internal and external communications are down!”
“Connection to the remote defense turrets lost!”
“Control systems on local backup, the station’s network is offline!”
Sato glared at the blue screen. There were more rats in the basement than she’d thought. This was bad. This was very bad.
“Get them back! Get them back now!”
It was hard for her to not sound like she was panicking. A part of her mind couldn’t help but notice that she was playing the stereotypical Bond Villain role to a tee. If she stayed, she was going to be captured, or probably killed in an amusingly ironic way.
“Most of their systems just shut down,” Desmond reported. “It looks like Cortana’s virus just kicked in.”
“I thought you said we’d have ten minutes,” said Mari quickly.
“That was just an estimate. We should’ve had ten minutes,” The hologram leaned in over the comm’s panel, making a show of checking systems he’d already checked. “That’s not right.”
He trailed off as he set to work figuring out how his counterfeit codes had been beaten so damned quick. It was an insult.
Mari gritted her teeth. It didn’t matter. In for a penny, in for a pound. It was too late to pull now. “Go to full throttle. Their defense grid isn’t going to be down for much longer. Tell Jet to standby, we’re not going to be landing,”
Quattro knew that Nehalennia was doomed. Great Justice wouldn’t stop with just one ship. This was just the advance guard, the initial raid to disable the stations defenses. The stormtroopers would follow soon after.
She did the math.
She figured that from the moment they landed, she’d have twenty minutes to clean up after herself in the lab. It’d take them twenty minutes to fight down to the lab from the landing bay. Time enough to grab what she could, destroy the evidence and get out.
She turned back to her little pet, “Looks like your friends are coming,”
Cathy pinned herself against the tube wall. Did she hope or did she fear?
Quattro ignored her. This was no time for play. A virus in the computer, an impressive one from such a limited intelligence. Thanks to it, it would take at least a half hour to get the station’s systems back from scratch.
Her own systems were still online. She could use them to bootstrap. First, she brought up the comm’s, adjusting her glasses for best signal. Making herself sound like some control room droid was simple
“All personnel, All personnel. We are under attack. We are evacuating the station. Make your to the hangar bay. Make your way to the hangar bay for evacuation.”
When Great Justice landed, they would open the bay doors first. By the time they sorted out the resulting mess, she’d be long gone.
“All personnel, All personnel. We are under attack. We are evacuating the station. Make your to the hangar bay. Make your way to the hangar bay for evacuation.”
Sato’s blood went dead cold when she heard the announcement.
“Who gave that order?”
Whoever they were, they’d just gotten a lot of people killed. And she’d take the blame for it. Wasn’t that how command responsibility worked?
“I don’t know,” the werewolf answered in a panic “I can’t even get manual. It’s... the whole lot’s fried.”
He looked to Sato for the answer, those yellow wolf-eyes pleading for deliverance.
“Maybe we should evacuate?” Raven suggested, hopefully.
Sato glowered at her. She shrunk back. She was terrified.
“Alright,” Sato sighed, rubbing at her temples. The beginnings of a headache were starting to gnaw at the back of her mind “Stay away from the launch bay and any airlocks. Go back to your apartments. Do not make a fight of it.”
She stayed until they’d gone, fumbling out the doors. Someone’s terminal died with a pop of smoke as a mug of liquid spilled across it. Some would still try run for it
She took one last look at the control room, before she ran for her private hanger herself. Nehalennia was doomed, there was no sense in staying to face the music.
“All personnel, All personnel. We are under attack. We are evacuating the station. Make your to the hangar bay. Make your way to the hangar bay for evacuation.”
Cathy looked up at Ford. “It is Jet,” she said, hopefully. “It is about the right time if they got the signal,”
Ford was focused on the corridor ahead. They had to push their way through a crowd of panicking Goths. Some of them were running, some of them were panicking. Some of them dived into hiding places. Others saw the catgirl and the courier running armed and figured it was a good idea to pick up a gun and join in the fight.
“Yeah sister, we’ll show them that just because we’re Goths, we’re not pushovers,”
Dead goths walking. Compared to what she’d heard of Jet’s abilities, they were. She wasn’t sure whether to hope Jet was exaggerating about her abilities or not. The thought of those gliesbies getting cut in half made her feel queasy. They didn’t deserve that... they were just idiots, not zwilniks.
There wasn’t much, if anything, she could do to stop them.
“I think something may have happened to their computers,” Cathy said with a grin. “All the doors have fail-safed to unlocked.”
Ford kicked an access hatch open. It clanged against the rock wall. This access passageway led on down to to the labs.
Ford swung in, quickly covering the passageway.
“Clear,” she barked.
Cathy followed, covering rearwards.
A minute to Quattro’s lab, maybe less.
Jet felt all her controls slip off her body like a silken negligé. Jet didn’t know how she knew what that felt like, she just decided it was an appropriate metaphor. It was that same private release of tension in her body, just allowing it to fall down around her feet.
Take a deep breath in vacuum, feel liquid freedom spread through her body. The wristcom gave tips that, physically at least, didn’t really apply to Jet anymore. A sliver of duct tape held a compatible mic and earpiece to her left ear.
Blades locked into place on her forearms, the extra mass of the steel reassuringly familiar. The others had their own blades, either clamped to their forearms or strapped to their back in the form of an massive, oversized balisword capable of cutting an unarmoured human being in two from head down in one effortless sweep.
And that wasn’t hyperbole. Jet had seen Lenneth do it.
Jet checked her harness, her webbing, her pistol. Medkit, flashbangs. Everything was secure and stable. The others were busy doing the same thing. The same usual routine.
Jet was fizzing to get out there. Jet had to keep herself calm. This was, from a practical standpoint, no different to any other mission. Add Ford to the mix, and it was completely different.
“Engel one, Gruppe. Comms check,”
Her hardware gave an error. Right. Disabled that. She switched the headset over to vox.
“Engel one, Gruppe. Comms check,”
The other four answered in turn. Lenneth, Tiegel wiith his eye black a permanent feature. Lightweight Jash the sprinter with the demolitions gear and Yukio with her cocky grin and AC-built figure.
The hatches blew, bursting open at once as the electromagnetic locks powered down.
“Jet, Acknowledged.” she finished with herself. “Hart kämpfern,”
“Echten kämpfern!” the others responded.
Call and respond might’ve been a little cheesy, but it lit a fire of fury in the blood.
“Hart kämpfern!” Jet bellowed once more, almost interrogating them.
“Echten kämpfern!”
Jet felt her heart race, a savage grin on her face. She closed her visor, her helmet pressurising with a thump. One last time.
“Hart kämpfern!”
As if she didn’t believe them
“Echten kämpfern!” they roared. It made the speaker crackle, and the watch complain. It gave Jet a vulpine smirk.
It was time.
Jet lit her engines, flaring off into the black.
“Angreifen!,” she bellowed.
Hotaru ‘manned’ the weapons console on the bridge of the Nova. She held herself in her own private world, ignoring the tension around her. Her blue eyes stared, reflecting twin images of the TFT screen.
Authorisation ‘Silence Glaive’. Mode. Ground fire support. Switch to high resolution gun-camera mode. Overlay map. Target select. Laser rangefinder. System calculations. Compensate for relative velocity. Adjust for rotation. Adjust for engine coil magnetic effects. Firing solution input. Lock solution.
There was enough ECM going up to make using any sort of radar guided missile an exercise in futility. The Nova had coilguns; bog standard projectile weapons. The good thing about the coilgun was that, once they’d left the barrel, the bullets would only go in the one direction.
While computers could help, ultimately it was solely down to the skill and experience of the gunner to get them on target. Hotaru prided herself on being able to make the money shot. Hotaru prided herself on being able to fill in the blanks that the computers just couldn’t.
Her displays lit up green as the Nova’s targeting computer finally figured itself out, pulling something resembling a proper solution out of all the variables.
“Firing solution locked,” she said, to no-one in particular. She flicked up a translucent molly guard.
The command came back. “Fire!”
That little green button clicked as she pushed it in. Relays latched. Control circuits energised. Turrets tracked targets. Gun barrels adjusted themselves. The Nova had a pair of turrets, each with a pair of coilguns. Each turret tracked it’s own target.
A heartbeat after Hotaru’d pushed the button, the guns fired their first bursts. Moments later, they fell silent, re-aimed themselves, then fired again. Each burst shook the Nova’s frame, the recoil of the guns acting as thrusters.
Hotaru’d compensated for it. It was something that was hard to computerise. It required intuition. It required experience. It required a pilot who knew what she was doing to keep the ship on course.
Tracers lanced out into space.
The guns stopped, finishing their cycle. Hotaru’s panels flashed red. The capacitor banks were empty. Stupid things always took forever to recharge.
“Firing complete,” she reported.
She sounded almost disappointed.
Quattro wore a shark’s smirk in her lab, playing her own electronic symphony on her holographic keyboard. A wall of ECM kept the incoming ship from launching missiles. They didn’t even seem to be trying to fight back against it.
She adjusted her glasses. They were properly docked with the clips on the side of her skull, providing full wireless access to her own computer systems, then out to what was left of the station’s network. This was her at her strongest, her most powerful, her most undefeatable.
A few keystrokes armed Nehalennia’s missile battery. They were a token effort, enough to discourage a single attacker, but not a full fleet. She might be able to take out the vanguard, but all that’d do was buy her time.
If GJ had any sort of competence, they’d be coming straight to her lab. The elite troops would come in first and hit hardest. Anything following would just be a mop-up.
Quattro cursed as she saw the target appear to discrete, five new contacts appearing under it. Missiles? Working with inhuman speed, she answered back with a hail of chaff and anti-missile countermeasures. She filled the void with shrapnel.
The missiles just dodged around. They weren’t just guided, they weren’t riding radar beams, there was an intelligence in there, anticipating, dodging, re-aiming. AI guided missiles. She smirked to herself, so GJ really did use them. She made a quick estimate of their impact time, before returning fire.
Cathy, still in her prison, could only gape as she saw four green markers move inevitably towards one large red one. The monitor cut out moments later, switching over to a text terminal.
Quattro turned back to her for a second. “I assume your AI friend is on that ship? Don’t worry, you will be joining it soon.”
Cathy did not answer... the Nova was a good ship, and the Stargazer had her own forcefield. Jet and the other Kunstlers were far more agile than anything Quattro had... they would manage to break this insane woman's defenses. They would rescue her... somehow.
She had to hope.
Hotaru’s panel lit up. Her stomach screwed itself into a knot.
“Track four missiles. Inbound. Impact. Thirty seconds.”
“Confirmed.” Desmond said, stonefaced, upper lip properly stiff.
Mari thought quickly. “Corkscrew Port!”
A jerk hit the bridge as the Nova was suddenly thrown into a spiral rotation, inertial dampers overwhelmed. The ships’ structure creaked and groaned with the strain, threatening to tear itself apart. Strain gauges threw up warning lights as they went out of limits. Gunshot bangs rang through the frame as old welds gave way.
Mari was pinned painfully against her hardness, straps crushing into her body as g-forces tried to force her stomach out her mouth. Hotaru held on for dear life to a pair of worn grab-handles mounted to her panel, hair only held down by virtue of Brylcreem.
Desmond stood firm, the projection completely unaffected by the G-force until his projector began to buckle on its mountings.
Anything loose was thrown about the ship. Bedding, toys and books along with a mass of cutlery, food remains, a surprised mouse and some panelling that’d come loose where tossed around like lose change in a running washing machine, rattling and pattering and crashing against each other and the hull.
Linda was pinned against the ceiling of the battery compartment. In the engine room Andy Maion clung on to hand-holds, pressing himself against a sealed electrical panel. In the cargo-bay, the Stargazer lifted against its tie-downs. Cortana wondered about who was flying.
Carrie at the controls grunted and hung on, trusting the old Boskone rustbucket to hold itself together.
“Missiles still tracking. Ten seconds,” Hotaru called out.
“Collision!” Mari barked.
Miranda braced herself with one hand, keying open the ships intercom. “Brace, Brace, Brace!”. Alarms began to chime throughout the ship. Pressure doors locked themselves shut.
“Reverse your turn,” Mari ordered. “Deploy countermeasures!”
Carrie hauled the Nova over, pulling the nose straight up. The forces on her body inverted, driving her down into the chair. Everything that’d taken flight during the dive crashed to the deck. It sounded like a car crash. Hotaru stabbed at a button on her panel.
Covers blew off the belly of the Nova, revealing packed rows of cartridges.They burst, filling the space behind the ship with a cloud of metallic foil, burning flares and radio signal generators. The hope was that it’d be good enough to confuse the missiles tracking systems while the Nova changed course.
Now, there was nothing left to do but hang on and hope that it’d be enough. Count the seconds. Count the heartbeats. Whisper a prayer. Hang on. Just keep hanging on. Glance at the screen. Estimate three seconds to impact. Hold your breath.
Two seconds. The longest two seconds imaginable.
One second. Maybe the last of a lifetime.
The first missile met the cloud of countermeasures. It burst into a hail of razor-sharp confetti. The second, followed suit. The third missile had its motor knocked out by a stray shard of shrapnel. It spiralled off into the black trailing smoke.
The fourth missile streaked straight on through the cloud of expanding debris, zeroing in on the plume blazing out of the Nova’s starboard engine nacelle.
Hotaru didn’t even get the chance to shout out “Leaker!” before it hit.
There were five of them, armed with an assortment of shotguns, stun-guns and handguns. They’d managed to set themselves up something of a barricade in a corridor somewhere between the residential area and the restricted section. It was made up of little more than crates loaded with food, a pair of old bulkhead doors and some bedding. It’d still stop bullets.
Edward inspected his work, brushing his hands together. “Well, nobody’s ain’t getting through that without a fight.”
“Why are we doing this?” Laura wondered, nervously rubbing her hands together. “These people are pro’s.”
“They’ll take us to prison,” Ebony said, babbling fearfully, clutching some old Makarov to her chest as if it was a shield. “I don’t want to go to Azkhaban, there’re real Zwilniks there,”
Himei was still giddy. The Remington she had was her first gun. It was her first real gun. Finger on the trigger, ready to shoot at the first thing that came around the corner up ahead. Her whole body was just shaking, fear and adrenaline sparking and surging inside her.
Edward crouched down behind the barricade, making a point of keeping the barrel of his shotgun aimed away from the others.“Five of us from cover, I reckon that’ll make something of a defense. We can hold them up, make them cut a deal.”
Cob was quiet. Ebony was right. Going to Azkhaban with real criminals just wasn’t an option. They weren’t criminals, they were just.... well.... they were just idiots. Panicked, desperate idiots. Run to the launchbay, they’d be killed as soon as the doors were blown. Stay on the station, go to prison. Then die in prison or worse. Going to prison was bad. A cold place where no sun shines.
Maybe if they fought back, they might be able to negotiate something. This was their station after all. Cob checked his taser. Yeah... that might work.
Jet was forging her way through through the rain of metal and fire. Shrapnel pattered off her armour as she jinked round a point defense missile that got a little too close for comfort. Jet just cursed and pushed on.
She saw four missiles shoot by, aimed at the Nova. The Nova’s own shots would hit any second now. One, two, three, four all five of them were chasing the projectiles in.
Five sets of explosions blossomed across the surface of the base, blowing holes in it’s structure. Atmosphere burst out, sending gouts of freezing mist into space, carrying twinkling shards of debris. Moments later, the base lights flickered and died. The rain of shrapnel ceased.
“Engel flight. Remember your objectives,” she broadcast.
Four acknowledgements came back, clear and crisp despite the electronic wall being thrown up by the station.
“Proceed to targets,” she ordered.
They broke formation, taking individual paths down towards the base. Jet dove down towards a smoking hole, the point on the surface nearest to Quattros lab.
Jet caught a glimpse of a lemon yellow fencar shooting off away into the dark. She tracked it for a moment. It matched descriptions of Satos fencar. Jet swore privately. Sato was running free.
But fuck her. She wasn’t the main target here, not by a long shot. So long as Quattro wasn’t in that thing with her, the mission was still on.
So long as Quattro didn’t escape.
Jet tried once to hail the Nova, then a second time. There was no response.
Jet tried not to wonder what had happened to them, but couldn’t help but recall those missiles. Even one of them in the wrong place would be enough to turn the Nova into a puffball of expanding debris. Jet looked back, taking a moment to scan for the ship. She didn’t see her. She didn’t see a cloud of debris either. That was a mild relief.
She landed hard on the surface of the asteroid, kicking up a hail of regolith. There were scattered craters around her feet, where a few stray shots had ripped up the rock, leading straight up to a gaping hole in the wall. Beyond, was a corridor filled with debris, lit only by the dim orange glow of battery backed emergency lights.
The cyborg ran inside.
Quattro switched the base defenses over to automatic. She herself didn’t even bother following the missiles once they were outbound, not especially caring whether they actually hit or not. It didn’t matter to her.
So long as it bought her more time. So long as the catgirl didn’t see them successfully evade.
If she was lucky, they’d blown it out of the sky. If not - most likely not - she’d still bought herself another few minutes while it circled around and came back for another pass to make a landing.
She did the maths in her mind. It worked out. Quattro rigged the system to write garbage over the disks first, overwriting files with random data.
Second, she set the encryption software to erase its own keys when the system powered down. What would be left on the disks would be little more than a chaotic smudge of bytes.
A high-powered AI might be able to crack it, eventually. What they’d get when they were done, would be a few minutes worth of output from a real random number source. They’d have wasted all that time with the decryption, to get nothing.
Well not nothing, she reminded herself bitterly, but even the good data that’d been stolen by that pest would be suspect thanks to the garbage she’d fed it.
It was much more satisfying to make them work for their failure, wasn’t it? She spared a half-second to check up on the attacking ship; It’d disappeared from scanners. A trail of debris was clearly evident, streaking below the Nehalennia horizon. Three missiles had reported detonation. Perhaps she’d gotten lucky after all.
Now, she had time to deal with the final piece of evidence standing in the Cat’s Cradle, whimpering.
The thought did occur to her to just shoot the thing, but a dead catgirl wouldn’t hold anyone up. It’d just be a body to be cleared up later. A live blank would have to be dealt with; it would have to be cared for. A live blank wouldn’t obviously be blank for quite some time.
She couldn’t destroy her systems until after she’d finished with the thing, but it’d take her five minutes to wipe it. It’d cost the enemy twice as long trying to deal with it. Spend five minutes she was sure she had now to earn five extra minutes she would need later; it sounded like a bargain.
She turned around for the last time, “Well it’s been fun, but it’s time for you to go.” Her expression morphed into a mockery of glee, “Goodbye!”
Everything was scripted to run in sequence. She just had to hit ‘enter’ and the whole system would erase the catgirl, and then get about destroying itself autonomously while she ran for it.
She never got the chance. With a metallic bang, the laboratory door slammed open, rebounding against the wall. Quattro spun on her heels to face the open door, drawing her stun-gun.
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