GDA gunship, hiding in the Berge system
They watched the freighter sit undisturbed for several hours, quietly and indifferently orbiting Berge every forty-nine minutes. To any casual observer, just another trader ship amongst several dozen other trader ships, at any given time, awaiting clearance to descend and land.
‘They’ve been there a while now,’ said an impatient Clunk. ‘Plenty of ships that arrived after them have landed. What are they waiting for?’
‘They might not have to land, just transmit the data from the drone.’
‘Aren’t you scanning for that?’
‘Yep.’
‘And have they?’
‘Nope.’
‘So, wouldn’t they have done that by now?’
‘It could be paranoia,’ said Bache. ‘They could be watching and listening to everyone else. Checking for anyone paying them unwarranted attention.’
‘Like us?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Won’t they detect our array sweeping over them?’
‘No, because I’m piggybacking our scans into Berge’s planetary defence satellites that scan everything every fifty milliseconds anyway.’
‘Clever.’
‘Thank you.’
Clunk rolled his eyes and sat back, lacing his fingers behind his head. He stared at the holomap above, willing for something, anything to happen, and then it did.
A GDA destroyer jumped in only a few hundred metres from the freighter, something flashed from one to the other and the destroyer was gone again.
‘What the fuck just happened?’ yelped Clunk, swinging upright again. ‘Did they just fire on that warship?’
‘No,’ said Bache. ‘That was a drone being handed over.’
‘So we need to follow that destroyer?’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘No, it was a drone being handed over, but not our drone.’
Clunk looked up at the holomap again.
‘So, that was just a ruse?’
‘Yep, but a worrying ruse all the same.’
‘Yeah—what’s a GDA warship doing involved in all of this? Do you know which ship that was?’
‘It wasn’t transmitting any identification,’ said Bache, tapping away on his tablet.
‘So, you don’t then?’
‘I didn’t say that,’ answered Bache, waving his wrist at the underside of the tablet.
Clunk must have witnessed it, because he turned in his seat and stared at Bache.
‘Have you got one of those illegal dermal chips?’ he asked, in an accusatory tone.
‘Don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Bache, holding his tablet up so Clunk could see the screen. ‘GDA destroyer Vasilias, supposedly destroyed several years ago above a planet called Quillon III.’
‘How d’you know that?’
‘Because I was one of the only survivors.’
‘Several years ago?’ questioned Clunk. ‘What, while you were a recruit?’
‘No, I was still a civilian then.’
‘What the hell was a civilian boy doing on a GDA destroyer in a war zone?’
‘It wasn’t a war zone and anyway it’s a long story,’ said Bache, making it obvious by his tone that he wasn’t going to say more.
‘So, you’re saying someone’s supposedly rebuilt a lost navy destroyer under the noses of the GDA?’
‘It’s the only explanatio—they’re moving,’ Bache blurted, suddenly glad to be changing the subject and pointing at the holomap.
The freighter had turned and begun dropping in towards the planet, bringing its bow up to offer its armoured underbelly to the friction of planetary insertion.
‘Do we follow?’ Clunk asked, his hands hovering over the gunship’s flight screens.
‘Get over there,’ said Bache. ‘But remain in space for now. I want to see where they put down. Watch out for traffic though. Remember no one can see us.’
Clunk had the gunship out of the shadow of the fractured moon and powering towards Berge in seconds as Bache kept an eye on the freighter’s whereabouts. It took twenty-two minutes to get to a position in space directly above and following the movements of the Killonian ship. By this time it was in the lower atmosphere, hidden below layers of cloud shrouding the planet’s surface from view.
Bache knew, however, the freighter was descending towards one of the major cities rather unimaginatively called Bergess. From what he could see, the town was set in a vee between two converging rivers, one considerably larger than the other, then both flowed out into an ocean.
The freighter pulled up at about a thousand metres and turned, following the smaller tributary inland. Where the city’s outer suburbs finally ended, desert took over and stretched onward for around eighty kilometres. The desert ended in a range of snow-capped mountains stretching east-west all the way down the majority of the northernmost edge of the continent.
The ship turned again, crossing into the desert and headed south towards the hills, before stopping suddenly in the middle of nowhere and hung motionless.
‘What are they doing?’ asked Clunk. ‘Are they lost?’
‘No, I think they’re just paranoid about being followed,’ said Bache.
‘D’you think they’ve detected our scans?’
‘I’m using the city’s arrays to keep tabs, not ours, so they certainly won’t know about us up here. They’re watching for suspicious activity behind them.’
As Bache finished speaking, the ship suddenly took off again, completed a U-turn and headed at speed back towards the city. It descended again as it approached a series of larger buildings in an industrial area right on the furthest edge of the town.
‘Okay, Clunk, take us down—but quietly.’
‘I’ll drop us in over the ocean,’ Clunk replied, his eyes already closing as he concentrated on his omniscient vision display and dropped the gunship into the gravitational pull of Berge. ‘There’s plenty of cloud cover too, so our trail should go unnoticed.’
Thirty-four minutes later, with the sound of the heat shielding popping and ticking as it cooled below them, they dropped out of the cloud cover and could see Burgess city sprawling away to the south.
‘Stay high and watch for traffic,’ said Bache, as he engaged the forward-mounted cameras and panned in on the far edge of the town.
The location of the freighter wasn’t hard to find. Its heat signature stood out from everything around that area, especially on such a cold day. It sat on a landing pad not much bigger than itself and gently steamed away in the light drizzle falling on its still-hot hull.
Even from this distance, Bache could see the main freight side door was open and a few bodies could be seen milling around between the ship and an adjacent building.
‘Can you see the drone?’ Clunk asked.
‘No, not yet,’ replied Bache. ‘The prevailing wind is coming in off the coast so stay south of them and come down to about a thousand metres just under the cloud base.’
The excellent sharpness of the cameras meant the detail was becoming very good now and facial features were quite discernible. The only problem was, most of them were wearing coats and hats against the rain, although Bache could see that some of the personnel weren’t Gatas. But many of them were and he’d forgotten that Gatas had super-sharp hearing. Several turned in their direction, peered up and pointed. A couple of the humans turned and looked up too.
‘Oh—hello,’ said Bache, his eyes wide as he zoomed the camera feed in on the upturned faces.
‘Someone you know?’ Clunk asked, concentrating on the flying and not able to see what Bache was seeing.
‘Pull back quickly,’ Bache said. ‘The locals can hear us.’
‘Shit, really?’
‘It’s this noisy bloody thing,’ Bache moaned, as the gunship backed away. ‘Crap, that’s going to have them on alert now.’
It turned out to be much worse than that, as almost all the ground crew drew weapons and began firing randomly in the rough direction of where they’d been only a few moments before.
‘They’re trying to fluoresce our shields,’ said Clunk.
‘Get back into the cloud,’ said Bache, as a section of the roof of the large building powered back, revealing a ground-based laser cannon that immediately began panning around searching for a target. ‘Ah—shit, not another one of those bastards.’
The cloud enveloped them and Clunk quickly fired the ship out over the ocean again and up towards space.
‘Are we hanging around here?’ he asked, opening his eyes and glancing at Bache.
Bache was studying the last good image of the faces from below. A second one caught his attention, this one a local, shortly before the facial recognition system confirmed his gut feeling of having seen that face before.
‘The GDA’s in big trouble,’ he whispered. ‘We need to get away from here and fast.’
‘Who was down there?’ Clunk asked.
‘That Skirmat from Dasos,’ he said.
‘What, Kyyt—the bastard who had me shot?’
‘Uh, huh.’
‘Well, that doesn’t surprise me.’
‘There was someone else—who he was talking to.’
‘Well?’
Bache took a deep breath.
‘Desulet,’ he said, almost spitting the name.
‘What, as in GDA Minister for Defence, Hitten Desulet?’
‘Uh, huh.’
‘Oh, fuck—you’re right—the GDA is in big trouble.’