The pilot chuckled as the shuttle levelled out and arrowed towards an airlock near the top of the boxy platform. Neil watched, unconcerned, as they passed deactivated weapons stations, each one only requiring the touch of a button to bring it to life again. The station’s crew could kill thirty Marines, if they opened fire, but then the fleet outside would reduce the station to flaming debris, all of which would fall into the planet’s atmosphere and probably set off another environmental change.
He keyed his suit’s radio. “Commander Fox, you will assemble your command crew in the main compartment,” he ordered. “Any officer or crewman found out of place will be unceremoniously shot.”
“We understand,” Fox’s voice said. Neil’s expression twisted with disgust at the whining sound. Fox sounded very much as if he would like to fight, yet didn’t quite dare to open fire — or, for that matter, to purge the computers and trigger the self-destruct. “We will comply.”
A dull thump echoed through the shuttle as the pilot brought her in to dock with the airlock. Neil checked the computers and was relieved to discover that Marine-grade incursion software was capable of inserting itself into the station’s computers and subverting them. It was a pity that such systems couldn’t be used without a physical link into the computers, but the Empire — paranoid about the Geeks and Nerds — had constructed the systems to avoid such intrusions. It wouldn’t have mattered. If worst came to worst, Neil and his men could have burned right through the station’s hull and vented it into space, while they were secure in their armoured suits.
The airlock hissed open and Neil marched right in, ignoring the half-hearted protests from two of the younger Marines. Admiral Walker might be too important to risk, Neil knew, but the day a Marine became too important to risk was the day that he needed to resign. His own actions after his relief, he understood now, had been more about getting himself killed than about doing anything constructive. The Marines had understood. Few others would have been that understanding, or sympathetic.
He glanced from side to side as he moved through the corridor and into the control section. It was smaller than he had expected, but then, the Imperial Navy hadn’t bothered to spend large sums on a penal planet station. There were more important places to spend money on, such as senior officers’ quarters or luxuries for the Thousand Families. Commander Fox looked exactly as Neil had pictured him, a young man with an old face. His record suggested neither competence nor political connections.
“Secure them,” he ordered. He grasped Fox’s hands himself, pulling them behind the man’s back and wrapping a pair of memory cuffs around them. The metal flowed into place; comfortable, but unbreakable. He waited until the remaining twelve crewmen were subdued before continuing. “Commander Fox; why are there other people on your station, not within this compartment?”
Fox couldn’t look into the darkened visor covering Neil’s eyes. “You ordered my crew to be brought up to this compartment,” he stammered. He had to know that Neil could have crushed his neck using his suit’s augmented muscles, even by accident. “The others on this station are not part of my crew.”
“Rules lawyer,” Neil snarled. Fox looked terrified. A sudden change in his body’s heat emissions suggested that he had wet himself. “Who are they?”
“Workers,” Fox said, finally. “They’re convicts who come to work for us in exchange for safety and food and others and…”
His eyes rolled up in his head and he fainted. Neil shook his head with disgust and lowered him to the floor, dropping him with all the elegance of a sack of potatoes. “Guard them,” he ordered the first platoon, and marched out of the compartment without bothering to check if his two bodyguards were accompanying him. He wanted to see for himself. The interior of the station was dull and depression. It surprised him that, even after serving nearly a decade on the station, Commander Fox and his men hadn’t bothered to try to make it like home. They might not have been allowed children on their base, yet they could have decorated…
He checked the station’s security systems and frowned. All of the remaining life-signs were gathered in one of the cargo bays, so he led his small group there. The station didn’t actually store much between convict flights, just in case the convicts somehow managed to get up to the station and take over. The prisoner transports would bring most of their supplies, which would then be distributed by Fox and his men. It was a neat little system, with the slight problem that a few delayed fights and Fox and his crew would start to starve. Their food processors were hardly the latest models.
“In here,” he said, as they finally reached the hatch. It wasn’t coded shut, but it hardly mattered. Anyone inside the cargo bay — unless they had a powered armour suit of their own — was trapped. There was no other way out, apart from the main hatch which led out into space. “Check the environmental systems and then open the hatch.”
He wasn’t sure what he expected when he opened the hatch, but what he saw surprised him. There were thirty-seven women within the compartment, all young and stunningly pretty — and naked. Some looked as if they had been the victims of abuse; others looked as if they were cared for, even loved. They all cowered away from the Marines, almost as if they feared the Marines more than their masters. Neil couldn’t blame them. Inside the armoured suit, he was just a faceless monster. They couldn’t possibly know who or what he was.
It was easy to tell their story. They would have been selected from the female convicts and offered the choice between working on the platform… or being launched down to the surface of the planet in a one-way pod. Neil had worked with Marines ever since he had joined the Corps and he understood; some of the women looked abused because they were abused, others looked unharmed because they had been unharmed. Some of Fox’s men would have seen them purely as receptacles for their lust, while others would have allowed themselves to develop emotional attachments to their girls. Who knew — perhaps the girls felt the same way too. It wasn’t as if life on the surface of the planet would be much better.
Warning lights flashed up in his HUD and he scowled. He hadn’t realised that he was squeezing his own hands so tightly until the alerts sounded, warning them that he might damage his own suit. Part of him wanted to go back to the command section and pop Fox’s head like a grape, the other part knew that Fox and his men had merely made the best of a bad posting. There were few who would have resisted temptation.
“Take them to the shuttles,” he ordered, finally. He doubted that any of them were truly dangerous. The station’s crew would have to be insane to allow a known murderess or serial killer onboard. Of course, given that no one knew how Hester Hyman had escaped from her prison ship, it was possible that someone had been that stupid and she’d merely taken advantage of it. “And then secure the remaining station. It’s time to start scanning the records.”
“We have all the records downloaded, sir,” the communications officer said. “They’re being routed to intelligence now.”
Colin nodded, shortly. They only had a handful of intelligence officers — Anderson was the most senior — who had volunteered to join the rebellion. They couldn’t be trusted in any case; Colin only trusted Anderson because he could have blown the whistle at any time and wrecked the whole plan to mutiny before it had even got off the ground. Still… he’d found some volunteers from Daria’s people and, between them, they could start locating the prisoners the underground wanted liberated.