"Yessir!"
The screen blanked, then relit almost instantly with the face of Colonel Arturo Tigh. The colonel looked just as worried as the major, but he hid it better and managed to produce a tight smile.
"I'm always honored to hear from you, Sir Arthur, but I'm afraid—"
"I'm sorry to disturb you, Colonel, but I need to know what's happening out there."
"We don't know, sir. We— Is this a secure channel?" Keita nodded, and the colonel shrugged. "We don't know what's going on. We had a major security breach two hours ago, and things have been going crazy ever since."
"Security breach?" Keita's eyes narrowed. "What kind of breach?"
"Somebody hijacked a forward recon skimmer—at least we assume it was hijacked, though we haven't been able to turn up a missing vehicle report on it yet—and crashed through Gate Twelve. The automatics gave it a transponder clearance, but then the gate sentries—" The colonel looked like a man eating green persimmons. "Sir Arthur, they say they never saw it. Every alert on the base went off when it crossed the sensor threshold, but ten different people, all of them good, reliable types, say they never saw a thing." He paused, as if awaiting Keita's snort of disbelief, but the brigadier only grunted and nodded for him to continue.
"Well, the inner sensor net started tracking immediately, and the duty officer scrambled a pair of sting ships while the ready skimmers went in pursuit, but that was one hell of a pilot. He never brought his own weapons on line, but we've got fires all over the western ring access route—all from misses from the pursuit force, as far as I can tell—and then the skimmer went straight up like a missile and the stingers nailed it with HVW."
"The pilot?" Keita demanded harshly, and the colonel shrugged.
"We assumed he was still aboard, but now I'm not so sure. I mean, no one saw him abandon the vehicle, so he ought to've been aboard, but then this other thing came up, and I just can't believe it's a coincidence."
"What other thing, Colonel?"
"Something's gone haywire with one of our ships, sir. One of our ships, hell! We've got a brand new alpha synth boosting for the outer system at max without clearance or orders."
"Who's on board?" Keita's strained face was suddenly white.
"That's just it," Tigh said almost desperately. "As far as we know, no one's on board. It wasn't even due to impress until ten hundred hours!"
"Vishnu!" Keita whispered. He wrenched his eyes away from the screen to stare at Ben Belkassem, and the inspector shrugged. The brigadier turned back to the colonel. "Have you tried to raise it?"
"Of course. We're trying right now, but we're getting damn-all back."
Keita closed his eyes in pain, then straightened his shoulders.
"Colonel," he said very quietly, "I'm afraid you're going to have to destroy that ship."
"Are you crazy?!" Tigh blurted, then swallowed. "Sir," he went on in a more controlled voice, "we're talking about an alpha synth. That ship costs thirty billion credits. I can't—I mean, no one groundside can authorize—"
"I can," Keita grated, and the colonel's face froze as he realized just who, and what, he was speaking to.
"Sir, I'll still have to give the port admiral a reason."
"Very well. Tell him I have reason to believe his ship has been hijacked by Captain Alicia DeVries, Imperial Cadre, for purposes unknown."
"A Cadrewoman?" Tigh stared at Keita. "I don't— Sir, I don't even know if that's possible! Was she checked out on cyber synth?"
"No, and it doesn't matter. Captain DeVries has been hospitalized for observation since the Mathison's World Raid. She's demonstrated ... unstable and delusionary behavior," Keita's hands clenched out of the screen pickup's field, as if his words cost him physical pain, but his voice held level, "and unknown but highly—I repeat, Colonel, highly—unusual and unpredictable capabilities no one can account for. We have evidence that she's already reactivated her own augmentation without hardware support and despite three levels of security lockouts, not to mention her apparent ability to hijack the skimmer to which you referred. Given that, I believe it's entirely possible she's somehow penetrated your security and managed to steal that ship, and if she has—" The brigadier paused and steeled himself.
"If she has, she must be considered deranged and highly dangerous."
"Dear God." Tigh was even whiter than Keita had been. "The only way she could even move it is through the alpha synth. That means she must've made impression, and if she's crazy—!"
His voice had risen steadily as the awful possibility registered, and now he spun away from the screen and started shouting for the port admiral. -=0=-***-=0=
"I believe they've made up their minds about us," the AI remarked, and Alicia nodded tightly. The tick still trembled in her blood—she didn't dare waste time vomiting just now—and every excruciating second was an eternity. No one had seemed to notice for perhaps a minute, and the first attempt to do anything about it had been limited to efforts to access the ship's remotes.
Even if the AI hadn't been prepared to ignore them, they would have been fruitless. Tisiphone had wiped the telemetry programming early on in her struggle with the computer, but Groundside hadn't realized that. They'd gone on trying to access with ever increasing desperation for five full minutes, during which the alpha synth's velocity had climbed to over a hundred KPS. Then all access attempts had stopped and silence had reigned for several minutes. By the time the first effort to raise Alicia by name came in, the alpha synth was up to over two hundred KPS—and a visibly-shrinking Soissons lay over fifty thousand kilometers astern.
Alicia had listened to the com without response, perfectly willing to let them dither while she watched through her sensors, wrapped in fascination and a sort of manic delight, and she and her—allies? symbiotes? delusions?—perpetrated the greatest single-handed theft in the history of mankind. But the voices on the other end of the com link were changing as Groundside got itself together, and now a new, crisp speaker was on the line.
"Captain DeVries, this is Port Admiral Marat. I order you to decelerate and heave to immediately. If you refuse to comply, you will leave me no choice but to consider you a hostile vessel. Respond at once."
"They sound a bit upset," the AI observed. "Ha! Look at that"
A mental finger guided Alicia's attention to the blue fireflies of a dozen cruisers' suddenly activated Fasset drives in Soisson's orbit and data on their capabilities slotted into her brain. It was an incredible sensation, completely different from an assault shuttle's instrumentation.
"How bad is it?"
"Those hulks?" The AI sniffed, and Alicia bit her lip at the scathing tone. It was like listening to herself in what Tannis called "insufferably confident mode," and she felt a sudden stab of sympathy for her friend. "I've got a ten-minute head start, and they can't come within twelve percent of my field strength, even this close to a planet."
"What about their weapons?"
"They're some threat," the AI admitted, "but I'm not too worried. My data on their fire control isn't complete, but I know enough to screw their accuracy to hell. They'll have quite a while to shoot—maximum beam range is about fifteen light-seconds, and half-charge energy torps have about five more LS of reach—but they're going to be lousy shots."
"Great, but I think you left something out—like missiles."
"So? Cruisers are too small to mount SLAMs. Their Hauptman coil missiles have an effective range of about ten light-minutes, but the best they can reach before burn-out is point-six-cee. Then they go ballistic, and there's no way one cruiser flotilla's gonna saturate my defenses."