© 2000 Marko Lehtinen
Craig Haynes cursed loudly as he turned his small ship into a downward spin, trying to avoid the laser beams that burned through the atmosphere, veering towards him. Even though the range of the lasers was very limited in the atmosphere, he had no inclination to stay still and see how his shields would take their punishment. The very first rule of space combat was to keep the shields as the last resort, when your piloting skills were inadequate to get you to safety in time.
As the brown-grey mountain range grew in sight in the main display, Craig gritted his teeth together and kept his eyes on the rapidly decreasing number that indicated his distance from the ground. All through his manoeuvring, he had been able to duck the laser beams, but he had not been able to identify the attacker. The battle scanner showed only two ships in his vicinity and one of them was the almost unarmed passenger transport that had launched from the spaceport just ahead of him.
He had paid little attention to the other ship flying in the vicinity of the spaceport, since its flight path had given him the impression that it was just another trader in search of a landing pad and some human company. In retrospect he realised that he had made a mistake in not identifying the ship as soon as he had noticed it, but there was nothing he could do about it now. The sudden unannounced attack had taken him by surprise and all he could do now was to try to stay alive.
He grimaced in disgust when he glanced at the radar screen again realised what the presence of only two dots in the scanner meant. No police had launched after the uninvited attacker. The spaceport and the city in its vicinity were only ten kilometres from his present location and if the police had decided to come to help him, they should already show up in the scanner display. And if the police were not going to help him, he would have to take care of the attacker by himself.
He spent no time trying to figure out how the attacker had managed to arrange the disinterest of the police and concentrated on trying to survive the encounter. The treetops on the mountainsides were already sharp in his view, when he finally lifted the nose of his craft and tried to level his flight path. The bottom thruster whined at the edges of its endurance as the ship tried to follow his commands. Craig would have liked to turn his ship around completely, to use the main thruster instead of the manoeuvring thrusters as he would have done in space, but he knew that he had to take full use of the atmosphere itself, and the partial aerodynamics of his craft, to avoid the tall trees. You just could not pilot a ship the same way in an atmosphere as you did in the vacuum of space.
When it was clear that he had been able to turn his ship in time, Craig took another glance at the scanner screen. He smiled wryly as he noticed that the other ship had dived after him, but at a considerably slower speed. With the safety of the longer distance, he looked at the main display of his surroundings and turned his ship back towards the city. If the police did not care about a murder attempt taking place ten kilos from the population centre, perhaps they would change their mind if he brought the battle to them. He barely dared to hope that if he played it right, he might be able to get out of the dire situation without having to fire a single shot.
His single enemy had not fired its lasers for a while, which told Craig that he was not dealing with a beginner who would spray the landscape with laser fire, hoping to get a lucky shot at him. But that was not a surprise to him anymore. No beginner would have attacked him so close to the spaceport or have been able to take care of the police the way this attacker appeared to have done.
Craig checked the rear view display and saw that his enemy had not yet been able to get onto his tail. There was a part of him that wished that he had been able to see the attacker, so that he would have been able to identify at least the ship type, but the bigger part was only happy to note that he had been able to outmanoeuvre his enemy. Since he still had time, he checked the status of his three missiles and wondered if he would have to rely on them. With his luck, they would probably crash down into the woods and fields below, having been designed for space use only, but he was still prepared to arm and use them as he tried to keep his ship in its course towards the city.
It was then that the laser beam passed only metres above his ship, its path steaming as the laser burned through the humid air outside. Craig checked the rear view display, saw the enemy ship at the edge of the view and turned his own ship sharply to the left, at the same time locking his radar mapper to the other ship. Immediately, the upper right corner of his main display was filled up with valuable information.
His attacker was flying a Cobra Mk III, equipped with a military drive, a beam laser and some shielding. Craig's eyes narrowed as he studied the statistics of the ship model that was over two hundred years older than his own ship. Of course, that did not mean much. The Cobra was still one of the most manoeuvrable ships in the human space, and certainly at least equal to his own ship, however modified it was. It should have been easy for the Cobra pilot to follow him through his dive towards the planet and fry him out of the sky if the pilot had any skill at all.
Craig could not make himself believe that he was up against someone who, on one hand, was able to plan an attack as well as the Cobra pilot had done, and, on the other hand, was an inferior pilot. Therefore, his immediate conclusion was that the other pilot was toying with him, perhaps preparing him for some surprise that lay ahead. He took another look at the city that now lay only a couple of kilometres in front of him. Suddenly, he felt shivers running down his back as he looked at the dark walls of the city rising threateningly towards the sky and blocking the sunshine from his view. His thoughts went suddenly back to his mission and how he had thought that he had earned the money so easily this time.
***
Manchester Starport was one of the busiest spaceports in the sector, which did not actually mean much at all, given that the system, Tionisla, was located out of way of any important part of the populated space. It was not part of any serious trade route and since the system was in a state of anarchy and the only planet with atmosphere had an average temperature of over 50 degrees of centigrade, it did not attract many tourists either. It was the high-tech system, Zaonce, in the same sector that drew most of the traffic and trade, and Lave and Leesti in the adjacent sector. Not much was left for a system such as Tionisla.
But there were lots of people in Manchester Starport despite all this. There were some people who had been driven away from the Federation or the Empire for their numerous crimes, others who relished in anarchy, contracting themselves for the numerous assassination missions that the locals often commissioned at each other. Many of the people there were also pirates, who used the system as a stronghold for their frequent attacks to the richer systems nearby.
All this information rolled around in Craig's mind, when he navigated his way along the city streets back towards the spaceport. He was driving an old model air-car that, with all the peculiar noises coming from the engines, sounded as if it was about to break apart if he tried to go faster than 30 kph. Which he would have liked to do, since he did not feel at all secure. The necessary visit to the city had been a short one, for which he was grateful. He doubted his chances at surviving in such a hostile place for more than a day, since he did not belong to any of the pirate or trade organisations that provided their members some semblance of security. At least that of greater numbers, if nothing else. Being an alone in a strange place, asking stupid questions were reasons enough to get oneself killed and Craig had no wish to end up in the local gutter. In the permanent heat and humidity, that persisted even inside the city limits and inside his supposedly climate-controlled air-car, his body would start smelling in only a couple of hours. He did not want to end his life like that.
He grinned slightly as he veered his car around a corner, deserving an ugly sneer from a badly dressed pedestrian on the sidewalk who thought that the smile was aimed at him. Craig glanced over his shoulder to make sure that the sneering man did not turn around after him and was relieved to see that the pedestrian had been just that, a pedestrian - with no pressing motivation to chase after him and paint the road with the pinkish colour of his brains.
Sighing in relief, Craig turned his attention ahead again and touched his jacket pocket with his left hand while gripping the steering stick with his right one. That pocket contained a datapad with information in it that would see him free of his debts and possibly living in a safer system for the next few months. But it would only do that to him if he managed to get it away from the star system to Lave safely and unnoticed.
What made him less than certain about his chances of getting out of Tionisla was the fact that he knew little if anything about his mission, except for what he had been told. His simple, if it really was that, task had been to find a certain old man and ask him a selection of questions that he had been given beforehand. The questions had appeared onto the datapad screen for him to read during the interview and he had had no time to think about any of them. The whole discussion had been recorded onto the datapad and it was the only copy that he had been told to have. He was not permitted to copy the contents of the datapad, or even go through the recorded interview again by himself. As it was, he had not understood half of the questions himself, but since it was not his job to understand them, he did not worry about it. He tried to convince himself that since would be paid handsomely for the contents of the datapad, he did not have to care what the interview had been about or what was going to be done with the information.
The promise of ten thousand credits for a successful retrieval of information had been enough to almost persuade him to ignore even the slightest inclination of interest towards the aims of his commissioners that he might have felt at the time when he accepted the mission. The mere idea of the kind of money had been enough to make him even turn a blind eye to his own security and come to a place like Manchester Starport with no other security than his old and rusting sidearm. But the situation had quickly changed when he had actually read the questions aloud to the old man and realised how strange - in their apparent innocence - they were. Added to that the knowledge that someone was willing to pay him ten big ones for the mission, had slowly began to eat at the back of his mind when he had left the interviewee and headed back towards the spaceport, until he was ready to believe that everyone that he saw was somehow after him and the datapad.
As to the strangeness of the questions, most of them had seemed simple questions of the old man's past and work history, as if it had been a simple job interview. Some others had explored the old man's opinions and feelings of his career and life, whereas some of them he had been unable to understand at all. Still, the old man had answered all of the questions without a question, which must have been largely due to the drunken state in which Craig had found him and which he had further induced with some money invested at the local drinking establishment where they had met. If there had not been the extremely high reward for the mission, which the client had explained to be due to the fact that he needed the information so badly, did not have time to go to Tionisla by himself and because the system crawled with pirate activity, he might not have suspected anything at all. But as it was, there was definitely something fishy in the works.
But in the end he had reached the spaceport without any difficulties and found his modified Gyr on its assigned landing pad where he had left it. He had felt his uncertainty give way to elation as he had realised that he could already consider the ten thousand credits earned and start planning the system where he was going to spend it.
His mind had been preoccupied with these thoughts when he had received the departure clearance and started up the enhanced manoeuvring thrusters of his trusty ship. The fifty percent increase in their power, compared to the standard model, had cost him a pretty sum, but had often also been the deciding factor in saving his life in battles against pirate and other ships. The modification was also the main reason why he was in debt and had to take whatever seedy missions he could in order to pay the nasty interest every month.
In his elation and relief, he had not noticed the Cobra Mk III until it started shooting and him, and then he had been only saved by the fact that his reactions were faster than his mind.
***
As the city walls loomed in front of him, Craig was almost certain that he was finally done for and that, in his greed, he had finally taken up a mission that was too much for him. Afraid that the police force of Manchester Starport was also against him and waiting for him in the cover of the tall buildings, he turned his ship aside, bursting his manoeuvring thrusters to full force in an attempt to stop his ship before he entered the city limits. At the same time, the Cobra started firing at him again, the beam laser searing into the walls of the buildings behind the Gyr as if they were made of paper.
Explosions surrounded the GYR as the buildings went up in flames and Craig did everything he could to avoid the flying pieces of mortar and the enemy laser fire. His shields were quickly giving away under the strain, but he was able to stop his ship and turn its nose towards the attacking Cobra while the Gyr's bottom thrusters screamed as it kept him aloft in the air. A missile soared towards him from the Cobra so suddenly that he had no time to hit ECM in time, but it hit one of the city buildings instead of him.
Droplets of sweat lined Craig's face as his sweaty fingers found the trigger of his own main weapon and he returned fire to the Cobra. He was doing the one thing that was most likely to get any pilot dead in a millisecond; standing still in the air while the other ship was zooming in, weapons blazing. But the luck was on his side and the Cobra pilot was unable to hit him with his beam laser and soon he had to turn his ship aside to avoid flying into the maelstrom where the Gyr was still trapped.
Gradually, the Gyr's main thrusters started to get him out from under the falling buildings and Craig had time to check his scanner. The air was full of old police Vipers now, as if they had only just realised what was happening and started to act accordingly. The Cobra that had attacked him was accelerating towards the twelve kilometre safety zone, apparently planning to jump into hyperspace as soon as it got there. Craig wondered if it all had really happened so quickly that the police had not been able to react any sooner, or if his attacker had bribed them to stay away and they had changed their mind only when the battle was brought into the city.
As the Gyr's comm system was filled up with police threats to stop and surrender his ship, as if he was the responsible party, Craig closed his ears and concentrated on getting himself out of the way of the Vipers. A quick check told him that he was already a marked fugitive in the system and that the fine was set so high that he was never going to have a chance to pay it. Grinding his teeth, and knowing that if he did not make it, he would spend the rest of his days in some dark, cold prison cell, Craig accelerated his ship towards the mountain range and the forest fires that marked the place where he had been forced back to the low altitudes and into the city.
The police were not so easily ignored, however, and the four old vipers opened fire at him, their laser beams expertly closing the Gyr in from above and from the sides, thus forcing it further towards the ground if it wanted to avoid being hit. Craig cursed and checked his shields, only now noticing that they were already down to 30 percent due to his encounter with the falling buildings. He tried accelerating away for a moment longer, but that only gave the police vipers more time to co-ordinate their laser beams to force him down.
There was nothing more than Craig could do if he did not want to take his ship through the barricade of laser fire and risk blowing himself up. He opened the comm system and announced his surrender, powering down his main thruster at the same time. It seemed that he was going to have to face that cold cell or find a way to pay the fines that had accumulated for him. He doubted his chances to avoid the fines, even though he was, strictly speaking, not responsible for the damages on the city.
When the police were satisfied with the evidence that he really was surrendering, the comm system burst out with their message, delivered in a strict and emotionless tone. "GR-873, turn your ship around and follow the Vipers to your destination." Craig sunk back in his seat and did as he was told to, knowing that he was now, once for all, really done for.
***
"You are facing serious charges here, Mr Haynes," the policewoman said. She was wearing a uniform that seemed to snuggle up to her body in all the right places and her features were not unlovely either, but they did nothing to alleviate the seriousness in her voice. "Figures from the disaster area indicate that at least a hundred men, women and children were killed due to your actions."
The police officer, who had not introduced herself, checked the numbers from a datapad that she held in her hand, which told Craig that those numbers would likely rise as the interrogation went on. He tried to ignore his own feelings of horror at the thought of so many dead and concentrate on his own situation. After all, he said to himself, he was innocent to those deaths.
When he had landed his ship to one of the police landing pads, there had been a squad of wide-eyed police officers waiting for him, probably expecting to see some evil looking murderous bastard that mass murderers always looked like in holovids. But Craig know that his appearance had been a disappointment to them. With his sandy-brown dirty hair and his height less than 180 centimetres, which was extremely short considering the average height of nearly 190 cm, he must have seemed the most innocent small-time trader that there had ever been visiting in Manchester Starport.
Nevertheless, the officers had surrounded him and manhandled him towards the department buildings. Inside, he had been stripped of his weapons and every other piece of equipment that he was carrying, including the extra datapad that he had been given in Lave to carry out his mission. The police officer who had taken the two datapads, had given them a curious look and set them aside from all the other standard stuff that they had found on him.
Then he had been brought to his present location, which was a small, square room with only one door. He had not been given much time to recover as the female police officer had soon entered the room and proclaimed the words that, to Craig, seemed to indicate a very unpleasant future for him. He raised his eyes to meet the officer's, but she had turned away from him. From behind, it seemed to Craig that she had caught something in her eye, as she wiped at it with her fingers.
"I didn't do it," Craig said slowly, and in a voice that sounded meek even to his own ears. "It was the one who attacked me who killed all those people."
At the sound of his words, the officer turned around and stepped towards him, her eyes wide in anger. Before he had time to see what she intended, her hand slapped him on his left cheek, almost dropping him from the chair he was sitting on. "Don't even try to deny your responsibility, you piece of scum," she said. "It doesn't matter who started the fight, as long as it was brought here inside the city district and caused the death of all those people."
Craig raised his hand to his cheek and turned his eyes away from the officer, wondering what he should say. For an officer who had found herself working in a system as corrupted as Tionisla, it was clear that she was one of the more honest ones. At least when faced with a crime that had caused the death of so many people. He had no idea what he could do to get himself out of the trouble and thus he kept his mouth shut. What he needed the least right now, was another slap from the woman.
"What were you doing in the Manchester Starport, Mr Haynes?" the policewoman asked and measured the small room with short, precise steps, the heels of her black shiny boots clicking on the concrete each time with the same carefully measured amount of force.
Craig followed the hypnotising steps with his eyes, trying to decide how much he could tell and whether any of what he had to say could make his own situation somewhat easier or if he would only be digging himself a deeper hole. "This was a normal business trip," he said at last, already bracing himself for another strike from the officer. It did not come.
The officer stopped walking and turned to face him with a sneer on her face. "Do not lie to me, Mr Haynes. No one visits Manchester Starport in normal business in a single pilot fighter. Tell me what you were doing here now, or we'll have to forget about being polite with you."
Craig grimaced and looked at the tabletop in front of him. He knew very well how impolite the police of pirate infested small systems could be and he did not want to go there. Thus far he had been given more leeway than he might have ever hoped for, as shown by the fact that he was even alive anymore. Almost anywhere else, the police would just have shot him from the sky and be done with it. Or executed him for his crimes without a chance to explain himself. With that thought in his mind, Craig narrowed his eyes suspiciously and looked up at his interrogator.
"Why are you being this polite with me, officer? Why was I not fried in the second your Vipers launched?"
"You are not asking the questions here, Mr Haynes," the police said. "Answer to my question, or you will be sorry."
Craig grimaced. "I was hired to do an interview," he began, "of an old man named Victor Decasse. I did that, and I was leaving the system when I was suddenly attacked."
The police officer frowned down at him. "You expect us to believe that, Mr Haynes?"
Craig nodded.
The officer checked her datapad and punched a few buttons. Craig saw the screen lit up with a few rows of text and a small picture. The officer frowned at the information for a moment and then turned back to look at her prisoner. "It appears that we do have a citizen by that name in the city. Who is this Victor Decasse and why did you want to interview him?"
"I accepted a mission to do so, officer, in the Lave system," Craig said carefully. It seemed to him that the officer was willing to believe him for a while, but he did not think it would continue when she found out how little he knew of anything. "I don't know who this man is, or was when he was younger, nor do I know anything else about him."
"Who hired you?" the woman asked. She was now standing in a relaxed posture and did not seem inclined to continue her stroll around the room.
Craig shrugged. "Someone who said she was working for the RIG newspaper. I did not ask for more."
The officer frowned at him, obviously dissatisfied with his answer. "What did they want from this Victor Decasse. Surely you did not come here to interview with that little information. What were they after?"
"I don't know," Craig said simply. He had accepted the strange mission since he had got a grand in forward payment and had been promised nine more when he returned. No one asked too many questions at such a delicious offer.
"What did you interview him about, then?" the officer asked, clearly getting impatient again. Her left foot started tapping the concrete floor.
Craig found himself grimacing again. He knew his answer to be a bad one. "The questions were about his life, mainly. It appears that he was once a politician in some regional government." He paused and looked at the officer as honestly as he could, saying, "I did not really pay that much attention to the questions, you understand. I just read them aloud and recorded his answers."
The officer raised her eyebrows. "You recorded the interview? Where's that recording now? And where did you read the questions from?"
Craig explained the fact that he had had a datapad that the woman who had hired had given to him for the assignment and asked him to return it to her when he finished. He did not explain that he had been told not to study the datapad or the recordings after the interview.
After hearing his story, the officer nodded to him and left the room, closing and locking the door behind her. Left alone, Craig leaned back in his chair and wondered what the police would do next. They already had the datapad and he suspected that someone had already been studying it while the female officer had questioned him. He also suspected that the recording of the interview would be encrypted just in case he had still had the inclination to try to access it during his return journey. He was more than certain that he would have, as well. Long journeys in system space were usually so dull that one did everything one could to pass the time. And DreamWare was sometimes not quite enough for the job.
There was no clock in the room, but Craig knew that no more than thirty minutes had passed when the door opened again and his interrogator returned. There was a worried expression on her face and the prisoner wondered what had happened. He hoped that there were no more casualties in the city's disaster area.
"We studied both of your datapads, Mr Haynes," the officer began as she stepped to the small table and looked at him. There was a moment of silence, before she continued, her voice very troubled, "Did you take a single look at the datapad that you were given, Mr Haynes."
"No, I didn't," Craig answered.
The officer frowned, and said, "Then you should probably know that there is no trace of your interview on its memory banks, Mr Haynes."
Craig straightened up in his chair and stared at the officer. "There has to be," he insisted. "I was not lying to you about it. You can ask Mr Decasse himself, if you need confirmation."
The female officer tilted her head sideways and her eyes bore into his. "I do not suspect you, Mr Haynes. In fact, I now think that you really know as little as you have indicated in this interrogation. Before I found out what I did on the datapad, I was thinking about giving you over to some of our specialist interrogators, but now it seems unnecessary."
Craig stared at the police officer, trying to read her mind and find out what she knew. "What do you mean, officer? What did you find on that datapad?"
"You should really make a better job at checking the people who you fork for, Mr Haynes," the officer said, clearly stalling revealing him what she knew. Then, after a dramatic pause, she said, "The datapad that you carried contained no data at all. It had been completely wiped clean and not even a trace of any information ever being there remained."
"But what," Craig stuttered. "How..?"
"There was a transmitter inside the datapad, Mr Haynes. It appears that any recording that you made was immediately transmitted to somewhere else. Then, a virus program ran through the system and erased all the data in it," the officer said coolly, studying the effects her words had on Craig.
"But," Craig exclaimed, "what does it mean?"
"It means, Mr Haynes, that whoever hired you to make this interview was only after the data. Either they did not want to pay for your work, which seems unlikely, or they wanted to hide every track of their involvement, including you."
Craig leaned towards the table and buried his face into his hands. He had done several rather dangerous missions in his time, but he had never got mixed up in something like this. His mind was numb and he could not understand what was happening around him. The interview had seemed suspicious to him, right from the beginning, but he had not suspected that he might be double-crossed as badly as he had been. It had not even occurred to him that he had not been carrying the recording of the interview with him.
"And that's not all, Mr Haynes," the officer continued after a while.
Craig raised his face from his hands and looked at the dark-haired woman. When he saw her expression, he prepared himself for another shock. "There's more?" he asked hoarsely.
"We tried to contact Victor Decasse, the man you said you interviewed. He was unreachable, and it seems that his home address was in the same building that was hit by the missile that was fired by that Cobra Mk III that chased you."
Craig buried his face back into his hands and fainted.