Traitor's Duty by Richard Tongue Read Free Book Online

Apparently there was an attack on Hydra Station…”
     “Not Hades,” Ryder interrupted.
     “No,” he replied, shaking his head. “A Cabal task force, two battlecruisers and four scoutships. I’ll let you take a look at the details, but the basic gist is that they were repelled with light losses, and that Hydra is secure.” He paused, then said, “Damn.”
     “What’s the problem?”
     “If the Cabal launched an attack,” he looked at the date stamp and continued, “two weeks ago, that might suggest that they never had any intention of honoring the peace treaty in the first place.” Shrugging, he said, “Of course, this might just be a trick, as I said, and we don’t know what’s happened out here since the task force left. Tramiel might not have needed any help to start a war.”
     “Then we might have come out here for nothing.”
     “Hardly that,” Logan said. “In the worst case, we’ve just thrown another laser battlecruiser at the front line. I doubt we’ll get any serious complaints about that. Not until the dust settles, anyway.”
     “And when it does?”
     “My advice? Be elsewhere.”
     

 
    Chapter 5
     
     Orlova took a sip of her coffee, and glanced around the restaurant for the fifth time . The view was perfect from her table, looking out across the street to the nondescript building on the far side, the one with two security guards standing in front of it. To the casual observer, they were just private guards, nothing to attract attention, but they were carrying last-model Triplanetary sidearms at their belt, and standing in a perfect ‘at ease’ stance .
     She glanced down at her datapad, looking at the specifications again. Former Cornucopia offices, sold to a holding company six months ago, listed as Progressive Party headquarters for Sagan City. Evidently those plans had chan g ed; no placards, signs or banners trying to tempt people to yield them their vote, just two stony-faced guards.
     Again, to the casual observer, the former owners of the building would have meant little other than another collapsed company, which had managed to cause a nine-month slump on their way down. Given that Cornucopia was a Cabal front, however, she was willing to bet that there were some interesting surprises waiting in that building, gadgets that the new owners might well be making use of. They could hardly hold the Commandant in a Triplanetary facility; using one of the open ones would have le d to a lot of questions no-one wanted to answer, and Intelligence wasn’t co-operating sufficiently to let them use a safe house.
     The second hand of her old watch continued to count down, slowly heading for the deadline. The wonderful thing about living in a completely artificial environment was that everything had to be controlled, and therefore could be taken over. Naturally, most of the systems had lots of redundancies and back-ups. Taking out the life support systems would never be permitted to happen, but the more cosmetic features had rather less security. Such as the lighting, for example. She reached into her pocket for her sunglasses, closed her eyes, counted to five, and slipped them on.
     Harper had done her job well, and the blinding light had everyone unprepared in a daze, including the two guards at the door. As she raced across the street, all the exterior lights went out, and her glasses automatically switched to night-vision, giving her a perfect view of the pandemonium taking place outside. From a far corner, out of sight, a pair of blowguns, wielded by two soldiers from the Ragnarok Embassy who had volunteered for the assignment, fired two darts at the guards, who slumped down to the ground as Orlova raced past.
     By now, security would be all over the place, but their priority was going to be dealing with the sabotage to the lighting systems, with everything else permitted to wait. There was no way that they could permit any risk that someone might