Free Aneka Jansen 6: The Lowest Depths of Shame by Niall Teasdale Page B

on his right. His suit had picked up an identity transponder and was decrypting the bio-monitor readouts as he narrowed in on it. Low blood pressure, thready, weak pulse, but whoever it was they were alive. He found her as a name flashed past: Tuft, Donna. She was lying in a pool of blood, but not all of it was hers. Beside her lay a dead Herosian in combat gear, killed by a laser hit to the side of the head. Someone had killed the Herosian and not noticed the woman?
    Jared sent out a request for immediate medical assistance to his location and a notification to the rest of his squad that he had a survivor he was securing. Then he checked the rest of the apartment, but there were no more aliens, and no sign of any real conflict aside from the two casualties.
    It was as the medics were arriving that Jared realised that there was also nothing in the way of weapons in the room.
    13.7.530 FSC.
    Ape Gibbons watched as bodies were carried out of the mine. He had insisted on coming down to the planet, despite the protestations of his XO and Thackett who seemed to think that surface activities were none of his concern. So he was down on the planet and regretting every moment of it.
    It was also why Leeforth was standing nearby in full Marine armour and carrying a rifle which looked large against her slim frame. She handled it like a pro, however. She was an ex-Marine, so she was a pro, but her talents were not really needed.
    ‘You sure you need to see this?’ Leeforth asked over the direct radio connection they had set up.
    ‘Yes,’ Ape replied. ‘I need to see this.’
    ‘It’s not like this is our fault, and the Guardians have this covered.’
    There was silence for a second as a stretcher with a rather small body on it was carried out.
    ‘Something doesn’t feel right about the way this happened,’ Ape said, and then moved toward a figure walking out of the tunnel the microbots had carved. He switched his suit to external speaker. ‘Captain Tasker, you’re finding hostages?’
    ‘We’re finding bodies,’ Tasker replied sourly. ‘The explosions brought the roof down across half the mine. We’re hoping to find some people alive deeper in the tunnels, but… Kids, Ape… They were children.’
    ‘Yes… we need to talk, somewhere private.’
    ‘The Hand? Meet me up there.’
    Ape nodded, turning on his heel. ‘Judy, let’s go. We’ve a meeting to attend.’
    Shadataga.
    ‘We’ve been through every scrap of sensor data we have, several times,’ Winter said. ‘None of our systems picked up any radio traffic of the kind reported by this frigate.’
    ‘That… seems odd,’ Aneka said.
    ‘But inconclusive. The frigate was in a low orbit. It could have picked something up we could not.’
    ‘Your message suggested that your findings were more… more of an issue than that.’
    ‘Yes… You read the end of mystery novels first, don’t you?’
    ‘No! I just… like getting to the point.’
    Winter’s lips twitched. ‘The nuclear detonations happened more or less immediately after the interception of ground battery fire and the elimination of a large number of fighters. None of the Navy’s missiles appeared to be in the area of the detonations. It would appear that the Herosians did, indeed, set off nuclear charges themselves.’
    ‘Except,’ War put in, ‘that the explosions were low-altitude air bursts. One at about seventy-five metres, the other at fifty. Not high, but higher than any of the buildings in the area.’
    ‘But none of the missiles got that low,’ Aneka said, her eyes on the tracks of every weapon that had dropped down from the ships in orbit.
    ‘That ignores this anomaly.’ The display retraced its steps to before the missile were launched and rotated, swinging around to show them the far side of the planet where a lone frigate was low in the atmosphere. There were heat markers showing on its forward hull. ‘We detected this ship launching missiles forty-seven seconds before the