Free Aneka Jansen 5: The Greatest Heights of Honour by Niall Teasdale Page A

attacked.’ Aneka glanced at the kitchen. ‘Don’t let that happen either. Janna would never speak to me again.’
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    Ella held up a small, red data card and Aneka looked at it a little suspiciously. ‘A blonde teenager bumped into me on the way home,’ Ella said. ‘She slipped this into my bodice, would you believe, while she was helping me up and apologising a lot.’
    ‘A teenager we know?’
    ‘Uh-huh. And it’s red…’
    Aneka took the card and headed for the bedroom. Locked in her gun safe, hidden away at the back of one of the wardrobes, was a secure card reader. Despite being quite secure in and of itself, the device had no decryption system built into it; that was handled once the entire package had been uploaded to Aneka’s internal storage. It took her twenty minutes or so to go over the contents once it had been decrypted.
    ‘Basically,’ Aneka explained, ‘it’s from Justine. Someone claiming to know who killed Winter, and why, has come forward. They say they’re being hunted. They’ll come in, but they only trust Elaine Truelove. Sharissa will be handling the security and extraction.’
    ‘So it’s a trap,’ Ella said flatly.
    ‘Well, yeah.’
    ‘So why are they going to do it?’
    ‘In case it isn’t a trap, but with the stipulations for the meeting…’
    ‘Like?’
    ‘Hand weapons only. No more than three agents besides Sharissa and Elaine. The meeting is to take place in a wooded area about twenty klicks outside the city. Winter sent topographic maps and aerial photographs, and it’s prime ambush territory. It’s a trap.’
    Ella’s hands clenched into fists and she bit her lip, worry written all over her face. ‘Can we do anything? And by “we” I obviously mean you.’
    Aneka flashed her a grin. ‘Well, Winter’s given me a lot of information…’
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    ‘TacNet up and running?’ Aneka asked silently.
    ‘Full tactical network orchestration is engaged,’ Al replied. ‘Data feeds from the passive sensor array are assimilated. I have hacked the communications network the agents are using, and included their bio-monitor feeds in the available data. I have also managed to patch into the air traffic control system for the city and I am monitoring the radar grid for this area. It is possible that Justine has detected my intrusion, but no one else has and she will say nothing.’
    ‘And your new software…?’
    ‘Is functioning perfectly. This is not the field trial I had planned for it. Something less critical involving a simple archaeology expedition would have been less of a stress test.’
    ‘Maybe, but I trust you and it’ll be useful. Give me a display of the area.’
    It was not so much a display as an environment. Aneka was sealed away within her nanosuit; even her eyes were covered in a layer of living metal. Since she saw through the ‘eyes’ of the suit’s sensors it was easy enough to replace that with a virtual environment representing a bird’s eye view of the area, in three dimensions, stitched together from multispectral sensor images and manufactured data. It took a second or two to adjust to the sudden shift in perspective, then…
    ‘This is amazing. I feel like I can see everything. I’m a tactician, not a strategist, but this makes me feel like I could do both.’
    ‘If it were not for your comprehension speed, the influx of data would be overwhelming,’ Al reminded her. ‘You are rather more capable of handling this sensory load than a normal person would be.’
    ‘Huh.’
    Sharissa, Justine, and Truelove were in a clearing within a large coppice of moderately aged trees. There were two more agents with them, taking up positions just outside the clearing to watch the two main ways in and out, to east and south-west. Aneka’s position was also marked, four metres up a tree on the north side of the clearing. Between her camouflage and the canopy she was invisible to anyone