The Crane War

by Graeme Rodaughan

  Clayton glanced at the secondary screen displaying the disposition of friendly forces. His prized praetorians were clustered on sub-level-2, but there was no indication of the fire doors on the ‘friendly forces,’ display. He had no way of readily determining which forces could now reach which locations. “You there,” Clayton said, pointing at the oldest male operator. “What forces have we got that can reach the nemesis tower?”

  The operator paled; his skin chalky beneath his short gray hair. A bead of perspiration appeared on his temple and began sliding down in front of his ear. He lifted a trembling finger and pointed at a slim, young, dark-skinned woman and murmured, “She’s next in line.”

  Clayton’s gaze focused on the young woman. Her name tag read, ‘Siobhan Ulysses.’ For a brief moment, she stared back at him with a steely gaze, then stated, “Sir, we have two squads of day guards guarding the pumping station. They could be at the nemesis tower in less than a minute. There’s another squad heading to Kraken dash one, I’d advise bringing them back to secure the saboteurs. We have three squads guarding the hangers, we could send them onto Kraken dash two.”

  Clayton’s lip curled. Here was someone who knew what they were doing. “Do it, Commander.”

  She turned back to her console, and spoke quiet calm orders into a microphone.

  Clayton accelerated again. The last feed showed Arthur Slayne, Li Wu, and Anton Slayne approaching the ladder to maintenance sub-level-3-1. They must be heading for the Panopticon. He blinked. He had to get this situation locked down immediately. No one would be spared in his efforts to protect the Panopticon from Arthur Slayne and the Mirovar force team. He asked the new commander, “What of the Panopticon?”

  “Two squads are already en route to reinforce,” she glanced briefly at the nearest praetorian, who stared back at her with indifferent eyes, “… the praetorians there, but they are also trapped by fire doors.”

  “Then send others. Send the squads from the hangers.”

  Ulysses shook her head once, “Sir, if Kraken dash two goes offline, the Panopticon will go offline. If that happens, the day guard’s smart rifles will go offline diminishing a key advantage for us. In addition, the selected targets are significant. Kraken dash one is offline. Shutting down Kraken dash two will initiate the Panopticon evacuation protocol. Given the disposition of enemy forces I think they’re attempting to steal the Panopticon, but to do that they have to breach the main server room guardhouse. That guardhouse is in lock down and has four of your praetorians as a final line of defense. The final door is like a bank vault, no one can get through to the Panopticon until the red alert is lifted.”

  Clayton snorted, his lip curled and he said, “Pray that you are correct.” He stabbed a dark finger at her and snapped.. “How long before the fire alarm resets?”

  Ulysses pointed at a red counter on a side screen. It ticked over to 02:40, then to 02:39. “Once that counter hits zero. The fire doors will retract.”

  “Send your troops, commander,” he uttered, staring at the screens.

  For the moment his hands were tied but not for long.

  No, not for long at all.

  * * *

  “Why are there no fire doors in these tunnels.” Li asked.

  Slayne glanced to his left and stated, “You’re a curious young lady aren’t you.”

  “Well, to be honest Arthur,” Anton said, “I’d like to know too.”

  “In another four minutes we’ll be knee deep in vampires, and you both want to talk about technicalities?”

  Anton nodded, and Li answered, “Yes.”

  Slayne’s eyes tightened as he pulled to a stop next to a ladder positioned against the back of a narrow square alcove in the wall. “Okay, the bottom line is that two companies built the levels of the fortress under different sub-contracts. They each had a requirement for fire control systems, one picked fire doors, the other picked CO2 fire suppression systems. Don’t start a fire down here, the CO2 will suffocate you before the smoke does.” He stepped into the alcove and onto the metal rungs of the ladder, and glanced back at Li. “Are we good?”

  Li nodded.

  Slayne let go of the ladder free falling to the bottom of the shaft. He landed lightly on his feet, whirled and swore, “Shi-”

  A heavy machine gun thundered into life on the lower level, drowning out Slayne’s words. Bright flashes strobing up the ladder shaft. Anton’s eyes widened, he lifted his assault rifle, and dived head first into the shaft.

  Li blinked. What the hell did Anton just do? He’d kill himself when he hit the bottom of the shaft. She rushed forward twisting to the left, her right hand caressed the right-side of the ladder, her right boot brushing against the same. She dropped down the shaft in free fall.

  Anton’s assault rifle roared on full auto beneath her.

  Individual rounds from Slayne’s auto-pistol cracked through the air like an iron whip, blue flashes counterpointing the stuttering roar and fiery flashes of the .50 caliber machine gun.

  Li gripped the ladder hard, pulling herself to a halt. She waved her P90 sub-machine gun aside to get a better look down the shaft. Anton was upside down, anchored by jamming his boots against the narrowly spaced walls of the shaft, his legs spread in a ‘V.’ He held his rifle beneath his head, its barrel reaching just below the bottom rim of the shaft. The weapon ran dry, and Anton dropped it to the steel mesh floor a dozen feet below. He crunched forward, snatching a pair of grenades from his webbing. He pulled the pins with his clenched teeth, and spat the rings away. He shouted, “Fire in the hold!” and launched the grenades deep into the maintenance tunnel.

  Time seemed to stretch for a moment, then the grenades exploded with a thunderous roar and a flash of white light.

  The .50 cal stopped firing.

  Anton released his foothold on the walls of the shaft, dropping and twisting cat-like to land in a crouch next to his empty assault rifle.

  Slayne blurred past him on the right, firing a single shot from his auto-pistol. He called out, “Clear.”

  Li dropped to the floor. Anton and his grandfather stood thirty-feet away next to a tracked ground drone. The machine was a sleek eight-foot dark-gray tube, with four sets of triangular tracks standing four feet high. It carried a .50 caliber heavy machine gun on its back. The gun’s trigger mechanism clicked continuously on an empty firing chamber; the ammunition belt feed smashed to oblivion by Anton’s grenades. Blue smoke rose from a neat hole near the rear of the drone. The clicking slowed, then stopped. The drone settled to the floor, surrounded by a thin blue haze of acrid smoke.

  Slayne and Anton glanced at each other, and the older man instructed, “Ahh … it’s ‘Fire in the hole,’ Anton.”

  Anton shook his head. “Huh? What?”

  “It’s ‘Fire in the hole.’ You said, ‘Fire in the hold.’”

  “No I didn’t.”

  Li came up beside him and declared, “Yes, you did. I heard it.”

  Anton glanced back and forth between his grandfather and Li. His lips curled into a half-grin and he shrugged sheepishly. “Well, I must’ve got a little over-excited back there.” He smiled broadly, ramming a fresh magazine of caseless ammunition into his assault rifle with a sharp click.

  Slayne lifted an eyebrow, turned away and led them past the smoking ruins of the drone. “We have to drop down to maintenance sub-level four dash one, from there we can come back up onto sub-level dash four. The only way into the main server room and the Panopticon core is via the guardhouse on that level.”

  Li frowned. “Surely, they’d have it locked down by now.”

  “Yes, they have done exactly that,” Slayne said, knowingly. “However, there is another protocol built into the door. The final guardhouse was built by one of my companies, it has a little extra functionality built in.”

  “A back door?” Anton asked.

  Slayne smiled in the strip-lit gloom of the tunnel. “More like a front door keyhole,” he tilted his head slightly and raised his fore
finger, “and I have the key.”

  Li frowned. “Your biometrics are in the system.”

  “In the hardware. It’s a lot harder to find when it’s hardwired into the electronics of the door.”

  Li grinned despite herself. There was no denying that Slayne had performed marvels of preparation for this mission, and just maybe there was a sliver of hope in the Slayne’s ability to do the unexpected.

  Her brief smile evaporated, by the same token the elder Slayne could just as easily be leading them all to their deaths, and one day, Anton would do something that wasn’t crazy-smart but just plain crazy, and get himself, and those around him killed.

  It was only a matter of time until disaster struck.

  The events in her vision were still in the future.

  * * *

  Peter blurred out of the final ladder shaft and into the dimly lit inner core of the nemesis tower.

  Chiara followed a moment later, her gaze locking on the only exit from the chamber, an open doorway leading into a twenty-foot-long corridor.

  The room was square, a hundred feet on a side, with twenty feet high ceilings. It was studded with yard-thick pillars, industrial piping and heavy power cables. He moved quickly through the space, checking to see if there was anyone else in the room. He arrived in the middle of the room. They were alone. Above him, a narrow shaft rose up through the tower. It was barely four feet wide and was equipped with a ladder set close to the wall.

  Peter’s nightglasses adjusted to the ambient lighting in the shaft. Metadata scrolling across his field of view stated the shaft was two-hundred and seventy feet high. It didn’t reach the control dome on top of the tower. It wasn’t another way in.

  The walls of the shaft were covered with glistening cold-blue fuel cells and massive power cables. Additional power cables snaked into conduits that disappeared back into the maintenance level they’d just come from. He shook his head, he’d love to be able to spend a week deconstructing and understanding the technologies involved in the tower, but there was no time for that. He sighed and turned to the sole corridor leading out of the chamber. Chiara glanced back at him from halfway down the hall, a ‘hurry-up,’ expression flashing across her face.

  Peter shrugged his massive shoulders, and whispered, “I know, no time to smell the roses.” He strode forward, unlimbering one of his double-bladed battle axes with his left hand. He held an MP7 sub-machine gun loaded with silver-laced high-performance armor-piercing bullets in his other hand. The Milkor MGL swung from a strap at his left hip.

  Chiara glided silently forward to a slatted metal door at the end of the corridor. The halls beyond were well lit, thin strips of bright light casting tiger stripes on her lithe form. She froze, looking back over her shoulder at Peter and slashing her fingers across her throat - the universal sign for silence.

  Peter crept forward and peered through the slats in the door.

  There were eight fully armed and ready day guards in the hall outside. One commanded, “Sochi, take your squad up the stairs. Don’t let anyone get to the top.”

  “Sir,” a voice responded from the base of the stairwell on the edge of what Peter could see. Four sets of boots tramped up the stairs to Peter’s left.

  Peter looked at Chiara. She lifted four fingers and pointed up the stairs. He nodded; a squad was going up the stairwell that spiraled around the inner wall of the tower to the command center at the top. She flicked her head to the right, lifting four fingers again.

  Peter nodded. There was a second squad guarding the base of the tower. Well, eight day guards weren’t that bad. Sure, they were fast, strong, tough, skilled and deadly accurate with their smart rifles, but there was only eight of them. Chiara and Peter could hit the bottom four before the ones above could react. He lifted his hand to signal the attack.

  “Hendrickson,” a new voice called. “We’ve been sent to reinforce this position. The hostiles are in the ground-floor chamber now. Our orders are to hold them in place until the praetorians arrive.”

  Peter crouched and stared. The guards knew exactly where they were and weren’t afraid that Peter and Chiara knew that they knew. Another squad had taken a position thirty feet back from the first squad. Now there were twelve day guards, and the back four would get shots in before they’d dealt with the front four. Worse, the squad up the stairs would come down as soon as a fight started. They could easily get caught in a crossfire, and they’d both seen how deadly the smart rifles were at the conclave.

  Chiara tapped him on his chest, leaned in close, and whispered, “How are we going to get past these guys?”

  Peter frowned and whispered back, “It’s a good question.”

  It was a damn good question.

  Peter glanced at the time readout on his Order nightglasses. It read 14:44:55, in a little under two minutes the fire doors would lift and the trapped praetorians would be free. Like Peter and Chiara, they’d take about eighty or ninety seconds to get from the guardhouse to the base of the nemesis tower. Probably faster since they had the benefit of using the main corridors.

  Peter frowned, they had less than three minutes left to take control of the nemesis tower and execute their mission. However, they had twelve day guards with smart rifles waiting to kill them as they emerged from the maintenance tunnel to enter the stairwell.

  If that wasn’t the definition of a ‘turkey shoot,’ Peter didn’t know what was.

  They needed help but where was help going to come from?

  * * *

  Jay blurred down the maintenance corridor.

  It had been a long ramp. Francis and Jay had covered more than a mile through the maze of maintenance tunnels to the edge of the northern power station in under two minutes. There was a final dog-leg to pass through and they’d emerge into the lower ground floor of Kraken-2, the sole remaining power station for the Panopticon fortress.

  Their mission was simple. Shut down the power station, and disable the diesel backups. They’d discussed the technical details back at the roadhouse that morning. They knew what they had to do and now was the time to do it.

  Jay hit the left-hand turn at full speed, he went around the corner in two bounds across the walls, descending to the floor to cover the next fifty feet of corridor to the final right hand turn into the power station. Francis was fifty yards behind him, a distance maintained to allow Francis to react if Jay hit something. Jay was on point; Francis was watching his back. Jay had volunteered for the role, he wanted to be first to contact the enemy.

  There’d been a lot to deal with in the last few weeks. The loss of Yvette was at the top of the list. The revelation that Arthur Slayne might not be the murderer he’d been led to believe growing up was in second place, and the near destruction of the Order was third.

  Jay wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to keep going with the Mirovar force team. Perhaps it was time to break out and create his own team. The Order needed to be rebuilt and shaped to a modern era, but that was a secondary concern. The main issue was that the spy who’d betrayed Yvette and Juliette to Armitage was still in the team. He’d weighed the available evidence and settled on Chiara as the guilty one, but nothing had been done. The rush of events had conspired to delay the application of Truther and the determination of guilt, and without cast-iron evidence he couldn’t act.

  He’d made a mistake blaming Anton for his Grandfather’s actions, and now it seemed most likely that Ramin Kain was the true murderer of his mother. Jay didn’t want to repeat the same mistake with Chiara.

  In an ironic twist of fate, he’d taken Ramin Kain’s head in the dungeons beneath Armitage’s manor house without realizing he’d been delivering a long-awaited justice for his mother’s murder. With Arthur Slayne absolved of guilt for his mother’s death and the real killer dealt with, there was no reason to continue to hate the elder Slayne, but habits nurtured from a young age were hard to break.

  The unresolved issue of the spy was setting his nerves on edge. He knew it was a problem and h
e was less than his best for it, but, he couldn’t just let it go.

  It’d become clear that Slayne wasn’t a murderer and had been falsely accused in an act of rank injustice, and Anton was a brother in arms and a proven warrior against the vampires. But, he needed justice for Yvette and both the Slayne’s rubbed him up the wrong way. They were reckless in their actions and took unnecessary risks. If they were comfortable with harboring a known spy then that would be the last straw.

  Jay set his thoughts aside. He launched himself up the wall to take the last corner. He hit the far wall getting his first glimpse into the bowels of the power station. The final leg of the maintenance corridor was more antechamber than corridor. Sixty feet long, thirty feet wide, and twenty feet high, the ceiling was fitted with closed retractable doors running the length of the corridor. The corridor opened up into the main chamber of the power station. The chamber was well lit, with walls of pipes, control consoles, maintenance ramps and walkways surrounding three huge thrumming turbines. Standing in a flat semicircle facing the entrance were ten day guards armed with smart rifles. Another two were manning 7.62mm mini-guns, positioned deeper into the power station on a maintenance walkway in front of the closest turbine and fifteen feet above the floor. Red laser sights hung like straight strings filling the corridor he was about to land in.

  He had time to react - just a matter of a tenth of a second faster than the fastest day guards manning the mini-guns and rifles set to fill the corridor with a storm of sudden death.

  All his tremendous momentum was pushing him forward, deeper into the corridor toward the waiting weapons. Barrels snapped into motion as the guards responded to his arrival, ably assisted by the Panopticon tracking his movement. Fingers pulled on rifle triggers. The electric motors on the mini-guns whirred, barrels spinning into deadly motion. Bright golden fire erupted from the throats of a dozen weapons.

  Jay kicked hard, his left hand flying up to grab a steel reinforcing rod on the left-side retractable door. He swung hard, his shoulder snapping, agony lancing across his chest. He pivoted in a sharp arc back into the short corridor in the middle of the dog-leg.