Peter grinned the fighting grimace of a wounded bull. He re-sheathed his axes over his back and lifted his Milkor multiple grenade launcher from the strap at his hip. The weapon was set for autofire. He stepped away from the corner of the corridor and fired against the far wall, ricocheting three 40mm grenades into the squad of day guards lurking back toward the main administration building.
They shouted warnings and began running, then explosions tore through the corridor sending a sheet of flame and smoke into the intersection.
Peter strode into the dying flames, his eyebrows shrinking from the heat. He turned his torso to the left, the MGL chuffing three times, shooting more grenades up into the stairwell. The MGL clicked on empty and he dropped it to the floor.
Chiara appeared from the other corridor. He caught her gaze for an instant, flicked his head right to indicate where he was going, and blurred into the corridor to face the remaining day guards there.
Chiara went in the opposite direction, chasing the explosions rising along the stairwell to confront the squad coming down from above.
Peter passed into the remaining haze of the exploded 40mm grenades, his battle-axes reappearing in his bloodied hands. The gray smoke eddied and swirled, shadowy forms moving through it, rising to strike back at him.
It was a target rich environment.
* * *
Peter’s grenades filled the stairwell with flame.
Chiara blurred up the stairs, chasing the flames as they vanished into gray smoke. She’d slung her P90 sub-machine gun, favoring her edged weapons against the day guards in the confined and smoky spaces of the stairwell. She’d flicked her katana clear after dismembering the two day guards outside the stairwell, and sheathed it across her shoulders. Her throwing daggers, pulled from the sides of her boots appeared in her hands. The silver-laced blades gleamed despite the haze in the air. They were a comfortable weight in her grip, perfectly balanced for throwing. Their razor-sharp edges equally lethal for human or vampire targets. She didn’t always carry them but had selected them for this mission, and had borne them through the underground river along with her favorite sword.
The first guard emerged from the smoke, his assault rifle swinging around to bear upon her. A second guard was a step behind and to the right, his smart rifle rising to bear on her chest, the laser sight cutting a flickering red line through the gray smoke.
Two six-inch blades flashed through the haze, sinking up to their hilts in the throats of the two day guards. Chiara blurred after her knives, passing the falling men before they hit the floor. Her katana swished free of its scabbard in an instant.
She sank deeper into silence. Power surged through her body and she accelerated up the curving stairs.
Flames burst through the haze from above her on the left, lines of fire ripping through the confined space. The final day guards were emptying their clips, bullets spraying everywhere.
Chiara pushed up to the right, wall running along the outside wall.
The guards responded, lifting their weapons, the final rounds in their magazines stuttering along the wall.
A bullet slammed into her left hand, dragging it and her katana back to the right.
A second bullet missed her chest by a hairsbreadth, drilling a hole through her right bicep.
Chiara snarled, flying over the guard’s heads to land on the stairs behind them.
They whirled, dragging on their triggers, their rifles clicking on empty.
She stepped into the two men; her long dark plait mirrored in their visors rising like an enraged serpent above her. Her katana swept through a flat arc from left to right, collecting first one head and then the other. Their bodies slumped away, fountaining blood. Their helmeted heads bouncing and rolling down the stairs, disappearing around the corner of the stairwell.
Chiara staggered back to the inner wall, lifting her left hand up. There was a neat hole through the middle of her palm running blood down her forearm. She looked to her right arm. Her bicep had been perforated like a piece of meat with a sharp knife. Blood was streaming from the entry and exit wounds, running in rivulets down to her elbow where it dropped away to splatter on the tiled stairs.
She clenched her right fist around the handle of her katana. Her grip was strong. They’d missed the bone in her arm. Her left hand was another matter. She flexed it and agony ripped up her forearm.
She looked at it dispassionately. She’d dealt with worse before her ninth birthday at the hands of her father and her master instructor - Taipan. She descended several steps and retrieved her throwing daggers. She paused for a moment to clean them on the guard’s uniforms before sheathing them back in her boots.
Mounting the stairs, she stooped and picked up a pair of smart rifles and a satchel of fresh magazines. She’d rather use their ammunition first when more day guard reinforcements arrived. That would leave the silver laced ammo in her sub-machine gun for the inevitable vampires. She picked up her pace. It was time to secure the nemesis tower, and once that was done she would bind her wounds.
The sounds of battle faded behind her. She had no doubt Peter would join her shortly after dispatching the last squad of day guards in the corridor. She flexed her injured hand again, pain shooting like barbed lightning along her left arm to her shoulder. Chiara circled the tower another three times. The last thirty feet of stairs curved heavily to the left, contracting into the midline of the tower. Unlike the rest of the stairs they were made of metal. Chiara emerged from the stairwell onto a twenty foot wide metallic landing directly above the tower’s midline. The landing was surrounded by ten feet high circular metallic walls. A single wide doorway opened onto the command center of the nemesis tower. She stepped off the landing and onto the polished metal floor of the nemesis tower command center.
She circled the dome once. The chamber was deserted. Above the squat column over the stairwell, sat the operator cockpit. Beside the column was the rail gun phalanx. It sat on a heavy cradle, its barrels punching through the barely visible wall of the dome. Thin strips of metal in the interior of the dome showed where the gun could be raised or lowered on the vertical axis. She presumed the dome could rotate left or right to point the gun in any direction.
Hence the metal stairs. The top thirty feet must reconfigure as the dome rotates. She whispered quietly to herself. “You don’t have to be an engineer to work this stuff out.”
Chiara surveyed the valley beyond the fortress, It was quite a view. She glanced at her hands. Blood was dripping from them onto the floor. She mused fatalistically to herself. We were never going to get out of this unscathed.
* * *
“- you have seconds to act,” Li called out over the tactical link.
Francis was already moving. Jay launched himself forward, coming aside his force leader as they curved into the last corridor leading into the lower mezzanine level of the power station. The enhanced aiming of the smart rifles should be off. They had a slim window of opportunity to break through the screen of day guards and complete their mission.
The final corridor into the tower was a sixty feet long kill zone. The only saving grace was its thirty feet of width and twenty feet of height. They would need every inch of maneuvering room to make it into the power station alive.
Jay hit the far-left wall fully ramped, blurring through the corner a yard above floor height. Francis was above him, wall running ten feet off the floor. The important thing was to present the enemy with two targets that were moving too fast to follow, and to never run in each other’s wake - that’s where the bullets would be - until the Panopticon aiming came back online and the day guards sharpened up their accuracy.
The ten day guards stood in an arc sixty feet back from the corridor exit. Without the benefit of the Panopticon, their ability to co-ordinate on a single target per squad was lost. Each man aimed for themselves.
The first two seconds were critical.
Jay leaped, arcing diagonally over the floor to the far-right wall, his fi
nger pressed hard against his H&K 416 assault rifle’s trigger. His weapon stuttered, high-performance rounds spearing away toward the guards on the far left of the arc. Francis opened up on the far-right edge of the arc. The day guards were fast, they had demonstrated that at the conclave, but they weren’t as fast as a Ramp master - they couldn’t dodge bullets.
The day guards fired, ten smart rifles opening up at the same time. Every guard was attempting to hit either Francis or Jay, and their streams of bullets flooded into the corridor. Their laser sights led the bullets. What would have been a tactical advantage to assist aiming against a normal opponent simply provided advance warning to a Ramp master of where the bullets were going.
The first two day guards spun away in plumes of pink mist, struck down by Francis and Jay’s armor-piercing rounds. The nearest guards began reflexively sidling toward the middle of the arc in front of the maintenance corridor exit.
Francis and Jay fired continuously. The mini-guns positioned on the maintenance walkway a hundred feet inside the power station opened up. Bright streams of fire spearing down toward them.
Jay cut left, leaning low to avoid a laser sight string. He leaped, rolling over another two red strings and the golden stream lancing down from one of the mini-guns. He fired back, leaping to the left-hand side of the corridor. More guards staggered back, rounds punching through their armor and opening up fist sized holes in their backs.
Francis and Jay burst free of the corridor. Four guards remained standing on the floor of the chamber, desperately dragging on their rifles to bring their weapons to bear on the two blurring Ramp masters.
Jay cut hard left toward a giant pipe rising out of the floor, Francis cut hard right, running away from Jay. The day guards were a tight group in the middle of the open area and then began scattering. Francis and Jay kept firing, pale-gray smoke shrouding their weapons. They caught the remaining guards in a deadly cross-fire and cut them to ribbons before they ran ten feet. Their opponent’s smart rifle return fire dwindled to nothing, stray bullets ricocheting off walls and industrial sized pipes behind the two Ramp masters.
The mini-guns on the maintenance walkway tracked them to their cover behind identical rising pipes on opposite sides of the chamber, bullets ricocheting off the polished concrete of the power station floor.
Jay glanced at his rifle; a counter indicated he had two rounds left in his magazine. He looked across at Francis who was ramming a fresh magazine home.
Francis lifted a pair of fingers and pointed in the direction of the walkway. He chopped his hand down and blurred forward. Jay went with him, bringing his gun to bear on the day guard positioned on the far right. He fired twice, and continued blurring forward to escape any return fire. There was none; the mini-guns didn’t have time to spin up, their operators taken out by double taps to the head. Jay and Francis met in the middle of the chamber. They looked back, staring hard into the corridor leading back to the fortress.
“The other three squads are coming,” Francis warned. “They’ll have the Panopticon back online. They’ll be a lot more dangerous than these fellows were. I need you to hold them off so I can shut this station down.”
Jay nodded, “You got it, Boss.”
Francis smiled grimly and blurred away to the power station’s command center. A small office built above the level of the turbines on the far-right wall. There was no one inside. The normal operation of the station was fully automated but it could be manually controlled from the office.
Jay ejected his rifle’s spent magazine and rammed a fresh one home. He cocked the under-barrel grenade launcher, loading a 40mm grenade into position. Cover and speed would be his defense. He just had to hold the squads off long enough for Francis to shut off the main power. Arthur Slayne had explained the Panopticon would then go into ‘evacuation mode,’ eliminating all the primary Panopticon systems including the day guard’s smart rifles.
He stepped behind a screen of pipes, taking a position where he could see down to the end of the last corridor. The squads would be on him in moments, their smart rifles would be back online.
He’d have to hold them off for up to a minute.
Jay took a deep breath and let it out. He couldn’t lose; if he won, the mission won, but if he lost, he’d be reunited with Yvette.
He grinned and laughed harshly.
He had nothing left to lose.
* * *
Peter stepped off the stairwell landing and entered the nemesis tower command center.
Chiara was there to greet him. He placed a warm hand on her right shoulder and said quietly, “You’d better bind those wounds.”
Chiara looked up at him, and slung her sub-machine gun at her hip. “I know, I was waiting for you to get up here.” She studied his wounds briefly and declared, “You got lucky, all that bleeding you’re doing looks superficial.”
Peter shrugged and shook his head once. “I’ll cut the fragments out once I get a spare minute.” He backed toward the nearest wall and surveyed the nemesis tower command center. It was a hemispherical dome eighty feet in diameter. It was dominated by the tower’s primary weapon system - the rail gun phalanx. The rail gun’s three barrels, two above and one below in a triangular formation cut through the armor skin of the dome and ran another forty feet past it. Three silvery six-feet-tall heat-dissipation fins describing a ‘Y’ ran the length of the barrels outside the dome.
The previous evening, the dome had been shiny black when observed from outside. From the inside it was transparent. Peter shook his head in awe, the Vampire Dominion had the best technology. The rail gun was mounted on a massive cradle that allowed it to rise to nearly vertical or depress well past the horizontal. A strip of transparent armor two yards wide intersected with the barrels. The strip would move with the weapon to allow it to rise or fall. A pair of power cables thicker than Peter’s thighs rose out of the floor, snaked over the cradle and connected to the rear of the weapon. The weapon was placed off-center to the left. The very middle of the sphere was occupied by an open cockpit directly above the stairwell exit, with a single chair and control console.
“This I’ve got to try,” Peter enthused, his eyes filled with awe. There was a ladder running ten feet up to the top of the central column. He quickly mounted the ladder, hunched, and squeezed himself into the cockpit, muttering to himself, “Damn equipment, always built for dwarves.” He gave up on attempting to strap himself in and studied the command console.
“Right,” Peter said, and grinned. “Time to put this gun to good use.” He flicked a switch and a three-dimensional holographic battlespace display painted the interior wall of the sphere surrounded the cockpit. There was a single joystick mounted on the right-hand arm of the cockpit chair. He grasped it and leaned it to the left.
The whole dome began rotating to the left. The cockpit followed it, rotating above the central column. The stairwell humming and clanking beneath him as it automatically adjusted to the new position of the dome.
“Nice,” Peter whispered, bringing the gun to line up on the southwest specter defense tower.
A set of pale cross-hairs appeared on the wall aligned with the center of the specter defense tower. There was a black button on top of the joystick. Peter depressed it.
Bright red bold-faced letters appeared on the battlespace display. ‘NEMESIS SYSTEM COCKPIT LOCKED. SYSTEM CONTROL SLAVED TO C&CC.’
“Well, I should’ve expected that,” Peter stated. He tapped his earbud. “Li, are you online?”
Li’s voice came back shrouded by gunfire, “Wait!” The firing ceased. “Another drone. We’re on sub-level dash four proceeding to the main server vault. What do you need?”
“The nemesis tower is locked down. All weapons control is with the command and control center.”
Li paused for a moment. “I can’t unlock those weapons from outside the main server room. I need more access.”
Arthur instructed, “Li can do it once she logs into the core networks. We have to g
et into the main server room first. You’ll have to hold for another two minutes.”
Peter glanced at the time readout on his Order nightglasses. He’d set a countdown timer on the fire doors. In another forty seconds the praetorians would be free, and in two minutes time they could be at the base of the tower. It was going to be a close thing. If they sent two squads, there was no way Chiara could hold off eight vampires by herself while he dealt with the specter defense towers. He’d have to help her, and if he was helping her - he wasn’t executing the mission and destroying the vampires’ ability to stop them escaping in a captured nightfalcon by shooting it down.
In a worst-case scenario, the vampires would overwhelm them before they could execute the plan and the opportunity of escape would be lost for the whole team. As the possibility of failure clawed at his guts, Peter grinned ironically and silently vowed that he would not fail the mission - he’d see all his opponents dead before that happened.
There was constant background gunfire over the broadcast channel. Jay and Francis were silent, which meant they were ramping and fighting. The mission to shutdown the second power station was undecided.
Peter wiped blood off his forehead with the back of his hand and said, “Those fire doors aren’t going to hold forever. We’ll have vampires on our six in less than two minutes.”
“There’s only one way out of here,” Arthur declared. “We’re almost at the main server room vault now. You have to hold for another two minutes - make it happen.”
Peter bit his tongue. Sir! Fucking yes, Sir! “Don’t worry!” he half-shouted, his gaze locked on Chiara’s face. She simply took a breath, her eyes closed and her face filled with a deathly calm. Peter blinked, he’d never seen an expression of such conviction on someone’s face before and it took his breath away. Chastened, he said quietly, “We’ll get it done.”
“Noted,” Arthur answered.
The line silenced.
Peter glanced down to his right, where Chiara stood facing into the stairwell. A lot was riding on Chiara’s ability to stop anyone coming up the stairs. She’d opened her eyes and he caught her gaze. “You, good?”
The Crane War Page 19