The beast seemed odd amid the grays and whites of the pack. It was larger than the others, although it moved with a grace expected from an animal half its size. The deep growl it made elicited whimpers from the assembly. Red pounced on the mottled wolf, snapping at its neck several times. The whimpering subordinate mewled out an apology that was barely accepted by its alpha. Red threw Mottled into several of the others before whirling back to the heavy trampled snow. High pitched screams preceded Red’s fangs coming up with the valgur that had ducked into the powder.
Nostrils flared as the nest’s decoy writhed in his mouth. The alpha’s head ticked in minute movements, tracking something beyond sight somewhere in the glade. The pack knew this mannerism well. They settled into the snow to wait for his divination. Red spat his victim into the snow, slamming it with a paw to keep it in place. The screeching rabbit didn’t bother Red in the least during his search for whatever had pricked his senses.
Slowly, the alpha lifted its paw, allowing the valgur to rocket away at breakneck speed. None of the pack attempted to snag the little fugitive, except for Mottled, who received a snap from Red for his effort. The little rabbit darted in a straight line toward the bramble.
Red’s growl returned. It was the slight rumble of the earth right before a major quake. He barked twice, a danger sign to the rest of his subordinates. Two wolves bounded away from the tangle, sprinting toward the stream at the base of the mountain. Red stayed in place as the rest of the pack fell away by twos, a guardian against whatever thing now threatened his family. Once they were all on the run, he bared his teeth one last time at the apparently empty woods his senses suggested were really full of threats. He loped away from the kill zone, picking up speed when the last two wolves hidden in the trees, fell into step behind him.
Once they were gone, a section of the snow in the kill zone depressed slightly in a meter long shape. The ghostly form above it was just a distortion of the air, like looking through a smudge on a camera lens. It moved forward slowly, another depression forming next to the first. More ghosts moved beside it, taking residence behind a tree, or shrinking to half their height. The ghosts remained still until the need to voice overrode the need for silence.
“Control, this is Kilmartin. We're approaching the base of the mountain. How are the drone feeds?”
A sultry voice broke through the digital tangle of their network. It was a hint of spice wrapped in satin that would be good to hear, no matter what mood the speaker was in. “Mr. Kilmartin, drone feeds suggest the route is clear. The wolves have also moved across the stream. You are free to proceed to target.”
“Don’t sound so relieved, Control.” Kilmartin said, his attempt at sarcasm dripping into the comm unit.
Control's exasperated sigh was just loud enough to push through the network. “I just lost fifty on a wager that the wolf would snag the rabbit.”
“That’s too bad, Control. I just made fifty by betting on the bunny.” Kilmartin made a chit-chit-chit noise into the microphone in his best skittering bunny impression.
The ghosts regained their feet, stalking their way toward the mountain on a parallel course with the stream. Periodically, a digital flutter would work its way across one of the ghosts, causing its invisibility to go from smudge to shape, then back again.
Kilmartin scanned their net for deficiencies in their approach. “Dial in the sensor range on that cloak, Chow. We don’t want our friends up there knowing we’re bringing a surprise for dinner.”
Far less sultry than the voice of Control, Chow responded to the team leader. “On it, boss.”
“Alright. Move by two toward the end of the heavy tree cover. The wolves won’t bother you, so no shooting at them. It’s quick and quiet from here. Control, this is Kilmartin. Can we get that Kangal close to drop? I don’t want to have to wait for it if they have a Boogeyman on site.”
“Of course, Mr. Kilmartin,” Control cooed. “But if you can finish the operation today without using the mech, Ms. Chen has promised you a healthy bonus.”
“Can’t spend the bonus if I’m dead, Control.”
The ghosts moved to the base of the mountain, taking several switchbacks and tracking along spurs in the terrain to hide their approach. Holographic maps in heads-up displays traced their progress, showing the safest, most direct routes to their target. Blue dots signified the rest of the team to each other, allowing for gun fighting while cloaked. When part of the group moved, the others remained still to cover them should they take any incoming fire. It was a haunted ballet of orchestrated movement that had been practiced by the team, ad nauseam.
Just beyond the next ridge, was a cabin set into the middle of the mountain. The team could see threads of smoke rising from a chimney. Kilmartin could hear the grinding motion of a water wheel as it used the stream to push power to whatever process it was devised for.
The Chen Cartel had already sent two teams after the target. The first team had no trouble tracking them into Kabran city on the Kesthi Steppe. The heads of the team leaders were found on spikes outside of the target’s safe house. The second team had tracked them to the jungles in the south, where the Chen family exerted much of its control. It was smart for them to hide right under the family’s noses. This time, Chen had sent a better class of hitter. The result was the same except the target’s protector had left a calling card. It was a tarot card with the “the Fool” prominently displayed. A quick search of the database came back with a match, prompting the cartel to hire Kilmartin as a foil to their nemesis.
The trees were sparse on the slope, making covered movement a difficulty. Chen had spared no expense when they hired him. Kilmartin had given them a list of desired kit based on the kill order they outlined. Drop shields, expensive tech normally reserved for the wealthiest colonies out in the Frontier, would provide them with protection when the tree cover got thin. Up here on the mountain side, it was practically anorexic.
A digital crackled popped in Kilmartin’s ear. “Go for Boss?” There was silence on the other end of the radio, which put a knot in the pit of his stomach. “All Ghost Tiger elements, ping IFF markers immediately.”
In his HUD, Kilmartin saw all twelve markers that represented his team flash in the display. “I don’t know what that interference was. Change to alternate freq and flutter pop IFF to ping every fifteen seconds. Khan, Sun, drop a shield in front and back. Move into kite formation. Progress to target.”
The group assembled into a wedge of phantoms, four of them floating behind to act as a rear guard. The formation resembled a kite with a tail. One of the men pulled out a handheld device. The machine appeared out from under the invisibility field, looking like a disembodied limb was holding it. It beeped twice, showing a batch of hidden scanners along the path leading to the cabin.
“Lam, put a leash on those sensors. Everyone climb over to that cut in the terrain.” Kilmartin made a chopping motion with his hand to signal the direction he wanted them to move. “I don’t want to go back down but I don’t want to stay here, either. Once in place, kick the drop shields to the front, with the gain on those cloaks pushed to max.”
They slithered into the terrain, waiting to see if anyone showed up to inspect the road. If the info from Chen was legitimate, the person guarding the target was Madame Tarot, a merc working out of the core world of Mylos. In the last six months she'd racked up an impressive record, completing bond after bond. Rumors suggested that she was a Black Tasker, a human commander operating a mercenary team of robots. Kilmartin didn’t have any real intelligence on her crew but the word on the stars was that they weren’t second hand or off the rack models. She had spent some serious coin on them.
A woman in a battered military style Skeletal Combat Frame walked down the path to check one of the sensors.
“Alright kids, no one move a muscle. This is where we see if this tech is as good as Chen claims.” Kilmartin said. It didn’t matter to him that he was the only non-Chen soldier here. He had taken these men
for his crew, training them to his standard over several weeks in preparations for this. For all intents and purposes, they were his men now.
Lam watched through a viewfinder. “She looks too human to be a bot. Is that Tarot?”
“Dunno,” Kilmartin answered. “No one has ever seen her face. She’s checking the sensor data. Is she going to see that thing’s been tampered with?”
“No,” Lam said emphatically. “The slice was good. She'd have to take the thing down to the code to see what I did.”
The woman covered the motion sensor with snow and moss. She scanned the terrain with a viewfinder, panning slowly in ticking motions, frequently stopping to sensor back before continuing the arc. She had tracked right along the Ghost Tigers, never detecting them. The merc produced two wasp style drones from a cargo pocket, tossing them into the air on her way back up the path.
“She’s pretty good,” Lam said. “She’s using the drones to cover her back to the cabin. Probably also scanning for motion. We should sit still until they pass.”
Kilmartin took a second to decipher the heavily accented Trade-2 Lam was speaking. “So, you’re saying you can’t slice them like the motion sensors?”
“I could, but it would take a long time.” Lam shrugged, as if he thought Kilmartin could see him under the optic camouflage. “If I gaff it, they'll alert anyone else in the cabin.”
Kilmartin worried that staying here any longer would compromise his team. He needed more info. “Control, got anything on the flyovers suggesting we have active bots patrolling? I need to know who's in that cabin.”
“We can see two heat signatures,” Control responded after a moment. “The woman you saw and one other. There is an active power signature just outside the cabin. Looks like they’re trying to hide it, too, using a power grid scrambler. Whatever the class, it looks big.”
“Big as the Kangal?” Kilmartin asked.
“Not that big, but I’d be careful if I were you.”
“Careful is my middle name.” The hint of a smile on Kilmartin’s face was evident through the comms. “Alright, Lam. I want you to slice into those drones without being caught. Maybe give us a good look at what’s inside. Everyone dial down the camo. Move slick and silent back to the path. We’ll climb to the switchbacks in the road until we get to the cabin. Guns up. Kuya, set up above us. Let me know when you're set.”
“On it, Boss,” came Kuya’s response.
The militarized specters drifted across the road.
Kilmartin crested the hill with his ghostly tribe in tow. Taking a knee, he scanned the landscape, waiting for the combat computer in his helmet to align the operation's map with what he was looking at. He watched the rest of the blips, representing his men, climb the hill, taking similar positions in the tight copse. The cabin was a lot smaller than he’d thought. If Madame Tarot and the target were there, she'd be able to fit just one, maybe two bots inside.
His men spread along the tree line, using the forest for cover. They were halfway up the mountain set into a relief. The semi-level piece of land was split by the stream coming off of the peak. It wasn't a very fast moving or wide piece of water, but it was enough to push the water wheel set against the house. That was constructed of regular wood, most likely chinked with something modern to keep wind and moisture from pushing through seams in the logs. Kilmartin thought the structure would make a nice place to retire if he weren't about to blow it to the twin hells.
Looking just beyond the corner of the house, set in a wooden overhang, was a large bot. The mech appeared new. It was showing minimal power readings in his HUD, indicating that it must be on standby or on a charge cycle. He wondered if the vagabond, a derogatory word for merc used in the CORAL, had rigged the water wheel for a low power option to keep the bots charged at capacity. A heavy loader mech, fitted with armor, weapons, and a cheap AI, would be a great distraction against a strike team. Set the thing loose to cover so the target can get away with the more expensive models. Kilmartin was beginning to think he had this whole merc business wrong. Charge the client like a king. Spend like a pauper. This Tarot had some racket.
The satin smooth voice of Control, cut through his musings as he was surveying the battle space. “Kilmartin Control. We are having some problems with the readings from your men. We aren't getting a return signal when we ping their frames.”
“Who's not answering?”
“Kuya and Lam.”
“That's ridiculous, Lam is right...” Kilmartin stopped, reaching into empty air for the man who should have been beside him. “Lam, Kilmartin. What's your status?”
There was silence. No radio squelch breaks to indicate he was listening but couldn't talk. Although each Ghost Tiger wore a skel-frame, Kilmartin had insisted that all of their helmets were sealed systems, allowing for breathing and speaking at normal levels without anyone outside the lid hearing them. Even if the men couldn't answer, they should have been able to make enough noise to activate the radio.
That old familiar feeling in the pit of his stomach flared up. When he was a merc working in the CORAL, he would sometimes say that his danger senses were kicking in. He stopped using that phrase when he worked beside an actual psychic who could do that. Even so, one day he didn't go out on a patrol because of the bad feeling and the psychic got smoked. He guessed that her super senses must have taken that day off. The same 'don't go out on patrol' feeling was back. He knew that you don't ignore the magic man cramps if you want to go on breathing. Also, you never said magic man cramps out loud just in case some buff female marine or vagabond took offense and sandblasted you in the teeth.
“Ghost Tigers, tighten it up.” Kilmartin pushed over the comms. “Watch your zones. We are not alone!”
One of the Tigers kicked a tree. Immediately, Kilmartin came over the net. “What are you doing?”
“Boss, if we knock some of the snow down...”
It was a loud plan, but a solid one. If the enemy had camouflage similar or better than theirs, the fallen snow would rest on top of them to expose their position. Of course, the downside to the plan was that the Ghost Tigers would also be exposed. “Never let the perfect plan be the enemy of a good one,” Kilmartin's instructors used to say.
All the Tigers braced for a maximum push from the skel-frames, each slamming a foot into the trees. Snow sloughed off the branches, falling around the mercs. Their reactive camouflage mimicked the snow on top of the chameleon ponchos, making them appear as powder flecked floating dark spots.
“Great plan. Too bad you didn't think of it sooner!” came a voice behind Chow's shoulder.
The shooter was yanked off his feet by a robot materializing behind him. A snow camo-patterned paint job covered a slim bot armed with a rifle. Its head had the shape of a person’s face, except without any of the parts able to move. It resembled one of the old theater masks, a symbol for cheap entertainment common in the frontier. It slammed Chow into the ground, causing the merc to bounce several times before coming to a stop.
Kilmartin opened fire, striking the machine several times in the chest. It spun behind a tree, allowing the trunk to take the brunt of the blaster fire. Accessing the space, Kilmartin could see four more silhouettes outlined in snow. He threw a chaff grenade into the general direction of the enemy ghosts. The grenade was a standard piece of tech for any merc who thought he might have to go up against a technological threat. The charged shreds of metal confetti ruined target locks, disabled active sonar and ground surveillance radar. It made seeing in certain spectra nearly impossible. It also happened to disable cloaking fields relying on reactive camouflage, which wasn't lost on his men. The Tigers had trained for this eventuality. One of them punched a flare into the air, the glowing ember lighting up the entire side of the mountain on its float toward the snow cover.
A group of three mercs huddled together to lay down a wave of blaster fire at one of the bots. Battle plans swapped over the net as the crew coordinated their attacks. The bot was caught off guard wh
en another merc, who had avoided the chaff blast to maintain his invisibility, came from nowhere to tackle it. The pair skidded in the snow, coming to a stop a few meters away. The crew shifted their fire to a new bot to allow the mech wrangler to finish it. The machine tried to backhand its assailant, but was blocked by the clang of metal against resicarbon. The skel-frames allowed normal humans to fight toe to toe with bots of this size. If the AI had a combat resolution matrix, the human wouldn't be able to keep up with the strikes coming from the mech. Fortunately, the frames the mercs were running were outfitted with a battle system of their own. The Skel-frame could help the fighter move as fast as militarized robotics. Ducking an incoming shot, the merc plastered the thing's head in the snow, blowing out the front of its chest plate with a plasma torch.
Blaster fire lit the space like a repeated camera flash. Multicolored bolts seared the grove, shedding brilliant spears of light across the reflective surface of the stream. Kilmartin saw another two mercs go down from the exposed enemy ghosts. He was down to eight men, beside himself, and they hadn't even gotten near the house yet. There was also the matter of the large mech in the overhang to deal with. He shouted a command word in Trade-9, activating the targeting system on his armor’s wrist launcher. A reticle changed from red to green, hissing a sharp tone for the target lock. The micro-missile sailed away, striking the mech in the hip, blowing it apart like a pinata at a child's birthday party.
A decoy, Kilmartin thought. Magic man-cramps were assaulting his pelvis, signaling that the merc should run for everything he was worth. Decoys were expected, but having hyper adaptive, onboard camouflage hiding a large troop of enemy mechanized soldiers was stoking the fires of his fear factory. He needed to turn the tide of this surprise, fast, or the mark would get away. Calling out again in Trade-9, he signaled to the orbital weapons locker they'd put on station above their position.
The Revenant: A Military Sci-Fi Series (Hunter's Moon Book 2) Page 2