With limited sight in the darkness, her touch occupied by holding the downloading unit, and taste and smell restricted by the atmosphere in her helmet, Warlock was left with one choice. After dialing up the outside mic, she concentrated on the sounds of the warship.
The rattle of the huge ion wall powering the ship vibrated and resonated around her. Between the deck overhead and the top of the armored combat control center where she sat, the ion cannons dominated. By focusing and searching, she located additional clutter but nothing stood out. Then, the lift tube from above shook as the car dropped to the combat control center below. It was the first time the elevator had moved.
Practice and instinct shot a warning to Warlock’s mind. She typed a message to Sergeant Natsuki, ‘Company coming.’
A glance showed her five minutes remained. It was one of the longest collections of minutes in the experienced combat leader’s life. But she didn’t waste the downtime, she used it to visualize her exit route.
Finally, the yellow light on top of the unit blinked rapidly. Warlock separated the large section and shoved it in the pouch. For a heartbeat, she almost rushed off without completing Walden’s final directions. But her researcher’s guidance had brought her this far.
Carefully so as not to dislodge the clamps, Warlock tucked the small boxes inside the wrapping of the bundle, pulled out a roll of black tape, and sealed up the slit. It seemed useless as the bulging patch wouldn’t stand up to even the most basic inspection. Then, following his final order, she set a silent alarm for thirty minutes on her PID.
“Out,’ Warlock sent to Sergeant Natsuki letting the Marine know the data was collected and Diosa was in the process of vacating the area.
Warlock, relieved to have this part of the mission completed, crawled to where the slope of the egg permitted her to stand. The descent required grabbing struts to keep from falling but she still rushed. At the maintenance platform, she placed a foot on a beam and jumped across the divide.
***
The crushed door almost came off the hinges when she opened it. Letting it dangle, Warlock poked her head through the hatch and looked for the elevator’s location. The cable showed it was below and she moved forward with the intention of leaping for the car’s support. Before she was halfway out of the hole, the rails in the shaft shook and the elevator rose. Jerking back, the former retired waited for it to pass. But it didn’t. The car stopped at the deck where she entered the shaft.
“That’s convenient,” she whispered.
Warlock dove out of the maintenance hatch, collided with the cable, and slid quickly downward. She wasn’t sure how long the car would idle at the deck and didn’t want an unscheduled ride. Just before her boots slammed into the car, she clamped the cable tightly, and eased down onto the roof.
Unsure who occupied the elevator, she knelt, lifted the trapdoor, and peeked into the car. She caught sight of three Troops with rifles stepping onto the deck. Drawing her pistol, she tossed the door back, and vaulted into the empty elevator car. Leaning into the corridor, she noted the three Constabulary Troops heading for the interior hatch.
‘‘With,’ Warlock sent the second to last of Poets mission codes as she ran out of the elevator in the opposite direction taken by the soldiers. Needing to get a picture of the circumstances before rushing through the hatch and down the corridor to her exit, she stopped at the bend and squatted down. There she sent another text. ‘Situation?’
***
One of Sergeant Natsuki’s guns was down. A shooter from the hatch, used by Warlock, caught the Marines by surprise. When the Constabulary burst through three other hatches in a coordinated assault, she had forced back two groups easily with storms of fifty-two caliber rounds.
Lance Corporal Benigno had a harder time. But his tenacity and smooth changes of magazines eventually beat the living Troops back through the hatch on his side.
While the mounted weapons chewed up the charging soldiers, Lance Corporal Auður targeted the Travelers peering around the hatch frames. After the officers suffered too many losses, they ordered a withdrawal of their Troops. The Marine sniper continued the harassing fire by rotating between the partially open hatches.
It was during the lull in fighting, the air curtain fell away, and a Constabulary shooter, located high above the deck, placed a round into one of the mounted weapons.
Natsuki elevated the barrel of her remaining gun, triggered it, and poured a burst of fifty-two rounds into the hatch. With the enemy sniper suppressed, the NCO checked her PID.
‘With,’ came through from Master Sergeant Alberich and a short time later, ‘Situation?’
“Hot, too hot,’ Sergeant Natsuki typed back. ‘plus, a sniper is at your exit hatch.’
Once the messages were sent, Natsuki triggered the mounted gun again.
***
The text of a ‘Sniper at your hatch’ rocked Warlock. She knew three Troops had gone down the corridor. Were they security for a marksman or was one of them an excellent shot? Whether three or four soldiers waited for her didn’t matter. They blocked her exit and had to be removed.
As Diosa came through the interior hatch, steel ovals plunked off the deck and overhead. Fat, misshapen, and still carrying velocity, the fifty-two caliber rounds from Natsuki’s mounted gun mimicked rubber balls bouncing through a conduit. Except these ricocheting objects would cut through the fabric of a flight suit and the flesh underneath.
Warlock backtracked out of the hailstorm.
‘Firing instructions,’ typed the Master Sergeant. ‘Two bursts, twenty seconds apart. Then cease firing. I’m coming through the hatch.’
‘Acknowledged,’ Natsuki replied. ‘Note, under protest.’
The last part of Sergeant Natsuki’s text referenced the twenty-second delay. Marines were trained to respond to sniper fire with a volley to force the marksman down and off his target. Within twenty seconds, a sniper could get off a series of uninterrupted shots. One-third of a minute in combat was possibly the difference between life and death.
Warlock had her reasons and trusted the Sergeant to follow directions.
More kinetic rounds zinged down the passageway and through the hatch. Then they stopped. Warlock jumped through, closed the hatch, and ran down the corridor as she mentally counted down the seconds. At ten seconds, she could see three Constabulary soldiers in the distance. One stood, fired a couple of rounds, and ducked. When the Marines didn’t return fire, he stood, and began picking targets. The two Troops kneeling on either side of the shooter hesitated before adding their rifles to the firing. But they stopped occasionally to point through the hatch obviously suggesting additional targets. At nineteen seconds, Warlock dropped, rolled against the bulkhead, and tried to make herself as small as possible.
The Constabulary riflemen got lucky. Two managed to duck just as the Marines resumed firing. And the kinetic ring that did strike one of the spotters had less mass. It smashed against the soldier’s armored chest only rocking the big Troop. He dropped down below the hatch with the others. The suppression fire had come from Lance Corporal Benigno’s weapon. While a smaller caliber, the flurry of forty-five rounds would pass easily through a flight suit.
Diosa hugged the deck and wondered if the sniper had taken out Sergeant Natsuki’s mounted guns. There was nothing she could do about the loss. Besides, she had issues of her own. Each of the soldiers at the hatch outweighed her by a factor of two or more. And they were muscular and big boned. Close quarters combat with one presented an almost insurmountable challenge. Three meant certain defeat for the Striker hand-to-hand expert.
The firing ended and, despite the uneven matchup, Warlock pushed to a sprinter’s stance. Drawing her pistol, she ran towards the end of the corridor, the Troops and her exit.
All three soldiers faced away from her, waiting to see if the Marines below would resume firing. When none did, the sniper stood and sighted down the barrel of his rifle. As before, his two companions hesitated before exposing themsel
ves. Pistol shots rang out behind them and the two spotters fell to the deck with wounds to their legs.
Master Sergeant Alberich fired at one leg, then swept her pistol across the corridor, shot the other’s leg before shifting back to the first. Strikers were trained to shoot from odd positions. Running straight ahead and successfully hitting multiple targets was a basic skill. As planned, two of the Troops tumbled to the floor. While down, they weren’t necessarily out of the fight. Both had long thick arms that could drag a stationary adversary to the ground.
The sniper heard the yells of pain and the reports from a pistol. Spinning from the hatch, he began to elevate his rifle from the downward angle used to target the resupply bay. His finger squeezed the trigger prematurely. The initial rounds clipped the deck a meter short of a figure closing on him. As he raised the rifle preparing to fire center mass, a pair of boots tapped the barrel off target causing the next rounds to go harmlessly down the empty corridor.
Mechanics deal with velocity, weight, acceleration, force, and mass. Mass being the property of an object’s resistance to motion. Master Sergeant Alberich ruthlessly applied four of the physics’ quantities to affect the solid mass of the Constabulary sniper.
At distance of a meter and a half and, at an all-out sprint, Warlock launched her body and went horizontal. Accelerating rapidly forward, her boots slapped down the rifle barrel before hammering into the Troop’s broad chest. The force of the impact caused the massive soldier to stagger backward. When his lower legs hit the frame, he tripped and toppled out of the hatch.
As he fell into open space, Warlock rode his sternum through the hatchway. But unlike the surprised soldier who maintained his grip on the rifle, Warlock released her pistol and grabbed the inside of the frame with both hands. And while he fell a long distance to the deck, the Striker’s hold on the hatch jerked her to a stop.
A twist of her legs flipped her over and Warlock fell straight down to the top of the ladder. Crushing the rails between her palms and insteps allowed her to begin a controlled slide down to the resupply deck.
Warlock had been so focused on the assault she failed to notice Natsuki’s mounted gun was still active. The weapon slung rounds at enemy positions, just not in the Master Sergeant’s direction.
***
Sergeant Misaki Natsuki didn’t see Master Sergeant Alberich’s acrobatic exit through the hatch and high-speed descent.
“Warlock is down,” Lieutenant Ayana reported.
“Down? Where? How badly injured?” Natsuki demanded.
The Sergeant didn’t have the luxury of looking away from her monitor. Out in space, two Constabulary shuttles zoomed around dodging rounds from her mounted gun. They crisscrossed, maneuvering to reach the supply bay and deposit soldiers.
While their Sergeant defended against the assault from space, Benigno, Auður, and Lieutenant Ayana, with a forty-five over and under rifle, targeted the deck level hatches.
“She’s not injured,” Ayana replied. The Lieutenant reached for another sonic grenade, loaded the rifle, and fired at a group of Troops staged at an entrance. Without marksmanship training, the Marine NCO had coached her on using the explosive rounds.
“Warlock is heading for our ride,” Auður added. “Sergeant. It’s time to leave.”
“Pull back, form a defensive perimeter, and report,” Natsuki ordered. After typing in a command on the gun’s controller, she watched the mounted weapon spin away from the attacking shuttles. “Call out.”
“Moving,” Benigno shouted.
The gunner walked backward across the deck firing bursts as he went.
“Coming to you,” Auður responded.
The sniper leaped from crate to crate and stopped to fire bursts at hatches before continuing his withdrawal.
“Stogies,” Warlock’s voice came over the radio. She had changed frequencies on the run and saved time by verbally relaying the final mission code. “Lieutenant Ayana, time to stop playing Marine and get back in the saddle.”
“None too soon,” Firethorn declared as she handed Warlock the rifle. “Sergeant Natsuki. Two minutes till’ launch.”
“Get behind the axis of the gun,” directed Natsuki as she climbed onto the crates and replaced the ammo cans. “I’m flipping it to target acquisition mode.”
Without the big gun firing, the Constabulary shuttles flew over the deck and settled down between adjacent stacks of crates. Apparently, the landings were signals and Troops poured out of the hatches. Warlock and the Marines sent rounds into the charging masses of soldiers.
“Activating,” Natsuki announced. The mounted gun snapped to the right, jerked in short arcs until it rotated one hundred eighty degrees from where it started. “Drop your toys boys and girls and get onboard. Big mama is about to give a lecture. Move it.”
Lance Corporal Benigno tossed away his machine gun and jerked the harness over his head as he sprinted to Talon One. From high above, Lance Corporal Jari Auður forcefully threw his sniper rifle to the deck intentionally damaging the weapon. Then he climbed down the crates and ran for the shuttle as well.
Warlock raised the rifle over her head, smashed the forty-five into the deck, dropped the pieces, and stepped into the shuttle. With all members of the mission loaded, the Sergeant twirled her hand in the air signaling Firethorn to lift off. With her other hand, she snapped off the safety freeing the mounted gun.
The automatic targeting and firing program took command and the barrel began pumping fifty-twos into identified targets as it swept back to the right. Natsuki leaped off the crates and dove into the shuttle. Diosa closed and secured the hatch.
“Go, go, go,” shouted the Sergeant.
The runners on Talon One scraped across the deck plating as the spacecraft fought the gravity. Warlock’s PID flashed a notice that the thirty minutes had elapsed.
Lieutenant Ayana shoved the power bar forward and the ion cannons of the interior drive became a droning noise as the rattling blended together to sound like one. The shuttle launched and Firethorn flew it away from the supply bay.
The hairs on the Navy pilot’s neck stood on end and her back tightened. At any moment, Ayana expected her instruments to alert her to a scan, notify her of a lock-on by a targeting system, and begin screaming an alert while tracking an inbound missile. None of that happened. As Talon One shot towards the barren planet, the gun and rocket battery crews and sensor divisions on Elf-09 were scrambling to regain control.
***
After Warlock removed the data storage section from the unit, Walden Geboren’s device didn’t stop. With the clamps still attached to the warship’s fiber optic bundle, the small unit sent an order to a subprogram. Unnoticed by the antivirus software because it was routine, the instructions were allowed to start a countdown. At thirty minutes, Elf-09’s computer initiated a ship-wide training drill. Using the last general quarters as a model, it locked the warship’s weapons, directed the sensor and scanner arrays to match the last situation, and requested input from each section on how they would improve their efficiency.
In the midst of an attack on their supply bay and with the ship hiding and on full alert, the technicians, gunners, and supervisors scrambled to override the drill and shut down the training program. They did regain control. But not before Talon One slipped through the hole in their sensor coverage and reached the thin atmosphere of the planet.
Chapter 15 – Mission Guidance
“Talon, this is Talon One. We are away and on course,” Firethorn radioed.
“Come home, Talon One,” Poet responded. Then he spoke to the Marine gunner. “Corporal Katla. Pease, send in our final torpedo.”
“Yes sir, one gift for the Constabulary on the way,” Katla acknowledged.
The torpedo’s engine ignited and burned just long enough to put it in motion. As before, the planet gave the weapon a boost and it sailed quietly around the world and out into space.
“It’s on station,” the Corporal reported a short while later.
“Let it drift until we collect our people,” Poet advised.
The shuttle closed with the converted yacht and Ayana did a masterful job of piloting it to the hanger bay. Poet didn’t waste time attaching both arms, with one secured, he reeled in Talon One.
“Injuries?” Walden inquired.
“Nothing except dented armor and bruises,” Ayana reported.
“Clear the shuttle and get everyone to the command deck and strapped in,” ordered Walden.
Benigno, Auður, and Natsuki stomped through the hatch while unstrapping their helmets. All three Marines had smiles on their faces until they sat down. Then the dented armor dug into already bruised areas of their bodies and they moaned.
“Good fight,” Benigno exclaimed then he let out an ouch. “I don’t know which one got off those shots but I hope I repaid the favor.”
The armor of all three Marines displayed deep furrows in multiple locations from Constabulary rounds. But noticeably, Benigno’s torso displayed indentions and scarring far in excess of the others.
“I’d guess more than one shot you up,” ventured Auður.
“Then I hope I got them all,” the heavy weapons specialist replied.
Lieutenant Ayana stepped onto the command deck holding her helmet in her hands. As she walked, Firethorn examined two grooves on top of the headgear.
“Next time, we’ll teach you to duck while reloading,” offered Sergeant Natsuki.
“There won’t be a next time,” Ayana stated as she sat heavily in a chair and secured the harness. “I’m staying in my fighter. Why I volunteered for this mission, I’ll mark up to boredom and youthful exuberance.”
“You’re still young, Lieutenant,” Natsuki pointed out.
“I don’t know about that, Sergeant,” admitted Ayana. “I feel a thousand years old right now.”
“You’re coming down from the adrenaline spikes, ma’am,” offered Corporal Katla. “You’ll feel better once you’re back on the Doric Pillar.”
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