by Terry Mixon
“I’m not the only one here. They don’t give us a lot of interaction with each other, but there’s…”
“Another sixty or so prisoners, at least a tenth of them Agency,” Brad confirmed. “We’ve got shuttles on the roof and you probably heard our doorknocker. We can evac everyone, though it’ll be tight.”
He glanced around.
“Any chance that some of these folks actually deserve to be here?”
“It’s possible, but the only people I’ve met are basically political enemies of President Mills. I don’t know how long this has been going, but it runs deep.”
“Then we need to burn it out. We need to clean out this place’s computers. Reece?” Brad turned to his hacker.
“Honestly, sir? I’m good…but the Agency types the Red Diamonds locked down here? They’re as good or better—and seven of us will make a hell of a lot bigger dent than one.”
“Kate?”
“She’s right,” Falcone replied. “Let me at these bastards’ computers. I think I may even know what I’m looking for!”
“Let’s do it.”
“Incoming!”
Gunfire started up again as Brad led the collection of techno-geeks back to the security control center. Reece and Falcone had dug up the rest of the Agents held prisoner, all of whom were grateful to be released—and grimly furious at being imprisoned by their own government.
“Get into the computers,” Brad ordered. He grabbed his rifle and stepped over the barricade, where his people were throwing a fusillade of fire down the hallway.
He realized quickly that it wasn’t being a very effective fusillade. He’d never seen anything like what the defenders were throwing at him.
Three figures were proceeding down the corridor. Each was at least two and a half meters tall, black juggernauts wrapped in layers of armor that laughed at his people’s weapons. They were equipped to deal with light body armor at worst, not…whatever in Everdark this was!
The suits clearly came with some kind of muscle augmentation as well, as no human could heft the massive heavy machine guns the three figures were carrying. Carefully aimed bursts down the corridor were keeping his people behind cover.
Even if their guns could get through that armor, they weren’t firing with enough accuracy to manage it.
And the juggernauts advanced.
“Saburo?” Brad demanded as he reached their blockade.
“Power armor,” the Colonel said with a shake of his head. “Fleet has something like, I don’t know, maybe a dozen suits on each cruiser? You almost don’t want them in space, as anything that can take them down will wreck the ship you’re standing on.”
“Not so big a concern down here,” Brad concluded.
“No. I think the national militaries all have elite forces using them. Of course the bloody Secret Service has them.”
“They’re slow, at least,” the Commodore observed.
“Yeah…and they want prisoners, which is the only reason any of us are still alive.”
Brad had suspected as much. Those heavy machine guns could blow right through the cover his people were using. On the other hand…he was much less determined to take prisoners.
“Got a plan?” he asked.
“Working on one. You?”
Brad grinned and produced the toy-sized crossbow he’d used on New Venice from his combat gear. It had a far lower velocity than any of his “real” guns—but its monofilament-edged tip did not care about armor.
“How fast does that reload?”
“About a second.”
“This is going to suck,” Saburo noted.
“Got another plan?” Brad asked.
“Nope. Covering you.”
Brad sprang out from behind his cover, taking careful aim. Every fraction of a second that he was visible was a risk, but the bow was a short-range weapon with no sights and a long reload time. He couldn’t afford to miss.
The mini-crossbow snapped—and the bolt punched into the lead trooper’s helmet. Its metallic fins were still protruding, but the point was at least three or four centimeters into the Secret Service man’s brain.
Brad dropped as the two survivors focused their fire. The little motor in the crossbow reloaded, seeming almost glacially slow compared to a modern firearm, and he had to roll to the side as the HMG fire punched through their impromptu cover.
He popped back up and took aim again. This time, he barely got the shot off before a bullet hit him. His second shot was off target, but it still took his victim in the jaw. A crippling and life-threatening wound.
Brad, thankfully, was wearing his skintight armor under his armored vac-suit. Neither would have been enough to stop the heavy round at this range on their own. As it was, well, he wasn’t using his right arm anytime soon—bruising and probably a cracked shoulder blade.
Unfortunately for the remaining uninjured trooper, Brad might not have felt up to using a mini crossbow with his left hand…but he was definitely up to using a mono-blade with it.
He was over the barricade as the trooper struggled to pull his friend back. With a curse, Saburo came after him…but he wasn’t needed.
Brad bisected both of the troopers’ weapons and whipped his mono-blade around to embed it in the neck of the third man.
He didn’t take off the man’s head. There was an electromagnetic field of some kind in the suit, one that would resist a charged mono-blade even if it couldn’t stop the monofilament-edged crossbow bolt.
There was no way it would stop him a second time, and as Brad held the blade, he knew his opponent knew that as well.
“Shut down the suit and step out,” he ordered. “Get your friend to do the same and we’ll help you give him first aid. If you surrender. Deal?”
The hallway was silent and frozen for a moment, and then Saburo stepped up with the reloaded mini-crossbow and a truly vicious grin.
Then the Secret Service trooper carefully raised their hands and clicked a command on their helmet. She removed the heavy headgear to reveal a youngish woman with short-cropped copper hair and very, very scared eyes.
“Deal,” she choked out.
“Out of the suits. Move!” he barked. “Your friends are coming, and I don’t like my prisoners getting caught in the crossfire!”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Brad escorted the two half-armored grunts back behind his people’s barricade, where Corporal Jimenez immediately set to treating the young man with a ten-centimeter crossbow bolt embedded in his jaw.
The mercenary commander couldn’t help feeling guilty, even if the two young people he now had prisoner had been shooting at him. So far as they knew, they were legitimately working for the Commonwealth—and his people had just blown in the roof and started breaking prisoners free.
“There’s no good news,” Falcone told him as the medic took their new prisoners away. “We’re locked out. I think the data is intact underneath, but all of our access has been cut. Without getting into the computer data center, we’re not getting anything out of these people’s files.”
“Okay, so where’s the data center?” Brad asked. So far, they had been letting the defenders come to them, but if he needed to assault deeper into the facility, he would.
He would lose people. He knew that. And half the people he was killing were basically innocents, too. But with the entire Commonwealth riding on the next few hours…he’d do what he had to do.
“Yeah, well, there may be no good news, but there’s worse news,” the Agent told him in a dry tone. “The one thing we are getting is a countdown timer. In about five minutes, this entire place is going to get blown sky-high—and unless I’m severely mistaken, the landing pad dome is sealed.
“No one is getting out, Brad. Someone, probably on the outside, pushed a button that trapped everyone in here and is going to kill them.”
“We can get out,” Brad replied. “But we need that data, Kate.”
“Then we need to go,” she told him. “Evac th
e prisoners, evac everyone. There’s nothing here worth dying for.”
“There might be,” he said quietly. “Do you have enough to impeach Mills?”
Agent Falcone stared at him.
“No, but we have time and now we know. We can find the proof.”
“In sixteen hours, President Mills will ask the Senate for a declaration of war and associated emergency powers,” Brad told her. “Once he has them, I doubt he’s going to relinquish them. The survival of our nation, Kate, depends on whether we can break him today.”
“I can’t,” she admitted. “We don’t have enough. I might be able to convince the Senate not to hand him emergency powers, to give us the authority to impanel a special prosecutor…”
“But if he’s got the votes tied up enough that he expects to pass his declaration tonight, then we need a smoking gun, something sufficient to arrest him on the Senate floor,” Brad replied.
“Then you need these people to surrender and I have no idea how you’re going to do that,” Falcone said. “There’s a bomb at the deepest part of this complex, probably a fusion weapon of some kind, rigged to vaporize the entire underground base.”
“So, they haven’t told the grunts, or no one would be trying to fight past us,” the Commodore noted. “Unless…”
It struck him like a blow.
“Kate, we’re in the deepest part of the base. A roughly central part, too—and if they’re running a secret black prison for the President’s enemies, wouldn’t you want to make damn sure those enemies never got out?”
“Everlit,” Falcone breathed. “You mean we’re sitting on top of the damned bomb?!”
Once they knew what they were looking for, it took them under a minute to find the bomb. The radiation levels hadn’t been enough to trigger any alerts—they were effectively nonexistent, really—but the sensors on their combat vac-suits were more than capable of tracking it.
A floor panel in the center of the prison turned out to cover an access to a hidden compartment that contained a series of wires and blinking lights completely unfamiliar to Brad.
“Saburo,” he barked into his coms. “Can we blockade the entrance so they can’t get through inside the next few minutes?”
“Yeah, we were just keeping it open so we could get to the computer center,” his Colonel replied.
“New plan. They’re going to let us into the computer center. Seal the tunnel, whatever it takes, then get everybody aboard the shuttles. Leave one behind for me and Falcone, then get everybody else the Everdark out of here.”
He looked over at the Agent.
“You can disarm this, right?”
She was studying the bomb carefully, poking at wires.
“Yes,” she confirmed. “Not quickly, though. We may not have enough time.”
“Get started,” he ordered, then tapped his com. “Get out of here, Saburo. It’s down to me talking and Falcone disabling the bomb. Anything else is just putting lives at risk. Go!”
“Wilco. And you said I’d never get any use out of these instant-concrete bombs.”
“You brought those?” Brad demanded.
The “bombs” in question were more on the order of emergency reinforcement tools, designed to spray a foam all around them and then harden it in place. They wouldn’t hold up anyone for long…but they’d buy ten minutes, at least.
The distinctive cracking and bubbling noise of the devices echoed down the hallway, and Brad switched his helmet radio to omnidirectional broadband.
“I need to talk to Jessica Andrews,” he said calmly. “And I’d say we have about…oh, two minutes to have this conversation.”
Several seconds passed.
“I’m impressed,” the calm voice of an older woman finally responded. “Most people think I’m dead.”
“I saw footage of you on Longbow, Ms. Andrews,” Brad told her. “I’m guessing you didn’t activate the bomb, so I have one very easy question for you: what are you prepared to do to get the man who did?”
“Who am I talking to? Madrid?”
“Bingo.”
“Damn, you’re a pain in my ass,” she said. “Twenty years I gave this project, Madrid. Don’t pity me because they decided I was expendable. I was in this for power and money. Willing to let me walk away?”
“No,” he told her. “But right now, I’m sitting on a bomb that will kill you and everyone in this base—and we can turn it off. Do you want to live, Ms. Andrews?”
“Very much,” Andrews snapped. “So, how about we stop playing games and you tell me what you want?”
“I want this base’s files, intact and handed over to the Agency,” Brad said. “And I want you with me tonight when President Mills tries to sell the Senate on making him dictator.”
“I want full immunity,” she countered instantly.
“You have sixty seconds or fiery death,” Brad pointed out.
“And all of your shuttles but one have left,” she replied. “If you don’t disarm that bomb, you die with me. I’ll give you everything you want, Mills just stabbed me in the back—but I want out and I want out clean. If you’re not Agency, there’s someone there who is and can make that promise.”
Brad muted his mike and looked at Falcone.
“Are we going to die?” he asked bluntly.
She tore a chunk of wires out of the bomb and grinned.
“Not today.”
“Can I actually offer full immunity?”
“Yes. I want that bitch to swing, but yes,” she allowed.
He sighed, and turned on the microphone.
“All right, Ms. Andrews. You have a deal. You surrender this base and give me Mills’s head on a plate, and we’ll disarm the bomb. You get to live.”
“Done,” she said instantly. “Even if you probably already did disarm the bomb, I still want that fucker’s head.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
It was evening in New York City by the time they had everything in order. Brad, Falcone, and Andrews arrived at the spaceport on a regular civilian suborbital flight from Buenos Aires. Several of Brad’s shuttlecraft remained in the city as well, but the two Agents, their witness, and the Vikings mercenaries he’d brought along for security filled the first- and business-class sections of the aircraft.
Harmon was waiting for them as they left the gate at the airport, a dozen burly young men in expensive black suits hanging around the squat Director of the Agency.
“Ms. Andrews,” he greeted their witness. “It’s been a long time. It’s a pleasure to see you’re still alive.”
“Oh, shut up, Antonio,” Andrews replied. “We’ve been sparring through the shadows at arm’s length for a decade. You’re allowed to gloat.”
“I’ll save gloating for when this is over,” he told her. “I don’t like the deal Madrid cut with you, won’t pretend otherwise, but I’ll honor it. When Mills is in jail, you get your pardon and immunity.”
“I know you, Antonio,” she said. “I was never worried. Now, I believe we have a Senate meeting to crash?”
“Are you trying to make me angry?” Harmon asked. “Because you’ll have to try a lot harder.”
She chuckled.
“Oh, I know. Shall we, my dear Director?” Andrews offered Harmon her arm.
He glared at her and gestured for the guards to fall in around her.
“This whole situation is getting messier by the second,” he told Brad and Falcone, his gaze lingering on Brad. “Let’s get this stage of it over with so we can deal with the next complication this disaster throws at us.”
“Any more complications we can expect?” Brad asked.
“We’ll need to borrow your troops,” Harmon said, glancing at the mercenaries following Brad and Falcone. “At least some of the lictors at the UN building will defend Mills no matter what. We need to neutralize them, nonlethally if possible.”
“That’ll depend on what gear you can get us,” Brad told him. “We didn’t check bags full of hardware, if that’s wh
at you’re asking.”
“We’ll sort something out,” he confirmed. “Are you ready, Commodore? This is something new for you, as I understand?”
“I’ve argued my case in front of planetary governments,” the gaunt mercenary replied. “This is just the next step up.”
“I don’t believe you’ve ever tried to arrest the leader of a planet, let alone the leader of the Commonwealth,” Harmon said with a chuckle as a car pulled up to pick them up. “No one has.”
“I just want it over,” Brad admitted. “Full gravity is starting to get obnoxious.”
His legs hurt. So did everything else. The subtle feeling of rightness was being overwhelmed by exhaustion at this point. Working out in a one-gravity gym for an hour a day at most didn’t prepare you for spending a full day in that gravity.
It was a good thing no one was expecting him to do much more than talk at this point.
“It is a dark hour for our people.”
Even as Brad and his companions were making their way through the corridors of the United Nations building toward the chamber where the Senate was in session, President Mills’s speech was being relayed to his earpiece.
His people had scattered to the winds along with most of Harmon’s bodyguards. There were just two of the suited grunts with them now, which was more than enough—with Brad and Falcone along, at least—to ensure Andrews didn’t get any clever ideas.
“The attack on Ceres shows how daring, how bold our enemies have become. Cadre ships came within millimeters of destroying one of this star system’s central sources of water. If the spacers of our brave Fleet had been one iota less capable, one iota less brave, one iota less well equipped…millions would have died.”
“How long is he going to talk for?” Falcone muttered as they reached a security checkpoint.
Four lictors in decorative uniforms—but carrying very non-decorative assault rifles—blocked the way, and Harmon barged forward.
“We need to speak to the Senate,” he told the guards.
“The President is speaking,” the constable in charge of the lictors replied. “The Senate is in closed session.”