The rumbling boom of another explosion sounded in the distance almost the moment the HUD countdown reached zero.
“Go!”
The sub-level didn’t shake so much as vibrate while the kill team tossed an assortment of grenades into the drive control room. By the time Wraith, who was last in the stack, hurled his weapons, he could see that some of the shock troopers had shifted their gaze from the shaking walls and ceiling to the fraggers plinking about their feet. Victory Squad had flooded the room with deadly explosives in a matter of seconds.
Over S-comm, a shock trooper screamed, “Grenades!” but his voice was drowned by a series of concussive explosions.
The second missile hit, erupting at the base of a construction spire. This one, too, caused the sub-level to shake as though they were in the midst of an earthquake. The sound of collapsing impervisteel and secondary explosions told Wraith that the damage had been considerable.
“Inside!” Chhun ordered, leading the way into the smoke-filled room.
Consoles and screens where engineers monitored the progress of the super-destroyer’s drive build were now pockmarked with gouges and carbon-scored divots. The polished black floors were littered with stunned and bleeding shock troopers. An officer, clad in a black uniform, sat dead, slumped against a wall, his entrails spilling out of his stomach. Above him, a cheerfully rendered sign touted four hundred and eighty-eight days since the last workplace injury on this sub-level.
Victory Squad swept over the surviving shock troopers like angels of death, sending single shots through the bucket of every shock trooper, until twenty-four of Goth Sullus’s men lay dead. That some of these men might be former friends or colleagues was a thought the kill team didn’t dwell on.
“Bear, Sticks,” Chhun called out, “keep the way we came in secure. Wraith, monitor S-comms for any indication that we’ve got company coming. Masters, check the bodies for intel. Fish, you’re with me. We’re going into the drive’s core to initiate the overload protocols.”
With shouts of “Ooah!” the team dispersed, taking up their respective positions.
As Masters sifted through the bodies, providing mundane and irreverent reports—“Nothing here. Nothing here. Thanks for the fragger. Nothing here. Clean your weapon better.”—Wraith took a knee and began to switch between S-comm channels, rotating through the primary S-comm and as many squad frequencies as he could find. The chatter was almost overwhelming, with too many voices flooding the comms at once.
Most of the chatter was about the two missile attacks, and questions about where they had come from. The Black Fleet was engaged in its own battles and had provided no intel, except to state they had no starfighters to spare. The second hit on the generators had apparently wiped out a squadron sent to investigate, and the missile attack on the construction spire had caused the mostly constructed corvette dry-docked there to come tumbling down, causing a series of fires that threatened to consume a number of records buildings and warehouses.
This was all good news, but the chatter prevented Wraith from getting any sense of whether the fight at the super-destroyer’s drive build had been reported. While letting the S-comm chaos continue to play out in his ear, he decided to try contacting the Six again.
“Indelible VI, this is Wraith. Do you copy?”
Still no answer.
“Repeat. Wraith to—”
He cut his transmission short when a comm-wide chime sounded over the S-comm. It was an inversion of the all-comm chime used by the Legion. Wraith couldn’t give Goth Sullus many points for originality—but perhaps that was the idea.
The voice coming in over S-comm was crisp and authoritative. “This is Captain Condaras at Kesselverks Headquarters Division. General Nero has left the planet for the Tarrago moon and has placed me in command. We believe these attacks are the result of a Republic kill team. All outposts are to report status updates immediately. Condaras out.”
“Masters,” Wraith called. “Get over to that lieutenant with his guts hanging out and bring me his identification.”
Wraith listened in as comm officers checked in directly with the various enemy outposts and squadrons stationed throughout the shipyards. Hopefully he would have some time before they called this location.
“Command Headquarters to White Platoon: report,” came the call over S-comm.
There was no reply.
“Does his sec-badge say White Platoon?” Wraith called to Masters, who was attempting to search the deceased lieutenant with as little mess as possible.
“Yeah,” Masters said, un-clipping an authorization badge from behind the officer’s belt.
“Well hurry up and bring it over,” called Wraith, motioning for Masters to get moving. “They’re calling our number.”
“Command Headquarters to White Platoon, do you copy?”
Masters handed Wraith the sec-card. Wraith fumbled it in his hands, turning it to read the relevant data. He opened an S-comm transmission. “This is Lieutenant Ellors. Nothing to report.”
“What took you so long?” asked the comm officer.
“Nothing, I, uh, had to use the restroom. During the attack. I was, uh, cleaning up when you hailed.”
“Oba,” came the somewhat disgusted reply of the comm officer. “Well, hurry up and finish. Lieutenant Worley has been ordered to link up with your platoon. Projections show your locale as the most likely point of attack, should the kill team enter the compound at your sub-level.”
“Acknowledged, HQ,” Wraith said, pausing to re-read the name on the card. “Lieutenant Ellors out.”
He closed the transmission, then shouted into L-comm, “Chhun! We’re about to have company!”
***
Chhun and Fish were in sight of the super-destroyer’s reactor controls when Wraith’s message came through.
Chhun acknowledged the transmission, then turned to Fish. “Nothing we can do about that but keep doing what we’re doing,” he said. “Your shoulder okay?”
“Fine. A little singed maybe, but otherwise all right.”
They were traveling along a narrow catwalk suspended above the drive’s massive cooling shaft. This particular drive was complete and functional. A celebratory scrawl along the catwalk’s guardrail confirmed this; the engineer and building team had all signed their names, as was customary, along with the date of completion. That meant it had already been fired up and had performed within operational standards. While in use, the catwalk would have been inaccessible without environmental suits capable of withstanding the intense heat and radiation emitted by a destroyer’s drive—but after testing, it had been powered down, its radioactive elements scrubbed out and put into accelerated decay chambers that lined the spherical drive walls. It was now as if the reactions had never taken place, and the legionnaires could walk to the drive’s core control center without any fear of contamination.
Sometimes, Chhun told himself, you forget about just how amazing all of this is.
The catwalk led to a sphere that sat directly in the middle of the drive core. A railed walkway circled the sphere, and on the opposite side of the sphere another, equally long catwalk went in the opposite direction from the legionnaires’ approach. This sphere was roughly the size of a four-story building, was the drive core. Most of its interior was used to create the energy that would flood the drive itself before being routed to engines, with baffles and tributaries keeping the vessel’s power generators fully charged.
Chhun and Fish stopped before a massive door in the side of the sphere. While Chhun used his kill team overrides on a keypad beside the door, Fisher navigated a full circle around the drive core, to be sure no one was on the other side.
“All clear,” Fish announced as he rejoined Chhun, who was waiting with the door open. The two leejes stepped inside.
A second, smaller sphere sat inside the first, dividing the core into two chambers. The outer chamber was where the engineering crew worked; identical workstations were set all around the core’s
thick outer wall, protecting the users from the maelstrom of energy that formed when a destroyer was in use. The inner chamber was where the reactor generated its power. The raw energy was released out of the drive core into the drive chamber through a series of powerful emissions that roared through a callarum crystal rod ported through the outer chamber. Thick slabs of transparent impervisteel allowed the engineers to monitor the core’s power fluxes, venting and building as needed to keep the destroyer’s drive system in order. It was the same system that was found on every starship in the galaxy capable of hyperspace travel, only on a much larger scale.
Chhun went to the chief engineer’s console and began to work his way through the intricate web of commands, overrides, and Legion-only security codes that would put the drive core into an irreversible overload. This factory was coming down.
“I just had a thought,” Fish said as Chhun’s fingers worked their way across the console screens. “What if the company Wraith called to warn us about cuts through the drive instead of going all the way around to the freight lifts?”
Chhun slowed his advance on the drive’s command console, gradually coming to a stop. “That would be faster,” he said, typing in a new set of commands. “That’s what we would do. Let’s see if the core’s stationary cams are operable.”
Holoscreens throughout the outer chamber flickered to life, one every twenty meters or so. Chhun and Fish looked up to the holoscreen above their console. Sure enough, a platoon-sized element of shock troopers was working their way toward the drive core across the long catwalk.
“Sket!” hollered Chhun. “Yep. There they are.”
Chhun didn’t bother calling for reinforcements. He and Fish both knew their Dark Ops brothers couldn’t reach the drive core in time to make a difference.
“Cap,” said Fish, “can we fire up the reactor? Fry these kelhorns before they reach us?”
Chhun shook his head. “These things take a while to get going unless you do the shortcut we’re after. If the drive fired up, they’d just start running. They’d be at the door before they even started sweating in their armor.” He began working on the sequence again, but paused to look at Fish. “Either way, we need to buy ourselves some time.”
Fish hoisted his squad automatic blaster over his shoulder. “Say no more, boss.”
***
Fish ran through the outer chamber, passing unused engineering stations as he worked his way around to the door on the opposite side. In spite of moving at a flat-out sprint, with as big as the core was, he felt like he couldn’t possibly run fast enough. “How,” he panted, “far?”
The team was so synced up, that Chhun understood immediately that his labored question was about the shock troopers, not the distance to the door.
“They’re a little short of halfway.”
That was good. Fish could do something with that. Do some damage.
He slowed his pace as he reached the door. He held his cumbersome weapon up, deployed its bipod, and moved shoulder-first, as if he planned to batter down the door. The door automatically swooshed open, and he fell to his stomach and steadied the squad automatic blaster on the bipod.
The shock troopers were startled only for a moment by the sight of a black-clad Dark Ops legionnaire bursting through the drive core door. They quickly recovered and sent blaster bolts down the remaining length of the catwalk. The shots sailed harmlessly over Fish’s head as he hit the deck.
Calmly, though the shock troopers were already adjusting their fire, Fish primed his SAB, pulled back the charge level, and heard that beautiful, high-pitched whine. He gently squeezed his trigger, sending a relentless barrage of blaster bolts into the shock troopers traveling two by two down the catwalk. It was incredible, really. How so slight a motion could bring forth such colossal destruction. A simple squeeze.
The first man dropped face first, and the man behind him was hit almost as soon as the first. Fish gently swayed the barrel of his blaster—not too much—just enough to eat up the ranks of shock troopers on either side. These dark-armored impostors dropped over the catwalk’s sides, falling into the depths below. The others fell into each other, hugged the deck, and then… broke and retreated. The cost of reaching Fish was too high. Retreat wasn’t cheap, either; the retreating soldiers left a trail of dead bodies behind them.
Fish didn’t stop firing until the last shock trooper had retreated behind the heavy blast doors at the other end of the catwalk. Then he flipped his medium-range scope to the top of the weapon, preferring it to the iron sights, and he watched the sealed blast doors.
They’d be back. And Fish would make them pay.
17
“We’ve got some significant contact going on here at the drive core,” Chhun called in.
Wraith tilted his head. The S-comms were full of the details, and it sounded like squads of shock troopers from throughout the facility were converging on the drive core.
“Yeah,” Wraith answered over the squad’s L-comm. “Their comms are hot. I’ve done what I could to make ’em believe that as bad as it is for the platoon you and Fish are holding down, it’s worse here. I’ve got the missiles looking for large groupings of shock troopers if they start crossing the open ground on the surface.”
“Good,” Chhun said. “I need you to do something else.”
“Name it.”
“Take Masters and get back to the ship. I don’t think we’ll have the opportunity to get clear in time without getting flown out.”
Wraith considered this. Leenah could easily bring the ship in for an emergency pickup at the shipyards. There weren’t any anti-air emplacements to speak of—the big gun on the moon and the defense fleet were supposed to be sufficient for all that. But he was growing increasingly worried that something had happened to Leenah, and regardless, it didn’t make for good planning to assume the ship would be on its way as soon as they popped their heads back into the warehouse like chuck prairies coming out of their holes. He could always have the AI fly the thing in, he supposed… but as he’d said many times in the past, that was a surefire way to get your ship shot down.
“Good call,” he said. “I’ll see if I can get Leenah to bring the ship to us. Hopefully they’ll be able to pick us up. But if it’s worst case, and we need to retake the ship… I’ll need Masters to help.”
“Aw, that would suck,” Masters said, an edge of gloom creeping into his usual irreverence. “I like that kid you have on board.”
“You ready?” Wraith asked, already passing Bear and moving toward the corridor leading to the freight lift.
“Yeah.” Masters grabbed his N-4 and hurried to catch up to the swiftly moving operative.
The two ran through the corridor, weapons ready. No comm traffic suggested that a squad was headed in their direction, which allowed them to run faster than they otherwise would. But caution was still necessary. They had to keep the initiative. Had to KTF.
Masters reached the freight lift first, nearly slipping in the pooled blood from the guard Chhun had eliminated earlier. “Pride intact,” he announced to Wraith. “Lift is still here. So nobody up at the warehouse level is there to recall it.”
Wraith nodded. “So far, so good.”
Masters stepped onto the lift, but Wraith motioned for him to step back off. “No. We’d be stationary targets riding that thing back up. C’mon.”
Moving around to the side of the elevator, near the spot where they’d hid the shock trooper who had guarded this sector’s body, Wraith grabbed hold of two rungs on a panel painted with black and yellow stripes. He pulled hard, causing the panel to move toward him on a hinge. He pushed the panel up into a locked position and stepped back. With the panel removed, a narrow shaft with ladder rungs was now visible. Each level likely had a similar access panel in the otherwise enclosed ladder shaft. “Time to climb.”
“Hey, great,” Masters said, the disingenuous tone clear in his voice. “Climbing up all these levels in full leej kit… that should be fun. I’m ex
cited, Wraith. Can you tell I’m excited?”
“You had to do worse in Legion school,” Wraith answered, beginning to climb up the dimly lit shaft.
“Yeah, yeah,” Masters muttered, grabbing the rungs and following. “Do we get to run for miles once we get to the top? Just like Legion school?”
“Probably.”
“It’s real nice to have you back,” Masters deadpanned. “What a great time I’m having right now.”
***
Fish watched unblinkingly through his scope. The doors hadn’t opened in a while. Not after the last time. A shock trooper—probably a marksman—had crouched just inside the doors, his long rifle aiming outward in an attempt to pick Fish off. With a flurry of concentrated burst fire, Fish had eaten up the blast door’s frame all around the sharpshooter, with one bolt blasting its way through the man’s scope. The sharpshooter fell over sideways into the doorway, keeping the doors from closing. Two more shock troopers attempted to pull the body clear, but Fish got bolts into them as well.
With the doors propped open, he could cut the room at the other end of the catwalk in half, denying access to the mounting reinforcements trying to enter from the opposite side. It wasn’t until one such squad took heavy damage from Fish’s automatic blaster that someone made the decision to manually shut the blast doors—despite the fact the sharpshooter’s body was still in the way. As the doors slowly shut, the dead sharpshooter’s body was squeezed as though in a vise. It… wasn’t pretty.
“How we doing, boss?” Fish asked. Chhun should be close to finished by now.
Sword of the Legion (Galaxy's Edge Book 5) Page 14