The approach controller hesitated and asked them to wait.
In the back of Andien’s mind, something wasn’t right. She looked over her shoulder. She could see back down the narrow passage leading from the flight deck down into the lounge below the bridge. Hutch was talking to Prisma and the pink-skinned princess, who was standing protectively near the girl. The Endurian had insisted that she go in too. Wherever Prisma went, she was going.
They had counted on that.
What did the princess think—that they actually wanted to kill a little girl? They just wanted to get this over and done with, then wash their hands of these civvies. But then, Andien was part of the Carnivale now. And she’d heard the rumors. Killing a little girl… maybe that wasn’t such a stretch after all.
Well. Not on her watch.
The plan was for Shadow Team to take the two of them along into the base. They’d locate an access terminal below the processor stacks and hack in. Two minutes later they would get a bio-scan authorization, and if they passed that, they’d learn where the Doomsday Fleet currently was.
The code slicer, Garret, had said he could get it done in less than two minutes, easy, but Hutch hadn’t like the kid’s chances of keeping quiet down there. And Andien had to admit, the kid looked like a klutz. Besides, Maas was one of the best hackers in Nether Ops.
The pilot turned and nodded, his shaggy hair bobbing up and down as he grinned and gave her a dirty thumbs-up. They’d gotten the green light for landing. He cut the engines and brought the repulsors to full while he threw out the four landing gears. The ship settled onto its massive hydraulic shock absorbers, and Scooter, with a grand flourish, reached up and pulled the emergency handles on the master vent controls.
“Go,” whispered Andien into the comm that connected her with all of Ghost.
According to plan, both teams were now deploying to position one. Shadow into and under the massive superstructure of the landing platform, Zombie out through the cargo doors now rising at the aft of the ship.
The code slicer, the cat, and the war bot had all promised to remain in the lounge and stay out of the way. No one would get hurt, everything would get done, and they’d be gears up and finished with each other soon enough.
Andien started the mission clock.
They had twenty minutes.
***
Hutch switched to thermal optics as Crutchke popped the hatch in the belly of the ship and dropped onto the landing platform. Without thermal, their buckets would have shown nothing but engine gas billowing up all around them.
“Hurry,” whispered Hutch when he saw Crutchke struggle with a bolt on the maintenance hatch.
“Won’t budge,” whispered the operator over comm. “It’s calcified. Probably the low temps this place faces.”
“Then cut it.”
Crutchke was already way ahead of him. He’d pulled a small torch from his armor that emitted a tiny finger of twisting fire. A second later it sliced through the bolt like it was made of paper. One more cut, and the bolt was useless.
Crutchke popped both sides of the bolt with a screwdriver, then lifted the hatch, peered inside, nodded, and went down head first. He dropped down onto the platform, then looked up toward the belly of the dropship just above his head. Maas followed him down, and the two of them lifted Prisma down gently. They’d outfitted her and the Endurian with skin suits that would cover their IR signatures and keep them warm. Both suits were also low audio profile. No tool belts. No weapons. Minimum signature.
The Endurian went next. She may have whispered a nasty curse at Hutch as she slithered by him, and that made him like her even more. Truth was… he could get sweet on her. She had nice curves, and he liked his women saucy. He went down after her, with Enda bringing up the rear.
They stoop-walked down a small maintenance access hallway. This led to an access door that entered directly into the facility. Crutchke put his head against the door and waited for his armor’s audio acquisition to pick up anything on the other side. Signaling that he’d gotten a negative on any sounds beyond ambient machinery, he switched on his armor’s radar.
While Ghost Team might have looked like typical legionnaires at a distance, their armor had some significant differences. Notably, it wasn’t made of the awful forged ceramic-weave the new Legion armor was composed of. The stuff with the reflective shine that the Legion hated and the Republic loved. Ghost Team’s armor was made of a polymerized graphene that wore like soft rubber and stood up to a pretty fair amount of explosive and light blaster damage. It was invisible to most security systems on IR and EM, and it could visually mess with automated sensors by passively sending a QR signal that essentially removed the suit from the image of whatever the camera was focused on. Currently the team’s armor was a gray charcoal, but it had a camo system that sensed light and optimized for shadow and terrain. The armor handled all this automatically, based on the situation.
Crutchke’s radar detected nothing beyond the door.
Maas stepped forward and hacked the door’s cycling lock in twenty-four seconds.
Crutchke stood back and deployed his blaster. This was an optimized version of the sub-mini the Zombies were concealing as they unloaded cargo above. Each blaster was outfitted with laser tri-dot targeting system hardware along with popped short shoulder stocks. Blast silencers were attached at the ends of the barrels; when fired, the blasters would give off only a series of thump thump thumps, as opposed to the usual high-pitched whines. They were solid weapons. They burned through charge packs like there was no tomorrow, but they had a high rate of fire, and they hit what they were pointed at.
With Crutchke in the lead, they made their way through the level one maintenance catacombs. Hutch kept one hand on Prisma and checked the mission clock inside his HUD. Eighteen minutes left.
Things continued smoothly for the next nine minutes. They found an acceptable terminal just below the processor stacks inside the comm node’s deep core, and Maas stepped up to begin the hack.
And then things started to go severely sideways. Almost as soon as Maas started the hack, something tripped somewhere, and someone got wise to a data breach.
Maas was sure it wasn’t his fault.
***
The shock trooper sniper, part of a Black Fleet special operations tower, was looking out a narrow window at the top of the oblong tower when the message came over S-Comm.
“Take out the pilot.”
Without hesitation, the sniper pulled the trigger on a matte black vented sniper rifle currently set to high gain for max penetration. A ray of green light shot through the tower window and into the cockpit of the “freighter” on the platform below. A pico-second later it tore out the pilot’s throat.
***
Andien was standing behind Scooter when the shot struck. She’d been watching the feeds from the teams, and the ship itself, in the small command station aft of the cockpit. She heard the tinkle of burned glass as it sprayed across the cockpit and then saw the pilot pitch backward, clutching at his throat. His body spasmed as he died.
Then she saw the shock troopers coming out of the facility from the main hangar leading down into the ice. These must be the ones Wraith had mentioned in his report. They were using the loading ramp as cover, and they were already engaging the Zombies.
Zombie Team at least had cover in the bogus supplies they’d been offloading. But there were a lot of shock troopers in snow-camoed armor coming out of the facility.
“Shadow Team, we’re made! Abort!” Andien shouted into the comm. “Hutch, get back to the ship, now!”
21
Taylor, the Zombie Team leader, pulled his sub-mini and touched the “deploy” contact. The weapon transformed into the blaster configuration they’d set up before the op. Ten-round bursts, low intensity. They’d figured they might have to put down the unarmored comm node shipping personnel, not actual tangos in leej armor.
Wonkeye went down first. A shock trooper shot him clean through
the heart as he tried to suppress while the rest of the team set up a hasty defense and crossfire.
A second later Taylor was on comm with Hutch.
“Tangos all over us, Hutch!” He popped up, unloaded a burst on a closing dark legionnaire, and dropped the guy. The rest of Zombie were now covering and returning fire. If the shock troopers really were leejes, or ex-leejes, they’d pin them down and flank just like Legion small-unit doctrine indicated.
He checked Reeco and Divitts’s position. They were exposed on the right because Wonkeye was down. In a few seconds the enemy would work that out and push where they were weak. Taylor dashed from cargo pallet to cargo pallet. If he could get over to the right flank, he could be waiting for them.
And still, there was no response from Hutch. The comm was dead silent.
***
“Got it,” whispered Maas over comm once he’d cracked the terminal. A few seconds later he had a search algorithm trawling comm logs for the Doomsday Fleet. A few seconds after that they got the first “need-to-know security confirmation checks.” Serious stuff. They had a few pass codes that might work—hopefully it was enough to get through the first layers, to access the buried biometric scan that only a few would know about.
Hutch snapped his fingers at the Endurian and motioned for the little girl to be ready for the scan. The look he got from Leenah was pure hatred.
Maas had the biometric scan security page up. “Just stand here, little girl,” he said. He spoke in a kindly tone that was at odds with his external suit vocalizer, which made him sound like an electronic ghost. They were keeping the two females off the comms.
Prisma positioned herself in front of the terminal. A small articulating bot arm popped out and chattered in logic-numerica, the standard code interface language for admin system bots. A wide, knife-edged green laser ran down Prisma from head to toe, paused, then retraced its course.
For a long minute they held their breath as nothing changed on the security page.
Then it accessed the galactic transponder positioning grid. Every ship’s last known transponder position was displayed. Taken all at once, it was overwhelming on layers the mind would immediately identify as incomprehensible. But the search parameters, code identifiers, and Prisma’s biometrics scan sent the map in one specific direction. Off toward the deep edge. Out into the unpopulated regions of a particularly nasty piece of unincorporated space.
A place where legends and rumors were often found annotated on the stellar navigation reports from ships that had never been heard from again. A place where most did not go.
The map was still sectioning, then expanding, and then sectioning and expanding again. They moved Prisma away from the screen, and Maas stood ready to capture the needed data and download it into Ghost Team’s cloud.
“Got it!” he whispered.
“Where?” grunted Hutch.
“Umanar. Out in the Deep Well.”
“Never heard of it.”
That’s when they got the call from Andien that the mission was blown.
That’s when the entire facility went into lockdown.
***
Andien had dragged the dead pilot from his cockpit chair. She was still keeping down, trying to spot the sniper in the tower, as she powered up the ship for takeoff.
Garret approached from the passage leading from the flight deck back to the aft quarters. He hugged the passage walls. He whispered loudly to her. “Miss! Hey!”
Why is he whispering? Andien thought. “Stay down!” she shouted at him. “Get back to the lounge. You’ll be safe there.”
Blaster fire smashed into the hull around the cockpit. Sparks showered out and away across the wide impervisteel-latticed windows.
“I can turn this around,” he said frantically.
She ignored him and tried to raise Shadow Team. Someone must’ve set up a local jammer. And those were definitely dark legionnaires out there trying to take the landing pad. Somehow they’d walked into the middle of someone else’s op.
Taylor bellowed into the comm above the ululating whine of blaster fire. “Do not even think about leaving my brothers behind, ma’am! You do, and I will hunt you down and make you wish you’d never seen my face.” His words were interspersed with the whine of distant blaster fire and the report of his own.
This is why you don’t use Legion for Nether Ops, Andien thought to herself.
“We can help. Skrizz is a pilot,” insisted Garret from back in the passage, eyeing the lifeless body of the pilot on the deck of the cockpit. Main motive turbines were spooled up to full now, blowing snow everywhere across the rear of the platform. It was like a sudden storm had come to life all at once behind the ship.
“Plus… we got us a war bot,” said Garret with a devilish grin. “Reloaded him before you snatched us.”
The kid had a point. The mission packet had said the girl’s servant was an old-school war machine from back in the day. End of the Savage Wars, when things had been made to last.
She nodded at Garret, giving the go-ahead.
She hoped he couldn’t see the desperation in her eyes.
***
Perimeter security blast doors had come down, sealing the facility off from the outside world. Someone in charge had caught wind of the hack and was intent on not letting them get away. But during missiong planning, Hutch had studied the layout of the facility long enough to know what he had to do next to get his team out. Since a soft egress wasn’t possible, it was time to stage a jailbreak.
Right now they were in the outer maintenance sections, located between the facility’s perimeter and the hab. Threading the tight passage leading away from the terminal they’d hacked, they came to a door marked “CN4.” From the layout running on Hutch’s HUD, he knew this would take them deep into the node.
He switched to hand signals—standard operating procedure if an op was compromised. It was theoretically possible to crack the quantum encryption that guarded just about any comm, and if that was the case with theirs, it was best not to broadcast their next steps. Besides, Ghost Squad was just as comfortable with silent communication as with comms. In the trust-no-one world of Nether Ops, a comm system was not as vital as some liked to believe.
He put Enda and Crutchke on the door, and held Maas behind him with the two girls.
According to the facility’s top tier security protocols, whoever had access to the base’s root system could deny entry by just shutting down the blast doors and hatches, throwing the locking bolts into place automatically. No amount of hacking was going to get though a dead door, and cutting it with the torches would take a whole lot of time. But there was the third option. Something that would take only half a second.
Hutch activated his armor’s personal deflector, a short duration directional barrier only the team leaders’ armor kits were outfitted with. He pumped the repulsors in his pack, then slammed into the door.
The impact rung his bell, but he was a large man, and the impervisteel blast hatch gave way. It shot out into the highly polished curving corridor beyond, slammed off the wall, left a dent, and hit the floor with a loud metallic clang.
Hutch steadied himself.
Probably a mild concussion.
“Shake it off,” he grunted at himself as he reached out a hand to focus and stop the world from spinning.
A moment later the corridor was filled by the hot blaster fire of dark legionnaires. Enda and Crutchke charged in and returned accurate fire. In seconds, four dark legionnaires were down. You didn’t leave the Legion to disappear into Nether Ops unless you had skills, reflexes, and accuracy beyond the one percent of the one percent of the one percent. And Enda had been the Third Legionnaire Division’s combat blaster pistol champ. He insisted that he was even better with a blaster rifle.
Hutch regained his senses. He signaled for Maas to bring the Endurian and the little girl out.
He bent down on one knee in front of the girl. “We gotta do this the hard way now, Prisma. Stay
close, and I promise I’ll get you out of here. Don’t be afraid.”
“I’m not afraid. Ravi said it would be like this,” the girl replied.
Hutch had no clue what she meant.
He checked in with the Endurian, relishing another dose of her hatred. He was falling in love, some never-serious part of his mind joked.
Except he saw something else.
She was watching him and not hating him. Because he’d taken the time to stop and promise Prisma that she would be okay. That he would do his best to get her out of there.
Leenah knew. Knew what the little girl who’d begun to reluctantly cling to her had gone through. Knew how scared, and brave in the same moment, she was. But in the end, she was just a little girl, and she was capable of only so much.
The galaxy is a hard place. Even for little girls.
Leenah nodded at him.
And that put Hutch, the big man who swam in the hatred of others, off his game.
He pulled his holdout pistol, flipped it, and handed it to her grip first.
And something passed between them.
***
With the green light to bring Skrizz and KRS-88 into play, things happened fast. First the giant cat slithered between Andien and the flight controls. He brought in the reverse thrusters with a deft flick. Just barely. The sudden snowstorm now covered the cockpit windshield, and would have swirled inside had the wobanki not activated the auto-seal, a plate of impervisteel that covered the hole.
The storm was at least good for denying the sniper visibility. Andien knew a good sniper would switch to IR… but that wasn’t an optimal targeting solution. The yowling cat’s maneuver had bought them a little cover.
***
Garret led KRS-88 into the dark interior of the cargo hold. Beyond the open rear door, snow swirled in whirlwinds and columns. One of the operators—Taylor, thought Garret—was dragging a wounded comrade back toward the cargo ramp. Both were shooting back at the unseen shock troopers shifting positions out among the cargo pallets.
Sword of the Legion (Galaxy's Edge Book 5) Page 18