Garret deployed his latest datapad and brought up the app that controlled the war bot. After entering a quick and enigmatic passcode, he had root access to the old war machine’s combat protocol.
“Get back inside the ship, kid!” Taylor shouted. The operator he was dragging back looked dead. Except that he was coughing up blood in pathetic little spasms. Even Garret knew that guy was flatlining.
He swiped the on-screen toggle on the app that controlled KRS-88. Instantly the seven-foot bot’s posture changed—from the erect bearing of a servant bot hovering to be of service, all prim and proper, to the grimly homicidal stance of the war bot more nightmare than machine.
“Commencing operations now,” intoned the nightmare. Gone was KRS-88’s basso butler baritone; its voice now sounded like a drowned ghost recorded electronically.
Garret established its targeting protocols and gave it orders to secure the landing pad.
***
KRS-88 marched out into a hail of blaster fire. Dark legionnaires were already surrounding the landing pad. The bot raised its hands and deployed its wrist blasters, instantly knocking down three shock troopers. Most of the rest scrambled to get away from the thing, but one tried to close, firing on full auto, targeting KRS-88’s leg actuators. It was a notoriously vulnerable spot on that particular model of the war bot chassis.
KRS-88 responded by taking two giant and sudden steps that brought it within reach of the firing shock trooper. It backhanded the soldier, probably breaking his neck, and sent him sprawling off the elevated landing pad and into the snowfield below the outpost.
The dark legionnaires hunkered down and kept up a steady stream of fire as KRS-88 dodged and tried to get closer to them.
Unbeknownst to any one organic creature on that battlefield, two things were happening simultaneously. Because KRS-88 was a war bot with advanced sensors and lightning-quick MicroFrame processors (thanks to Garret), he was aware of both.
At the appearance of the fearsome war bot, the shock troopers had called in an air strike on the pad. Their orders hadn’t included capturing the ship, just the little girl. Their commanding officer knew the girl was inside the facility with the second team, and authorized the air strike immediately.
Two howling tri-fighters, assigned to provide tactical air support for the special operations team, streaked down out of the gray and stormy sky above. KRS-88 registered the incoming fighters and marked them as hostile when they began their strafing run on the pad.
At the same moment, a shock trooper was ordered by his sergeant to use an anti-vehicle fragger on the war bot. The trooper stepped back, armed the fragger by twisting the ball atop the stick, and prepared to lob it at the rampaging war bot. If it hit, or even got close, it would magnetically attach itself and then explode, substantially damaging the war machine.
KRS-88 was aware of this action as well. Its onboard radar had tagged every combatant and assigned them an order of priority with regards to termination. Its processors interpreted the shock trooper’s movements as a classic counterattack with anti-vehicle explosives, and KRS-88 upgraded the soldier’s termination status.
In the moment the shock trooper stepped back and flung his arm over his shoulder plates, armed fragger in hand, KRS-88 took two massive steps, almost lunging for the trooper, reached over the top of the stacked supply pallets the team was covering behind, grabbed the trooper with his massive metal hand, and whipped him skyward toward the closing tri-fighters. As though the man were a mere rag doll. A plaything to be tossed about on a whim, or in rage.
The hurled trooper with the anti-vehicle grenade rammed into the diving tri-fighter. The entire ship exploded just two hundred feet above the pad. Debris rained down as the other fighter peeled off and streaked out across the ice field.
Then KRS-88 began to murder the other shock troopers all around him. He flung one into the tower wall. Smashed another flat. And shot the rest with his rapid-fire hand blasters.
22
Captain Mordo, the shock trooper tactical officer leading the special operations team, had watched his own infiltration mission go from bad to worse.
The mission had fallen to them, because they were closest. A team held in reserve for whatever the Republic might have planned after Tarrago. And even with their proximity, they got to the facility less than a day ahead of the Republic.
They had dropped in eighteen hours ago, far out in the ice field. In the dead of night, they’d taken the facility and eliminated its pathetic security force. By dawn, they’d finished interrogating the techs that actually ran the data stacks and had archived all the comm traffic from across the galaxy.
Their orders from Black Fleet Intelligence, specifically Admiral Crodus, had been to find the location of the Republic’s Doomsday Fleet. Their mission briefing had made them painfully aware that they would need a biometric scan to access the fleet location. But… it was thought that one of the techs might have a workaround. It had taken three dead techs, their nervous systems flayed alive by a device they called the Inducer, to find out that there was no workaround. That the Doomsday Fleet was indeed one of the most closely guarded secrets of the Republic and the House of Reason.
Captain Mordo ordered the rest of the techs, and all facility personnel, save the cargo handlers and one admin, executed.
But that would have to wait until it was time to wrap things up. Their mission briefing indicated that the girl, their secondary target, might arrive with a small security detail. In that event, their mission was was to take her alive and use her to accomplish the biometric scan. This didn’t stop Mordo from attempting to hack the systems with his own techs. He didn’t want to wait on unverified intel. And there was always the possibility the little girl might get herself killed when the capture finally went down.
When the cargo ship arrived, it was fairly clear that this was the tactical team assigned to the girl. And Mordo was prepared—or so he believed. To be honest, he’d assumed they’d just march her right in through the cargo doors once they were sure things were secure, enter with full authorization, and access the data vault terminal on the main level. With that in mind, he’d planned quite a clever ruse, putting his men in station uniforms and surrounding the perimeter with a heavy weapons team that could deploy swiftly. He’d also set up two snipers with clear sight pictures of the terminal.
Their first shots would’ve killed the security detail within three seconds. The team would then sweep the survivors, secure the girl, and terminate the rest.
Mordo planned his operations well. He expected them to happen just like he envisioned them.
Except none of this had happened.
Instead, while his men were waiting for the security team to exit the freighter, they’d infiltrated through the landing platform. Within ten minutes they were hacking the terminals, and Mordo was fairly sure they’d gotten the info they needed.
He immediately locked down the facility so that the only way out was through the main entrance inside the lower hangar. He then reoriented his teams to deny access to this exit back into the cargo bays and out onto the landing platform.
Which should have been easy.
Except the security detail guarding the little girl moved quickly through the facility, taking secondary routes that bypassed his hasty ambushes. And none of the internal security systems were reading the intruders, capturing them on visual, or tracking them via sensor or hatch access codes. It was as though they were ghosts passing though the walls as they wished, knocking out his teams in a seemingly wanton fashion. One moment his assets would be reporting in, and the next they were gone, their vitals on his Unit Roster HUD showing them as terminated.
And now there was this rampaging war bot. The surviving tri-fighter pilot couldn’t make another pass because those old war bots had been configured for anti-air capabilities. And surprise was gone.
Surrounded by his command team and a squad of shock troopers, Mordo screamed at his men. “Go out and take down the war bot!�
�
He glanced back at the master control panel for the main gate and facility access. To his surprise, it had locked him out. All it showed him now was the station template, showing the various doors in lockdown mode. And as he looked, three of those doors unlocked. They formed a path, leading back to the main exit.
“They’ve hacked in!” he screamed, almost apoplectic now. He stabbed his finger at an intersection between the exit and the last blast door that had just opened. “Deploy here! Now! No one escapes!”
***
Hutch was walking sideways, watching the team in front of him, keeping the two girls moving, and checking in with Maas to the rear at all the same time. They were hustling down a wide, white hall, gleaming and polished, with comm panels and processor switching grids along the walls, their lights flashing across ceramic panels. A typical state-of-the-art Repub comm node.
The first shock troopers in their black-lacquered armor came at them from behind, driving them forward. Searing red blaster fire smashed into a processor near Maas and exploded into a shower of sparks. Maas returned fire as he dove across the hall.
It was a standard Ghost Team tactic in close quarters battles: draw fire and then move evasively while your other team members targeted the return fire. Instinctively Hutch pivoted and unloaded on two shock troopers. One took it in the chest and went down on his back. The other got hit and spun away. More were coming up from behind.
“Move!” he shouted at the girls.
He covered Maas, then Maas fell back to cover him. Ten feet. Fire. Ten feet more.
The next group of shock troopers came from down a narrow hall intersecting the one they were taking back to the main entrance. Crutchke and Enda took either side of the passage and alternated putting fire down at the approaching shock troopers. Enda held up one hand, telling Prisma and Leenah to wait. The return fire was too heavy for them to cross the corridor.
The shock troopers coming up behind were forcing Hutch and Maas to give ground they were running out of. Blaster fire whined and shrieked. They couldn’t move forward, not while protecting the girl, and they couldn’t move back.
The noose was closing all about them.
***
Leenah saw the big man they called Hutch holding his ground. He wasn’t ceding anymore. There was no more to give.
They were caught.
She heard a distant pounding and guessed it was her heart. Because she knew what she was going to do next.
She picked up Prisma, shielded her with her own body, and dashed across the blaster fire coming from the shock troopers down the crossing corridor. She felt Prisma’s chest against her own, felt her rapid breathing, and in that moment she knew she would always protect her. Or at least die trying.
A moment later they were racing away from the chaos, straight toward the main blast doors that led outside. Leenah put Prisma down and dragged her by the hand, hardly slowing.
Ahead, the massive doors seemed to be rupturing in a dozen places. Indentations appeared like mountains rising up through its heavy impervisteel surface. Then one mountain gave way, erupting into a jagged gash, and two massive metallic bot hands pushed through it. They rent the blast doors asunder.
KRS-88 forced its body through and widened the gap through sheer hydraulic counter-strength.
“Crash!” shouted Prisma.
For a moment the bot paused in its destruction, and Leenah swore that its optical sensors changed. Softened, somehow. Like it processed the little girl and recalled, somewhere deep in its circuits, another relationship with her.
And then it was back to being a war bot.
As Prisma and Leenah slipped past the bot and through the door, KRS-88 covered Hutch and the rest of the team, allowing them to withdraw. The bot made the dark legionnaires pay as they swarmed down the corridor in pursuit.
By the time the war bot made it up the hangar ramp, the rest of Shadow Team had made the cargo ramp leading up into the ship. Crash ran, and the operators gave it covering fire. Shock troopers were slipping through the gap in the doors and giving chase.
Once the war bot was on board the ship, the repulsors kicked in. Skrizz had the ship moving skyward even as the cargo ramp was starting up. Shock troopers on the ground fired up at them, aiming for the engines.
Then Skrizz punched it, and the ship shot off over the ice field.
Gone.
***
Ruh-Ro, the first officer on the Forresaw, was a moktaar who mostly kept to himself. Simian humanoids were like that. But he was a good mechanic, and with the aid of a general service bot, he kept the ship clean and running. He was technically a chief in the Repub Navy somewhere on some list. When they got leave, he and Scooter would hit port, drink, dance with what each species considered pretty ladies, and generally enjoy themselves.
When the firefight on the landing platform erupted, the moktaar had been busy supervising the sham loading operation. He’d peeked his simian head out of the cargo deck and sniffed at the cold arctic air of the station. He smelled fear and murder, and he didn’t like it one bit.
Ruh-Ro had been in his share of hot landing zones. Hot enough that he’d occasionally had to deploy the door-mounted heavy blaster off the rear cargo deck, for suppressive fire to get the teams back aboard. But in this instance, the mounted heavy blaster was positioned away from the facility and the ramp that led down to the lower hangars. So the weapon was useless.
He called up to Scooter using the inter-ship comm, and got no response. He checked the damage control panel, noted the damage to the cockpit’s hull integrity, and went forward to inspect the damage to the cockpit windows.
He was not dreading the worst.
Maybe just a little.
But when he saw his dead friend, Scooter, lying on the deck, and the wobanki slithering into the pilot’s seat and activating the launch start pre-flight checklist… all hell broke loose.
Not because Scooter was dead.
That was only part of it.
All hell broke loose because wobanki and moktaar are deadly enemies. And ever since Prisma and her guardians had been brought on board, Skrizz and Ruh-Ro had been silently whispering murderous threats at each other in their native tongues any chance they could get.
Most people weren’t aware of the bad blood between the two races. Most people had either forgotten, or never knew, that the races had fought three major wars against each other. The wobanki had used the moktaar home world as a private hunting ground for hundreds of years before the Republic came into being—and once the moktaar got their hands on the hyperdrive, they’d promptly invaded one of the three wobanki homeworlds and enslaved everyone on it.
Things had gotten much worse in the thousand years since.
Ruh-Ro hissed and swung his hydro-spanner in a wide arc, intent on braining the cat with a surprise attack. But the wobanki, like all cats, wasn’t so easily brained. Skrizz dodged, scrambled from his seat, and popped claws. A moment later he’d shredded the front of the mechanic’s overalls along with a good portion of simian fur.
Ruh-Ro monkey-screeched, grabbed on to the ceiling, and swung his mace-like hydro-spanner again. This time he smashed the cat right in his jaw. Skrizz yowled in pain and reared back to lunge for a killing blow with all claws popped.
And that was when Andien stuck her blaster in the cat’s whiskers.
“Not here. Not now,” she muttered through gritted teeth.
The moktaar swung from the ceiling of the cockpit and promised Skrizz that he would set his skull in front of his family’s tent. In chittering Moktaar, of course. It was an ancient oath-promise of the standard blood-and-revenge variety.
“What did you say?” Andien roared as Skrizz’s hackles flared. Beyond the cockpit window shock troopers were advancing through the storm created by the ship’s reverse thrusters.
“I told him,” rumbled the moktaar, “that I was just kidding.” Then the monkey man smiled a wicked, savage grin. “Here, kitty kitty kitty… I was just playing with
you.” He added a moktaari vulgarity that was reserved for blood feuds that could only be satisfied by death.
“If,” began Andien slowly, “either of you hurts the other, you will kill us all.”
She looked at the monkey. “Cat’s the only one who can fly this ship right now.”
She looked at Skrizz. “Monkey’s the only one who can…” She paused. “Well, we need him to do the… monkey things,” she finished awkwardly.
Then she looked at both. “Work together, and I’ll let you kill each other once we’re clear of the mission. Agreed?”
They both agreed.
They’d rather have killed each right now, never mind the shock troopers swarming the ship. Instead they each had to be satisfied with swearing to provide death to the other as soon as possible.
***
Once the teams were back on board, Skrizz brought in the repulsors, got good seals on all the hatches, and pointed the ship skyward. To the rear he could hear them bringing the cursing wounded into the main lounge.
The truth was, he didn’t need this in his life. It was a conversation with himself he’d grown used to having of late. This was not the wobanki way. Wobanki didn’t stick around and get sentimental about associations. They were nomadic killers.
One of the premier uber predators of the galaxy.
Except… well, he liked the little girl.
It was as simple as that.
It had happened back on the other ship. After the action. After the near escape from that crazy bounty hunter setting off a nuclear weapon. After all that. He’d been sitting near a bulkhead, wondering how he was going to extricate himself from all this drama. Wobanki do not like drama, nor do they care to involve themselves in the affairs of the Republic.
Sword of the Legion (Galaxy's Edge Book 5) Page 19