A moment later Garret made it up. When he saw the terminal on the landing, he crawled over to it. His face was soon a frozen mask of impassive concentration. Or stunned wonder.
Crutchke came up next. He turned to help Prisma, who needed no help; she crawled past him. Placing a hand on her shoulder, he moved her to the side of the passage and waited for the Endurian princess.
“Very strange,” murmured Garret from the terminal, its blue light casting a ghostly glow across his face. “The operations code is in basic binary. But it’s indecipherable. All I can see are patterns.”
“Not important right now,” Crutchke whispered. “We’re leavin’.”
“Lemme have a few minutes with this. Maybe I can…” And then he trailed off. As though he’d forgotten he was speaking halfway through his sentence.
“Whatever. We’re leaving, kid. You wanna stick around, that’s on you. Otherwise follow me.”
Crutchke made his way into the dark tunnel. About fifty meters ahead, he saw the ultrabeam on Taylor’s weapon barrel flash on. It steadily illuminatied one section of the tunnel, unmoving—like Taylor had found something of interest and was studying it.
But when they got there, all of Taylor that was found was his sub-mini, lying on the steel deck of the passage. As though it had been dropped. The ultrabeam was still on—still shining on some random section of the passage.
26
Hutch poured hot fire into the advancing Titans. He’d set up a kill zone beyond a bottleneck, back where they’d first entered, and now he was killing them as they tried to come through. He’d killed his tenth when he got a broken and distorted transmission from Crutchke.
“Hutch…”
Static.
“… missing. We’re mov…”
And then a wall of static washed out the comm completely.
The comm system had never had any kind of problem inside any ship. In fact, it had been designed with ship interference in mind. But now something was messing with the transmission.
The Titans had ceased coming through the bottleneck. Hutch had fired so much he could smell the burnt ozone even through his armor’s filters.
He allowed himself a moment to acknowledge that things were looking pretty bad. Then he broke that off at the root and started to duck-walk backwards, keeping a low profile, his barrel sighted back down the passage. They could be waiting for him to run.
He made it back to the shaft. Everyone had moved on. In the distance he thought he could hear the articulating hydraulic joints of the war bot; they had a distinctive whine. But then they were gone.
He scanned the passage behind him once more. The Titans weren’t coming after him from that direction. Which meant they were trying a new approach vector.
He switched on the armor’s local radar.
For a second he got the standard ghostly version of the real world, showing all the passages and some movement behind the bulkheads and inner hull in the immediate area… and then it washed out in a blinding flash.
“Sergeant,” intoned a calm, cool voice inside the darkness of his helmet. “Sergeant Kandaar Hutch.”
Hutch froze.
He was blind. He could see nothing on his HUD. Not even an external view. He slapped the side of his helmet with his gauntlet.
“Sergeant. I currently have control of the processors inside your armor. I’m disabling them as we speak.”
Pause.
None of the interfaces were working.
Hutch felt for the warm boot button located near the collar of his bucket. He pressed it. Nothing.
“We’ve taken Sergeant Enda,” announced the calm, cool voice in the yawning darkness within Hutch’s armor. The cadence of the voice was odd—a though it was only used to making statements, and never having to have a conversation… with words. As though every sentence was seemingly unrelated to the sentence that had preceded it, or followed it.
“We’re dissecting him now.”
And then…
“Would you like to watch?”
It was as if the voice were offering him some fresh lemonade, and even tea cookies, on a hot day in some other place.
Suddenly the HUD went active. Just a few apps appearing in the darkness of the bucket.
Video feed came up.
The word “Live” blinked over and over in the upper right-hand corner.
On screen, Enda was splayed out and held aloft by four robotic clamps. Auto-surgeons, or what looked like standard Repub auto-surgeons, danced in and out of frame. Making small cuts and incisions.
Enda screamed soundlessly.
Half of his armor had been cut away. Some of his neoprene suit had been cut away. And some of his flesh had been cut away, too.
“All our files on human anatomy are up to date,” said the calm voice. “We’re just cross-checking to see if there have been any evolutionary moments since our last research, conducted twenty-eight days ago on a freighter crew that happened to be passing through this system. We want to make sure our information is always current.”
Hutch roared inside his helmet.
“Oh,” exclaimed the voice beneath Hutch’s promise to murder everything and everyone who responsible for the torture and dissection of Enda. “I’m sorry. I had the sound feed turned down.”
In the half second it took for Hutch to disconnect his bucket from his armor and fling it at the wall of the shaft, he heard his team brother legionnaire screaming like no one should ever scream.
Screaming for death and all the release it promised.
***
When they came to a dead end, it was just Crutchke, Prisma, and Leenah, with KRS-88 bringing up the rear. Crutchke leaned against the panel blocking their way forward and listened using his armor’s advanced snooping sensors.
Nothing.
Nothing beyond a dull electronic hum that thrummed a low bass note throughout the entire ship.
Crutchke looked back at the others. He had no contact with any other Ghost Squad members. And his last orders had been to get the girl back to the ship and get away.
He stepped back and kicked the panel. It clattered out into a bright passage, coming to rest against the almost mirror-like finish of the deck. He stepped through, following his weapon, scanning both directions for targets.
This passage was almost identical to the one they’d taken from the hangar deck. There was a chance—because the hangar deck was so vast—that this passage might lead straight back to the Forresaw, perhaps coming out higher up, on one of the control balconies.
“Good enough,” muttered Crutchke. “Follow me. We’re almost outta here.”
They ran. Ran, with Crutchke really jogging alongside, restraining himself from a sprint that would’ve easily outdistanced the others in seconds. He checked their six and kept a watch forward, ignoring thoughts that he was the last of Ghost Squad. That everyone else was dead and he probably would be too in the next few minutes.
They came to an intersection. To the right, three Titans were marching down corridor, heading straight for them. Two in front ,one to the rear, their hoplite-like heads scanning back and forth, three unblinking red optical sensors seeming to watch everything.
They spotted Crutchke immediately.
He fired and dropped the first one. It took the shot directly in the chest and flopped backwards onto the deck, its mechanical limbs slowly flailing. The other two returned fire. Crutchke barely got back around the corner in time.
He popped a fragger, cooked it off, and bounced it against the wall down the passage, guessing by their loud metallic footsteps how fast they were closing on him. The explosion sent shrapnel in every direction. He glanced back at Leenah, who was holding the little girl close to her.
The big war bot stepped forward, past him, out into the intersecting passage. It fired a steady stream of blistering fire from its hand blasters. Crutchke dared a peek around the corner, and saw that both bots were still moving, still trying to fire back at the war bot, even though they
’d almost been blown to pieces. The one Crutchke had shot first now sat back up and started firing at the war bot. A solid shot bounced off KRS-88’s head, dazing the giant war machine for a half second. Then it recovered, in an almost comically slow motion gesture, and shot that one too.
Now all three of the machines were down.
Deactivated.
Dead.
In the distance, Crutchke could hear more of the giant bots coming for them.
“C’mon!” he practically screamed. His voice sounded hoarse and desperate. “This way.” And he headed down the next passage.
Halfway along its length he came to a skidding halt. Titans filed across the width of it farther down. There was no cover. Nowhere to run.
Last stand time.
Crutchke fell to one knee and laid down fire in those last seconds of his life. He was a dead man walking. The least he could do was buy a little time for the girls to get clear.
The Titans opened fire on him.
High-intensity blasts.
The first one seared straight through his chest plate and came out the back of his armor. Right where his heart had been. He had time enough to look down before the next shot tore out his stomach. The third smashed into his bucket. He was dead before his body hit the deck of the passage in an underwhelming thump.
Watching from behind this macabre scene, the girls froze.
KRS-88 stepped in front of them, shielding them with his massive battle frame, and returned fire.
From behind the wall of Titans down the passage, another Titan stepped forward with what looked like a sniper rifle, but heavier, vented for high-intensity shots. Where there would’ve been a scope for a legionnaire sniper, this weapon had a targeting laser designator.
A hot white dot appeared on KRS-88’s processors, located halfway up his ancient chest housing. A half second later a high-intensity shot burned straight through the armor and knocked out the processor.
The girls ran.
Prisma was screaming as Leenah dragged her away from the slaughter. Screaming for Crash.
The bot could hear that. And part of it wanted to tell Prisma… so many things.
But the war bot part of him was in control. The thing he’d once been. The war bot awarded the highest honor the Legion can bestow. The Hero of Psydon.
He was a machine who had asked to forget all the horror he’d witnessed. All the death and forgotten bravery.
But that is another story. For another time.
Without targeting processors, KRS-88 transferred all available battery power to overcharging the wrist blasters for rapid fire.
Titans fell as they advanced on his blaster-brutalized frame.
The next shot from the sniper tore off KRS-88’s right arm assembly.
The war bot merely glanced down at that, then took one step forward as though even more determined to prevent them from pursuing the little girl he had sworn to serve. And he continued to fire with his remaining blaster.
Another shot blew his hydraulic knee assembly away. He collapsed to the deck.
And still he continued to fire back at them.
The next shot tore out his internal power plant.
The Titans had closed.
And there were more Titans coming from behind.
Preventing Prisma and Leenah from escaping.
The war bot frizzed out and tried to destroy itself, as per ancient Repub protocol, to prevent itself from falling into enemy hands.
In that self-annihilating second of surrender, Crash took over for one last second. One last message.
“Crash!” Prisma cried as Leenah pulled her close. The Titans towering over them.
Crash was being shot down.
Shot to pieces.
One optical assembly exploded as half of Crash’s main processor erupted from a blast. Yet still, he kept one eye on her. One eye on the little girl he’d promised all the promises a machine can make.
He re-routed what little reserve battery power was left to the last seconds of run time.
The Titans stopped firing.
There were standing over Crash’s frame. Heavy blasters trained on the two girls now.
“Take care… young miss,” he managed.
And then he was gone.
***
Garret finally managed to slice in a local decryption daemon. Instantly, the strange arcane programming language tried to hunt it down on the terminal and terminate it—but not before he teased a few tidbits out of the system.
It was tracking all of them. Whoever was running the system was watching all of them.
Had been tracking them since they’d come aboard.
And had sliced their way into the legionnaires’ armor within the last five minutes. Meaning they must’ve somehow taken one of the legionnaires out, cracked the comm within record time, and tracked everyone else.
The daemon was trying to destroy his encryption algorithm, attempting to freeze him out of the system.
“Not today, my friend,” Garret muttered. He slapped his swimming fingers across the terminal keyboard.
He uploaded some bogus apps and waited for the daemon to go fishing around. Even though the algorithm was sophisticated and advanced, if not the most advanced he’d ever seen, it was simple. It followed him like a dog being lured along with sticks. It immediately dove for his honey-trap apps, and he locked it down for a few minutes inside a blind deca-stacking encryption program that promised something hidden, yet merely kept subdividing itself by fours in a never-ending loop.
That would buy him a few minutes.
Garret heard the distant blaster fire from Hutch.
He’d probably never see him again, that clinical part of his mind analyzed. He called it being reasonable. He wanted to feel bad about that, but instead he got the ship’s schematics opened up. Not that he knew much about ships, but he was able to watch everyone in real time.
Crutchke was running down a main corridor. Prisma, Leenah, and KRS-88 were right behind him. On the map he could see they were about to walk into a trap that was tightening all about them. Those giant bots were closing in from all sides.
He scrolled back to his own position.
They were coming for him too.
Except not the giant bots—the ones the Ghost Team hacker, Maas, had called Titans. The bots coming for him were more like spiders, but with tentacles instead of legs. Their torsos were humanoid-shaped, and their main processers were housed in insectile heads. They weren’t totally bots. Not pure machines. They were biomechanical. Biologic. And machine.
Their identifiers were encoded behind a dense encryption, and the anti-virus that had been chasing Garret through the system had almost hacked it way out of his honey trap. Still, he needed to know what they were.
He made a few passes, brought in a shell cracker, and had their identifiers unscrambled a few seconds later. That was the thing about slicers, he ruminated as the screen unscrambled around the strange biomechanical spiders coming down the vent tube at his back. For slicers, like hackers of old, it was the knowing that was the real kick. Just getting in and knowing all the things someone had tried to prevent you from knowing. That was enough.
Can you die happy now? he asked himself.
There it was. The high anxiety he had to fight any time he got in somewhere where he wasn’t supposed to. It threatened to choke and drown him.
Because you’re about to die now.
It was true. The spiders were coming closer by the second.
He brought up the map and looked for a way out.
While he studied it, he told the root access to ignore him for purposes of tracking. He disappeared from the on-screen map.
He switched over to one of the feeds.
The legionnaire escorting Prisma was down.
He watched it all and didn’t feel powerless. Yeah, he had a crush on Leenah. But he wasn’t totally clueless. Everyone else seemed to, too. And he got that she didn’t go for guys like him. That didn’t matter.
He still liked her, and that was enough for him. But he knew there was no chance, right now, of him rescuing her in any way, shape, or form.
The map showed a micro-wire bundle conduit not far down the maintenance passage. It led back into the main decks. He opened it via the terminal, closed up his datapad, and ran for it. If he could get in there, he could play hide-and-seek with them for a while. At least.
He studied the unit/type identifiers for one second more.
“What’s a Cybar?” he murmured.
It meant nothing to him. But that it would not treat him pleasantly when it found him… that much was all too clear.
Maybe he could rescue Leenah, and Prisma.
You’re not that guy, that other, more cautious voice reminded him.
And Garret replied, “Maybe today I’m different. Maybe today I’m the guy that rescues.”
***
The enemy had been tracking them using the processing software attached to the comm in their buckets. Hutch knew enough about evasion to figure that out.
This had never been the mission for Ghost. They did infiltration. Without detection. This had turned into a fight. And there was no way they were winning this one.
He climbed the ladder and saw the terminal Garret had been using only minutes before. He heard a metallic clang. Like something had opened, or suddenly slammed back into place. And then nothing but a yawning silence, and below all that, if one listened close enough… machines humming.
On the live feeds displayed on the terminal he saw the Titans frog-marching Prisma and Leenah down the corridor. On another feed he saw Crutchke’s body. And the war bot, shot to pieces in the gleaming corridor, still spotless but for the blood and the blasted machine.
He heard something coming down the vent tubing. Something that chittered and clicked like an Andalorian hydrascorpion. Some other type of sentry bot, most likely.
He climbed back down the ladder, back down into the darkness. Followed the vent tubing down into the depths of the ship. His armor, even without his bucket, would evade most electronic detection. Even closed-circuit surveillance.
Sword of the Legion (Galaxy's Edge Book 5) Page 22