Brevik cleared his throat. “Thank you, sir.” He turned back to the team, resting his massive hands on the table. “We’re going in with standard kits, everyone has their own weapons and equipment assigned as usual. We’ll all be going in fully suited, the new Otero battlesuits with active camo.” He received several smiles at the mention of the highly-secret and incredibly expensive armor.
“In addition, because of capsule size and weight issues, we have an unmanned drop capsule loaded with additional weaponry, ammo, batteries, and personnel autorestraints.” Lamber’s eyebrows went up. Brevik noticed and gave a quick glare. “Restraints, yes. Relax, Ensign, can’t kill ‘em all.” He continued. “It will land with us at the LZ, and we’ll retrieve it as soon as we break our seals. Each person will be humping the additional gear, including you, Ensign,” he said as he looked at Takahashi. “Even with your special project. Capsules will then be cloaked and stashed for later retrieval.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Gabriel said. “We’ve all gone through the assault. I want to reiterate we are here to take out the leadership, not the grunts. We’re using non-lethal force whenever possible,” he said as he glanced in Lamber’s direction.
He turned back to the screen, illuminating the greenhouse on the ridge. “Sabra, this is the ridge I want you on with your Burton. You’ll be dropped just a bit further north than the rest of us so you can make it up there by the time we get to the gates, so you just bought yourself an exemption from extra gear duty.”
Sabra grinned fiercely. “Absolutely, Commander.”
Gabriel narrowed his eyes. “Remember, non-lethal. I just want you for cover in case we run into an issue outside. As soon as we enter the compound, double time it down and join us.” He leaned his hands on the table, scanning the faces around it. “Any questions?”
A chorus of ‘no sirs’ answered him, and he stood up straight. “OK then. We’ve got a five hour flight, let’s all do a quick once-over of your gear, maybe catch some shuteye, and we’ll assemble in the shuttle bay in…”
“Commander,” St. Laurent said, pointing to the screen. “One of the Larry signals just went out.”
Gabriel turned back to the screen, seeing that one of the two lights closest to the colony’s main gate had disappeared. “Well, what happened here?”
“What the hell was that?” Witten said loudly as he stumbled in the blowing snow, looking behind him.
Marta was ahead of him, pulling the empty supply cart on its skids across the icy surface. She glanced over her shoulder to see Witten had stopped pushing, and sighed. “C’mon, last run of the day. Can you at least give me a hand?” she asked, out of breath.
Witten had turned and was retracing his steps. He looked down at his footprints and brushed at his snow-encrusted environment mask, trying to clear a sightline. He stooped down over a small snow mound, poked his hand into the snow, then turned to Marta and waved her over. “Come here, you ever see anything like this?
Marta dropped the cart’s handle and shook her head, then walked back to Witten. “We really don’t have time for this, and night’s falling.” She reached his side, Witten still squatting in the snow. “What, you find last week’s burgers?”
He reached down and picked up a mass of snow, which wasn’t snow at all upon closer inspection. He lifted it carefully, still in a crouch. It was the size of a small incinerator unit, and about the same cylindrical shape. It was the color of the snow, but blurry, almost like a fuzzy holovid. Then Marta looked closer and saw that Witten’s hand, which was holding the device from the bottom, appeared to be on the top as she looked down at it. In fact, it looked like his arm ended at the bottom of the device, and began again at the top.
“It’s a visible light bender,” he said excitedly. “I’ve read about these!”
Marta bent over and squinted through her mask. “What’s it bending the light around?”
“I don’t know, something somebody didn’t want found I guess.” He turned it on its side, his hand still oddly out of place. “Look, the bottom isn’t covered,” he said, turning the device completely upside down, and the light bending effect viewed from above ceased. Instead it revealed legs, like a small animal, although made of metal, all six of them. They were slowly articulating in the blowing wind; Marta couldn’t tell if they were moving on their own or being pushed by the gale.
“Looks like I might have damaged it when I kicked it,” he said, pointing to a broken leg and several frayed wires protruding from one corner.
“Don’t mess with it,” Marta warned. “We don’t know who put it there or why, and the last thing we need is to have it blow up on us.” She stood up straighter. “Put it back, and let’s finish and report it.”
“I can probably just shove this wire back in, and…”
The device emitted a bright blue pencil-thin beam of light. Witten grunted and dropped it into the snow, falling face first after it. Marta quickly backed up with a loud scream, stumbling over the supply cart and falling backwards. Her head crashed into the icy ground, and her vision faded to gray.
Chapter 15
Six people sat around a large synthoak table in the conference room. A wallscreen projected an image of a man that was speaking. “We can’t increase production without an unnecessary strain on our sole power unit.”
Several of the people at the table nodded their agreement. A woman holding a flexscreen spoke up. “Absolutely correct. We’re running over ninety percent capacity on the fusion reactor, and our wind turbines as you all know are notoriously unreliable.”
A man across from her shook his head. “Not true, we’ve been getting good power from the turbines. It’s the delivery that’s been unreliable,” he said, pointedly looking at another man, who glared back.
“Give me a break, Arnette,” he shot back. “Nothing wrong with the cables and you know it.”
A third man chimed in. “Doesn’t matter if everything worked, we don’t have the battery capacity to store any extra power we can pick up.”
“Stop with the battery crap, Tino. You’ve been requesting extra budget to expand the battery bank. Where’s all that money been going, huh?”
The man at the head of the table listened quietly, observing the arguments with a hooded stare. After a few more minutes of bickering, he leaned forward and rapped his knuckles on the table, the synthoak surface turning it into a dull thud. “Enough,” he said in a low voice.
The people around the table stopped talking, and with a few extra glances and glares, relaxed their postures and sat back in their chairs.
“Pointless arguing didn’t found this colony, and pointless arguing won’t help it expand,” he said. “Alia,” he nodded to the woman with the flexscreen. “What would an additional Tokamak give us right now?”
Alia looked startled. “What would it give us?” she repeated. “Hell, even an old Mark Eight Tokamak would put us way past the power curve we’d need to expand the system.”
“Why?” asked Arnette. “You have one lying around you’re not telling us about?”
The chairman pursed his lips and shook his head slightly. “No, but that’s just an example of a solution, not a complaint.”
“But Mister Chairman,” Tino started, interrupted by the chairman raising a palm.
“We need power to expand, correct?” he said, seeing nods around the table. “Well, let’s find a solution to that problem. Naz,” he said looking at a man at the far end of the table. “You still have your contacts with Amalgamated Infosys?”
Naz, a wiry man with a thin mustache, looked surprised. “Well, yes, but I don’t know what that…”
“I know for a fact they have an overabundance of Mark Nine Tokamak fusion reactors they picked up in a consolidation deal with Delta last year. Talk to your contacts, and see if they’d be willing to part with one. Find out the asking price, and we’ll go from there.”
Naz shrugged. “I’ll see what I can find out.”
“Philby!” Marta screamed as s
he smashed open the door to the colony’s medlab.
The doctor on duty looked up from his screen in alarm, his mug of coffee crashing to the floor. He turned to the door to see Marta, still wearing environmental gear covered in snow, her mask dangling around her neck, dragging a supply cart behind her. It wasn’t the gear, the snow, or the wide eyes that caught his attention the most. What caused him to jump up from his chair and rush over to her was the bloody body draped across the top of the cart.
“Jesus, Marta, what the hell happened?” he asked as he reached in his pocket for a medscanner.
“I don’t know…it was…I don’t…” she gasped. “Ah dammit, look at him!” she said, stepping back from the mess. Witten’s body was warming up, and the blood began to flow more rapidly, pooling on the floor under the cart.
The doctor hurried over to a gurney parked along one wall of the sickbay and wheeled it back over. “Here, help me get him up on this. He’s still alive,” he said.
“I know,” Marta replied sternly, looking the doctor directly in the eyes. “And you’re going to keep him that way.”
The two struggled to lift Witten onto the gurney. The doctor marveled at how a woman of Marta’s small size could have managed to drag his body onto the cart and across the frozen surface to get him here.
With Witten now face up on the gurney, Philby began cutting away the environment gear with a laser scalpel. The fabric and plastic sizzled and melted, and an acrid odor rose into the air as the doctor exposed Witten’s skin.
“Laser burn?” he asked Marta, looking down at Witten’s ravaged stomach.
“Yes, high power, short burst, caught him right in the gut,” she replied as she backed away a bit from her bloody coworker. She noticed his chest was rising and falling intermittently, and bloody spittle dribbled from his mouth. “Can you help him?”
He probed the wound with the medscanner and a pair of tongs. “There’s a lot of damage. Blast went clean through him, but only caught part of his small intestine and stomach, which explains the blood. Full laser burn would have cauterized the wound.” He probed further, lifting Witten’s flesh with the tongs. Witten’s breath hiccuped and blood spat from his mouth. “His left kidney and spleen are completely burned away, and he’s got a slight tear through his left lung, but otherwise he’s in good shape.”
Marta’s eyes bugged out. “Good shape? Jesus, Philby, what do you mean?”
He answered without turning, still probing with the medscanner. “What I mean is I can repair the burns, stop the bleeding, and patch him up. He’ll live, just with one kidney and no spleen, unless he chooses to have new ones grown.” He turned to face her. “Now, you want to tell me who did this?”
She looked over at the supply container, now coated with Witten’s blood and melted snow. “Not who. What. Some kind of…device he found outside.” She pointed at the container. “I put it in there and brought it back.”
“What?” Philby exclaimed, taking a step back and bumping into the gurney.
“I don’t know, I thought it might help in figuring out what happened to him and help save his life,” she said as she looked back at Witten. “I just kind of did it without thinking, then picked him up and brought him here.”
“But you said it shot him!”
She nodded. “I pulled the power wire out, the same one he put back in before it fired…” Her voice trailed off. “Self defense, it was a self defense mechanism,” she said. “When he kicked it over, it knocked the power out, but when he reconnected it, it saw a threat and fired.”
“You sure it’s off?” he asked, relaxing a bit.
“Dead as a doornail,” she said. She looked back at the container. “I need to get it to the Chairman, ‘cuz this ain’t ours, and someone needs to figure out whose it is.”
“Good idea,” he replied, relief that the threat would be removed from his medlab evident in his voice.
Marta turned back to the doctor. “You take care of Witten, hear me? And if he needs something grown and can’t afford it, you talk to me.”
Philby nodded. “Of course.” He walked over to a cabinet and began taking out surgical equipment. “Good luck with the Chairman,” he said as Marta began dragging the dripping cart from the room. His eyes lingered on the pool of blood and water on the floor, wondering if he was going to be responsible for cleaning it up.
“As for the rest of the power issues,” the chairman said, “we’ll table it until the new reactor arrives.” Several eyebrows went up at the confidence in the chairman’s voice. “I need solutions, not complaints, understand?”
Heads nodded as the meeting broke up. The chairman was the last to stand up, the image on the wallscreen still showing the man who had begun the power discussion. “Karr, I need you to get a hold of…” He was interrupted by the buzzing of a comm on the table. “Hang on,” he said. “Go ahead,” he called out to the comm.
“Mister Chairman, this is Vanheel in Operations,” a voice said. “Sir, I think you need to see something one of the workers found outside.”
The chairman frowned. “Now?” he asked.
“Uh, yes sir. As soon as possible. I think we may have a security problem.”
The chairman paused for a few seconds, pondering what issues they could possibly have with security on an ice-bound planet two jumps from any civilized world. He turned back to the wallscreen. “Karr, I’ll catch up with you later,” he said, cutting the connection. “On my way,” he called over his shoulder to the comm as he walked from the room.
The chairman strode into Operations, a large room filled with workstations and walls lined with screens showing scrolling data or video views of various other sections of the colony. Several personnel were at work, even at the late hour. So hard at work, in fact, that the chairman saw that no one noticed his arrival, except for Vanheel who hurried over to him.
“Mister Chairman, thanks for coming down,” he said, extending his hand. The chairman took it and gave it a quick shake, then looked over Vanheel’s shoulder.
“Who’s that?” he asked, inclining his head towards a woman wearing environment gear, the still-damp outer jacket rolled down around her waist.
“Sir, that’s Marta, she’s one of our entry-level employees,” Vanheel answered. “She found the device.”
“Device?” the chairman asked with a raised eyebrow.
“Sorry, yes, I should have explained further,” he replied. “Here, I’ll show you.”
He led the chairman over to the central area of Operations, a raised platform able to overlook most of the workstations, where Marta stood. Marta straightened at the chairman’s arrival.
“Hello, Marta,” the chairman said. “Mind telling me what pulled me out of a board meeting, and why you’re dripping on my floor?”
Marta stiffened. “Sir, I’m sorry, it’s, uh, complicated,” she stammered. “I thought I should bring this to Mister Vanheel, ‘cuz he helped me with a situation I had…”
“Vanheel, you want to clue me in?” the chairman asked with a hint of exasperation.
“Right here,” Vanheel said, pointing to the large box sitting on the command center table. The chairman noticed it looked blurry, and blinked his eyes to try to clear the fuzz. “It’s got a cloaking system, an actual light bender, very advanced.”
“This is not ours, I’m assuming?” the chairman asked, still peering at the device.
“Not even remotely. This is far beyond what we can do here, and probably even beyond the capabilities of our backers.”
The chairman rubbed his chin. “This was outside?”
Marta spoke up, her confidence returning. “Yes sir, my coworker and I found it. It shot him,” she said, quickly adding, “But it’s deactivated now of course.”
“Shot? Like this is a weapon?” he asked.
Vanheel shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. Looks like some type of sensor system, the weapon must have been defensive. It’s too small and underpowered to be an offensive weapon.”
The chairman ignored her, still staring at the device. “Take it apart, let’s see if we can find out where it came from, and why it’s here.”
“Absolutely sir,” Vanheel replied. “I just needed to run this past you. I was kind of hoping this was ours, some secret project you and the board had.”
The chairman shook his head. “Nothing I know of.” He turned to leave. “Keep me updated on the progress,” he said, heading for the door. “And you might want to send a few more people out to see if there are any more.”
Just as he reached the hatchway, he heard one of the personnel at a workstation he just passed announce, “Emergence at T-Gate.” The chairman paused and turned back to the young lady who spoke.
“Tell me about it,” he said as he leaned over her shoulder to look at her screen.
Caught off guard, she stammered, “Uh, Mister Chairman, sorry. Uh, the gate station just detected a Cherenkov flare at the wormhole.” She tapped at a few keys, reading her screen. “No ship sighted, no broadcast tags. Just typical cometary mass, happens all the time.”
The chairman straightened up. Cometary mass, he repeated to himself. Happens all the time. He looked back at Vanheel, who was turning the device over and looking at it with Marta. Something clicked in his mind.
“Vanheel!” he called out, the Operations manager looking up from the device. “Put out the word to everyone. Prepare for company, and I don’t think they’re friendlies.”
Chapter 16
“Drop in five, four, three, two, one…DROP, DROP, DROP!”
Gabriel’s head was slammed back against the padded wall of the drop capsule, known to drop-troopers as coffins, as the Marcinko spat the team from the drop bay like bullets. Nine capsules shot towards the surface of Poliahu at over seven G’s.
After the initial shock, Gabriel relaxed his breathing and had his neuretics bring up the drop data in Mindseye. Nine green dots, falling towards the surface at over 18,000 miles per hour, all secure telemetry in order. He checked for an update of the LZ, and confirmed the team was on target and all probes showed the same quiet colony. All but one probe, he thought. I only hope that was a glitch.
Gabriel's Redemption Page 11