He noticed one dot slightly off target, double checked that it was Sabra, and reconfirmed her flight path was taking her to the predetermined LZ at the base of the ridge. One more green dot was wavering. He sent a quick burst to Jimenez to adjust course, and his dot came back in line within a few seconds.
Gabriel adjusted his course slightly, tiny hydrazine jets on the outside of the coffin giving a few quick puffs. He wanted to land just outside the circle of his team to not only get a closer look at the colony upon landing, but also to be able to see Sabra better as she landed. He still wasn’t sold on her loyalty; something with her and Lamber still simmered below the surface, and he planned to make a point of keeping a very close eye on them planetside.
They began entering Poliahu’s atmosphere, Gabriel’s coffin buffeted by the ionized air molecules screaming past his falling capsule. The heat inside rose by several degrees as friction took hold, and he ordered the battlesuit he wore to lower its temperature a bit to compensate. His nose itched something fierce, but in his standing position with arms locked at his side, he couldn’t do anything about it. Not to mention the combat helmet would prevent it anyway. Standing upright, paralyzed, in a coffin. Great way to start the day.
The buffeting increased to a shudder and Gabriel’s teeth rattled. A quick check of the drop data showed them just a few seconds from retroburn, so he clamped his jaw and gritted his way through the shaking, hoping his recent filling stayed in place.
As one, the nine capsules reached their IP, ejected their heat shields with a bang, and activated the retroengines. Light blue tongues of plasma fired from the three conical jets on the bottom of each capsule as their heat shields fluttered away above them. Gabriel felt a massive squeeze in his chest and his blood began pooling in his legs, vision graying, as the g-forces of the burn took hold. Slowly the pressure decreased and he took a few deep breaths, checking data once again.
The capsules were all on target, Sabra just north of the others, as they all slowed their descents to a more manageable landing velocity. Twenty seconds to touchdown, he noted, so he began activating the armor’s servos and sensors, bringing the Otero battlesuit fully online. Heads-up displays illuminated his visor, the first bit of light he had seen since entering the capsule over an hour ago. The suit ran through diagnostics, everything in order he saw with satisfaction, and he tensed his leg muscles in anticipation of touchdown.
Gabriel’s retroengine rose in pitch, then abruptly shut off, and his capsule banged into the surface of the icy planet. The shell of the capsule split vertically and spread the doors wide, allowing the weak pre-dawn glow to enter. Gabriel quickly hopped from the capsule, taking several steps away, knowing full well how many men and women had been injured when the eight foot tall capsule had tipped over on them as they emerged.
He turned back to the capsule to see it still standing upright, steam billowing from its underside as the engines ticked and cooled. He stepped back to the capsule, sent a command, and its doors swung shut again. He pushed it over backwards and it toppled into the snow, exposing the blackened engine nacelles and a puddle of water that was quickly refreezing.
He turned back towards the ridge to catch a glimpse of Sabra’s capsule touching down near the base in a cloud of snow. He checked the data and his heads-up displayed her capsule landing safely and opening. Good, he thought. Hers was an important position, and he didn’t want to waste time trying to compensate for a bad drop. Although it did appear she may have landed a bit too close to the valley entrance.
Walking around to the top of his capsule, he reached down, and with the enhanced servos in his battlesuit, grabbed the tow handle built into the top of it and began dragging it to their rally point, leaving a furrow in the snow behind him that began immediately filling back in with falling snow.
“Did you see something?”
The two men were sitting in Diji’s cafeteria, having an early morning coffee. The one who had spoken pointed out the window.
“No, I’m facing the other way, jackwagon,” replied the other, his eyes barely open.
The first man stood up and went to the window, the dimly-lit landscape barely visible through the iced windows. “Thought I saw a shooting star,” he said.
The tired man grunted. “Maybe you shouldn’t have had that last margarita last night, eh?”
“You’re the one who drank the last one, remember?” he asked as he stood at the window, still peering out. “But I swear, it looked like a star, or a meteor or something, headed for Solsbury Hill.”
“Keep your voice down,” the other replied. “My head is pounding. Just tell the shift boss when you report. No biggie, probably another falling satellite. Nothing works around here anymore…” his voice trailed off as his eyes closed and his head dipped.
He turned away from the window and shrugged. “Whatever. The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.” He walked over to the dispenser and refilled his coffee.
The team, less Sabra, reached the rally point where the gear capsule had touched down, each of them dragging their own capsule behind them. Brevik was already at work opening the unmanned one and doling out the equipment for each person.
Takahashi was wearing his project, as everyone had taken to call it, and accepted another ruck of batteries. St. Laurent took one of the personnel restraint cases and strapped it to her back; Sowers did the same with the second. Jimenez gladly took the extra weapons, while Lamber clipped on ammo cases to his suit’s rear mounts, grumbling. Gabriel took two smaller cases, each containing hand weapons, and another case of batteries. Brevik, by far the largest of the team, had Jimenez help him strap two heavy assault plasma cannons to mounting points on his armor’s back, then added several extra cases of plasma ammo to his waist mounts.
The team sent commands to the capsules, switching on the visual cloaking, and one by one the cold coffins faded into the snow. Brevik closed the gear capsule and did the same to it. Fully loaded, they began moving out towards their target.
With sunrise still almost an hour away, the chairman strode into Operations, where Vanheel waited.
“What do we have?” the chairman asked, ignoring the stares from the morning shift.
“We’ve got nothing, sir,” Vanheel replied. “But again, we don’t have top of the line sensors, as you know. We’re pretty much flying blind here. All we have is your hunch.”
The chairman glared at him. “My hunches are what have kept this colony functioning, and kept you employed. Remember that,” he said firmly as he looked around the room. “Do we have any visuals of anything out of the ordinary?”
Vanheel shook his head. “No, and we probably won’t for quite a while. The storm that came in yesterday is blowing hard and will be sticking around for at least three more days.”
The chairman walked over to a tech sitting at a workstation who was looking up at him with a frown. “Son, is there a problem?”
“No, sir, not really, uh,” the tech stammered. “It’s just that, well, one of my subordinates said he saw a meteor come down nearby an hour ago. I mean, it’s probably nothing,” he said, shrugging. “And he was out late last night, so…”
“Where?” the chairman asked, cutting him off.
“Where? Uh, well I guess he was playing cards at Rita’s, where everyone goes late night. It’s the place near…”
“No,” the chairman said sharply. “Where did he see the meteor come down?”
The tech looked at Vanheel questioningly. “Go ahead, Peckens, spit it out,” Vanheel said.
Peckens turned back to the chairman. “Near the foot of Solsbury,” he said, letting out a breath.
The chairman turned and walked back over to Vanheel. “Get some people stationed outside with comms and weapons. This is no hunch.”
“But sir, we hardly have any weapons,” he replied, turning his palms up slightly.
“Then get them rocks and clubs, dammit,” the chairman replied angrily. “I’m not about to lose everything we’ve worked f
or without a fight.”
Chapter 17
The team trudged on in silence. Their battlesuits’ active camo blended them into the snow and ice. Not for the first time, Gabriel thanked whatever weather gods existed on Poliahu for the snowstorm. It didn’t affect their mobility in the armor, but it definitely added an extra layer of concealment to their camouflage systems. Looking left and right, Gabriel was hard-pressed to pick any other team member out of the blowing flakes, even though his heads-up showed them each twenty feet apart in standard armor approach formation.
He had ordered all communications between team members to be low-power neuretics bursts, and only for extreme urgencies, but the silence was starting to wear on him. After an hour loaded in the coffins in the drop bay, another half hour of drop, followed by over an hour of marching across the surface, he was even looking forward to hearing just a few notes from Jimenez’s guitar.
They had passed three pairs of LR drones, and were coming up on the last pair. Gabriel sent a burst to the team to hold formation as he sent a query to the two drones near the compound’s entrance. One pinged an immediate reply, but the other didn’t respond. Almost like it wasn’t there, he thought to himself. He sent commands to the team to spread out to their preassigned positions, and they slowly inched forward to the last probe line.
Gabriel initiated a wide-range passive neuretic scan. While not very specific, a passive scan had a very low probability of being detected, and would at least give him an idea of the opposing force’s size and location. The scan showed him four bodies outside the main entrance, a double door on the end of a long building leading into the rest of the complex. Two appeared to be concealed behind a huge snowdrift away from the door, the other two in front of the doors themselves, but none showed any active energy signatures. It didn’t mean they weren’t armed, he knew, but it was unlikely those four had any type of heavy weapons. He tagged them in the team net as Target Alpha One and Alpha Two.
He pushed his scan further, not wanting to go active unless it was absolutely necessary. The scan caught an electronic whiff of two more bodies in an L-shaped alcove near another set of doors further along the complex, closer to the tallest building, a two-story structure with windows lining the upper floor. He designated them Target Beta.
He sent a silent burst to Lamber and St. Laurent with orders to flank the main entrance. He sent Sowers and Jimenez wide, avoiding the main entrance, to position themselves near the Beta. He had Takahashi stay with him to back up Lamber and St. Laurent, and had Brevik hang back and set up one of his plasma cannons on a small rise; a last resort if a major firefight broke out.
He watched in the heads-up as his four people approached the two targets, and he and Takahashi slid in behind Lamber and St. Laurent. He sent a quick burst to Sabra to watch Alpha in case things went south. Sabra’s neuretics clicked in response, affirming his order.
With one last electronic reminder for absolute silence and to stay non-lethal if at all possible, he ordered Alpha and Beta taken out.
“Hey Q, you ready?” Ran asked, walking in on Santander, who was watching a wallscreen boxing match in the passenger lounge.
Santander didn’t look up as he took another drink of his beer, grimacing again at the taste. “Ready as I’ll ever be. How long?”
Ran checked his wristwatch. “We’ll hit the last gate in just under an hour.” He looked back towards the door he had just walked in. “The team’s all in the CIC, you want to join us?”
“Hell no,” Santander spat. “The less I see of Yao and his crew the better.” He rose from the shabby couch he was sitting in and stretched his back, reaching to the ceiling. “I gotta hit the john. Call me after we transit, we’ll get together here and go over the plan one more time.”
“You got it, boss,” Ran replied, headed for the exit. “By the way,” he said before he left. “You never told us who the team is we’re supposed to be cleaning up.”
Santander smirked. “You’re right. Don’t worry about it until we get there. Let’s just say it’s an old acquaintance of mine.” With that, he turned and headed for the bathroom at the back of the lounge.
Ran pondered that last statement for a moment with a bit of concern. Santander had always been vague about certain things, but he had an odd feeling about this one. He shrugged to himself and headed to the CIC.
Lamber and St. Laurent crept up on their first two targets, red outlines in their IR sensors showing the warm bodies huddled behind a ten foot snowdrift about forty feet away from the doors, where the other two figures stood. St. Laurent reached her target first, a man wearing a civilian environment suit. His visor was so iced over that she would have been invisible even without the active camo. With the camo and silent approach, she was able to get within just a few feet of him before he even turned his head. She punched with her battlesuit’s armored fist.
The hardened carbotanium caught the man squarely in the chest, knocking the wind out of him as he collapsed around her arm like a rag doll. She caught the falling body, hoping she didn’t break too many ribs, and lowered the gasping figure to the ground. Taking one of the personnel autorestraints from her belt with the other metal hand, she slapped it over his head and activated it. The net-like device expanded and covered his entire body in less than a second, cinching itself at his feet and sealing. The mesh surface tightened and immobilized him, cocooning the man in a sound-and electronics-deadening Faraday cage, preventing any outbound transmissions from comms, neuretics, or anything else short of two tin cans and a string. The body struggled in the net, but made no sound. She moved on to her secondary target.
Meanwhile Lamber had taken out his primary a little differently, St. Laurent noticed out of the corner of her heads-up. His immobilized target, while showing life signs, also showed no signs of movement, and appeared to be bent at a very unnatural angle.
On the other side of the compound, Jimenez and Sowers were in position. They crouched on the opposite side of a mining vehicle from Beta, two figures that appeared to be smoking and talking in low tones. Sowers sent a quick burst to Jimenez, signaling him to go around the back end of the vehicle as he rounded the front.
They both slowly made their way around the truck, stepping carefully around waste containers. Just as they approached arm’s reach, Jimenez tripped over a half-buried container and fell forward into the snow, not being able to compensate quickly enough for the mass of his battlesuit.
The two sentries looked up in alarm, seeing the indentations in the snow as Jimenez struggled to right himself. One of the men shouted and raised a weapon as a cigarette fell from his lips. Sowers cursed as he caught a burst of a comm. He snapped an active jamming signal out, blocking any further communications from the sentries, but most likely alerting others to their presence.
Stepping forward quickly, Sowers was able to disarm his sentry with a quick chop of a steel arm. He heard the bones snap in the man’s forearm as he screamed in pain. A careful smack to the side of his head knocked him out cold, and his body dropped into the snow.
Jimenez wasn’t so quick as he staggered upwards from his fallen position in the snow, and the second sentry’s weapon spat rounds rapid fire. Jimenez stumbled back under the onslaught of the rounds, but his suit’s carbotanium shell withstood the kinetic impacts. Sowers took a few steps forward and grabbed the assault rifle, yanking it from the sentry’s hands and crushing it, the loud firing immediately ceasing. With his other hand he grabbed the sentry by the front of his environment suit, picked him up, and threw him into the side of the mining vehicle with a loud thump. His unconscious body slid down into a sitting position in the snow.
Sowers went over to where Jimenez was standing to assess the damage. He sent a quick burst to Gabriel to let him know the targets were down, but that it wasn’t exactly quietly. Jimenez sent a neuretics apology to Sowers, who snorted in his helmet. You owe me, buddy, he thought.
Meanwhile St. Laurent and Lamber were both approaching the doors where the other
two sentries stood. St. Laurent watched the passive scans in her heads-up, puzzling at one’s unusually small size. Before they were within twenty feet, they heard rifle fire from the other side of the building. Double time, she sent to Lamber, and the two of them sprinted the last few feet to the two figures at the door.
The sentries were alerted, and their figures went into crouches in St. Laurent’s heads-up. As she got within arm’s reach, she skidded to a halt in shock. In front of her, in a combat stance, was one of the Poliahu aliens she had seen in the briefings, wearing partial body armor and holding a laser pistol. Before she had time to react, the alien fired, and the light blast splashed across her armored chest plate.
Her electronics squealed in protest as several systems were overloaded. The battlesuit was able to take laser blasts in stride, but not entirely unscathed from such point blank range. Servos froze up, immobilizing her, as the energy pulsed its way throughout her suit. Her training kicking in, she frantically sent commands to her backup systems, rerouting alternate power and e-links in a split second. Freed up from the pulse, she dropped to one knee and reached out, grabbing the alien’s weapon before it had a chance to fire a second time. Fighting the urge to fire her suit’s arm-mounted pulse rifle, she pulled the alien’s arm downwards and pulled the gun from its grip as her other hand grabbed the alien’s armor to restrain it. A detached part of her brain noted the lack of claws on the alien’s hands, unlike what Gabriel had showed the team in the initial briefing.
Lamber had already immobilized the other sentry and turned to help St. Laurent. As he stepped towards the struggling duo, the alien’s small chest suddenly erupted in red gore, splattering on the doors behind it. The lifeless body fell backwards and St. Laurent let go of it. It landed in the snow with a wet thud, and blood pooled around it, quickly freezing in the super-chilled atmosphere.
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