Cassandra's War: A Sci-Fi Corporate Technothriller (The SynCorp Saga Book 2)

by Pourteau, Chris

  She laid the knife at his throat and barked in his ear, “I’m a friendly.”

  His partner was already swinging her weapon to bear.

  “No one on this station is a friendly,” the marine said. He was staring hard at the barrel of his partner’s automatic weapon. “Shoot her!”

  “We’re the good guys!” Lander yelled from the stairwell.

  The marine holding Ming in her sights glanced sideways, unsure what to do now.

  “We could’ve shot you from cover if we wanted you dead,” Ming breathed into her captive’s ear. “I need to get past that thing. We can work together.”

  Through the haptics in her suit, she could feel the young marine’s pulse hammering, feel his indecision. Then he made up his mind and nodded to his partner. “They’re with us.”

  Ming let him go, and they scrambled together toward the firing line. In the few seconds that had elapsed, the pod had advanced another two meters.

  “We’ve tried grenades and concentrated fire,” said the female marine. “We were about to abandon this position and see if we could find a side hall, flank them somehow.”

  “I don’t have that kind of time,” Ming snapped back. “Do you want my help or not?”

  The marine shrugged. “Sure.”

  “Here’s what you do.” Ming sketched out a plan of concentrated fire at a certain height for three seconds.

  “That’s it? What’re you gonna do?”

  “I’m going to run right over them,” she said with a grin. “Try not to shoot me in the back, yeah?”

  Ming backed down the hallway and assumed a sprinter’s starting stance. Her suit began to tighten against her skin, embracing her muscles, gathering energy to support her. Her vision calculated the speed she needed to achieve by the time she reached the end of the hallway. Or MoSCOW did. It was getting hard to tell the difference. She nodded at the two marines, who swung their rifles out to provide cover fire.

  Ming never heard the gunfire, or saw the cracked door with Lander’s one eye spread with horror as he realized what she was about to do.

  Her muscles released with an audible snap of energy. Arms pumping, knees driving, she bolted for the end of the hallway and leaped across the gap. She vaulted over the marines, their M24s firing what sounded like slow-motion rounds. Her right toe contacted the edge of the corner and she was running horizontally across the wall of the hallway, the covering fire from the marines shredding the air beneath her shoulder. Her stride devoured the distance between the end of the hall and the assault pod.

  She felt the texture of the wall beneath the balls of her feet. One—two—three—four steps. The marines’ covering fire ceased and Ming launched herself over the barrier of the assault pod. She rolled and skidded to a halt, already spinning, already drawing her Glock.

  There were three black-uniformed soldiers behind the assault pod, one operating the pod, two manning the weapons. Their necks were craned back at her, the woman on the left already pawing for her sidearm. Ming fired, crack-crack-crack, and a neat red hole appeared in each of their foreheads as if by magic. MoSCOW’s aim was perfect.

  Unmanned, the pod dropped to the deck. Silence descended on the hallway.

  Ming stood. “All clear.”

  The marines peered around the corner, then moved forward.

  “What the hell was that?” one of them asked, amazement in his voice. “Some kind of advanced super soldier stuff?”

  The door behind them crashed open and Lander stepped out, roaring, “What the hell was that?”

  Another radiation warning appeared in Ming’s display. She killed it. Just a few more minutes, that’s all she needed. Elise Kisaan should be just up the hallway.

  “You’re welcome,” she said to the marines. Then, to Lander: “You and I aren’t done yet.”

  It was a short walk to the locked doors of the observation deck. MoSCOW would be no help, since it had been forced out of the station’s network.

  “You sure this is it?” Lander asked.

  Ming nodded. “Her last reported position.” She just hoped Elise Kisaan was still in there. She wasn’t sure if she had enough strength left to go chasing her around this ridiculously large station.

  “You gonna do your voodoo thing to open the door?”

  Ming found she was still gripping her Glock. She raised the weapon, aimed it at the door’s control panel, and emptied the magazine.

  “I guess not.” Lander waited until she had lowered the muzzle to the floor before he said, “You have anger issues, you know that?”

  Ming felt lightheaded, her mind drifting. “You have no idea.”

  She leaned against the bulkhead while Lander worked the blade of his knife into the narrow space between the door and jamb. He levered it open a crack and inserted his fingers into the slit.

  “By the way, you’re bleeding again,” he said.

  Chapter 23

  Remy Cade • Cassandra Station, Observation Deck

  Through the windows of the observation lounge, Remy watched the space battle.

  Not much of a battle, really. The attackers, whoever they were, were using some kind of industrial equipment to gain access to the station. He’d seen at least four of the attacking force turned into slag in the last thirty minutes.

  Some of the attackers must have penetrated the station’s defenses, because a firefight had started in the hallway outside. Remy considered his options: he was unarmed and Elise was unconscious. Staying put was his best play.

  He checked on Elise again. Her limp body lay prone, the half face of Cassandra on her slender nape glaring up at him. Then her eyelids fluttered and Remy rolled her onto her back.

  He ran his fingers along the delicate curve of her jaw and leaned close.

  “Elise.”

  Her eyes popped open. Her gaze cut wildly from side to side until she focused on Remy.

  “Easy,” he said. “You fainted.”

  He didn’t see the right hook coming. Or the leg that swept from behind and over his head, caught him on the sternum, and slammed him backwards into the deck. In a flash, she was on top of him. Her open palm flashed down. His cheek stung. Her forearm pressed into his windpipe.

  No air. His vision started to tunnel in before Elise finally got off his chest.

  She stood over him as he regained his breath. “You led them here,” she said, framed against the observation windows. Behind her, orange flared, then was snuffed out. Remy felt the rapid-fire pulsing of the station’s rail guns throbbing through the deck. “You betrayed us.”

  “No.” Remy got to his knees. “I would never do that to you, Elise.”

  Elise turned to the battle raging beyond the window. “It’s too late now. They’re here.”

  The muffled gunfire that Remy had been hearing off and on for the last hour suddenly seemed closer. Right outside the door. The reinforced wall around the locked door of the room shuddered. The door cracked open. In its jaws was a knife blade, followed by fingers. A handgun pushed through.

  “Everyone stay right where you are,” a tall man said. His arm was through the door, his handgun pointed at them. He forced his body into the opening, then wedged it fully open with his hips.

  A young woman followed him, staggering as if drunk. She was Chinese, clad in a skintight black suit, and had a device that looked like half a goggle consuming the right side of her face. Her complexion was waxy and her nose dripped blood. She came to a stop, swaying, her good eye focusing on Remy and Elise.

  “Ming Qinlao,” Elise said. “Welcome to the Temple of Cassandra.”

  Remy looked at Elise sharply. Who the hell was Ming Qinlao?

  “Guard the door,” the woman called Ming told the tall man. She stepped across the room, her stride uneven, almost like the movements of a marionette. She pointed the pistol at Elise.

  “Give it to me.” Her voice was thick. “The cryptokey. I want it.”

  “That’s not possible, Ming,” Elise said, her words like silk. “What
you came here for was me, not the key. We think that’s the best choice.”

  Ming’s eyes shifted between Elise and Remy. The muzzle tracked with her gaze. “We? You and him? Why do I care what he thinks?”

  Elise stepped forward, causing the man with Ming to tense. Remy assessed the room, looking for anything he could use as a weapon. Then Elise spoke, and her words stopped his thoughts cold.

  “Not him,” she said, the disdain dripping from her words. “Cassandra. I am her vessel. She is in me. I am what you came for.”

  With her left hand, Ming slipped a packet from her belt and tore the package open with her teeth. She sucked the package dry in two swallows. The food seemed to steady her. She wiped her nose with the back of her free hand. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t waste you both right now and take what I want. ”

  Elise smiled. In profile, Remy watched her lips thin and bend. The smile was cruel, manipulative. Same with the voice. This shell of a person was not the woman he loved. This was not his Elise.

  “It is Her will that I come with you,” Elise whispered.

  Ming sniffed back a fresh flow of blood from her nose. “I don’t have time for this shit,” she said and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

  “You need to reload, Ming,” the man said. His weapon was out and covering the room.

  “You see,” Elise said. Remy knew that subtle tone, the one that made him putty in her grip. Now it made him sick. “I have been saved again. Cassandra provides for her true believers.”

  “One problem,” Ming said, reholstering her Glock.

  “Yes?” Elise was whispering now, sure of herself.

  “I’m not a believer.” In one smooth motion, she lifted an odd pistol with a square barrel from the holster on her left hip and pulled the trigger. It made a strange, compressive punk sound. Whatever the odd weapon fired, it impacted Elise. She staggered backward, stiffening suddenly, then collapsed.

  Ming trained the weapon on Remy.

  “Wait,” he said, “you don’t need to—”

  He saw her pull the trigger, felt a shiver run over his skin like the room was filled with static electricity. Then a crushing force gripped his entire body.

  Remy’s mind went blank.

  • • •

  William Graves • Cassandra Station, Reactor Deck

  By the time they’d fought their way to the reactor deck, Graves’s squad was down to four: Quincy, two marines, and Graves himself. Quincy carried one of the packs containing explosives. Graves carried the other, taken off the corpse of the other combat engineer.

  “I guess it’s just you and me left to set the charges, sir,” Quincy said. The two remaining marines had set up interlocking fields of fire overlooking the long stretch of empty corridor between them and the reactor compartment. “How much of your explosives training do you remember?”

  The idea of mission success depending on his atrophied engineering skills made Graves uncomfortable. It had been decades since he’d even touched explosives.

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, Captain.”

  The door separating them from the reactor room was made of reinforced steel, double wide and over ten feet tall: large enough to allow equipment to be moved in and out. The access panel on the wall next to it flashed red.

  Graves studied the twenty meters of intervening hallway. The corridor was extra wide and tall, with a sturdy gantry system overhead. Along the wall were pieces of machinery and structural supports—plenty of places for a man to hide—but the passageway looked empty.

  “I’m sending in a recon drone,” said Estes, the lead marine. Quincy nodded, her back still against the wall, her pack at her feet.

  He pulled a disc the size of his fist out of a cargo pocket and activated it. The drone lit up, and Estes synced it to his combat monitor. The corporal flipped it in the air, and the drone rose to the ceiling, its red eyes mapping the walls and deck. Deliberately, it advanced down the long hallway.

  Three tense minutes passed before Estes called out, “Looks all clear, ma’am.” He got to his feet, helping his fellow marine upright as he did so.

  Quincy shouldered her pack. “Let’s go.”

  With Estes taking point, they approached the massive door. The other marine, Ortega, slapped his hand against the thick steel. He was the shorter of the two, his dark complexion suggesting an Aztec heritage. “How much boom-boom you got in that pack, Captain?”

  Quincy inspected the door. “Not enough to open this baby without some help.” She squatted to inspect the hinges that were thick as Graves’s thigh. The door was designed to open toward them so that, in the event that the reactor compartment vented into space, the atmospheric pressure of the ship would help keep the hatch closed. She eyed the plasma cutter on the wall. “We could try to cut it open, but that would take at least an hour.” Her gaze roved around the crowded hallway, then swept upward. “Unless…”

  Within a few minutes, Quincy had formed a new plan. As Graves found the controls for the gantry and rolled the massive hook down the hallway to the door, Quincy and Ortega placed the shaped charges on the hinges and along the bottom of the door seal. Estes and his combat drone guarded their approach farther up the corridor.

  When Graves had the gantry at its stops with the hook swinging above the door frame, Quincy pointed to a heavy steel eyelet welded to the top of the door.

  “Gimme a boost,” she said to the marines.

  The two stood on either side of her and, making a cradle from their hands, lifted her to the height of their shoulders.

  “That’s good.” Quincy directed Graves to lower the gantry, then slipped the point of the hook into the eyelet. “Raise it up, General … take out the slack. Perfect.” She hopped to the deck with a clang of boots on metal. “Let’s pop this bitch open.”

  Gathering the remaining explosives and keeping the gantry remote in hand, Graves followed the team back down the hallway and around the corner until they got to the shelter of the stairwell. Quincy got out the remote detonator. “The door was designed to withstand pressure against the seals, but I’m betting it won’t be able to take shear forces.” She grinned at Graves. “Press the raise button on the gantry, General, and don’t let up. If I’m right, we’ll slice this thing right off the wall.”

  Graves held down the gantry button with his elbow and covered his ears.

  Quincy laughed wickedly. “Cover your ears, gentlemen, this is gonna be a major fire in the fucking hole.” She triggered the detonation.

  Graves felt his eyeballs compress with the force of the blast. When he removed his hands from his ears, one of his palms was bloody.

  Quincy got to her feet, shaky but grinning. “Let’s see what that did,” she shouted as if from very far away.

  Graves knees were rubbery, and he accepted a hand up from one of the marines. The eyes of the marines were wide as they followed Quincy back down the hall and around the corner.

  The end of the hallway was blackened and the deck plates bowed from the force of the blast. By some miracle, the massive reactor door was still attached to the gantry hook. Quincy hugged the wall as she spider-walked through the wreckage to the door. “It worked,” she crowed, backing away from the structure. “General, drop the hook.”

  Graves realized he was still toting the gantry remote control. He pressed on the button to lower it, but nothing happened.

  It took him and Quincy a few minutes to find the manual override. The young woman was operating on adrenaline. She laughed at the sight of the manual lever to drop the hook. “After you, sir,” she said.

  Graves threw the lever and the door crashed to the deck in a shower of soot, leaving the space station reactor compartment wide open.

  “Yes!” Quincy scrambled over the door to the entrance. Beyond her, Graves could make out an enormous room filled with piping and racks of equipment in front of the massive fusion reactor. She spun on her heel to face them.

  “Who’s got the power now, eh?” Q
uincy said, her grin wide.

  A single gunshot rang out, like the striking of a distant bell to Graves’s deadened hearing. Quincy’s left shoulder hitched and her champion’s smile collapsed. She stared down at a growing red stain on her chest. She looked up at Graves, her face frowning in puzzlement at the sight of blood on her uniform.

  The last combat engineer pitched forward on her face and lay still.

  Chapter 24

  Ming Qinlao • Cassandra Station

  “What the hell is that thing?” Lander asked, eyeing the odd weapon in Ming’s hand. He advanced on the bodies of Remy Cade and Elise Kisaan, his weapon at the ready. “Are they dead?”

  “I hope not,” Ming said. Although bulky, Erkennen’s invention was well balanced and had zero recoil. “Viktor gave it to me. Some kind of modern Taser…”

  Talking was becoming difficult again. With every exhale, another tiny bit of her life force seemed to drain away, as if she had a slow leak in her core. Without the suit, Ming doubted she’d even still be upright. She tugged another gel from her hip pocket and squeezed its contents into her mouth. When it hit her stomach, she experienced only a fraction of the energy boost she had before.

  “They’re not dead,” Lander said. He knelt next to Elise, his index finger on her carotid artery. “Just knocked out, I guess.”

  “Lander … I’m … I’m crashing.” Ming’s knees went soft. Getting closer to the floor felt like a biological imperative. Her own voice sounded very far away .

  Lander was next to her then, helping to steady her. “Don’t flake out on me now, kid. I need you to get my ass off this death trap.” He ripped open another gel pack and tipped her chin up. “C’mon, Ming. Eat this. Do not go to sleep on me.”

  She forced herself to swallow. With Lander’s help, she was able to stand again.

  “Get the cryptokey…”

  He returned to Kisaan, rolled her over. “It’s locked on her wrist.”