Susquehanna

by Chris Pourteau

“We’ll be out soon enough,” answered Logan.

  Behind the gate, the sewer passage was lined only with dim lights. They were grateful for that. Smelling the sludge they pushed their way through was bad enough. Seeing it any better would only add to the fun.

  Logan found a ladder ascending to a gantry, and liquid filth drained off him as he hauled himself up.

  “Hurry up, Sergeant,” he said, reaching down for Stug. “We need to close it again before someone notices it’s open.”

  One by one they gained the catwalk as Logan found the manual override controls for the sewer gate. Thirty seconds later, the screeching metal was lowered back into place.

  The QB noticed that her soldiers had begun wagging their heads; she felt it too. Transport jamming apparently covered the length and breadth of the City, even beneath it. “BICEs off,” she said. “Visual communication only.”

  “I sure hope the rest of your plan is sound,” said Hatch to Logan, clicking off his device. “’Cause it’s all on you now.”

  “I used to do this all the time,” said Logan. “Trust me.”

  Logan led them out of the sewer through a manhole and into a dim alley. Damp stone walls reached two stories high on either side of them. One building, the ex-TRACE spy told them, was Transport’s armory. The other was a flophouse for migrant workers from the cities of the Great Shelf, employed in Transport’s factories not far from here.

  The fall air drew a shroud of coldness around them as it funneled down the alley. “Fifteen minutes since the last explosion,” said Logan. “They’re as out of position as they’re gonna get.” They spotted no Transport soldiers around the building or in the area; they must have been drawn away to deal with the bombs. Logan’s plan was working.

  The lieutenant positioned Hawkeye and Bracer on the roof of the flophouse opposite the armory’s back door, its most vulnerable spot. Without his heavy machine gun, Bracer held position with only his laser rifle and sidearm, aided by his spotter. They stood above, watching the locked back door, which was painted red as a clear message to the locals to stay away. Hawkeye tracked his omni-lens constantly left and right, up and down. When he gave the signal, Logan and the QB joined them on the roof.

  Hatch was careful to stay in the shadows, away from Transport’s security cameras. Those all-seeing eyes monitored most of the City’s roads and alleys, one more way the Authority controlled movement. He searched quietly through a trash container for camouflage, coming up with a huge cotton blanket. He cut a head-sized hole out of it, then draped it over Stug. With his broad shoulders beneath the makeshift poncho, he looked like a circus tent with a head attached. But at least the blanket masked his weapons.

  “Is this really necessary?” whined the sergeant.

  “Nope. Well, unless you want to survive the first ten seconds of this little play. Then yep.”

  Stug wrinkled his nose. “It smells awful.”

  “That’s okay, so do you. Think of it as an opportunity to practice your method acting.”

  “Hey, look on the bright side, Sarge,” said Pusher. “You get to punch people in the first act.”

  The sergeant smiled. “Glass is half full, then.”

  Mindful of the security camera scanning the back entrance, Hatch and Pusher quickly crossed the alleyway, setting themselves up opposite Stug some thirty feet from the red door. They would cover the back entrance while Stug did his bit.

  Once in position, the lieutenant assessed the flophouse roof. The QB and Logan would be hunched down along the wall by now, preparing to leap across to the armory. Hawkeye’s omni-lens dipped once, twice, the moonlight twinkling briefly off its glass.

  All clear.

  “You’re on, Falstaff,” Hatch whispered.

  Stug splayed himself against the building in his circus poncho. Still hidden in a slice of shadow cut by the moon across the stone behind him, he waited patiently as the security camera panned across the alley. When it pointed directly away from him, Stug staggered forward.

  The camera whirred, its motion sensor tracking the monotony of the empty alley on its return arc. A jerky shadow made it stop. Stug’s irregular mass slowly took shape as he moved into the light.

  “Citizen,” came the computerized voice, impossibly huge, from the small speaker below the camera eye. “You have entered a restricted area. By order of the Transport Authority, you will leave immediately or face prosecution by a duly appointed magistrate.”

  Stug continued his jaunty progress. He took note of the order, jerked to the left, and fell into a mass of refuse bins. He lifted himself unsteadily to his feet and, mouthing gibberish, resumed his progress down the alley.

  “Citizen, this facility is off-limits,” said the voice. “Once before a magistrate, representation for your defense will not be provided. You will be tried for sedition for failing to leave a restricted area. This is your final warning.”

  Stug reached the door. He struck the reinforced metal with his fists.

  Pound. Pound. Pound.

  Then he began to cry-sing in the slurring voice of desperate loneliness only a drunken male can muster. “I shee a red door . . . and I hwant to pain’it black.”

  Pound. Pound. Pound.

  “Lemme in, mothuh!” he shouted. “Pleashhhhhh!”

  Pound. Pound. Pound.

  “I wanna see Jonah! Mothuhhhhhh!” His baritone voice reverberated against the surrounding stone, a church bell’s echo in an expansive belfry.

  Tumblers turned. Stug staggered back six inches so he was no longer leaning on the red metal. With a creak of its heavy hinges, the armory door swung open. Two Transport soldiers stood ready, laser rifles trained on the intruder.

  “Wha? You’re hnot my mothuh.” He looked beyond them. “Where’sh Jonah? Where’sh my dog?”

  “I don’t know where you think you are, fat man, but this isn’t your home,” barked one of the soldiers.

  With a flit of his eyes, Stug noted the lieutenant’s insignia across the pocket of the man’s uniform. You’re the one I need to worry about, then, he thought.

  “But I guess you could say we’re your keepers now,” sneered the lieutenant. “Down on the ground, lard ass.”

  Stug affected a delayed reaction of hurt, affront, and detached ignorance, all at the same time. “That wasshn’t very nishe.”

  “Christ, he stinks, Lieutenant.” The other soldier was younger, likely not long out of Transport’s boot camp for porters.

  “Vermin like this always do,” replied the officer. Returning his attention to the swaying circus freak in front of him, the officer shouted, “Ground! Now!”

  The drunk trespasser suddenly slipped and fell, crying out as his right knee cracked on the cement. The younger soldier instinctively moved forward, putting out an arm to try and steady the smelly bastard who’d interrupted an otherwise quiet watch.

  “No, wait!” the lieutenant warned.

  Stug threw back the poncho, easily grabbing the inexperienced soldier and pulling him off balance. As he moved, the sergeant heard Bracer take out the security camera over his head with a single laser blast, right on schedule. The big man’s calves flexed as he stood, hauling the soldier in front of him off the ground, a human shield. The lieutenant’s blast took the young porter square in the back. Grunting with effort, Stug shoved the soldier’s body straight at the lieutenant, who pulled his trigger again wildly, blasting the floor.

  Stug roared like a giant chasing would-be thieves from his treasure room. He fell upon the enemy officer, who was struggling to aim at the drunken vagrant who had become a whooping demon and charged him from the doorway. The sergeant ripped the laser rifle out of the officer’s hands and threw it behind him through the door. Terror blazed in the lieutenant’s eyes as two huge meat hooks reached down for him. Stug grabbed him by the front of his uniform, hauled him from beneath the dead trooper, then set him down on his feet, light as a kitten.

  Both men paused. The unarmed porter officer seemed confused by his sudden good fo
rtune. Stug centered himself. It then dawned on the lieutenant what was coming, but he could only stand there, paralyzed with fascination and fear. Stug swung a haymaker that knocked his foe the length of the corridor. The fact that he’d been an officer, and a Transport officer at that, made the sergeant’s face nearly break in half with a smile.

  Stug stepped forward as the floor’s friction brought the lieutenant to a squeaking stop. The man groaned and tried to get his hands under him. Stug aimed and fired. He hated dispatching even an enemy soldier so dispassionately, but the plan needed both the guards dead. Turning toward the door, he said, “You can come in now. The heavy lifting’s done.”

  Pusher came through first, while Hatch paused briefly to give a hand signal to the others on the flophouse roof. Three seconds later, the QB and Logan were leaping across to the armory while Bracer and Hawkeye maintained their overwatch position, protecting the red door and their means of escape.

  “Nice acting job,” said Hatch. “You were certainly convincing as a stinking, loveless drunk with no hope for your future.”

  “Real life is the crucible for good acting,” replied Stug.

  “Which way from here, sir?” Pusher asked impatiently. She wasn’t used to mid-crisis bantering.

  “Guns in the basement,” answered Hatch. “Logan says we should have ten minutes before Transport reinforcements arrive back here from the bomb sites.”

  From above, they heard a small, muffled explosion. That would be the QB, blowing the door on the roof in full view of Transport’s cameras. With two points of ingress now on the enemy’s collective mind, they’d theoretically be confused in their response—and since the camera observing the alleyway was destroyed, Transport would have no way of knowing how many of the enemy they faced from the ground. Hopefully, they’d focus on the two infiltrators they could see via their roof cameras, and the diversion would provide Hatch and his crew the time they needed to secure the weapons from the basement vault. According to Logan’s timetable, they now had nine minutes to get it done.

  Motioning Pusher to take point, Stug shed his poncho. Beyond a short entry corridor, branches went right and left. Logan’s intel had indicated the secured basement with Authority weapons would be to the right. The left would be the way the enemy would come at them.

  “Make sandbags,” Hatch ordered Pusher, indicating the two deceased Transport soldiers. Stug had already begun dragging the young trooper’s corpse to lay across the left hallway. Pusher grabbed the dead lieutenant, and Stug helped her haul him on top of the other dead man. She went prone behind their stacked protection, watching the approach from the left.

  “Let’s go,” Hatch said to Stug, heading to the right.

  The QB and Logan got twenty feet inside the building, to the top of the stairwell, before the first laser fire shot toward them. Transport’s response had been nearly instantaneous. As soon as they’d blown the door, klaxons had blared around them, drowning out all other sound but weapons fire.

  They sheltered against the wall, both breathing hard. The captain quickly scouted the stairs leading down, saw at least one shadow also holding position from cover. But she and Logan couldn’t afford to hold here. They had to move into a better position to lock down more of Transport’s response teams and keep the heat off the others below.

  She glanced below again, saw the shadow-soldier start to move, and popped her rifle around the corner without aiming. With the alarms blaring against the walls of the stairwell, she had no idea if she’d gotten lucky and hit anything.

  Only one way to find out, her inner self said in a voice that sounded like Hatch’s. And that annoyed her enough to fire her up.

  She swept her rifle around the corner again, crack-crack-cracked the area below with laser fire, then thrust herself out of cover and knelt at the top of the stairs. She was exposed but able to see the entire stairwell below. Black marks from her blind fire pocked the wall as if Picasso had shot them. Her heart beat like a hammer in her chest, her blood pounding loud enough in her ears to drown out the klaxons momentarily.

  The slow motion of battle kicked in as she saw the tip of the porter’s rifle turn the corner. Though her profile presented the smallest target to the enemy, Mary felt like a wooden doppelgänger on the firing range just waiting to be split in two.

  Arms came into view, bringing the laser rifle to bear.

  The QB took careful aim.

  She could see the enemy’s upper torso now, his eye sighting along his rifle. She could feel his finger tensing on the trigger.

  She exhaled.

  Both fired, but the QB had been a hair’s breadth faster. The porter’s shot went wild as he jerked backward against the wall, already dead but still in motion. The QB took half a breath to realize she was unhurt, then grabbed one of three sonic grenades she carried, popped its clip, and tossed it at the body.

  “Cover your ears!” she shouted at Logan above the sirens.

  There was no sound as the grenade went off, since the explosion was at a frequency beyond human hearing. But it attacked the inner ear of anyone in range, causing acute vertigo and excruciating pain. The QB counted it out, then launched herself to her feet, pulled Logan to his, and swung down the stairs, her rifle targeted at center-mass height. As they rounded the corner, they encountered two Authority soldiers lying in the stairwell, hands covering their ears, faces contorted. Two quick pulls of Mary’s trigger dispatched them both.

  “You’ve done this before,” said Logan.

  The klaxons still sounded, but their ears had begun to adjust to the constant noise.

  “A few times,” she replied, “but it’s been a while.”

  “Couldn’t tell.”

  He bent down to the dead soldiers and rifled through their equipment. Handing one of their laser rifles over for her to sling on her back, Logan stashed the other two inside a netting bag. Three more prizes from their raid, assuming they made it out again.

  Waste not, want not, said Hatch in her head. Having Hatch on BICE was bad enough sometimes. For her inner self to adopt his voice for its own made her more uncomfortable than staring down the sights of a Transport laser rifle ever could.

  The QB noticed that the weapon Logan chose to wield was a .45-caliber automatic pistol he’d taken off one of the dead soldiers. He stuck a second one in his belt. Then she remembered how long ago it was that he’d done covert ops for TRACE . . . long before even Transport had commonly carried laser weapons.

  Kickin’ it old school, her inner voice said in Hatch’s I know-something-you-don’t, sexy tone.

  Okay, stop that, Mary pleaded.

  They took up opposite positions on either side of the closed door leading onto the second floor. The QB stared at Logan, then flicked her eyes meaningfully at the nearest soldier’s dead body.

  “Oh,” said the ex-spy, snapping to her unspoken command. “Been a while for me, too.”

  He knelt, grabbed the corpse under the armpits, and leaned the soldier against the wall next to the door. In one hand, Logan held his .45-caliber. In the other, he held the dead man’s hand poised over the door’s swipe pad. The captain nodded, knelt, and pulled the pin on a second sonic grenade.

  Logan passed the still-useful palm over the pad, and they heard the snick of the door’s release. He grabbed its handle and pulled it three inches open. The QB tossed the grenade in, and Logan slammed the door shut, nearly taking her fingers off.

  “Sorry. Rusty.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She counted it off, then nodded, and he swiped the corpse’s hand over the pad again. The QB quickly pushed the corpse out of their way as Logan opened the door.

  Laser fire blasted from their right. The sonic grenade must’ve missed at least one of its targets. Any movement into the corridor would face heavy, unceasing fire from the right. There was more than one porter pinning them down.

  The captain assessed their situation. Theirs was a tactical diversion, not the primary mission. As long as they kept Transport ti
ed up on the upper floor, they’d achieved that objective. But two people stuck in one doorway halved their ability to do that. She flitted her eyes across the hallway. That door was closed and locked by a swipe pad, exactly like the one they’d just come through. But they needed to establish a second firing arc if they had any chance of holding Transport’s attention here.

  “Do we need to go any further?” asked Logan, knowing their tactical situation as well as she did. “Haven’t we done our job?”

  “Almost. You still got that Bowie knife?”

  “We should’ve brought more grunts,” said Stug, loading an okcillium battery into a twelfth laser rifle. “More grunts, more boxes.”

  “More grunts, more casualties. In small, out fast.”

  Stug paused.

  “Don’t even go there,” said Hatch.

  “Bah, you’re no fun,” said the sergeant, putting another rifle, battery installed, into the autonomous airbox.

  The AAB was a supply drone with the capacity to carry a score of laser rifles. It operated much like an airbus, only on a much smaller scale. By programming the AABs with specific GIS coordinates, Authority Command could quick-flight supplies of weapons, munitions, or whatever else its soldiers needed in the field, even while combat raged around them. That capability provided a huge tactical advantage over TRACE. But in this situation, that kind of programming was less than helpful. If Alpha Squad input coordinates into the AAB, it would carry its payload along the most direct route to reach its objective. Great for getting supplies to soldiers as soon as possible with friendly combat drones clearing a flight path; terrible for keeping covert operations like this one under the radar.

  “I still hate the idea of having this damned thing follow me like a puppy,” said Stug, his signature nasality creeping into his voice. “I don’t trust technology to know what it’s doing.”

  “Quit complaining and get those batteries installed.” Pusher was upstairs, Hatch knew, buying them time. They’d heard intermittent fire from the first floor, but the fact that it continued told them she was still in action. Small consolation when your escape route depended on one trained sergeant keeping her head down at the right time.