by Terry Mixon
“Who the hell could’ve taken it?” Ralph asked. “And how did they get in past all the guards up there?”
Carl started to answer, but Julia beat him to it by pointing downward.
“If they couldn’t get in from the surface and the train system wasn’t functional, there has to be something down lower that provided them with access. They also had to have a means of surviving in this awful atmosphere.
“Not only that, they had enough people, equipment, and training to safely disassemble and remove the fusion plant. Whoever they were, they knew exactly what they were doing and how to do it. We need to figure out who they were and where they went.”
Julia considered the situation and did an inventory of the air bottles she carried. They had used maybe thirty percent of what they’d brought with them. They had a little bit of time that they could spend looking around, but they didn’t have the air to go hunting extensively for where the equipment had been taken.
Thankfully, the people that had stolen the fusion plant hadn’t taken any effort to hide their tracks. A lot of the equipment they’d taken was cumbersome and had left obvious marks on the floor. The series of scratches and scrapes led deeper into this level rather than back the way they’d already come. That gave her a direction to go looking for answers.
“We’ve got enough air for a little bit of searching,” she said as she headed off.
The others didn’t seem convinced, but they didn’t argue against her plan either. They were undoubtedly as curious as she was.
Following the scrapes and gouges in the floor quickly led them to what could only be a service lift. Based on the doors, it was large and probably had a very high capacity. That would’ve allowed the intruders to get the fusion plant—suitably broken down into sections—moved to a different level.
What she didn’t understand was how it could’ve been used without any power.
She pressed the button to summon the lift, and to her surprise, it illuminated. A minute later, the doors opened, and a large lift car awaited them. One with operational overhead lighting that dispelled the gloom all around them.
It was downright spooky. All the scene needed was some intruding mist and disturbing background music.
“How is this working?” Carl demanded. “This isn’t possible. It’s not designed to have an internal power supply.”
“Could another fusion plant be online?” Austin asked.
Carl shook his head. “Cities aren’t designed like warships. They have one fusion plant. Two would be an unneeded expense. Maybe Imperial City or the Imperial Palace had more than one, but not a mid-sized city like Frankfort. The technology is too reliable to need a spare. If well maintained, there would never be a need to shut it down. They were built for continuous operation.”
“Is there any way we can tell which level the lift went to?” Julia asked. “If we can get to that level, maybe we can find out exactly how they did what they did and where this power is coming from.”
Without bothering to respond, Austin opened the panel beside the buttons inside the lift and began pulling equipment from one of his pouches. He quickly had a cable attached to the internal systems and was looking at the small screen in his hands.
“We’re at the highest level this lift services. It looks as if it’s made a lot of trips down to the very bottom level. And, by the way, that’s really far down. I had no idea that the city went so deep. Hell, it may go down farther if there are other lifts or stairs.”
“There’s no real way to know unless we look,” she said.
Carl shook his head. “No. What do we do if the lift stops working? If we get trapped down there, we’re dead.”
Without bothering to argue, Julia pressed the button for the lowest level. The lift doors slid shut, and it started down with them all inside.
Carl glared at her. “Have you lost your mind?”
“If the lift has made as many trips as you say, the odds of it breaking during this one trip are pretty damn low.”
The other three didn’t seem convinced, but it wasn’t as if they had a choice at this point. Julia had committed them all now.
13
Talbot watched the advancing forces and was impressed with the numbers he saw. For such a primitive people, the horde fielded quite a few dismounted fighters. He supposed that shouldn’t surprise him, as warlike as they were.
When they’d had the opportunity to walk through the horde city, they’d only seen a small area. There had been a lot of civilians, merchants, and other noncombatants, but the number of troops they’d passed had been relatively large. Most of them hadn’t been mounted, and neither were the forces arrayed against them now.
He wondered if that meant that the mounted forces were scouring the plains around the two cities. Did that mean that a large group of mounted riders was fanning out to make sure that they didn’t escape?
Probably.
The group below the tower in which he was perched seemed to have grown to around a thousand people. That was quite a force. If they had more than one group penetrating the city, this was going to be a tough fight for the locals to win.
When Lydia returned from passing on what they’d seen, he broached that subject with her. “Is there word on other forces? Are we looking at multiple groups with this many people, or is this it?”
The woman grimaced. “There are three groups. This seems to be the main one, but two others parallel it. Our best guess is that we’re dealing with maybe three thousand unmounted warriors, with possible reinforcements coming in behind them.”
Talbot raised an eyebrow. “And do you have the defensive forces to resist that?”
She shrugged. “We’ve never been invaded on this scale before. When the horde first formed, they were a much smaller group. In the last sixty years, as they built their city, they’ve enslaved many from other groups and now have a large number of young warriors.
“Can we fight them head to head? No. We’re going to have to use all the advantages of being a defender and knowing the terrain grants us. Some traps and ambushes will reduce their numbers.
“We’ll start that process here. Before the building lost most of its glass, we’d break out a window to use for our attack, which might have given us away beforehand. Now that the glass is gone, we can pick any vantage point that we want and reduce their leadership while forcing them to keep their heads down.”
“What kind of weapons do you have that will be accurate at this range?” Chloe asked. “For a bow and arrow, it’s going to be impossible to hit any particular individual. There are enough people down there that the odds of you hitting someone are fairly good, but we must be seven hundred meters up and a few hundred from their lead elements. Add another hundred or more to reach their leadership if we can even identify them at this range.”
The woman grinned at Chloe and went to a nearby closet, opening it to reveal a long-barreled weapon. It didn’t look like a flechette weapon. In fact, it bore a striking resemblance to weapons used in war vids that Kelsey had made him watch from the prespaceflight era.
“This is a sniper rifle,” the woman said. “It uses a chemical propellant to fire slugs of copper-sheathed lead. With an appropriate aiming mechanism like this magnifier and some skills, you can hit a human target at this distance.
“Admittedly, firing from such a high angle makes targeting a problematic concept because the bullets travel in an arc. When they’re fired, they rise, and then they fall as influenced by gravity. They’re also subject to deviation caused by the wind, which at this height is something to consider.
“We have other primitive weapons at the ambush sites that are going to make them pay for every meter they push into the city. At some point, they’re going to get tired of being killed and turn around. If we don’t decisively engage them, they can’t inflict the level of casualties they’d need to make us submit.”
Talbot nodded. “That makes sense, but what if they settle in? If they take over a set of build
ings, you’ll be at a disadvantage pushing them back out. With those kinds of numbers, they’ll be able to come in and keep reinforcing themselves. The disparity in forces is going to make it difficult to kick them back out again.”
Richard shook his head. “With the forces and weaponry we’ve managed to put together, we can take any building from them. All the structures are connected to the underground levels, and if we can get access to them, we can strike into their midst even though they think they’ve secured all access.
“The Imperials were quite clever about figuring out unobtrusive ways to get services into their buildings. These people will probably not be able to defend any building they try to hold.”
“If you say so,” Talbot said with a shrug. He didn’t bother masking the uncertainty in his voice. These people might know their city better than him, but he knew that pushing out a determined force that outnumbered you was a tricky business.
“So, when are you going to start using that sniper rifle?” Chloe asked.
“If I was confident of my aim, I might try now,” Lydia said. “We’ve been authorized to engage them, but they’re still too distant to accurately hit their leadership.”
Talbot held out a hand. “This might be a situation where my Marine Raider augmentation can be useful. Let me take a look.”
She considered him for a long moment and then handed the weapon over. “Okay, we’ll give it a try. I don’t think that you’re going to be able to target single individuals at this distance, much less hit them at this angle, but it’ll be interesting to watch you try.”
Talbot cleared broken glass away from the area nearest a shattered window that had a decent view of the enemy and knelt. The window had once gone from floor to ceiling. Now the opening allowed him to aim down as much as he liked without exposing himself overmuch.
Not that he expected that the enemy was going to be able to effectively return fire. Even their antiarmor weapons weren’t all that accurate at any range at all. Bows wouldn’t have a chance of hitting him since the arrows couldn’t get this high.
The weapon had a primitive scope attached to it. It was a long tube that held what looked like very small crosshairs inside and provided a significant magnification of the objects being viewed. Of course, even at this distance, the magnification was insufficient to provide any real detail.
“Can we take this off?” he asked. “I need to have a direct look at what I’m going to be shooting at. I hate to say it, but my augmented vision is better than what you’re getting through this scope.”
Richard looked at Lydia and then shrugged. “It will need to be sighted back in once you’re done, but I’m willing to give this a try because I’d also like to see you in action. Hand it here.”
Talbot passed it over to the man, who quickly removed the scope and handed the rifle back.
“It has five shots in the internal magazine,” Lydia said. “Once you’ve fired them, hand it back to me, and I’ll reload one time. I’m not willing to squander more than ten rounds. The ammunition is quite time-consuming and costly to make. They’re worth killing the enemy leadership with but shouldn’t be wasted.”
Talbot grinned. “Oh, I think you’ll be pleased with how well this is going to work. How do I tell which of them are leaders?”
He looked down the fixed sights as he aimed at the horde warriors, using his augmented vision to zoom in on them.
“All of the officers have colored stripes on their shoulders. If you see color there, you’re looking at an officer. The lighter colors are lower ranks, and the darker ones are higher. A deep red is pretty much the best kind of target if you can find one.”
Talbot swept the sights across the approaching enemies. Spotting a bit of red, he focused in on the man and saw that this one was dressed in armor that was of much higher quality than the people around him.
His first shot was going to be an educated guess, so he lined up with the man and made an estimate of where he thought the shot would go. He kept his focus reasonably wide so that he could tell where the bullet hit and squeezed the trigger so as not to jerk the weapon.
The kick against his shoulder was surprisingly sharp. Luckily, his augmentation made the recoil manageable.
His first shot went somewhere beyond the target and caused everyone below to duck a little, but they didn’t scramble for cover as the weapon ejected a piece of brass off to the side. It seemed ready to fire again, so Talbot lined up his next shot more carefully and lowered his point of aim.
The recoil was much easier to deal with the second time. This shot also went long, but Talbot saw its impact point as a puff of dirt a bit to the side and behind the target. The combat computer in his head made a few calculations, and he lowered his weapon to match where he thought he needed to aim to hit the target in the chest. Then, for the third time, he fired the weapon.
Blood blossomed from the target’s chest, and the man fell backward. Based on the way he lay, Talbot was pretty sure he was dead. Even if he wasn’t, it hardly mattered. He was out of the fight.
“Got him,” Talbot said. “Now, let’s see if we can make these bastards pay a little bit more before we have to relocate.”
The group that Kelsey was assigned to set out through the labyrinth of tunnels under the city. Their destination was the ground floor of a large building halfway across the city.
Once they arrived, she saw that it didn’t have windows on the ground level. The bottom floor had been thoroughly cleaned out and turned into another marshaling area and defensive redoubt. One with some peculiar features.
The leader of Kelsey’s attack group quickly arrayed their forces behind a ramp of dirt that went all the way to the ceiling. There were depressions that people could fire their weapons through, but the holes were small, only as wide as a person and less than half a meter from the ceiling.
Without waiting for permission, Kelsey scrambled up the embankment and took a look for herself. Someone had driven a lot of metal rods between the dirt and the wall to keep it from collapsing once the wall was breached, she noted.
Against the exterior wall at intervals, placed away from the openings the people would use, were explosive charges linked by wire. She suspected they were shaped charges, designed to send most of their force outward.
It was going to be interesting to see whether it worked like the defenders imagined or if the dirt collapsed under the shock wave. Dangerous but educational.
Satisfied, Kelsey climbed back down and made her way to where the man marshaling their forces was standing. “How far away is the enemy, and how much time do we have before you blow the walls?”
The man shrugged slightly. “The observers say we have about ten minutes before the first group arrives. We’re attacking the rightmost of the three prongs.
“The plan is simple. We set off mines buried outside the building to disrupt them, blow the walls, cause as much havoc and death as we can, and then retreat back underground.
“I’ll arm self-destruct charges underneath the floor here as soon as we’re clear. They’ll trigger them when they pursue us, and the explosions will kill many more of them as we make our way to the next fallback position and repeat the process.”
Grateful that she knew what was happening next, Kelsey found a place behind the embankment and waited for the fight to start. She hoped the piled dirt really did manage to stop the blast.
Even if it did, it was going to be impressively loud. Many of the locals would suffer permanent hearing loss, even if they stuffed their fingers in their ears, as was likely. There was only so much human flesh could do to stop the shock wave.
She hunkered down against the hard-packed dirt and examined her weapons more closely. When the time came to use them, she needed to know how everything worked. Some practice would’ve been a lot better, but she’d just have to make do.
The submachine gun was definitely handmade rather than constructed off a machined template, but the gunsmith had had real skill. She ran her fingers
across the smooth metal and decided that it was an impressive piece of work. She confirmed that the safety was engaged and that she knew how to quickly make it ready to fire.
She’d seen weapons like this in a number of the old vids, so she had some idea what was going to happen when she used it. It would obviously have a fair amount of recoil because the stock was made to deliver it to the shoulder. Each of the magazines was filled with brass cylinders that contained copper-sheathed lead slugs. Such pretty things for being so deadly.
It was similar—if far inferior in quality—to the Pirone Nitro Express 18 millimeter semi-automatic hunting rifle she’d used to kill the assassins that had come for her at the Imperial Retreat on Avalon. The bullets used by the submachine gun were also far weaker.
Still, the experience of using the massive weapon—which presently graced the wall in her quarters with Talbot aboard Persephone—gave her confidence that she could use these without any problem.
Unlike flechettes, these wouldn’t cause massive damage due to their slow speed. She didn’t think they’d be very good at penetrating armor either. Without testing, there was no way to be sure. She supposed she’d find out shortly.
The pistol was of a similar make, obviously a one-off by a professional. It was even more of a work of art than the submachine gun. She wished that she had the time and knowledge to disassemble both of them so that she could better understand how they worked.
Once she got off Terra, she’d double-check the databases on Persephone and see whether or not she could build weapons like this herself. They wouldn’t be the most effective choice for combat, of course, but they’d make for interesting pieces to hang on her wall with the Pirone.
Or maybe she could take these with her when they left Frankfort.