by Kal Spriggs
Tank threw Claude to the side and then squatted next to Bob.
“Cover fire, if you please,” he said in a calm voice, as if the gunfire were of little importance.
Mel caught the rifle he tossed to her and opened fire. A moment later, she saw that Claude had also begun to fire. Aldera finally crawled out of the corner and grabbed at the rifle from the man that Mel had shot. She scooted backwards towards a window and then opened fire. Her shots weren't the spray that Mel and the others laid down, they were single, aimed shots and Mel saw one of their attackers fall from the roof, a bullet hole square between his eyes.
Mel caught movement through one of the grimy windows and spun. She made out the shadows of several people outside and before she could think about it, she fired at the silhouettes. The rifle bucked against her shoulder as she fired, yet she held the sights level as she hit one target and then the other. Whether she had killed them or wounded them, she didn't know, but they dropped out of sight.
“We have to get out of here,” Bob gasped. “There's probably fifty or more of Marciano's men out there.”
“Why are they shooting at us?” Mel snapped.
“He, uh, had a disagreement about an earlier deal,” Bob grated. “I think I'm going to pass out...” Whether it was something that Tank had given him or blood loss the agent's eyes closed.
“Bob!” An accented voice shouted from outside, “You won't be getting out of this alive, but your friends might, if they come out now and throw down their weapons!”
Mel grimaced at that, so much for another of Bob's contacts. Was there anyone the man had dealt with that didn't hate him? She looked at Woodard, “How is he?”
Tank looked up, “He's lost some blood, but the bullet just passed through his side, right through the fatty tissue but it didn't penetrate his intestinal cavity. I gave him some painkillers and a mild sedative. He'll live.”
Claude looked around, “Let me try to talk to them, maybe I can buy us some time?”
Mel frowned, the amount of gunfire was certain to attract attention and the last thing they needed was for local law enforcement to show up. “Try it,” she said. She waved Aldera over and the woman duck-walked away from the window and then over within a few meters. “Is that our stuff?”
Aldera gave a slight nod, “Bob and I had time to check it before this Marciano fellow's goons waylaid us.” Up close, Mel could see a spreading bruise on her face. Clearly things had not been pretty after that.
“We have to get out of here,” Mel said. She pointed at the truck. The radiator steamed and a puddle of oil and coolant signaled it had taken more than a few hits, “I don't think that's a good option. Any ideas?”
Claude was near the door and he shouted out, “Bob's dead. If we send him out, will you let us walk?”
“Bring him out with you, no weapons, and we'll let you go,” Marciano shouted.
“Yeah, right,” Mel said, “tell me another one.” She tuned out their further conversation as she thought. Mel moved up to the side windows and glanced out. She saw the back of the warehouse was an open field and there were a pair of trucks parked only a few meters away. A couple of Marciano's men were crouched near them, but they didn't seem to see her. “Anyone see a back door?” Mel asked in a low voice.
Aldera spoke up, “There's one here,” she said. She checked it a moment later, “Locked, but I can get it open.”
“Okay,” Mel said. “Here's the plan. We grab what we can carry and run for the trucks. We'll need a distraction of some kind...”
Aldera rolled a heavy metal canister towards her. It rattled against the uneven concrete floor. “Oxygen canister. Maybe half-full. We roll that out front and hit it, it's going to get their heads down.”
Mel nodded, “That'll work.” She looked over at Claude, “You ready?”
He just gave her a nod, “Okay!” he shouted out the front, “We're going to throw his body out and we're coming out!”
At the side, Mel saw several of Marciano's men had moved away from their spots at the back and had shifted up towards the front. It seemed that the criminals had bought the bait. Aldera finished up her work at the back door and then grabbed one of the crates and dragged it over. Tank hoisted up Bob over his shoulder and then grabbed another crate under one arm and gave Mel a nod.
Claude moved over to the dead man that Mel had shot and grabbed him by the back of his body armor. In a surprising feat of strength, even for a man his size, he hoisted the body and then threw it out the doorway.
A moment later, Mel kicked the tank and watched it roll down the slight incline, bouncing and throwing sparks as it hit stones and rusted metal fittings. She glanced back and saw that Aldera had ripped open the back door and was dragging one of the two crates with her as she fired.
Mel rushed to the back of the warehouse before she turned and leveled her new pistol on the pressure tank as it bounced out the door and rolled under their rented truck where it came to a halt against the rear wheel, just under the fuel tank. As she started to squeeze the trigger, she heard shouts outside... and then she saw the holographic sight indicate that a round was selected for the target.
She completed the trigger squeeze before she thought about what that would do under the truck.
The Tyvex Autopistol's smart system was very good at identifying a number of targets to select a proper round. What it wasn't good at was improvising. The pistol's computer identified a metal canister as the target, but it didn't know density, structure, or contents. All it knew was that its user wanted to penetrate the target, which might or might not have a hostile person behind it. Given a longer user profile, it was capable of learning. For instance, if she regularly used metal targets for practice, it would learn to fire practice rounds.
However, on its factory settings, it defaulted to penetration and maximum damage against targets that might be behind armor or hard cover. That factory setting was why it selected an armor piercing, high explosive round, to better penetrate the metal of the pressure tank and then detonate in proximity to a human target.
The round punched directly through both sides of the hardened steel cylinder. As it did, it shattered the hard but brittle steel and released a cloud of pressurized oxygen, throwing shards of steel in all directions as the pressure vessel ripped apart. One of those shards drove upwards through the fuel tank, followed by a burst of pure oxygen with two hundred kilograms of force per square centimeter.
As the fuel shot skyward, propelled at high velocity by the expanding oxygen, the explosive, armor piercing round detected that it had penetrated its target and detonated.
The fuel tank, at this point, was a fairly equal mix of atomized diesel fuel and pure oxygen, along with a twenty foot column that had shot upwards through the truck bed and into the air. The relatively small explosion from the round was just enough to act as an ignition source as forty liters of petrol mixed with thirty cubic meters of oxygen in an improvised fuel air explosion.
Mel didn't know any of that. She just knew that a hot, hard hand picked her up and threw her through the back windows of the warehouse, just before the entire thing collapsed. She shook her head dazedly as she stared at the rising column of smoke. A pair of strong arms picked her up and she saw that Tank had hoisted her and then set her in the passenger seat of a truck. He shouted something at her, but she just shook her head, she couldn't hear anything over the ringing in her ears.
She wiped at her eyes and then looked back at the warehouse. The explosion had leveled the entire ramshackle building, along with the warehouse across the street and the buildings to either side. She looked around and saw that Aldera was in the driver's seat and Claude and Bob were in the back, next to the pair of crates. “We need to go!” she shouted.
She couldn't hear the truck running, but she could feel it's engine turn over as Aldera started it up. Tank had grabbed hold of the door next to Mel as they pulled out.
Tank shouted something at her as they pulled out of the warehouse distric
t along with a number of other vehicles, just as a pair of fire trucks and a host of police vehicles went howling in the other direction.
“What was that?” Mel shouted back.
She had to read his lips as he shouted back, “I said,” he pointed back the way they came, “that was awesome, but why did you blow up the building?”
Mel said the first thing that came to mind, “It seemed like the thing to do at the time”
***
Mel's ears still rung as she and the others stumbled into the lounge.
Swaim sat sprawled out on the couch, a litter of empty food wrappers scattered around. He looked over and froze, a piece of popcorn halfway to his lips. “Oh,” he said, “hey guys.”
“What's with the mess?” Mel demanded.
“Oh,” Swaim looked around, “Sorry, I've just been watching the newsfeeds. You've got to watch this, here, I've got the best part recorded.”
Before Mel could respond, Swaim hit play. “... police and firefighters are still sifting through the rubble, we have a copy of first-hand recordings of the explosion coming to you live, now from Ashe System News Network.”
The lounge holoviewer began at the start of the explosion... and Mel could make out the license plate of the rented truck, it showed that much detail. It looked to be from a set of security cameras further down the street, so it showed the street at an angle that let Mel appreciate the sheer amount of gunfire.
She couldn't see the impact of her bullet on the oxygen tank, but the video slowed down enough to show the massive fireball and the shock wave of air that blasted out.
“Can you imagine?” Swaim paused it just as the front of the warehouses started to crumble. “They've got a planet-wide manhunt going on down there. You guys are lucky you didn't have anything to do with that, they're still pulling bodies out of the rubble.”
He continued to crunch away at his popcorn, utterly oblivious to Mel's scorched clothing or the way that Bob leaned heavily on Tank. “Oh, hey, you did get the stuff we needed, right?” Swaim asked absently as he flipped the station back to the news feed.
“Yeah,” Mel snapped, “we got what we needed.” She wanted nothing more than to stuff the kid out the airlock just now, but she restrained that sentiment.
“...police are now reporting that the bomb looks to be the work of a terrorist group and we've obtained composite sketches from the Planetary Security. If you see any of these people, consider them armed and extremely dangerous...”
Swaim paused the video again and stared at the sketches of Mel, Bob, and the others. He looked back over at Mel, “Wow, that's a pretty good likeness, you don't have any family out here, do you Mel?”
Mel stared at the clueless young man for a long moment. She glanced at Johnny Woodard and then at Bob, “You better get him patched up. I'm going to go get cleaned up.”
As she turned away, she heard Swaim ask if they'd had time to pick up any new entertainment videos. I'm not going to kill him, she thought, because his screaming will just make my head hurt worse.
***
“Well...” Bob said as he gingerly look a seat in the lounge. “The police broadbands are broadcasting our general descriptions, pulled from the rental place or Marciano's surviving men, I'd assume. They've marked us as armed and extremely dangerous, but they've organized their search in the criminal farm workers rather than the spaceport or any recent departures, thankfully.”
Mel winced as his words made her head pound all the worse. Tank had sprayed her ears with some kind of foam which was supposed to undo some of the hearing damage, but it didn't do much for the concussion she had or the headache that resulted.
“I think it's safe to say that we should leave, then?” They had taken their shuttle out of the spaceport and back to Fenris, but they hadn't yet left the system while Aldera Kynes looked over the gear.
“Yeah,” Bob nodded, hand pressed to his side, “probably a good idea.”
“Uh,” Swaim said as he walked in, “Bob, is there anyone who doesn't want to kill you?”
Bob gave the young man a sharp look, “I don't see you providing us with any contacts. In case you missed it, we did get the equipment we needed.”
“Most of it, anyway,” Aldera said as she walked in. The cold woman gave Mel a nod, but her gaze focused on Bob. “It seems that even if he hadn't tried to kill us, your friend didn't plan to deal honestly with us. Some of the most expensive parts are either counterfeit or broken, probably picked up at a salvage yard. I can probably repair them, but I'll need a pair of hands.”
“My repair bots can assist,” Fenris growled. “I've got a pair scanning now, I think we can make do with what we have.”
Mel sighed, the discussion made her head hurt all the more. She had never been blown up before, she didn't want to repeat it. She leaned forward a bit and felt the sealed wounds on her back pull. Her passage through the glass windows had not gone without further injuries.
Despite her body armor, Tank had pulled two large pieces of glass out of her back and another three out of her neck and the back of her head. She was lucky in that one three inch long shard had missed her spinal cord by only five centimeters.
“Let's get out of this damned system,” she said. She hoped the rest of the mission went better, but she knew that the hard part hadn't yet begun. “Fenris, take us out of here.”
I hope that Brian and Marcus are doing better than we are, she thought.
Time: 0830 Zulu, 07 September 291 G.D.
Location: Danzig High Orbit, Neu Emshaven System
Brian Liu examined his uniform in the mirror and gave a satisfied nod as he examined his disguise. The blue and gold Guard Fleet officer's uniform was genuine enough. He'd taken it off the man whose identity he had taken, after all. That had been somewhat difficult, one handed, but Brian had managed, just as he'd managed to drag the corpse to a garbage incinerator and dispose of him. Actually, he found that lacking an arm slowed him down even more than the loss of a leg, as odd as that seemed.
He knew that Mel would disapprove of the murder of a Guard Fleet officer, but Brian wasn't going to tell her. In fairness, he had selected his target with care. Lieutenant Commander Darien Iyassa met all of Brian's search parameters: he was a decorated, recently wounded combat veteran of Asian ancestry, he was roughly of the right height and build, and he was also on leave pending a recent assignment to the Electra system.
The Electra system was where he had served as an intelligence officer attached to the Guard Army security force there, where he had been injured by a bomb while assisting the Guard Army in putting down a revolt on the prison planet.
That disfiguring injury made him the perfect candidate. The fact that Electra was a mutant penal colony was merely a happy benefit. Brian didn't approve of the poor treatment that fellow “sub” humans received at the hands of Guard Military Forces. So he took some pleasure in removing a man who no doubt had contributed to that treatment. Darien Iyassa might have walked away from the planet, but he hadn't survived much longer than that.
Brian had actually recruited Straken from Electra, so he knew very well what kind of hell the Guard Army “peacekeepers” had made it for their charges, even without an armed insurrection causing them to be more violent. He was certain his old friend would approve of his actions. If Mel found out about it, well, she could just be disappointed.
Though if she knew what it was like there, she probably wouldn't disagree too much, he thought.
And really, the disguise was a good one. It gave him reason for the severed arm, and he had added a non-functional regrowth tank to the stump. In truth, his arm was growing back quickly enough, but the regrowth tank attracted negative attention, people who realized what it was saw it more than they saw him.
The painful burns he had applied to his face had spared his eyes, at least, and once he put on the bandages, no one would realize that his eyes were still intact. Granted, he'd had to apply a torch to his other hand to burn away his fingerprints, but the
scar tissue didn't limit his dexterity on that hand. It had also hurt, but Brian had gone well past the point where a little pain disturbed him. For an exciting mission like this, he was willing to suffer some for the sake of pulling it off. He also had a handheld breathing tank, ostensibly for him to take hits of oxygen in order to counteract the damage to his lungs, but it actually contained chemicals to make his voice raspy.
In all, the disfiguring injuries made an excellent disguise. They broke up his face enough that most facial recognition software wouldn't peg him. The lack of fingerprints meant they couldn't scan him, and since his medial papers stated that his eyes were severely damaged, they wouldn't scan his eyes. The best bonus, he knew, was that most normal people would be repulsed by him. Thus far on the luxury liner, no one had even had the courage to look in his direction and he had moved about in a bubble of silence as the wealthy and whole avoided him.
A shame, he thought, that I ended poor Darien Iyassa's misery before he eventually took his own life. Still, in truth, the late commander had appointments at the Danzig Medal Center, so perhaps they would have made him presentable again. Brian wasn't really up to date on medical procedures, mostly because he could heal from anything that didn't kill him outright.
The customs agents would be forced to either detain him for a full genetic scan against his paperwork or pass him through, Brian knew. Basic human decency would probably mean they would pass him through and if not that, just being too uncomfortable to want to deal with a visible reminder of how people had suffered so that they could live their peaceful, ignorant lives. Which meant that he could move on to the next part of his plan soon enough.
Brian gave his reflection a last smirk before he put the bandages over his eyes and then took up his briefcase and breathing tank. He just hoped that Marcus made it to their rendezvous on time... or Brian was going to be very unhappy.