by R L Dean
Mat studied the images for a moment, then it came. "That freighter's carrying ore canisters ... Apex canisters."
The freighter’s hull had been reconstructed to facilitate carrying canisters.
She knew he now realized what this place was, but as if to be sure he asked, "Are their transponders active?"
"No."
"None of them?" He asked again, incredulous.
"No," she repeated.
He activated the comm again.
"Boss, I'm sorry about ..." Haydon said as soon as he answered.
"Haydon, we have to go right now," Mat told him. "Get Yuri and let's go."
In the background Yuri was talking, and then he yelled. Mat sat back in his seat and rubbed eyes.
On the aft dorsal camera Misaki watched as a hauler with a giant thruster assembly came in from the port side, lined up, and began moving slowly toward the depot. Something ... something seemed odd. She switched views and what she saw brought back the smell of the tug from her memories. A freighter had dropped out of its slot and was less than a thousand meters below them. Another ship was coming in overhead.
"Mat, we're being boxed in!" She yelled.
Mat looked at her, eyes wide.
She yelled again, "Pull us out now!"
"We can't leave Haydon and Yuri," he said, his face flat and eyes steady.
"We're not leaving them," she told him. "But if you don't get us out of this slot now none of us will ever leave." There wasn't time to explain that she would never leave any of them behind, they were ... family.
He finally started moving, unstrapping and stumbling across the deck in the light gravity. As he turned and sat in the cockpit he said, "Call Haydon ... they've got to get somewhere safe until we can pick them up ..."
"I'm working on it." She said quickly and opened a channel to Haydon's comm while using her other hand to flip through images of the depot.
The navigation thrusters kicked in and the Sadie jerked back from the depot's access tube. Mat wasn't the pilot that Yuri was.
"Misaki?" Haydon's voice came from the comm speaker.
The Sadie jerked again, throwing her against her straps. "They've got us on three sides!" Mat yelled. "I'm going to drop us under ..."
"Misaki what's happening?" Haydon asked, a mix of curiosity and rising tension in his voice.
"You and Yuri need to go ..." She began.
"Yuri won't go anywhere, I left him at a bar. He wants Mat to cash out ..."
"Haydon!" She yelled. "This is a pirate base ... they're trying to block us in ..."
He started cursing.
"You have to get out ..." She finished.
"Okay, okay ... I have to go get him. Where ..."
Suddenly it went from microgravity to being pushed up against her straps as the Sadie rolled and dropped away from the depot.
The hull rang. It was like someone hit it with a hammer. Misaki knew that sound.
"What was that!" Mat yelled.
"Turret fire, they hit us," she told him. To Haydon she said, "Get to a safe place until we can pick you up."
"Copy that." He was panting now.
"Where can we go?" That was Mat. "I won't leave them there!"
She couldn't answer him, it was requiring all her concentration to watch her sensor board and pull up the turret controls. Once she had the controls up she didn't hesitate. On the screen she used her fingers to pivot both dorsal turrets to starboard and up, and fired blindly at the ship that fired on them.
There was a tapping sound in the hull as each turret released twenty rounds, which was the lowest automated setting in the controls. On her screen Misaki watched as Mat's vector pulled them away from the freighter and flashes of fire peppered its thruster assembly and went in a line up the port side. Something blew in the housing where the thruster met the aft portion of the ship's deck. Hull plates popped off as white gas jetted out.
They weren't expecting this kind of fight, Misaki suspected. Otherwise they would have holed the Sadie's own thruster assembly. Or maybe they wanted the ship intact. She was just guessing, but now, whatever their reasons, they would be out for blood.
The Sadie shifted and dipped, Mat had found an opening. "Misaki, where am I going?" He asked, the stress coming through.
"Just a second ..." she said, linking the proximity sensors with the turrets and tagging three remaining ships that were trying to box them in.
"I don't think we have a ... now they want to talk. We don't have any cans, they must want the ship."
Out of the corner of her eye Misaki saw the comm alert flashing on her terminal.
"It doesn't matter," she said. "They won't let us leave here." The tug ... that wasn't going to happen again. She would die first. "Turn to heading thirty, bearing one-ninety, at mark sixty."
The hull thudded with a tapping sound, someone got too close and the turrets fired again. Then it rang as they were hit by return fire. A small part of her had time to become irritated at the prospect of her repair work being ruined.
"Mat, get us under!"
"I'm trying! The basic course didn't cover combat maneuvers ..."
She was thrown back in her seat as Mat took the opening too fast and the asteroid surface of the depot zoomed by on her screen.
The pirate ships were not reacting quickly enough, with their trap having failed the Sadie was proving to be more difficult prey than they expected. The ship below them opened up on its turrets, bolts of fire shot past a camera on the starboard quarter and hit the depot's rocky underside.
"The silos ..." she told Mat. The Sadie's mining sensors were picking up traces of hydrazine around a cluster of the silos sitting below the depot's terminal. Fuel storage.
"I see them," he said. "What are we doing ..."
The channel to Haydon's handcomm suddenly beeped and flashed. She tapped it but said to Mat, "Change to heading forty-five." Then, "Haydon?"
"Yeah, chief. They're after us now ... they're dressed in security uniforms, but they're not security. We're in a tunnel outside Reclamation, on level two."
"Almost to the silos," Mat called out. "Misaki, what are we doing?"
She watched two camera views on the screen. On one, the silos were approaching, on the other two pirates were coming under the terminal to follow them. "There is a refinery. Access should be somewhere behind the terminal," she told Haydon. She had seen it on the way in. "Get there."
"Got it, we'll find it."
He would figure out the rest.
"Misaki ..." Mat said again.
"Bring us behind the silos and cut speed to one-quarter."
"What're we going to do?"
"The same thing we did to the Martian freighter in the Belt, but with hydrazine." It wasn't an inspired plan, it was the only plan. The Sadie was a mining ship, not a UNSEC cruiser, they couldn't fend off the pirates forever, and they couldn't leave Haydon and Yuri on the depot.
"Okay, I got it ..." His voice trailed off as he said something about the course to himself.
The Sadie slowed and Mat and began a slight arc around the approaching silos. This close, on her screens she could count them ... five in all. They were old, covered in dust, each over thirty meters tall, and the sensors were picking up high concentrations of hydrazine around the maze of pipes at the cluster's base.
Behind them the pirate ships were lining out in a tight Y converging behind them. Misaki didn't know if they were being cautious of the Sadie's turrets, or if it was poor piloting skills that kept them at such a distance. She reset the turrets to manual.
"Mat, we need to give them more time, they're not close enough."
"Okay."
The Sadie's velocity slowed another ten percent ... a crawl. Now their pursuers were closing in.
Misaki didn't hear it hit the hull but the sensors reported damage to the main thruster, just a scrape from turret fire. The silos slid by to starboard and Mat leveled out his turn, keeping them directly aft. The camera view was blocked by the thruster
assembly, so all she could do now was watch blinking lights on the small plot on her screen.
"Mat," she began. "When I say, brake and turn hard to starboard."
He said okay and she put her fingers on the turret controls outlined on her screen. Five seconds later she said, "Now." Then twisted her wrist.
The braking was hard enough to knock the wind out of her as she was flung against her straps. There seemed to be no time between the vibration of the turret fire and the explosion of the silos on her screen. It was a flash of brilliant orange, then it was gone and the Sadie was shaking.
Misaki used the bulkhead to push herself upright in her seat, as the ship slewed and Mat fought the controls and accelerated. On her screens the silos were gone, and the pipes at their base were slagged. One of the pirate ships had veered off, a section of its hull glowing red and gases spewing out between plates. The other ship was nose down on the asteroid’s surface, plowing a trench through the dust and rock.
"Do you know where the refinery is?" She asked Mat.
"Yeah ... it was starboard of the terminal."
"Okay, let's go pick up Haydon and Yuri."
Misaki sunk back into her seat and took a breath.
19 - JJ
Jamala Jenkins had never run from anything in her life. When her father left her mother who was suffering from dementia, she stayed. When her husband, Christopher, was killed in Beirut, she didn't crumble and hide in her room from the responsibility of raising two daughters by herself. From the kindergarten playground of inner city Abuja to the Middle East's theater of war, Jamala stood her ground.
And there was no scenario— not even in Hell itself— in which she would run from physical therapy. Difficult though it was.
The outpatient center was three blocks from her apartment. She walked it, every time. And though she was Earth born, with the muscle and bone to match, the brace on her leg felt like an anchor even in the Martian gravity. So, she simply took it off and carried it in one hand, like a club. Without it on she had to be careful, bending her knee too far sent fire up her thigh and hip and caused muscle spasms. The first time she walked to the outpatient center without the brace she ended up face first on the sidewalk, cursing.
By the second block her knee would be stiff, making her leg harder to control. This was progress. Three weeks ago she hadn't been able to make it a half-block without stopping and resting on a bench. She pushed herself on, and made it three quarters of the second block before stopping, sweating profusely and breathing heavy. She sat back on the bench, stretching her leg out in front of her. Her appointment was at 1900 and there wasn't a lot of people out on the streets this time of day, the frenetic rush home from work was over, leaving behind only a few walking the sidewalks or standing at food kiosks. The bars were two streets over, and those that had nothing to go home to would be there.
The burrow's sky lights had begun to dim, emulating a diurnal cycle that Jamal's psyche still sensed as artificial. Most soldiers in C044 claimed to have gotten used to it, and in her opinion if it no longer bothered them then they had been here too long. Mars had long been thought of as UNSEC's dumping ground, though, there was nothing in any of her company's service jackets that would warrant such exile. And certainly not her own.
While her mind wouldn't let her relish the 'late evening' feel, she could enjoy the coolness of that simulated evening. And so she sat there with her head back and her eyes closed, letting the sweat dry.
Her leg had been useless for almost two weeks after Cydonia. It takes time to regrow nerves, bone, and cartilage. It had taken two surgeries to get everything in there where it needed to be, then a week lying in a hospital bed and her leg tingling like it was asleep while it began to heal. Now it was left to physical therapy and time. The therapist would scan her knee and make micro-adjustments to the new nerves, then work her as hard as any drill sergeant.
She was lucky, when so many on the ambush team were not.
While the fight at Cydonia Depot had not been the worst she had ever seen ... perhaps not even in the top ten ... it had been the shortest and most furious. With their HUDs set to passive and their comms silent, she and her twenty man team waited, hidden in the rocky debris around the crater. The depot's guidance dish, high up on a tower positioned on the crater wall, had been equipped with a telescopic sensor. It watched all directions, passively tracking movement in the surrounded desert wastes.
Jamala had been crouched down against a boulder on the west side of the crater, catnapping, when a single ping came through her helmet speakers. North. There was movement detected on the north side of the crater. Her team hurried into position, there was no need to confirm or even lay eyes on them. There had not been time for a dry run, the plan had been too hasty, but they had discussed it on the flight to the depot. And where detailed instructions failed, common sense would take over.
Scrambling through the scree and over patches of black ice she made the northeast corner of the crater in time to see two rovers pull to a stop. To her left, twenty meters away, Corporal Daimon Carson was hunched down behind a boulder the size of one of the rovers. He was the only one she saw and it made her grin. The others would be scattered around as well, but so tucked into the scree and rocks that they were invisible.
The rovers' rear hatches opened and two teams climbed out, all in UNSEC combat armor fitted over their vac-suits. Over the last year, as the FMN bombings increased, so had the sophistication of their explosives. That had led her to believe that they had access to other UNSEC equipment, but she still felt her eyebrows raise a notch in surprise. Stuff like this took connections, and money. Jamala agreed with the company scuttlebutt that Governor Shultz was in with the terrorists. Then— unexpectedly— he approved the Lieutenant Colonel's plan of a trap, using the Governor's own comm system no less. That had given her some pause in her suspicions. And that day, watching the terrorists organize themselves with grappling rifles and acting like they had professional training, Jamala couldn't say what she believed about the Martian government. If Shultz was backing the FMN why take the chance of being exposed? Yet, what she saw was a well-equipped and organized squad of soldiers, getting ready to assault the depot. Then, she hadn't had time to give the 'whys' and 'how-comes' much thought. Now, sitting on the bench beside the sidewalk, with seven of her team dead and the rest injured, three of them still in the hospital, and she herself on her way to physical therapy, the question of the Governor's involvement suddenly seemed relevant. It would mean a longer game.
The Lieutenant Colonel never agreed with the scuttlebutt surrounding Shultz, and to him the Governor agreeing to his plan to capture a terrorist cell was proof of innocence. Airing her suspicions without evidence would be nothing more than gossip. And the fact was she had no evidence. The single terrorist they captured died before they could pump him full of drugs and question him.
At the depot, Jamala's plan had been simple. They would wait until the terrorists entered the cargo hangers on the inside of the crater, where she and her team would corner them. In a worst case scenario she could lock them in the hangers and take a nap while the oxygen in their suits ran low and they passed out. Then they would go in and get them. That was the plan ... then the terrorists started planting explosive charges on the north face of the crater wall— they weren't going to go inside the hangers.
Through her helmet optics she watched as one of the armor suited terrorists set the T-Rex device against a depression in the wall and the clamp locked in place. It wasn't until they turned around, grabbed the grapple line, and repelled back down to the slope of scree that formed the base of the crater that she understood what was happening. The terrorists were scaling the wall, setting the charges, and coming back down. They had chosen an easier, more direct, method of destroying the contents of the hangers.
Jamala cursed.
Flipping her mic on, she stood and yelled, "Now! All units go now!"
Scrambling across the scree and ice she headed toward the closest
enemy. The armor changed things, her stun baton didn't have enough juice to punch through it, so she jerked her pistol free from the holster and charged with the mild hope of intimidating the terrorist into giving up without a fight.
Her comm speakers blared to life as her people sprang into action. Carter, taking his cue from her, bolted from his cover and ran in the same direction. The terrorist suddenly jerked his head, looking further down the base of the crater. He stared, in the opposite direction, shifting slightly— then he slowly started to pull his pistol.
Specialist Ursula Coleman yelled and cursed through the speakers of Jamala's helmet, she had been shot. It happened all at once, her people yelling status reports, directions, and screaming. Then, just as she and Carter closed on their target there was a loud, hollow thud and she was thrown to the ground and engulf in a wave of dust and scree.
When she woke, she was looking through the distorted cracks in her helmet visor, and the pain in her left leg was excruciating. She had been thrown twenty meters from the crater's slope, and was half buried in rock and dirt. The speakers in her helmet were crackling and she heard Coleman crying.
Sitting there on the bench beside the sidewalk the memory seemed to make her leg spasm. She cursed under her breath and rubbed her thigh and calf.
Jamala had been required, as all the survivors were, to see a shrink. He made her tell him what she remembered most about what happened. It was the anger ... that's what she remembered most of all, and the feeling of helplessness. It had taken her almost an hour to dig herself out of the dirt and scree, only to crawl ten meters before the pain in her leg made it impossible. Then she had to lie and wait while the depot's rent-a-soldiers came and tried to help and the Lieutenant Colonel sent a med shuttle with some of their own company from Capital Burrow.
She pushed herself up from the bench, and tried to push the feelings aside. Her face felt hot.
Hobbling down the sidewalk she thought of the Lieutenant Colonel again. He had been on her mind as much as any of the team. In three months it would be the fourth year she served under him. When she arrived on Mars and reported to him she knew immediately that this was his last posting. He was riding out his time with no intentions of re-upping. It was in his eyes, he was tired. Her tenth year in the military passed a week before her transfer to Mars, at the time it was his thirtieth.