Alliance Marines: The Road To War

by John Mierau

  She could do neither. Not yet. But something would change. She would watch, and listen, and wait.

  When the change came, Ashlan had to be ready.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  “Ready?” Lee asked by the door.

  “We’re good!” Frankie’s muffled voice told the team through a full-face breather mask grabbed from an emergency cabinet on the supply module’s wall. “I fooled the alarms by replacing the reduced volume of air in this hall with nonvolatiles.” She wore a brilliant, self-satisfied smile. “That means the air still feels nice and thick when you breathe it. Odds are nobody’s even thought about finding an ox supply.” She giggled and stamped her feet, proud of herself, then sobered up. “Do it now before too many people wise up.”

  “What’s it like out there?” Sameen asked.

  “It’s enough for a Reacher,” Frankie promised. “You can dance a jig if you have to.”

  “Or punch a guy in the face,” Willard offered optimistically.

  Jake thumped his brother-in-law on the back. “Yeah, even you get to be a badass today.”

  Frankie stayed behind in the supply module along with Dr. Mentel, who sat on the ground, her back to the opposite wall as Frankie, with a matching breather around her face. The zip ties were back on her wrist, tied to a supply tube on the wall behind her.

  Lee raised his eyebrows to Noelle, waiting for her to give him the 'go' sign. She’d been worried Lee wasn't going to take orders well when he requested taking the lead instead of her, but then he’d shown her what he could do. She nodded for him to go ahead, and he unlocked and opened the door. Noelle's clothes rustled as the pressure dropped, and then she followed him through.

  Two techs were sitting on the floor beside the door. Lee jumped clear of the door to make room for the others to fan out across the hall.

  The techs giggled drunkenly at each other, ignoring the new arrivals completely. There was a deck of cards on the floor between them. The tech against the wall screwed up his eyes at his cards, raised his head to his buddy, and slurred, “Go Fish!’”

  His buddy fell sideways to the floor. Lee saved the man's head from a high-speed encounter with the metal deck plating, lowering him slowly down.

  Jake stood beside him, arms crossed and frowning. Willard threaded between them both, nose wrinkled and grinning. “Maybe this can go down as a bloodless coup! Or is it a reverse coup? Coup-coup?”

  Lee took the head of the line again. Jake followed behind Willard. “You’re cuckoo,” he grumbled.

  Sameen and Padalecki went next. Padalecki stopped to pull the hat from the upright tech’s head. He didn’t notice. Sameen nodded her approval and grabbed a utility belt and a bulky imaging gun from beside the snoring tech with his head on the ground.

  Noelle brought up the rear, holding their second assault weapon in the middle of the barrel and whistling. Her artificial lung was chugging along, despite the thin air Frankie had filled the compartment with. Funny how things worked out, she thought, slapping her chest gratefully. Stepping over the sleeping tech, she fervently repeated Willard’s wish.

  She was going with ‘un-coup’ herself.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Card stormed around the room. “Where are they?” he growled.

  Ashlan had felt the network go dark as well. She had smiled at that small road block in Cartd’s plan, even as her heart broke for the ships trading fire outside. Had it progressed from defensive fire, or were the Reacher ships still holding themselves to destroying turrets and communications towers on Earth-aligned vessels?

  The council members were all trembling, gasping, some were outright crying. She looked across the room at Colonel Kapoor. He was calm. Focused. Ashlan had at least one ally in the room she could count on. No, two: Commodore Kagen, his left eye now a swollen, bruised wound, still kept his composure. His remaining eye darted between herself and Kapoor.

  Card stormed to the opening door. In her peripheral vision, Ashlan could make out three men and a woman out in the hall: Card and deceased councilman Costa’s security guards. “Why are our implants down?” he raged at them.

  A short, bald woman shrugged. “More Reachers piling on? We own Return, let’s put holes in Namante and Breaker, maybe that will get your slave radio broadcasting again.”

  Card paced, staring back into the room. “Or maybe you screwed up again, and someone is working against us!”

  The woman sighed. “Don’t get all wrinkly, Joe. It was just freaky luck Cloke got a message out before she blew.”

  Card rubbed the back of his head and exhaled, long and hard. “Okay, Shin. Sorry. But get some more firepower up here, just in case. I'm not going anywhere until you can knock those Reacher scramblers offline, or unless the Fleas start launching real attacks and our people start fighting back without any...encouragement. Otherwise, we stick with the plan, infect the other ships soon as we can, and take control.”

  “I know,” the Shin said with real disappointment in her voice. “No shooting. Disarm the Reachers and toss them in a hole. Let the Takers chew on 'em when we get to Intercept. Y'know, you’re no fun at all.”

  The barbed wire around Ashlan’s heart eased.

  The casualties were still low. Card’s takeover wasn’t complete.

  There was still time.

  Now all she needed was a weapon.

  “You…you know what?” one of the guards in the hall muttered, and fell to the ground, snoring.

  “Don’t feel so good either,” another guard said.

  Ashlan heard a loud slap. “Stay on your feet!” the girl muttered.

  “The air!” Card gasped. “There’s something in the air!”

  The door hissed closed, and Card displayed Shin and the others in the hall on the screen beside it.

  “Get reinforcements here, now!” he shouted, his voice breaking. “Something's happening!”

  Someone was changing the game on Card and his cronies.

  Ashlan had her weapon.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  The compartment holding the Fleet Command Council room was a maze of corridors. Luckily, Lee and everyone else on Noelle’s squad had shared maps of the place Frankie had shared before they'd switched off their implants.

  Padalecki and Sameen turned the corner ahead. Lee held a rifle at the ready, and waited.

  “You—you s’pose to be here?” someone asked blearily.

  A grunt. A gurgle. A sigh.

  A body hit the ground.

  Lee knelt and leaned around the corner. Sameen was patting a soldier’s chest. “Sweet dreams,” she whispered.

  Ahead, Padalecki scouted the next corner and flashed the all clear sign. Sameen was already walking forward and refilling the injector gun in her hands.

  Lee passed the signal back to Noelle and they advanced to the next section of hall.

  Only a few soldiers had been on their feet, none had put up a fight worth mentioning, and none had been hurt beyond being rendered unconscious. So long as they could put an end to this fast, a few injections and some bedrest would be the only consequences for the officers unlucky enough to find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Lee felt good. He felt great. His implant and the short break on the tender was enough to tide his body over, and his mind was gloriously awake, and free, and serving a purpose.

  Purpose. That word kept evolving, for him. Lee never thought about what he did during the civil war. He’d lost everything to Earth and now here he was, still fighting..

  It felt good to be part of a group again. He was trusted, and needed and useful.

  He was protecting people.

  He looked down at the Alliance uniform he was wearing.

  It fit well. It felt right.

  He trusted Major Carson to lead. He felt safe following Noelle’s lead, and leading others after her.

  Helping. Protecting.

  That was what he loved about soldiering.

  The team gathered behind him and the momen
t of introspection was over.

  They came to a stop near the end of the final hallway on their journey.

  Sameen limped back to the middle of the group. Padalecki knelt beside Lee and extended a strip of shiny reflective metal around the corner.

  She dragged it back fast and turned wide eyes to the others.

  Five men, she signed

  Lee saw Willard grin and Jake pout. His blood was up. He didn’t want to kill, Lee knew, but the big bruiser hadn’t even gotten the chance to knock some heads on this mission. As Lee watched, both men’s faces went slack.

  He turned back to Padalecki. Saw her second hand sign, the flesh pressed white with the force she pressed into her fingers.

  Three mechs.

  Noelle dropped her head, too.

  Lee let himself fall silently against the wall.

  A single mech could cut all of them to ribbons.

  Worse yet: mechs had their own air supply.

  Mechs weren’t ever utilized in-ship. Too much could go wrong with something so big and powerful inside a confined space.

  These mechs were definitely the bad guys.

  Major Carson tapped her wrist. They were out of time. She met every eye and nodded.

  Every eye nodded back.

  She smiled and signed out the plan.

  Jake and Noelle would go first. They were part of Return’s complement, and their uniforms wouldn’t stand out.

  To defend against suspicion, they took other precautions.

  Somewhere in her arsenal of military training in subterfuge and counter-insurgence, Noelle found a giggle.

  She stumbled around the corner, arms flailing for balance.

  She took note of two mechs, one on either of the Council room. The third was at the far end of the hall. All of them were scout mechs, lightly armoured and lightly armed, but more than a match for their team in direct confrontation.

  Hence the giggle.

  “G’back here!” Jake yelled after her. He appeared around the corner. His T-shirt was gone, his uniform jacket inside out and unbuttoned.

  She squealed and stumbled forward. She was met with laughter and ragged cheers.

  Only three of the five armed guards present were on their feet. They stumbled towards her with catcalls and open arms.

  She shushed them with a finger to her lips and guilty look on her face, and carried on down the hall.

  Jake followed, bouncing off the first mech and falling on his ass. He pretended to sober up enough to notice there was a mech standing in front of him. He pointed…and broke out in giggles.

  One of the guards helped him up. “Go git 'er!”

  Jake hugged him tight, giving every appearance of a man struggling to stay on his feet.

  “G’wan!” The guard pushed him down the hall and stared after, mouth open and panting.

  “Reed!” called a woman’s voice from the mech on the far side of the council door. “If anything else with a pulse comes around that corner, make it meat.”

  “Yes, Shin,” the speakers on the far side of the door said firmly.

  Carson and Garner cleared the far corner. The giggles and the footsteps faded. The mech at the end of the corridor stomped around in place and watched after them for a moment, then turned back around.

  The room was silent…save for a hiss emanating from the side of the mech belonging to ‘Reed.’

  The improvised explosive Jake had mixed inside a tube and stuffed into the hip joint of the mech exploded. Reed’s leg disappeared and reduced the three men still standing to a spray of mist and gore.

  The remains of the three guards were still dripping from the walls when Lee whipped a thin stream of crysteel down the hall and covered the helmet of the second mech. Without access to ship’s sensors, it was blinded by the attack.

  Padalecki and Willard charged down the hall, concentrating the fire from the team’s two rifles onto the legs of that same mech. Sparks flew from the legs before Padalecki ran out of ammo. Willard kept firing, as the two leaped behind the wreckage of the fallen scout mech.

  Lee ran down the hall, projecting a swirling blue shield ahead of him. It was peppered almost instantly by rounds from the mech at the far end of the hall. The shield slowed its spin, but had momentum enough to send the bullets flying into the walls instead of into his body.

  The rifle fire ended when the scout mech staggered out into the centre of the hall. Noelle appeared behind him, a length of pipe in her hand like a staff. Jake appeared on the far side of the mech wielding a matching pipe.

  They swung at it over and over, staggering the light mech and dancing from side to side before it could pin a bead on them with the guns mounted the either arm.

  They kept up the attack, running around the mech and landing blows, jumping powerfully off walls when the pilot finally managed to get its hands up to fire, and hammering the limbs back down.

  But the mech took the blows and kept firing, while fewer and fewer of Jake and Noelle’s blows were connecting, and their feet were moving slower.

  Willard kept firing until his clip ran dry, too. The scout mech had been pushed up against the council door. All its limbs sparked and popped. Servo-motors seized up. Fluid spurted. The mech’s pilot tried to eject, but damage to the system allowed the front halves of the scout mech to only part halfway.

  It was enough to let Shin draw her service pistol and fire through the gap. Blood sprayed from Willard’s shoulder as he fell behind the cover of the dead mech.

  Padalecki roared and pushed the inert combat chassis forward toward Shin’s mech. She earned a bullet for her trouble, but after she sagged the chassis rolled again and sent Shin's machine tumbling to the ground—with her trapped inside.

  Willard staggered over to the pieces of the men across the corridor, digging through the remains for a pistol.

  Shin roared as she fought against the half-open mech chassis trapping her inside.

  At the end of the hall Noelle cried out as the mech backhanded her.

  Jake got the pipe around its neck and pulled the mech backwards. Its pilot obliged him and hammered him against the wall. He dropped the pipe. The mech took three steps forward and kicked Noelle hard enough to send her rolling.

  Just then Lee reached the end of the hall. He leaped over Noelle and sliced the mech’s head off with a blade of crysteel, then bowled its stilled metal frame to the ground with the strength of his charge.

  He fell beside Jake and stumbled onto his side, struggling to get to his feet.

  Blood dripped from his stomach, a consequence of the one bullet his shield hadn’t stopped.

  Shin shrieked, the metal of her mech groaned, and she staggered out of the half-open front of her mech suit. She ran forward and kicked Willard in the face. The blood-sticky gun he had recovered fell back down.

  Shin picked it up and turned, raising the gun. “I'm going to enjoy thi—”

  Sameen batted her gun-hand to the side and drove the heel of her palm through Shin’s nose, and Shin’s nose into her brain.

  “Boo.”

  She limped on by before Shin’s corpse crumpled to the floor.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  When the first shots were fired outside the council room, Vice-Admiral Card fell apart in front of Ashlan’s eyes.

  He’d dropped to the ground, screaming, after the first explosion.

  “Who’s out there?” Card demanded. He was huddled against the wall opposite the door now, staring across the floor at Ashlan. “What did you do?”

  Her mouth opened, and—in response to another direct question— she could speak. “Did the noise frighten you, Joseph?” She was watching the council members when she spoke. Someone tittered.

  He glared at her and wiped his wet cheeks. “I made plenty of noise as Governor on Reach, thank you very much.”

  She laughed, her body breathing deeper now at least the restriction to silence had been removed. “Really? The reports I read show you moved your office to the basement when the protests gr
ew too big for your military to control.”

  He shook his head, eyes pinching to fight away a fresh batch of tears. “You weren’t there! You don’t know what I did!”

  “No, Joseph,” she agreed with him, using the distraction of conversation to see how much she could move. He’d commanded her to ‘sit down’ but there was some wiggle room there. She leaned forward. “If I had known what you did, or what you were planning, you would have faced a firing squad long ago.”

  Something slammed against the door.

  Card cried out and hid his head.

  Ashlan laughed aloud.

  “Stop that!” Card got to his feet. “And—and tell them to stay outside! Not to come in!”

  She smiled and climbed to her feet.

  “No, stop!” he screeched. “What are you doing, I said don’t move!”

  “Networks are down.” She pointed at the shattered roundtable. “That’s not connecting to anyone, either.” She pointed to the display by the door. “I have to use the screen at the door if you want me to tell them to stop.”

  Card licked his lips. “No, stay right there!”

  She smiled, despite her sudden inability to move her legs. “Joseph, you’re not thinking straight,” she said, her deep voice soaked with understanding. “How can you make any decisions if you don’t know who’s coming to kill you?”

  Card leaped to his feet, pointing at Ashlan. “That’s not what’s happening! It’s my men out there!” He tried to erect a sneer, but only managed to simper. “Shin’s out there! No one gets past Shin.” He froze, staring at the door. “We just have to…to wait,” he whispered.

  “Joseph, no one else has to die. Out there, or in here.”

  He wrapped his arms around himself. “I just wanted…”

  All the diamonds in the world? Ashlan nodded. “I understand,” she lied. “You wanted to help.”