“Gotta get me some of that,” I said wistfully, forgetting for a moment that theoretically the ship and therefore the camo was already mine.
It didn’t feel like mine what with Malcolm interfering.
“Soft target lock achieved. Awaiting your signal, Captain,” the Basic said through my helmet.
I gave the signal for Odo to lead the way, and we started out, stepping carefully across the glacier toward the cliff face.
It took us thirty minutes to make it, having to backtrack twice to avoid deep chasms in the glacier. It would have just been my luck to fall down an icy hole and miss Zyla’s rescue completely.
By the time we reached the cliff face, I was exhausted — too much beer in my diet lately and not enough of the good calories. My head thumped to a beat of its own, and my body was starting to overheat inside the armour. Ironic, considering what I was standing on top of.
I crouched down beside Odo and peered over the side of the glacier. It was a hell of a long way down to the valley floor from here.
“Camo on?” he asked.
He wasn’t even breathless. At least someone had kept up their exercise routine and nutritional plan while waiting to bust me off Delphini B.
I nodded and activated my suit’s camo. Instantly, Odo winked out of sight, but a humanoid figure appeared on my HUD telling me where he was in relation to me.
“Groovy,” he muttered.
“Rappelling lines,” I said, just wanting this part over with. I had no plans for us to climb back up the glacial cliff face afterwards. The Harpy II would have to come to us when we made our escape.
We attached our anchors and checked our lines and then gingerly started over the side of the glacier, backwards. I hated going backwards. And it was never like you see in the action flicks. None of that jump and release and land on two feet several metres down the side. We had to crawl and test each footing to make sure it was secure and wouldn’t give out beneath us and alert the guards at the base — or in the towers — that someone was stupidly rappelling down the side of the glacier and about to land on their unsuspecting heads.
It took us forty-five minutes to reach the ground, and I was close to death by the time we’d done it. I released my armour from the rappelling line, checked that I was still camouflaged, and then sank to the ground on my knees — considering kissing it through my helmet visor — and breathed deeply.
“You alright, Cap’n?” Odo asked.
I held up a hand and rocked my open palm from side to side to relay a non-verbal ‘so-so’ meaning.
“We can rest here a bit, I suppose,” Odo offered, looking around warily.
He knew as well as I did that we were too exposed. The entrance was a mere fifty metres away, but between us and the security shelter, there was nothing. If the camo faltered, we’d be fluxed. We might as well hold up a white flag and wave it frantically.
At least it would distract the guards firing plasma shots our way when they did see us.
I pushed up to my feet and blinked through black spots. The armour came complete with an automated medkit. If we got hit, the suit would treat the wound just enough for the wearer to vacate the danger zone and seek proper medical treatment. But that meant it had a selection of pharmaceuticals available as well.
I’d already taken one stim in the past twenty-four hours. It wasn’t wise to take too many. Coming down off that high could prove fatal. But surviving the next ten minutes was more important than recovering from an overdose of amphetamines.
I selected a stimulant and waited for the juice to hit me.
My body went cold and then hot and then cold again and then settled on an indeterminate temperature which I couldn’t have cared less about because I was happy. High as a kite, one might say.
I selected a mild downer to even me out, but not return the aches and pains, and waited for that to perform its magic. By the time I was done with this shit, I could get a job as a chemist at one of the suit manufacturing stations.
A small, almost imperceptible, tremor started up in my hands.
Perfect.
I nodded to Odo and then started heading toward the security shack, which wasn’t a shack and more like a bunker. Getting in there undetected was going to be hard. But intel said they did a perimeter check every half hour.
No one shot at us. No mines blew up under our feet, which I thought was an oversight by whoever devised the external security. Maybe the landmines were all at either end of the valley the facility was in. They really didn’t expect anyone to abseil down the glacier wall, and parachuting in under stealth was a tricky task considering the way the wind funnelled down the valley.
I registered that my mind was wandering.
I forced myself to concentrate, which was becoming harder and harder, but I needed to keep my shit together. The stimulant had taken away the aches and pains, and given me boundless energy — at least until I dropped — but it had also made my mind a little fuzzy.
I’ve had stims before, of course, so I knew what to do to counter the fuzzies. I started mentally reciting prime numbers in my head, and the haziness retreated slightly.
Enough to get me to the guard station.
Odo withdrew a device that allowed him to listen through the wall. I waited while he listened to whatever the guards were saying. When a guard approached the door, he slid the device away, nodded to me to get ready, and pulled out a long, serrated blade. I took one side of the door; he took the other.
The guard stepped through and Odo pounced; pulling him to the side so I could throw a stun grenade into the shelter.
“Take out the towers,” I shouted over the comm.
Two streaks of plasma fire belched out of the sky, pinpointing the Harpy II’s location. Thankfully, no surface-to-air missiles jumped into the sky towards it. But the facility’s alarm went up before we’d even managed to confirm the guards in the shelter were dead.
I turned around, feeling panic swamp me, only to find Odo holding the door open to the facility and urgently waving me toward him. The guard he’d dragged away already lay dead on the ground in a pool of rapidly cooling blood. It soaked into the snow and looked like a raspberry frosty.
I shook my head and sprinted for the door; using the actuators in my armour to give me more speed. Diving inside, I managed to miss the laser bars sealing the exits by millimetres.
“That was close,” I said, staring in morbid fascination at the few centimetres between my booted foot and the lowest laser bar.
“I’ve been yelling at you to get your ass moving for the past twenty seconds. What the flux happened out there?”
I scrambled to my feet and said, “We’ve gotta move. They know we came in through here.”
“Captain? Are you five by five?”
“I’d say more three by five,” I admitted, checking the hallway at the nearest intersection. It was clear. I started racing down it. “But when has that stopped me before now?”
Odo pushed past me at the next intersection, the map of the facility up on his HUD as well.
“I’ll lead. You guard the rear. Three by five,” he muttered in disgust.
“Hey. It’s been a long week.” Month. A long month.
Odo ignored me and led us deeper and deeper into the facility. At the point where we could have branched off to go directly to Zyla, he hesitated. If I’d been more on my game, I think he would have suggested splitting up. We hadn’t come across any security yet, so things were looking good.
But we both knew we couldn’t trust me to make it alone.
For the first time in a long time — prior to Delphini B, of course — I was the weak link in our unit.
It didn’t sit well, so I doubled my efforts to stay clearheaded and almost succeeded, too.
We found the guards at the next intersection. Dressed in high tech armour and carrying sleek looking weapons that could probably punch a hole in an asteroid.
I hadn’t expected it to be plain sailing to the Mutt’s door. Bu
t it was as if they had been expecting us. No guards en route. No guards down the corridor that led to Zyla’s cell. But twenty of them outside the Mutt’s?
“We could leave him and just grab Zyla,” Odo suggested.
God help me, but I considered it. But Malcolm had control of the ship, I was certain. And if it failed to register his Mutt’s biosignature when we boarded, it’d probably fly us to the nearest Zenith military installation, blaring out an alert to them of who was coming.
I was a wanted criminal in any Zenthian system. Surviving that was not going to happen. And I didn’t think the odds would be great for Odo either.
And then there was Zy. If we got caught, she’d get killed in another thirty or so hours. Her only hope was us, and our only hope was the Mutt currently incarcerated behind twenty armed Zenith guards and a maximum security door.
“Flux it,” I said, and reached for Odo’s rocket launcher.
“Hey!” he exclaimed, but I was done with this disco.
I loaded the rocket, said, “Cover me,” to Odo, and stepped out into the corridor, falling to one knee, rocket launcher resting on my shoulder.
Odo let out a war cry and started firing both railguns over my head. Plasma bolts lit up the corridor and scorched the gel walls and floor all around us. I could feel how close they got, but we were still largely camouflaged, and most of the hits were missing.
I flicked the switch on the side of the rocket, sucked in a deep breath of air, and announced, “Fire in the hole!”
The rocket thunked out of the launching tube and hung suspended in the air. In what felt like slow motion, I watched its propellent ignite and then it was streaking down the hallway and Zeniths were jumping to the sides in a mad rush, and the rocket exploded in a fiery ball of flames and shrapnel right, slap-bang in the middle of them.
Odo and I were blown backwards, landing hard on our backs and sucking in no air. It took a long second or two of mind over matter to get back up and get our weapons face forward. Neither of us could breathe, but we advanced slowly.
No one shot at us from the ground or behind any hidden crevices, and those that stirred as we approached soon didn’t.
And then out of the dust and floating debris stepped a Mutt minus his armour. They look decidedly naked without their armour on. A little less impressive, until you see the size of their feet and hands. This guy was big, broad across the shoulders, and had threatening-looking tattoos covering his arms from wrists to shoulders. I’d never seen that before, but who’s to say that it’s not normal; a Mutt’s armour usually covered their arms and legs.
I glanced down, but his legs weren’t tattooed. My eyes shot back up to his face.
He cocked his head at us and started to laugh.
“He sent you,” he said, sounding amused by the notion.
“You want out of here,” I growled, finally able to breathe enough to talk, “then follow us.”
“Stupid human,” the Mutt muttered. “You have no idea what you have done.”
Chapter Ten
The guards we’d taken out at the Mutt’s cell weren’t the only ones in the facility. I should have guessed from the amount of guards outside the building that they’d have a hell of a lot more inside than the twenty we’d come across so far.
The wailing of the alarm was muted in my helmet speakers, but I could tell it had to be screeching at an uncomfortable decibel level because the Mutt kept wincing.
Or he might have been injured. The Zeniths weren’t known for their hospitality in prisons.
We navigated through only one intersection before coming across four guards in body armour tearing around a corner towards us. They had the kit, alright; high tech and impressively shiny. But they lacked real-world fighting experience.
I took two out with as many pulls of my plasma rifle’s trigger. Odo sprayed railgun flechettes across the other two in a move that might have been called overkill if not for the fact that he was screaming bloody murder.
My engineer was in fighting form and ready for a melee.
He got it at the next corner where the Zeniths had managed to get themselves into better order.
“Exit’s this way,” the Mutt behind me said. I looked over my shoulder and saw him indicating the way we’d come in. His knowledge of the facility didn’t surprise me. If he were anything like Malcolm, he’d have discovered as much about the place as he could.
Maybe he even knew it all before he came here. Who was to say he hadn’t been caught infiltrating the place.
I pushed those thoughts aside and concentrated returning fire at the group of Zeniths who were blocking our way to Zyla’s cell. It was as if the bloody bastards were crawling out of the woodwork. I expected at any moment to be boxed in from all sides. We had to move this along.
“Try a grenade,” I suggested to Odo.
He plucked a frag grenade off his belt and pulled the pin. His aim was perfect, landing the grenade right in the middle of the group of Zeniths.
They panicked for a second, and then one enterprising individual kicked at the grenade; no doubt to hurl the damn thing back at us.
All he managed to do was make the bomb go off.
The sight of his leg and half his lower body getting blown to bits was not pretty. It sent the rest of the Zeniths into a major panic.
“Do you get the feeling that these guys are amateurs?” Odo asked, firing into the disordered line of guards and making short work of them.
“Yeah,” I said, leading the way forward.
I checked the rear camera view on my HUD and was relieved to see the Mutt still trailing us. If he knew how to get out of here, which I was pretty damn sure he did, then he could escape without us. And I wouldn’t have put it past Malcolm to have somehow programmed the ship to retrieve the Mutt as soon as his biosignature appeared outside the facility.
It was highly likely that Malcolm planned to leave us here. The Mutt could escape with my ship, and we’d be incarcerated and executed along with Zyla. Tie up those loose ends.
But the Mutt kept close to our backs, his beefy hands flexing at his sides as if he longed to pinch a plasma pistol off my thigh and use it. Both Odo and I hadn’t offered up any weapons to him. I didn’t fancy a bullet in the back of my helmet at any time.
We passed the downed guards and came up on Zyla’s corridor. Every single door to the cells that lined the hallway was open.
For a second, I couldn’t comprehend what that meant.
“They’ve moved her,” Odo helpfully supplied.
“They know we’re here for her now,” I said, regretting not getting Zy first when the way had been clear to her cell.
“They may not see you in your fancy armour,” the Mutt said behind us, “but they know exactly who you are. Bad move.”
Why they’d associate two camouflaged and fully armoured infiltrators, who’d just busted out this Mutt, with Zyla, I didn’t know. Unless Malcolm had dropped us in it.
There was a reason why he hadn’t sent his own guys in to get his Mutt. And considering how effective our small arms fire had been so far, it would’ve been a walk in the park for a couple of Mutts fully kitted. So, he’d either wanted us to get the blame or known whoever did it would get identified. And rather us than one of his, I guessed, was his philosophy.
It was something to worry about later; after we’d found out where the hell they’d taken Zyla to.
I checked the map of the facility on my HUD and decided that without sensors to locate her, we were shit out of luck.
“I’ve got nothing,” I told Odo. “We’re going to have to do this the hard way.”
“Door to door?”
“Yeah.” It wasn’t perfect. Hell, it wasn’t good by a long shot. The more time we spent in here, the more likely they’d bring in reinforcements. And the next lot of guards might have some decent training.
So far, we’d been lucky with their lack of experience. That luck wasn’t going to hold, though. We had to be ready.
I
turned to look at the Mutt and then sighed and pulled a plasma pistol off my thigh magnet.
“Here,” I said. “Cover our backs.”
“You want me to use a little peashooter like this?”
“You can shove it where the sun don’t shine for all I care,” I told him. “But if you want off this rock, you’re going to have to lend a hand.”
“I did point out the exit was back there, didn’t I?” he said.
“We’re not leaving without her.”
“Heard there was an important political prisoner about to be shot tomorrow. Maybe they decided to bring the schedule forward.”
I glared at the Mutt. He spoke fluent Earth Standard. Just like Malcolm. Unlike most of the Mutts who tended to speak more like Old Russian mafia thugs out of a movie.
For a second, I tried to see the similarity between this Mutt’s facial features and Malcolm’s. Were they related? But to be honest, and I’m not proud of it, they all tended to look a bit alike to me.
At least the head Mutt guard back on Chi Virginis had had a scar down his face to distinguish himself easily. Without armour and the wear they all wore so proudly, it was sometimes hard to tell them apart.
I decided, without any other information to go on, that I’d consider the Mutt’s advice. I checked the map for the location of the facility’s kill chamber and highlighted it on the network for Odo.
“Let’s head there. Zeniths tend to do things by the number. If they want to make a show of her execution, then they’ll want to do it with the Zenith flag flying behind her.”
“Good as anywhere,” Odo muttered.
We started moving forward again. Progress was slow as there was clearly more Zenith guards in the facility now than just a few minutes ago. Wherever they stashed them had to be nearby. They’d probably called in some of the guards from the security towers. I kind of wished I’d had the Basic go around and blow up each one while we were inside.
We took hits now and then, but the armour was top tier. They would have cost a lot of chits, and part of me wanted to respect Malcolm for providing them. And then I remembered the two programmes in the ship’s systems and the data stack that would fire off to Chi Virginis every time we exited a jump point.
Absolute Zero (The Sector Wars, Book 1) Page 11