Only maybe he was smart not to finish it off, because his ears twitch and he lazily lifts his head from the table, smacking his equine lips and bringing up the back of his hairy wrist to wipe his face. I see those ears swivel, like he thinks he can hear something in the near total dark room.
Like he hears us.
I send two blaster bolts into the donk’s chest, the double wick sound filling the small room for the briefest of seconds and then giving way to the noise of the donk spilling from his chair.
Winters moves past me to the door leading into the next room. It’s made from rough, unfinished wood and has a glass square at eye level. The kid peers through, checking to see if anyone is inside and—if they are—whether they’re stirring from the noise.
“Looks good,” he whispers into his comm. Much too quiet for me to hear unless I was being fed his voice in my ear.
“How many?” I ask.
“A lot. Maybe, thirty or forty asleep in bunks. Twenty stacks, two beds per.”
I grit my teeth. That’s a lot of donks in one room. And if any of them are armed, we can get ourselves into some trouble real quick.
“Maybe we string some det-cord over all the bunks while they sleep,” suggests Winters. “Then blow it and kill ’em all at once.”
I smile inwardly. The kid has imagination.
“That might work,” I say, shaking my head. “But it’s too easy to muck up. One guy feels a tickle and we’re hosed. No, we’re getting our hands a little dirty, I’m afraid.”
I pull my knife, a powder-coated black blade carbon forged from impervisteel salvaged from the Chiasm itself. Or at least that’s what the koob who sold it to me said. But koobs made good blades, regardless of the source. Any history is just a bonus.
“Roger,” Winters says, letting his rifle hang on its sling before fastening it to his side and pulling a koob knife of his own—practically a machete.
I can see the kid is ready for action with no hesitation, and no questioning the wisdom of what I’m saying. He seems… eager to do work that a lot of operators I’ve been around have been loath to perform. Killing is hard enough. Doing it up close and personal… not everyone is cut out for it. And there’s a fine line for the ones who can do the job as a job and do the job because it’s what they’d do anyway so they may as well be paid for it. I ran into a few guys like that in my time in the Legion and it always gave me the creeps. Still, I was glad they were on our side.
“No big swings,” Lash cautions from the back of the room. “Quick cuts. Sever the spinal cord so they can’t thrash around. This is gonna take too long.”
I look back at the big legionnaire. “I don’t disagree. We’re not going to kill every single one in their sleep. C’mon, man.”
“So what’s the plan?” Easy whispers.
“We move through the room and set some det-charges and incendiaries. Knives for any light sleepers. Lock the doors on our way out. Once we reach BT3 and go live, we blow the charges and let the donks cook. That way they don’t come after us. Ooah?”
The team acknowledges that they understand, though none of them say “Ooah” back to me. Even Lash. Makes me second-guess my theory about where he served.
“Lash,” I say, “you hang back with that SAB. Things go sideways and we drop and let him clear the room. Lana, you move ahead and get us ready to move from here to the temple proper—schematics showed a hall leading right to where we want to be from here. Winters, you cover her from center and watch for any zhee who might wake up. Easy, we set the charges and stay quiet, and then cover Lash while big man moves through to the other side. Questions?”
I’m met with silence.
“Go.”
I creep through the wooden door leading into the barracks. The first thing that hits me is the stink. I’d say it smells like a barn, but that doesn’t do it justice. More like a hog pen built atop an open sewer. I’ve smelled worse, but not by much. The room is musty and humid—stifling. Too many bodies, too much gas, too much funk.
I move to the nearest corner as Easy does the same on the opposite side of the room. I pull a charge from my satchel and affix it to the wall at chest-height, trigger-chaining a thermal fragger to it. Just before this thing blows, it’ll send a detonation sequence to the fragger’s thumb-switch interface causing it to cook down. And then the blast will push the blossoming relentless burn of the thermite into the center of the room and on the donks, their straw-like bedding—everything.
We’ll set up six of these in the barracks itself. That combined with the natural gas these zhee are producing in their sleep—I hear one of them rip and then quietly bray before rolling over—and this place should go up in an epic inferno.
I turn to verify that Easy has his first charge set. He gives me a thumbs up and then points to the ground. I look down and see a big part of the reason for the stink in this room. Other than the antechamber, this room has no partitions. No sinks, no showers… and no toilets, because instead the donks have four-inch diameter open holes that must sit atop a nasty cistern of filth below. The tile floor around the one at my feet is splattered with sticky piss and shards of whatever these zhee last ate.
Nasty.
And a tripping hazard, which is why Easy pointed it out. He motions that there are more throughout the room and for me to be careful. I give him the OK sign and check to see how Lana and Winters are faring. I see her at the end of the room as planned. Her PDW ready, she’s motioning for me to look amid the barracks.
I see the kid in the middle of plunging his blade into the neck of a snoring donk. I don’t know if the zhee was waking up or what, but it’s dying now. I involuntarily hold my breath, wanting to be quiet. Not wanting the donk to sound the alarm because Winters performed the knifework wrong. Not that he isn’t capable, just that I don’t know.
I trust myself to do it right. Lashley. Maybe Easy. Maybe.
But there’s no noise escaping from the zhee. Nor is there a struggle. Either Winters knew what he was doing or he took Lash’s advice to heart. Good result. We’re still clear.
I watch Winters creep back to the center of the room, a row of bunks lining the walls on either side. Easy and I move toward him, Lash standing in the open doorway behind us, his SAB ready. But as I take a step, I see that two of the donks on the bottom bunks are dead. Throats cut deep, blood pooling in their straw and pillows.
I throw up a hand and Easy stops. No way all these donks stirred. Maybe Winters is thinking insurance policy but I see it as an unnecessary risk. I motion the kid over, not wanting to speak but wanting to make it crystal clear that he needs to keep the stabbing to a minimum moving forward.
Winters stalks over while Easy takes a knee, watching the still slumbering bunk room with vigilance. I’m thinking of how to express the butt-kicking that’s waiting for Winters if he doesn’t cut back on the serial killer stuff without yelling when I hear a boom sound from the opposite end of the compound.
The walls and floor shake. Strands of straw rustle down from the donks’ bedding. My first thought in the continuous reel of activity in my mind is that we took too long and Hopper is having Alpha team assault their next target. But he would have gotten on comms to alert me.
All the other thoughts go out the window, because the blast woke the zhee up. The donks sit up in their bunks, their speed no doubt varying depending on just how drunk they were when they went to sleep.
And then Lash yells from the back of the room. “Get down!”
14
Easy drops at the sound of Lashley’s deep voice. But Winters sort of freezes. He makes a target for a semi-alert zhee who hops down from the top of his bunk wielding a vicious, curved kankari knife. I pull my shotgun from my back and intercept the would-be assassin with a boom so loud it’s sure to wake up any stragglers.
The zhee is caught off-balance and slams into the post of a nearby bunk before pi
rouetting down dead on the tile.
“Down!” Lash yells again, and I can hear the whine of his SAB as it spools up.
I drop, reaching out and grabbing the kid by his armored shoulder and pulling him down onto the tile. As I land, my elbow scrapes the edge of one of those shit-holes, breaking the skin.
Sket. That’s gonna be a whole series of shots from the medbot.
No sooner do I hit floor than Lashley’s SAB begins to cut its way through the room, sweeping across the bottom level of the bunks and sending smoking pieces of splintered wood and zhee flying in every direction. Lash has his charge set to full, and those caught in its fire are paying for it.
Zhee, awakened from their drunken stupors by adrenaline, begin jumping out of their beds, seeking what concealment they can find between the bunks.
I swing my rifle out in front of me and begin shooting at any zhee I can sight in the open space beneath the raised bunks, shooting along the floor and striking donks as they lay, or dropping them with blaster bolts to their legs as they attempt to crawl away or return fire on Lash from behind their beds.
“Easy! Sweep bottom! Winters! Mid-level!” I shout into the comm, hoping to be heard above the unyielding roar of Lashley’s SAB. That should free the big man from taking care of ground level so he can focus on the donks that haven’t jumped off of their top bunks.
I’m about to call out a donk who is rising from an upper bunk at the end of the room with a slug-throwing rifle when Lana sends up a burst from her PDW, riddling the zhee’s back with blaster bolts and sending him careening off the bunk, clipping his jaw on the bedframe next to him before the eight foot or so drop to the ground.
Lash sees what we’re doing and focuses on spraying the upper bunks while we send blaster bolts underneath and just above the bottom bunks. The only place not being peppered with fire is the door nook Lana has crammed herself into, at once hoping that no one comes through from the other side while dusting any zhee who attempt to flee in her direction.
Easy pops up to a knee, ceasing his fire, no longer capable of being the beast beneath the donks’ beds. “Nothing but dead bodies gettin’ in the way!” he shouts. And then he picks off any zhee he can spot in the open between top and bottom bunks.
I see pretty much the same and so I pop up. Our firing has slowed, getting more precise now that the threat in the room is either dead or lying among the dead. Only Lash is keeping up his high cycle of fire, though I suspect it’s no longer needed.
“Okay, cease fire!” I call.
A moment later the SAB whines to a cool. Little fires crackle and pop in the wooden bunk frames. The straw bedding smolders, mixing with the smell of dead and burnt zhee in a way that ups the retch factor already caused by the open toilets instead of covering the putrid odor up.
“Easy. We clear each row and then go. Lana, watch the door. Lash, Winters, cover us.”
I move first, Easy by my side. I visually sweep the top and bottom bunks for any sleepers, putting two blaster bolts into a donk who was probably already dead, lying in the top bunk nearest me. Swinging around the first set of bunks, I turn the corner with my blaster rifle on full auto, filling the pile of zhee I find in the gap between rows of beds with blaster bolts. Easy does the same on the opposite side.
No zhee pop up to stop us, and we repeat on the next row.
“Changing packs,” Easy calls.
“Changing packs,” I repeat, doing the same so I’m fresh before the next round.
Still no donk resistance. I think we got ’em all.
We clear each row of bunks and give the all clear for Lash and Winters to join us by Lana’s side.
“Alpha One, this is Bravo One, how copy?”
I don’t get a response.
“Hopper, this is Carter. We heard a boom on your side of the camp. What’s up?”
The comm jumps to life and immediately I hear blaster fire from the other end. It’s Hopper. “Carter, man! We’re on the run to AT3. Encountered heavy resistance. Had to blow a room just to slow the donks. I’m down two guys. We need support, brother!”
“Copy,” I say, pushing the message to my squad’s comms so we’re all up to speed on what happens now. “We’ve cleared BT2 and are proceeding to BT3. We’ll link up there to help.”
“That won’t work,” Winters says, and his voice is serious.
“Why not?” I ask.
“That won’t work,” Hopper says into my ear as I utter the words. “Your target three is our target four. We had one more stop than you.”
That wasn’t mentioned in the meeting I had with Surber. I look up to Winters. “You know something… spill it because we gotta go now.”
“In the initial planning, Alpha Team was to deny zhee access to a deep-chamber comm room. Keep them from calling into the Soob with a report. We gotta get there.”
“Okay. How?”
There are a ton of questions in my mind right now, but I’m chalking it up to Winters having sat with Surber and the Pekk chieftain all night and hearing more of the big picture than I was told. Hopper seemed to know more than me as well. So it’s not really a surprise. One thing about the way Big Nee and the execs run this operation is that everything—everything—is need to know.
“Fastest way is back to the front of the compound and around, but that won’t work.”
“Why not?”
Winters hesitates.
“Hey,” Lash says, pushing the kid hard on the shoulder. “If you know something, you best say it now, ’cause Alpha sounds hip deep in trouble.”
The kid looks around and says, “The Pekk tribe should be starting a full-force assault on those front gates. We don’t want to be caught in that. Fastest route now is to clear Bravo Target Three and then move on to take AT3 and relieve Alpha team.”
I let out a sigh. Not only because it means that we’ll have to take the temple down ourselves instead of with the support of Hopper’s team, but because this whole situation was likely avoidable if we’d have just been able to do the planning ourselves. I don’t care what assurances Surber gave, this is exactly why I was uneasy with an out-of-the-box op.
The directions are never as clear as the brass think. Never.
“Anything else we need to know?” I ask Winters.
The kid shakes his head.
“Okay, let’s move up on the objective. We’ll blow the room after we clear it to keep anyone from following us from the compound.”
“No,” Winters says, and I can feel the annoyance in the group.
“Why not?” I ask through gritted teeth.
“We might need to fall back through the exit. Harder to do if it’s on fire.”
I’m pretty sure there’s more than one way out of the temple itself, but it’s a fair enough point and I’m not going to waste time arguing. “Fine.”
I pull out a little holo-stick and approach the door leading to the temple. Stacked up against the wall itself, I push the stick underneath the solid wood door and watch the holoimage on my watch.
“Hallway is clear, but it’s a thirty-meter walk to the next set of doors leading to the temple.”
I stand up and try the door. It’s locked.
“Lash?”
The big man rolls out from his cover against the wall and with a booming kick, forces the door in. It swings wildly and then we’re all moving down the corridor. It’s fairly nondescript. Stone walls with iron-grated open air windows placed about two feet over our heads. High enough so you can’t see out but the moonlight can come in as weak shafts that illuminate the walls.
I can hear sporadic weapons fire from all across the compound. Some of it sounds close. “Easy, boost up and see if you can get a look at what’s going on out there.”
Easy hops up, grabbing the window ledge with his fingers and then pulling his head up for a peek. No sooner does he do so
than he falls back down in perfect timing with a boom that shakes us all so hard, we’re grabbing walls to stay on our feet. Dust and sand billow into the hall through the open window portals.
“What?” Lana manages.
“Missile,” pants Easy, lying flat on his back. “I saw it—I swear I saw it—streak right down and onto the main gates. Blew them out.”
Now the gunfire has increased tenfold. I’m hearing automatic blaster fire and the distinctive cracking of slug-throwing rifles spitting 7.62 bullets into the mix. Part of the rhythm of life on Kublar. The donks and the zhee both love that old tech. And without a Legion out there standing mostly impervious in their armor against it, why not?
Winters helps Easy to his feet. I feel Lana toying with the back of my neck.
“You’re bleeding,” she says, clicking a tiny ultrabeam on to better inspect whatever is wrong back there. I don’t feel anything. Maybe a trickle of blood seeping down my back.
“Can it wait?” I ask.
“Hold your repulsors.” She grafts on a small skinpack. “That needs to be cleaned out when we’re done, but you’re good.”
“Thanks.”
We hurry to the door, and I’m expecting it to burst open with zhee shooters set to fill this hallway with fire. But we get there with no contact.
The door is solid wood again, and locked. The space on either side is limited, so that we’re crowded together against the wall. I use my holo-wand again but can’t see anything from under the door. At all. It’s pitch black, too dark for the device’s night vision to work.
“Blind,” I inform the team. “Bangers.”
Easy and Winters each pull ear-poppers from their webbing and hold them ready.
“Lash.”
Lashley rolls out and gives the door a punishing kick. It doesn’t seem to budge. He tries another. Then a third. Still nothing.
“Back,” I say, not wanting him to be exposed in front of that door for too long. It’s thick, but thick enough to stop a hail of heavy weapons fire from going through and putting holes in him? Not worth the risk.
Galaxy's Edge: Takeover: Season Two: Book One Page 11