by Rick Partlow
She was on the opposite bank, crawling up on her belly to the crest of the rise, watching the truck as it passed across the bridge, heading for the lone gate in the block wall around the reactor complex. I couldn’t see it from where I was, but I’d gotten a good look at it when we’d been moving into position through the high grass at the edge of the river, over a three hour period from late morning to early afternoon. That wasn’t as long as it sounded on a planet with an eighteen-hour rotation, but I was glad we’d brought some ration bars and water along, and that it wasn’t raining that hard.
I sat there watching her watching them, envisioning the security blockhouse built into the wall, imagining the truck halted at the imposing metal barrier across the road while the guards checked their work order on computers hardwired to the systems across the river in town. I’d thought about just cutting the superconductive wires where they crossed the bridge in their polymer sheath, but that would have probably brought someone to investigate. This was riskier, but worth it.
“What is taking so fucking long?” I muttered.
“Patience, Commander,” Yassa said from right next to me. I glanced over in surprise; I hadn’t noticed her move, but she was crouched beside me on one knee. “Things happen when they happen.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, grinning despite the tension I felt. I was glad I’d brought her along.
Then I saw Ibanez motion for us to move.
“Go!” I hissed at the others, scrambling out from under the abutment and up the bank to the road.
The truck had already moved through into the bare, black lot beside the reactor facility’s loading dock, but the gate was still up. I sprinted across, feeling the others on my heels; once I reached the other side, Ibanez popped up and joined us. The bridge was only about fifty meters from end to end, but it felt like we were out in the open forever and my eyes were locked on the closed, tinted polymer window of the security blockhouse. I slammed into the door of the guard shack with my shoulder and it popped open readily, sending me half-stumbling inside.
Kane was there, leaning over the computer console, a lead from it plugged into one of his ‘face jacks, while Bobbi Taylor kept watch, pistol held down at low ready in both hands. The two men who’d been crewing the guard shack were on the bare, cement floor, unconscious, gagged with strips of cloth and secured with industrial plastic ties that were the closest we’d been able to come to flex cuffs.
“Any problems?” I asked, looking between the two of them. Yassa came in behind me, while the others crouched in the cover of the closing gate.
“Other than being stuck in the back of that truck for two hours under a load of crates?” Bobbi shot back, grinning. “No. These two didn’t see a thing until Kane smacked them down, then he basically sat on them while I choked them out.”
“Security vids are looped,” Kane told me, unplugging from the board. “We’re clear.”
That was practically a soliloquy for him.
“All right,” I waved for them to follow me outside. “Bobbi, you’re on point.” We needed to move before Ichiko’s drivers finished unloading the truck. “Go, quick.”
She trotted off toward the loading dock, and the rest of us followed at a regular, ten-meter interval. I stayed towards the middle of the pack and Yassa brought up the rear, taking her role as the “platoon sergeant” of our understrength squad seriously. We all had our guns out, though we would prefer not to use them; if we started killing Abuelo’s people, this was going to get out of hand very quickly.
We moved up the ramp, past the drivers, who were dutifully loading crates of raw soy and spirulina onto a pallet jack. They looked at us with worried glances but didn’t stop working; they knew who paid their salaries and Ichiko didn’t strike me as an easygoing boss. I waved at everyone to spread out once we were inside the building, motioning for Victor and Kurt to stay and guard the loading dock entrance, then signaling Bobbi to head up the block staircase that led out of the storage bay and into the main reactor facility.
We’d gone over the layout for this place with the woman who ran the city’s largest construction firm. She hadn’t actually built the reactor; it had been shipped in pieces in several heavy-lift cargo shuttle loads decades ago by Freeport’s founder, a woman named Aliya, who had been Crowley’s predecessor. But Val, the construction boss, had been a supervisor when the cement block walls had been built around the reactor and the cooling chambers and the turbines, and she had a pretty good idea of what the layout must be still.
It was a mostly automated setup, as far as I could tell from the files we’d been able to pull up on the local ‘nets, which weren’t much. It wouldn’t require more than a half dozen technicians on duty at any one time, maximum; Val thought two shifts might be there at once, to allow hot-swapping for breaks. That meant maybe as many as a dozen workers, and an unknown number of security guards. I was betting not too many; there wasn’t any incentive for anyone in Freeport to sabotage the plant. It was their lifeline as much as Abuelo’s.
In fact, we’d had that very argument when I’d explained my plan…
I moved past Ibanez and Sanders and put myself third behind Bobbi and Kane as we went up the stairs, pausing at the closed door there. I motioned for Kane to hang back, then nodded at Bobbi. She yanked the metal handle and jerked inward and I ducked through, my pistol held at low port. The hallway on the other side of the door curved off to the left, and I heard the sound of voices in a room a dozen meters down, off to the right.
“Break room,” I mouthed to Bobbi as she came through behind me, motioning for her to hold up the others.
I listened for a moment, trying to get a sense of how many of them there were. I made out two voices immediately, a man and a woman talking loudly, laughing about something. I concentrated, trying to make out the words.
“…the fucking coolant stack and I said, Gordo, you can’t flush the reactor just because…”
Then mumbling and cross-talk and more laughing. The man, and the woman, and one other, quieter, chuckling perhaps politely, as if he or she wasn’t as amused. I turned back to Bobbi and flashed three fingers. She nodded, then turned and waved the rest of the squad up. Kane, Sanders and Ibanez moved in and I directed them to deploy up and down the hallway from the loading dock door to just short of what I figured from the markings on the wall was a break room. I’d rather have bypassed it entirely, but there was no way around without being spotted.
Yassa came in last, and I relayed the information to her silently, then motioned for her and Bobbi to come with me. I sidled up to the breakroom entrance, looked to Yassa, then took a deep breath and swung around the corner. The two talkative ones didn’t even notice us at first, still gabbing away, sitting hunched over a folding table, hands clasped on the warmth of steaming coffee cups. One of them was a well-fed, squinty-eyed, pinch-faced, probably fortyish man dressed in clothes expensive enough that I knew he was a valued employee but sloppy enough that I also knew he wasn’t a manager. The other was a woman, maybe a bit younger, soft-featured and doe-eyed, with a mouth that seemed a bit too large for her face and clothes similar to the other talker.
The last one at the table saw us, though, the one who’d laughed politely. He wasn’t a technician or a manager. He wasn’t soft, and he wasn’t dressed like a worker. His head was shaved and he wore dark utility fatigues and an armored vest and had a large handgun strapped in a holster across his chest. His eyes opened wide, hands shifting off the table, away from the steaming ceramic mug and towards that gun.
“Don’t fucking move,” I said, aiming my pistol between his eyes.
The heads of the other two snapped around and I saw the man’s mouth start to open in a shout. I stepped across the room in the space of a second and put a hand over his mouth. He flinched away at the touch, but he didn’t cry out. The gunman glanced between me and Bobbi and Yassa and his hand didn’t move off the table.
“Everyone stay quiet and stay calm,” I cautioned, reaching over to ya
nk the security officer’s pistol from his holster, “and no one will get hurt. Nod if you understand.”
All three nodded, the two workers jerkily, obviously close to panic.
I looked around the room. Besides the cheap, green-topped table, there was a counter with a drink dispenser and a food processing unit, partially-empty plastic crates of soy and spirulina stacked next to it. Shelves above the counter held cups and plates and a bulletin board on the wall displayed a streaming series of dates and announcements. There was one other door in the room; a bathroom maybe.
“Check there,” I told Bobbi as Yassa and I patted the three of them down.
The security guy had some kind of short-range ‘link in a pouch on his vest, tied to an earpiece. I figured it must be tied to an internal communications system and I pocketed it, shoving the earpiece into my place so I could monitor if there were any announcements. The others had nothing but a few Tradenotes and some sort of pass on lanyards around their necks. I took those, too.
“You don’t know who you’re fucking with here,” the gunman said in a low, soft voice. His eyes were focused on me when he spoke, and he didn’t seem nearly as scared as he should have been.
“I think I do,” I countered, trying to keep my voice cool and emotionless.
Across the room, there was a startled cry and then a commotion and I looked over to the interior door Bobbi where I’d sent Bobbi. She lunged inside and I heard a smack of something hard hitting flesh and a grunt of pain. That was when the bald guy made his move, and I should have seen it coming. The table flipped over as he moved, sending hot coffee spraying everywhere and I swung my left hand at him instinctively, slamming his own pistol into the side of his head even as his fingers closed on the collar of my jacket.
He went down with a croak, clutching at his head, and the woman worker screeched in fright and surprise, dodging away, while the pudgy male made a break for the door. He made it to the doorway before a dull silver arm clotheslined him across the throat and he went down with a thump of a hundred kilos hitting a tile floor, choking and gagging. Kane stepped across in front of the entrance, staring at the prone worker impassively. Yassa grabbed the woman around the neck and covered her mouth with a hand as she put her into a choke hold, cutting off the blood at her carotid artery, only letting go once the woman had gone limp.
I sprinted over to the bathroom and pulled the door open. Inside, I saw another guard, a blond man dressed in the same black clothes except with his pants down around his ankles, lying unconscious on the floor next to a toilet, a bleeding cut across his cheek and a silver handgun on the floor next to his outstretched hand. Bobbi covering him with her pistol, an amused look on her face.
“Well,” I sighed, kicking the pistol away, “that could have gone better.”
“Could have been worse, too,” Yassa reminded me as she pulled out a handful of plastic ties. I tossed the handgun I’d taken off the guard onto the counter, then grabbed a few from her.
“Get them all tied and gagged and stuff them in the bathroom,” I said, walking over to the bald guard and twisting his hands behind his back, then zip-tying them in place. He moaned softly, blinking his eyes rapidly and trying to struggle against me without much strength. I secured his ankles, then pulled a strip of cloth out of my jacket and gagged him.
When I straightened, I could see that Yassa had done the same to the woman and Sanders and Ibanez had come inside and were tying up the male technician.
“Not him.” I pointed at the man in the expensive clothes. “Bring him over to the chair and sit him down.”
While the others hauled the bound and gagged woman and the two guards into the bathroom, Sanders and Ibanez yanked the one Kane had clotheslined up by his arms and dumped him in one of the chairs next to the overturned table, his dress shoes dragging through puddles of cooling coffee. He was still coughing, trying to get his breath back, his face turned purple by the shock and exertion and his eyes fogged over with fright. I crouched down in front of him, my pistol still in my right hand.
“You,” I smacked him lightly in the cheek with my left palm and he focused on me with a look of abject terror, “pay attention. What’s your name?”
He didn’t respond other than wheezing hoarsely, so I slapped him a bit harder and he yelped.
“I said,” I repeated, emphasizing each word, “what is your name?”
“Sanford,” he gasped, still trying to get his breath, his voice scratchy and pained. He smelled of stale coffee, sweat and urine. “Maynard Sanford. Chief Engineer…”
“Maynard, I need to know how many more people are at the plant tonight. How many engineers, how many more security guards?”
He hesitated and I let the muzzle of my pistol drift forward towards him.
“No one has to get killed tonight, Maynard,” I assured him. “I’d rather no one did. That’s why those guards,” I nodded at the two security officers being dragged into the bathroom, “are still alive. If I go on into the plant and there turn out to be more people than you tell me, I might be forced to shoot someone. If you tell me the truth,” I raised my left, empty hand in counterpoint to the one with the gun, “then I can arrange things so that we do what we have to do and no one gets badly hurt.”
He blinked, looking at the others thoughtfully.
“Okay,” he said, still breathing hard. “Okay. There are three more engineers on duty tonight, Janice, Will and Patrick.” His eyes took on a pleading look. “They’re good people, please don’t hurt them.”
There was a twisting in my guts and I suddenly felt a sense of shame.
“I’m not going to hurt them,” I promised him, meaning it. “How much security?”
“Just two more,” he answered. “I don’t know their names, just some of Constantine’s goons. Only one who ever talked to us is Joe, the bald guy.” He glanced towards the bathroom again, where Joe had been deposited. “They’re probably up in the control room with the crew, unless they’re sneaking off to get stoned.” He shrugged. “It’s a boring job out here for them.”
“All right.” I stood and holstered my sidearm. “We’re going to gag you and put you in there with them. Stay in there until someone comes to check on you and you’ll be fine.”
He didn’t respond, just staring into space now, a tear trickling down his cheek. I waved for Sanders to come and get him.
“We need to get this done before someone figures out we’re here and calls for reinforcements,” I said, once the bathroom door was shut on the captives. “Speed over stealth from now on. Bobbi, get us to that control room.”
Past the break room were a pair of dark, unoccupied offices, and beyond them was another door, this one larger and heavier. Bobbi looked at me for the go-ahead, then pulled it open, and with its soundproof seal gone, the whine of the Magnetohydrodynamic turbines filled the hallway. The corridor ahead was narrow and dimly lit, a passageway between the water lines that brought coolant in from the river and the turbines that ringed the reactor core.
The lines that carried power to the city, and to the defense lasers, were underground; they had to be, not for aesthetic reasons as on Earth or more settled colonies, but simply because the weather here would have played hob with anything overland. I’d seen the insulated pipe that took them across the river, and I’d briefly considered simply cutting it there, but that would have taken a lot of time, and it would have been too easy and simple to fix, as well as lacking in subtlety. This had to be done just right to deliver the message we were trying to send.
I was just behind Bobbi as she passed by the service alcove where the water pipes fed into the structure of the reactor and split off in each direction, so I saw the flicker of movement there nearly the same time she did. She acted before I could, though, lunging to the left with a single, powerful spring and swinging her pistol in a downward arc. The security guard hadn’t even been facing her; he was standing with his back to the passageway, hiding the drug patch he had slapped onto his forearm from anyo
ne that might pass by. I could see it in the shadowy gloom of the alcove as he collapsed, not even reaching for his gun.
Bobbi relieved him of his weapon and was already putting the first plastic tie in place before I covered the three steps between us. This one was younger than the others, with a beard shaved into a zigzag pattern and holographic tattoos on his face in a style that hadn’t been popular on Earth since before I was born. He looked barely conscious and I wasn’t sure if it was from the blow to the head or the drugs.
The others were starting to bunch up behind us and I waved them back, signaling for everyone to keep a look-out.
“Getting stoned just like Maynard said,” Bobbi murmured, gagging the man and shoving him back into the shadows. “Just one guard left.”
Another twenty meters and we reached the metal grillwork staircase that led up above the turbines to the control room. Bobbi paused, crouching low in the shadows at the side of the stairs. I looked up through the open grillwork and I could see the lights shining through the transplas windows of the chamber; it was basically a large, sheet metal box bolted into the side of the buildfoam dome, with superconductive control fibers collected inside polymer sheaths running into it through a half dozen different ports.
I could see one of the occupants through the windows, sitting carelessly on top of a panel, resting his head against the window. The others were too far back for us to get a look at. There was only one door to the room and they were going to see us coming once we hit the last flight of stairs. Nothing to be done about it.
I nodded for Bobbi to go, and she started climbing as silently as you could on decades-old metal steps. The creaking was probably inaudible over the high-pitched background whine of the turbines and the gentle rumble of water through the coolant pipes, but it seemed as loud as a snare drum to me from just behind her. The head in the window didn’t turn around though; my eyes were locked on it, willing it not to turn.