by Mason, Jolie
The boy would have to untangle a system full of pitfalls.
“All right, then we need our heavy hitters on Bravo. It’s likely to take a while to get what he needs. Bravo will have to take and hold the console room here.” Caden tapped on his datapad and lit up a whole room on the map. “Once you have the data, you’ll have a serious firefight to get back to the shuttle.”
Morgan flashed his best shark smile. “I believe I can help with that, Mr. Carnes”, he said smoothly. “Two of my fighters could clear the road and keep it clear, until you’re done. It won’t help on the inside, but it will keep the bastards off that shuttle.”
Caden nodded. “I’ll take it. Everyone clear on their part?”
The meeting began to break up slowly as the various details and logistics were divided up to appropriate people. Caden felt a pull on his arm. He turned away from Pak to see Ari glaring up at him.
“Can I speak with you in private?” she said quietly.
“Sure.” He excused himself to the other man and nervously followed Aricka to a small room off the conference. It contained an office space with sleek, comfortable furniture more like her than the ones in her room. A small fountain trickled in the corner. Earthy, he thought. This is where she spends most of her time. She waited for the door to slide shut before she let loose.
“He’s eighteen! He’s eighteen and completely untrained. What are you thinking?”
“Jace.” He’d known it was coming. “Jace came to me after he hacked my files to see the scout’s intel. He’s pretty convinced he’s the guy for the job.”
“He’s a kid. I don’t care what he thinks.”
“Ari, this is actually his plan. He’s capable, very.”
She sputtered to a stop. “His plan! He hacked your files, and you don’t think that could be an indicator of some irresponsibility and bravado?”
He shook his head. “It’s an indicator of desperation. He wants his dad.”
He watched as Ari teared up, but tried to hide it from him by turning her back. He walked up behind her, careful that she heard him coming. “Who else can go?”
“What?”
“Do you have anyone else with his skill set because I don’t? My teams use force, not tech.”
She shook her head. “He specialized young. No one could stop him then. Or now, apparently.”
“Ari, I’m going in with them. I will protect him with my life.”
She turned to him. “You’re going? Why?”
“I’m not completely without use, Ari. There are those who would tell you I’m pretty good in a fight.”
“Where did you learn that? The academy?”
“You could say that”, he said softly. “I learned a hard lesson there about being defenseless.”
She looked like she wanted to ask, but something about his body language made her stop before the words even got out. He imagined it was the perpetual scowl he wore when thinking of his time at the academy. He doubted she would know about the kidnapping while he was in school. It was only shortly after that she lost her father, and his father had done everything he could to interfere with the two of them. He’d succeeded, of course, so that Caden had never had to explain the marks of torture on his body or the training he’d gotten on his own time to turn himself into a soldier. No one ever expected it of him, the CEO.
Caden forced a smile to his face. “I’ll be there with him.”
She nodded. “It’s not like I can stop him anyway. He hardly knows me.”
The soft regret in her voice hit him right in the gut. It also made him suddenly brave enough to ask the question he’d needed to ask for twelve years. “Why didn’t you come back? Not to me. I get that. Why didn’t you come home?”
She opened her mouth to reply, then closed it quickly before trying again. “I don’t know... how to answer that.”
“You don’t have to answer, Ari. I don’t own you.” Her eyes went soft. Anguished. That was the word. Pained by his question. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”
“Guilt was part of it”, she said in a rush. “My family paid for my mistakes.”
“Us. You mean us.”
“Of course, I mean us. I grew up on Taarken. In New Haven. I knew your family. What was I thinking? Of course, I would never have been accepted for the heir to the realm. When Da lost his job in the mines, he laughed that it wouldn’t be so hard to do something else. He laughed, until every door in town was closed in his face. Because of me. He died because of me.”
Caden’s breath didn’t come for a moment. He hadn’t heard this. “He was fired?”
She looked skeptically his way. “The day you left, Caden. Your father made no secret of it. We struggled to live for years. If we hadn’t had too many friends to control them all, we’d have starved or left Taarken.”
Caden avoided her gaze.
“How could you not know? Da died in your foyer.”
His voice rough, he said, “I suspected something, of course. My... Samuel wasn’t the type to steal anything. There was no evidence. I looked.”
“Da thought he could reason with Carnes, Caden. He believed everyone could see reason. He just never understood that it wasn’t a lack of reason, but a lack of humanity that made your father evil.”
“Your brother. I knew there was a reason. It just... He didn’t tell me specifics.”
“I know, Caden. It’s not your fault. You’ve put right everything you could.” She reached between them and lightly touched his hand.
Caden sniffed once, on the verge of tears now himself. “If you can forgive me my part, why do you still feel guilty?”
“Because”, she said shakily. “I knew better. You didn’t see your father’s full nature. That is forgivable. A son always wants to believe in his father. I lived in that world long enough to know the rules. You were something I was never meant to have, Caden Carnes.”
He made a strangled noise. “So strange. I never doubted in fifteen years that you were meant for me.” He laced their hands together. Her small one fit into his larger hand like puzzle pieces.
“Caden?” She pulled her hand with a small tug. He gripped it tighter.
He used her arm to pull her closer, until his lips caressed the soft tip of her ear. “No doubts. You always assumed I’d been born to run the kingdom. I was born to love you, Aricka Badu.”
Her tight gasp brushed his jaw as she turned her face to his.
The comm chirped behind them on the desk. They both slowly pulled away, until Ari could reach behind them to press the audio.
“Captain,” Luca’s professional voice spoke. “The contractor is here to pick up one of our shipments.”
“I’ll be right there.” Anyone who knew her would have heard the strangeness of her tone. Luca appeared smart enough not to ask. Maybe, she knew she’d find out some other time, or maybe, Ari was still out here on her own in some ways. He didn’t know. He just knew he didn’t want to watch her walk away again.
Even as he had that thought, she pushed off her desk and walked out of the office without looking back once.
*****#*****
The blue planet filled the display as Ari paced back and forth on the bridge of the Bell. The shuttles had each been loaded with equipment. Every man was geared up and ready to go, but Ari wasn’t, could never be ready for this. Her gut twisted with foreboding. Something inside her rang an alarm with each passing moment, but it had to be done. There were no other options. Her brother would not get out of this without this mission.
Luca fiddled as she patched all the comm frequencies in to each other. In between each step of the process, the pilot twisted her braids in her fingers and bit her lip. Ari’s pacing was getting to her, she knew, but she just couldn’t stand still.
They’d left the bridge doors wide open to allow freedom to travel, as there were so many technical adjustments to be made in a situation like this. She paced a moment more before she heard a throat clearing just outside the open doors. She looked up,
and her mouth went dry.
Caden had the same black fatigues as the rest of the strike team, plenty of pockets and flexibility. Shield webbing stretched through the fabric and powered by small charge cells in two pockets of the field vest. He would probably save the helmet for the shuttle. Everyone hated the helmets. There was something so capable about him, and it wasn’t the illusion of the uniform. He looked like he’d spent some time in this gear. Wore it like a second skin, in fact.
His warm eyes met hers, and, without words, he asked her to join him outside. She noticed a speculative look from Luca as she did just that.
“Ari, you okay?”
“I’m fine”, she said tightly.
“You’re not, but I’ll give you the lie. I’ve got my best man with him. He’s the guy who trained me. He’ll be okay, Ari.”
“You can’t promise that, Caden.” She let out a small puff of air. “Any more than you can promise to keep yourself safe. It’s a battle. People die in battles.”
His eyes narrowed. “That something you’re worried about then? My safety?”
She looked down at the floor, then back up, boldly. Why lie to the man?
“I never said I stopped”, she answered.
He smiled at her, that silly, hopeful smile again. She couldn’t help it. She smiled back this time, and then he was gone, loping off down the ramp and back to the shuttles where he would walk straight into a firefight.
Ari fought the urge to throw up on her shiny bridge deck.
Chapter Four
Kent Abernathy ran one last check of his pulse rifle as they loaded the Bravo shuttle. He smiled reassuringly one last time at the greenhorn kid he was here to watch over for his best friend. Jace Badu had freckles, for fucks’ sake. What in the hell were they doing taking a freckle faced kid into this potential cluster?
There was no telling what resistance was on the ground here. He’d read the scout’s report, and it was all sunshine and roses. Bullshit. These guys are deliberately attacking Caden Carnes. They’d have something on the ground.
The kid wore a small clip transmitter over his left ear, and he had a comp pack over his shoulder. His sandy brown hair fell in waves over his forehead making him seem even younger than eighteen, but there was something about the kid. Presence. Kent didn’t know how to say it any better.
The Badu family had always preoccupied Caden, and now that he’d seen Aricka and his friend together he knew why. Obsession. Plain and simple obsession. Caden was in the kind of love into which only idiots fell; the timeless, irrational kind that ate your soul for breakfast. Kent could only pray he dodged that particular bullet as well as he dodged the real kind.
He felt the slight tug as the shuttle shot off the pad and toward space. The leader of Bravo Team, one commander Erickson, stood off to the side doing a short debrief on a private channel. He kept his head shaved like any good marine and spoke in the gravelly, brusque tones that all Marines were issued upon leaving the academy.
In moments, the Commander broke comms and turned to the small team lined up on parallel benches. “All right, Our objective is to remove the defensive perimeter around this base, followed by a secondary objective of getting young Badu here into the Promised Land. This means, Mr. Badu that you are the package, and we are the delivery men. That said, Mr. Badu, when we tell you to get down, you get down and stay there. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
The older Marine smiled tightly. “That’s what I like to hear. Abernathy here has one job, ladies and gentlemen, and that is to protect the package. Our job is to protect him and clear the road. Alpha team cannot approach till these rockets are down. Everybody, we are cleared to go in ten. Time for a barbeque.” The men around the commander shouted a tightly wound hoorah, and went back to checking their gear one more time. It was the ritual. Every unit seemed to have one. Kent smiled at this one because it was so stereotypically old school as to be almost funny.
Kent approached life a bit more irreverently. He laughed, played and lived hard, and he killed a little coldly. In his defense, everyone he’d ever killed had been trying to kill him first. He felt that tell tale tug again, as the shuttle slowed for controlled descent. There were no viewscreens in the hold. It was a miracle of science that no one felt the pull of coming into atmosphere. Of course, his friend Caden could afford the best, so maybe it wasn’t as much a miracle of science as a testament to money and the things it can buy.
He pulled his helmet on and reached over to adjust the kid’s. Jace might look a little jumpy, but he wasn’t obviously scared. Of course, it was his dad down there being held hostage, so maybe that motivated him pretty hard.
“Ready kid?” Kent asked.
He nodded hesitantly. Jace wasn’t ready, but he sure wasn’t going to admit it. Kent didn’t respect much, but he liked this kid. Barely even a man, and he had more balls than some men with decades of experience. It was a rare thing.
The shuttle doors slid open with a hiss once they reached the LZ, and the point team spilled out, quietly scouting the area. He held the kid back a moment as he awaited the all clear from Erickson in his ear. “Abernathy, we are go.”
Only then did Kent allow Badu to follow him down the shuttle ramp and into the greenest of spring meadows. Posies and wild flowers carpeted the field as the tactical unit moved efficiently man by man, alert and ready. They stood out in the knee deep flowers. The team assembled around himself and Badu, as Erickson gave the order to move out. A shuttle team of two, pilot and co-pilot stayed behind to protect the craft and relocate it if necessary.
It was morning on the planet and the sweet smell of dew on the vegetation filled the air as they moved rapidly toward the objective. It took fifteen minutes fast march before Erickson knelt in the bush and raised his fist in the air. Everyone behind him took cover, including Kent and his charge who he pulled to his knees in the high weeds. They all needed a breather, but the kid most of all. He wasn’t military, and he was used to an easier kind of life. It was why all spacers had to use a gym while shipboard. It was too easy to get out of shape. Techies had more of a tendency toward going soft no matter where they lived.
Erickson raised nocs to his face and took in the objective which appeared to be a large needled structure sticking out of the ground with an alcoved interface designed to withstand weather. It gleamed white in the rising sun. The commander hit a button on his earpiece tuning into the team’s exclusive frequency, so they could all hear him at a whisper.
“We have company, Bravo. There are two techs with one guard. They appear to have come in a vehicle from the base. That guard calls back, and we’re dead in the water. Sauren, you think you can get in behind him?”
A ginger haired female crept up a bit to take the nocs and assess the target. She smiled. “Yes, Sir. Private security thinking about his breakfast. Not a problem.”
“Keep it quiet, Sauren, and try to subdue the techies without killing them. I hate to kill a man just doing his job.”, the Commander gritted out. Kent grudgingly admitted to himself that he hated it too. It seldom stopped him from doing it, just bothered him later that some poor Joe got caught in a cross fire. Sauren crawled low into the brush and out of sight.
The wait was interminable. Five minutes in and Kent was antsy to get moving. Sauren popped up in a few more minutes to give the signal to move in. The team crossed the road on alert for any traffic headed their way. Jace was already removing his jack and had unfolded his comp pack. He activated a button on his own implant.
“That’s what I was afraid of”, he said as his eyes went glassy. “System’s in maintenance. It’s gonna be a few.”
“A few what?”, growled Erickson.
“It’s in reboot. It won’t be online for.. .” Jace appeared to stare off into the ether. “approximately eight minutes. I can’t begin my hack till then.”
“Great. I’ll let them know.” Erickson was justifiably bent. Once things started to go even a little wrong on a mission, they seldo
m stopped, until someone was unhappy or dead or both. Kent watched the perimeter scanning for hostiles.
Their force was relatively small. Erickson had his men hide in the bush, while he and Kent stood on either side of the alcove watching the horizon as the minutes ticked by. Ten minutes later, the kid tapped Kent’s arm drawing his attention.
“Perimeter weapons down.”
“How long till they come back up, Badu?” Erickson asked.
“They won’t, sir. I planted a virus. Perimeter weapons are offline awaiting repair.”
Erickson nodded. “Good man, Badu. Good man.”
Into his comms, the commander sent back the message that Alpha Team was go, and he signaled for Bravo to break cover. As they double timed along the dirt road leading back to the base, they could hear the sounds of pulsar fire and heavy fighting begin from the mining station. The small force was quiet as they moved as quickly as possible. The cargo bay doors of the base were large metal plates impervious to any type of explosion a small force could bring, so they needed the control panel. It nestled on the side closest to the spot where Bravo Team crouched low in cover. Two sentries were posted on the doors.
Beside Kent, Jace had done a damn good job keeping up and keeping calm. For a civvie, the kid had some nerve, he thought.
Erickson signaled one of his men who scoped both targets dropping them easily and silently. The sounds of fighting stayed in the area of the mining ship, and they were slowing down a bit. The shots coming in longer intervals. For mercs, this group was a bit of a pushover, and it made Kent nervous. This was a small base, but it was a financial asset. No one just let money hang out there exposed. What kind of defense trumped manpower?
Jace spoke softly, “Bay doors opening now.”
“What?”, Kent whispered.
“I hacked them remotely.” The massive gate swung upward revealing the interior of stacked crates and.. . “Shit, Mechs!”