He leaned against a desk and gave them a friendly smile. “You boys are in a bit of a tight spot here,” he said helpfully. “I’ll try to help you out as best as I can, but I wouldn’t hold my breath, if I were you.”
“A tight spot?” the man on his comrades’ laps blurted. “Soon as I get out of these restraints, I’ll shove that desk up a tight spot and see how you like it.”
Paul turned his gaze on the man. He’d run their faces before dropping in. “I’m afraid you aren’t reading the situation very well, Franco.” He pulled out his pistol and put a three-round burst into the man’s eye socket.
The low-caliber rounds bounced off the inside of Franco’s skull at a shallow angle, losing enough force on the first impact to ensure they wouldn’t come out the back and wound the man sitting on the end.
The four remaining faces were wide-eyed in shock as the body jerked in a macabre death rattle on their laps. Franco’s bladder, doing what any bladder would do in death, provided an even more visceral connection to the event as the four men found their own legs soaked.
They heaved and bucked until the body of their partner in crime tumbled to the filthy carpet at their feet.
“Alright, everybody settle down,” Paul soothed. “Now, Franco wasn’t cooperating but I let him off with a shooting.” He saw the stunned incomprehension and he raised his left shoulder slightly, tilting his head. “You know, first offense and all that…”
They were definitely confused by that, but at least he knew they were listening.
“Who are you?” Gilbert asked, then flinched as Paul turned to face him.
“Oh, yes. Sorry! Hi, Gilbert; I’m Paul.” He waved the pistol in a grotesque sketch of an elaborate court greeting. “I’m a former Marine, a current – I suppose – inspector from the Eye, unless they’ve declared us dead already, and, more relevant to you and your merry band of miscreants, the brother of Ava Klum.”
He didn’t have to wait for Gilbert to place the name. Ava was famous on Roanoke, after all. He wasn’t likely to have forgotten kidnapping her daughter.
“Now you understand why the five of you are in so much trouble,” he continued. He waved a hand at Franco. “I realize you might argue there’s only four of you now, but who knows how that number might change as the discussion progresses so I’m not going to distract myself with keeping count.”
He stared at Franco for a moment. “Tell me everything you can.”
“There’s nothing to tell,” Ted, the man on the right end protested.
“Shhh!” Paul brought up the pistol and shot Ted. He turned back to Gilbert. “Everything.”
“Darius Mecklenberg hired us to do the job. We grabbed her on her way to school and handed her off to mercs.”
“What makes you think they were mercs?”
“Because they were mercs,” the man insisted. “They were all ex-Marines.” He nodded at Paul. “They had the comms implant scar on their necks, just like you.”
“What did they look like?”
“Older guy was in charge. Long hair that was dark but starting to go gray. Nothing much there. One of the younger guys looked like he’d taken a round to the face. Had a big puckered scar on his right cheek, not that any of us were keen on staring – he was a scary-looking bastard.”
“Long hair, huh? On a Marine? So they’ve been here a while…”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Gilbert countered. “New scars on their wrists from citizen chips.”
Those chips were almost certainly hacked, but the local systems were unable to recognize the signal from a Marine Corps IFF transponder. It was doubtful they’d bother cutting into a Marine’s brain to hack the signal if it was effectively unrecognizable here. Paul just had to find those signals in all the noise.
“How many Marines?”
“Five.”
He couldn’t connect to the data net from this region. All of the signal repeaters had been disabled by the local denizens decades ago. He’d have to run a search for his new target once he was back in the more respectable areas.
“Anything else you think might be of use?” he demanded.
“Um…” Gilbert shook his head slowly. “I don’t think so…”
Lucas was the next man, two to Gilbert’s left. Paul shot him in the head. “Focus, Gilbert. I’m running out of dirtbags here. Don’t think I won’t shoot you to make a point.”
“I swear, I don’t know…”
Sam went next, his feet rattling on the greasy carpet as his body gave up the ghost.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes!”
Paul gave it a moment’s thought. He should be able to track down a party of Marines easily enough and Gilbert and his cronies were only ever useful as a link to them.
Time to move on to the next phase.
“OK,” Paul snapped the pistol up and put three rounds into Gilbert’s forehead. He looked down at the five men who’d taken his sister’s little girl.
“We’re done here.”
Cut it Out
An alarm chimed in her helmet and Julia struggled to wake up and re-acquaint herself with the situation. This time it wasn’t a drill. Her hand-picked team had actually been relieved to hear they’d be going into combat. The endless practice runs had spawned dozens of bruises and numerous patches of chafed skin. Most of the cutting-out team had developed a love-hate relationship with their EVA suits.
Julia had led the training but her heavy Marine armor was built with long-term use in mind so she was actually quite comfortable. Seeing as she had the only HMA suit, she saw no need to let them know that. She supposed the engineer assigned to re-attach her shoulder armor might have some idea, but she’d been a little too tall for a comfortable fit when she’d tested the repaired seams.
The clouds of k-423-e slid by beneath the team, fading to a yellowish orange at the horizon. Despite the beauty of the scene, she knew those clouds were raining hot tar down on the crude oil seas below.
She turned her head to check on her team, doing a quick headcount. Each EVA suit had a close proximity beacon but she felt the old-fashioned urge to get eyeballs on her entire team. All forty-seven members were still flying in formation.
Not that they could go off course if they wanted to. They’d been launched from draglines by one of the Ava Klum’s shuttles. Once set on their trajectory, there was no changing it. Julia’s HMA suit had a limited thrust capacity but she was hoping it wouldn’t be necessary.
The plan was as simple as it was reckless. They were sending in a cutting-out team to grab the Walter Currie. Their objective was a converted fresh-goods carrier and it was based on an asteroid that followed the ship as it pushed further into Roanokan space. Brother N’Zim was already earning his keep.
The hollowed-out rock was currently orbiting the secondary moon of k-423-e, and they should have no idea that the Ava Klum and the Mary Starbuck had dropped out on the far side of the massive planet. Their sensors, calibrated to find privateers, were unlikely to tell them that a small horde of maniacs was speeding toward their forward base in nothing but EVA suits.
Those maniacs were currently getting their wake-up calls. It was a long ride from the other side of the massive carbon giant.
The moon was growing larger in her field of vision and her HUD told her she’d be coming to the rendezvous with the asteroid base in less than ten minutes. “Report by divisions,” she ordered.
She had no intention of nagging forty-seven crewmen awake; that’s what division leaders were for.
“Weapons ready.”
“Engineering ready.”
“Bridge ready.”
The responses had come immediately and she was pleased. When she’d put out the call for a cutting out expedition, hundreds of applicants had pressed their cases. She’d cut it down to the small group now surrounding her because they’d been the ones to show the greatest initiative in the shakedown training.
As custom dictated, she’d let them elect their own division le
aders and they were keen to see those leaders succeed. They tended to do what needed to be done without having to be ordered.
Knowing they’d be checking in, they had all ensured their division leaders were ready to respond instantly.
A small thing, perhaps, but Julia felt it augured well for the success of their mission. Combat operations tend to swing on the hundreds of small things that never come up in a planning session.
A flashing red icon appeared in her HUD and she activated it. Their trajectory appeared in orange and it didn’t intersect with the asteroid.
“We’re coming in too hot,” she announced calmly. She wasn’t really calm, but it was never a good idea to sound like you’re scared when you’re leading troops into combat. Projecting confidence was a learned skill, much like stripping and assembling an assault rifle.
This was why she was at the back of the dragline. She waited until her suit’s processor could crunch the numbers. It looked like they could still carry out a perfect landing if she used up ninety-seven percent of her suit’s fuel.
It wasn’t like there was a choice involved so she set the thrust ports to automatic and let her processor control the adjustment.
The two long lines of her party began to swing together as their lines were pulled back by Julia’s suit. Hands reached out to fend off suits and gear as they gently collided. Shortly after they had come together, the suit increased the retarding force for several milli-days before cutting out.
The trajectories still didn’t line up. She brought up the thruster sub-menu and saw that a final burst was scheduled to take place at the last possible moment. She supposed it made sense. Collisions between team members might require fine tuning and it wouldn’t be possible if the final burn had already taken place.
It still didn’t do much for her confidence level as their course slowly converged with the lunar orbit of the enemy base. She could make out the Walter Currie now. The former food transport was faster than most freighters due to the need to get produce to market quickly.
Continually repositioning their forward base, the enemy force was becoming notorious for their unpredictability and their lightning-fast raids on shipping lanes. The Walter Currie was a potent disruptive force on the Roanokan economy and Julia intended to seize it for her own use.
She had a full-time intelligence asset to make use of, after all. She had to do everything she could to make the best of it. Not only would three ships give her an edge against convoys, but it would also help justify her outrageously large crew hire for the Ava Klum. If this worked, she’d be transferring volunteers to the new ship, relieving the crowding on the Gray cruiser.
They’d reached that point in the approach where the target seems to grow at an almost exponential rate. It was just the mind playing tricks on itself, but it did mean their long flight was almost over.
Julia looked down at the timer for the final thrust and wondered, for the hundredth time, whether the time remaining was accurate. It really did seem a bit long to her.
She grunted suddenly as her body pressed down toward the feet of her suit. Her orientation changed slightly as the draglines drew tight again, and she could just barely see the point where the first two Avas were about to hit the surface of the two-kilometer-long asteroid.
She was pressed against the back of her suit now as the program executed the final maneuver, dragging her end of the line forward so the cutting-out team wouldn’t simply pile on top of each other.
They hit the rocky crust in rapid succession, several of them managing to get an anchor into the tough material to prevent the entire assault party rebounding back into space.
From this point onward, all signals would be by hand. She caught Grocholski’s eye and waved him on.
The engineer’s mate sketched a salute in response and led his team in a low-gravity climb across the surface to the docking clamps of the Walter Currie. Their first task was to spot-weld the clamp retainers.
You couldn’t weld the clamps themselves because they had powerful screw drives that could snap all but the most thorough welds and it was a pain to free them afterward. The clamps, however, had an Achilles’ heel in the form of the clamp retainers.
As a safety mechanism, the retainers prevented power to the screw drives when they were deployed. They relied on simple brushless motors for retraction and didn’t have the torque to break even the smallest spot-welds. A small, remotely-detonated explosive charge on each clip would be enough to free the screw drives and get the clamps working again.
The Walter Currie wasn’t going to be going anywhere until Julia decided it could.
Her weapons team, chosen to operate their prize’s weapons until a full crew could be put aboard to help them, were also selected for their proficiency in the art of boom. They spread out across the surface of the asteroid, placing demo charges on every weapon platform they could find.
The bridge team was cross-trained on the critical command stations and they’d also been run through endless drills in shipboard combat in fully closed-up EVA suits. They’d be coming with Julia to lead the assault on the ship.
She kept them on the dragline and they half climbed, half walked their way to the main docking walkway of their target. As they approached it, they were essentially looking down at the steel and armorglass tunnel and they could occasionally see an enemy stroll between ship and station.
Thankfully, none of them ever thought to look up.
When they were still a hundred meters out, she saw a suited figure start walking across the top of the walkway, using the tunnel’s own grav-field to hold him down. She looked aft to see two more figures pulling their way along the docking clamp armature. A quick look forward proved that team of engineers were also getting close to their primary objectives as well.
The figure on the bridge had stopped. Julia fought the urge to do the same as she saw two men and a woman crossing into the asteroid beneath her engineer’s feet. He had to stop so his noise wouldn’t draw their attention. She had no such need to stop and so she forced herself to continue.
She brought her team to the station end of the docking bridge and motioned for them to crouch down. She’d decided against moving them to the ship end of the bridge. It might save them a few milli-days when the assault began but the risk of discovery posed by taking fifteen people across the bridge was too great to justify it.
The engineer who did cross had worked his way down to a section of hull to the right of where the walkway joined the ship. He laid out a magnetic backed tool wrap on the outer hull of the ship next to a hatch and he secured his harness clip to one of the rings mounted on the hull.
Timing would be everything and he was the trigger that would launch the entire enterprise into action.
From her vantage point, Julia could see that his team had finished securing the docking clamps and had moved to one of the aft escape trunks. She looked back at Grocholski, hanging by the access hatch, and raised one hand.
He returned the gesture, acknowledging that his engineers were in place. Now they just had to wait for the weapons team to arrive.
An enemy officer was making his way across to the station with a coffee in his hand when he stopped and peered out at Grocholski. Fortunately, the Walter Currie’s soon-to-be chief engineer had a well-developed sense of bullshit and he simply gave the man a friendly wave before pointing at the hatch and giving a resigned what-are-you-gonna-do shrug.
The officer returned a head shake of incomprehension and Grocholski jabbed a finger at the access hatch following up with a dramatic clenching and splaying of his gloved fingers to imitate an alarm going off. For good measure, he rapped his helmet several times in the universal I’m an idiot signal.
The officer nodded in sudden comprehension and, holding up a hand to ask for a moment, set his coffee on the side railing and jogged back to the internal door controls.
Julia couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Grocholski had been caught, or at least he’d seemed to be caugh
t, but he’d managed to turn it into a tactical advantage.
The one task left, the one that would trigger the entire force into action, was for him to disable the Walter Curries docking portal. As soon as they blew the glass of the boarding walkway, the pressure drop would automatically trigger the ship’s portal to close, so the portal had to be bypassed.
The reason Grocholski had to hang there and wait was because the external override was behind an alarmed hatch. He couldn’t start until the weapons team was ready along with Julia’s bridge team before whipping open the door and trying to accomplish the override before someone on the bridge could raise the alarm and close the only way into the ship for the cutting-out team.
Now he’d convinced an enemy officer to disable the alarm from the inside panel.
She was suddenly very glad nobody bothered with uniforms out here.
The officer came back and motioned at the hatch.
Grocholski pulled on the handle and Julia held her breath.
The officer cocked an ear toward the ship end of the glazed bridge before giving Grocholski a thumbs-up. He retrieved his coffee and walked by underneath Julia and her team on his way into the station.
She turned, seeing the grins behind her. Movement drew her attention and she looked past them to see the weapons team moving her way. They’d be a few more milli-days getting into place.
At least the portal was taken care of. That had been a rare piece of good luck.
As if the thought had jinxed the operation, a large group began moving across the walkway. They had a purpose in their stride that seemed to indicate something was up.
So much for luck, the full crew was probably about to board for a raid. She’d been counting on taking her with nothing more than an anchor watch aboard.
Julia hadn’t necessarily planned on causing a lot of enemy casualties but, if it came down to a question of the enemy or her own crew, there wasn’t really a choice at all.
And the Spirians had started this war when they’d wiped out all life on Dresden. She reached over her shoulder and pulled her assault rifle free, switching the selector to the armor-piercing setting.
Beyond the Rim (Rebels and Patriots Book 2) Page 12