Endless Advance: Age of Expansion - A Kurtherian Gambit Series (Uprise Saga Book 2)

by Amy DuBoff

  “Get your asses over here,” Ava told her team.

  Using her technique, the three other FDG warriors slipped past the guards.

  Edwin chuckled into the comm. “Poor bastards won’t know what to do when they can’t find us.”

  “Let’s not get cocky. This is far from over.” Ava jogged down the corridor along the course Nick had indicated on the map.

  They saw no other people in the halls on the rest of the way to the communications room, but Ava suspected others must be close.

  Outside the communication room itself, Ava used the sensors on her suit to look through the wall. “Two occupants,” she told her team.

  “Sonic blast may mess with the equipment,” Samantha cautioned.

  “Then we lure them out.” Ava beckoned for Nick to crack the security lock on the door.

  “What’s your plan?” Samantha asked while her colleague worked.

  “Stealth tech is great and all, but sometimes to get results, you need to do things the old-fashioned way. Follow my lead.” Ava smiled, even though her team couldn’t see it.

  As soon as the door lock clicked open, Ava stomped her booted foot against the door. It flew open. She deactivated the stealth on her armor and pointed her gun through the door. “On the ground!” she demanded over the external comm.

  The two occupants dropped to their knees and then lay down, their hands up in the air in front of them.

  “See? Easy,” Ava said on the private comm channel.

  Edwin and Nick grabbed the two techs by their wrists and dragged them into the hall. As soon as they were clear from the sensitive equipment, Edwin hit the techs with a sonic blast to knock them out.

  “I have to say, I really love these guns.” Edwin said.

  Samantha patted him on the shoulder. “Oh, and you handle it so well.”

  Edwin cocked his head. “That sounded dirty.”

  “Did it? You must be desperate for some attention.” Samantha sauntered back into the communication room.

  Ava sent her a private high-five over her HUD.

  Edwin grabbed the two techs and dragged them back inside the room, closing the door behind him.

  “Stealth back on,” Ava told her team. She adjusted her suit settings, and the others did the same. “I’ll contact the Raven to let them know what’s going on.”

  Nick and Samantha immediately got to work hacking into the system.

  Ava opened up a secure connection to their ship using the suit’s comms. She filled the captain of the Raven in on the arrival so he could keep FDG command apprised of the situation.

  “Can’t say I’m surprised,” he replied when she was finished.

  “Me either, but we’ll adapt. Given that, Leon and the Alucian ship should probably get out of here,” Ava advised.

  The Raven’s captain nodded. “I’ll pass on the message. Be careful down there.”

  “Talk to you soon.”

  Ava terminated the connection. She watched over Nick and Samantha’s shoulders while Edwin kept guard.

  “We’re in,” Nick reported after two minutes.

  “Wow, this is really segmented,” Samantha observed while she browsed through the database. “Either they have a lot of dealings with public infrastructure projects that never get constructed, or there’s some sort of code at play. It looks like there’s a public-facing part of the government, and then… whatever this is.” She pointed at the screen.

  “I was thinking the same thing,” Nick agreed. “There’s clearly a part of the database that’s used for real administration, and then another part that’s likely related to the work the Nezarans are doing for their alien overlords.”

  “And you say I’m the one with the flare for the dramatic,” Edwin commented from next to the door.

  “The alien overlords are more real than I’d like,” Ava interjected.

  “Holy shit, yeah, they are!” Nick exclaimed. “Take a look at this.”

  Ava read over the text he was pointing to on the screen. “Is that a record of NTech’s research projects?”

  “Yeah, it is. And half of these projects are using tech that seems to have mysteriously appeared,” the warrior explained. “Whatever is going on here, Ava, it’s definitely beyond just NTech and the chancellor. The entire government is in on it.”

  So much for taking out the chancellor and single-handedly eliminating the threat to this system. Ava took a slow breath. “Okay, so how do we determine which members of the government are involved and who’s doing the normal business around here?”

  “Can we assume there’s a distinction?” Samantha asked.

  “Maybe we can’t,” Ava realized. “I mean, Karen didn’t know anything was amiss when she was working here.”

  “So, maybe all of the administration is being controlled by the aliens, but that doesn’t mean that everyone performing those tasks knows what they’re doing,” Nick said. “If no one knows any better, anything could be made to look legitimate.”

  “We’ll need to vet everyone after this is over,” Ava agreed. “Only a test to look for the TR Luke identified will reveal who’s been completely subverted.”

  “Willing collaborators may be worse,” Samantha grumbled.

  “I can’t disagree with that. But I think anyone who’s gone along that willingly, knowing what they’re doing, will be easy to spot,” Ava told her.

  “Speaking of collaborators…” Nick interjected. “I think I found out what happened to Karen, but you’re not going to like it.”

  “Oh, shit.” Samantha slouched in her chair.

  Ava looked at Nick’s terminal. Displayed on the monitor was footage of a woman a few years older than Ava strapped to a chair in a concrete-walled room. “Fucking great. Looks like Karen got herself found out and caught.”

  “They must have realized she had defected for good,” Samantha murmured.

  “Of course, they did!” Ava groaned. “It was idiotic of her to think she could fool them.”

  “What do we do?” Nick asked.

  Ava took a slow breath. “First, we go for Karen. Then the chancellor will have some explaining to do.”

  * * *

  The room was dark and surprisingly cold. Karen’s thoughts were fuzzy, but she knew she was still on Nezar. I must be somewhere… underground?

  “Ah, you’re awake.” A female voice pierced the darkness.

  “Chancellor?” Karen questioned, trying to see who’d spoken.

  “I have to give you credit for trying,” the voice continued. It was decidedly female, but there was a quality to the voice that didn’t come across as quite human to Karen’s ear. Whether it was the adrenaline clouding her judgment or something much more deeply rooted, Karen had the distinct impression that her captor was not the woman with whom she’d spoken only hours before.

  “What did you think you would accomplish here?” the voice asked.

  “If you want me to share my secrets, then at least show your face,” Karen shot back.

  “Such vigor! It’s a shame you weren’t willing to work with us. You could have been such an asset.”

  “Is that all you have to say?” Karen flexed her hands, realizing they were bound behind her back.

  “I won’t ask you again. Why are you here?”

  The question was as much in Karen’s mind as she heard it spoken allowed. It bored into her, demanding a response. She tried to fight it, but the compulsion was too strong to resist.

  “I’m—I’m here to learn,” she stammered.

  “Learn what?” the voice snarled in her mind and out loud.

  “What you are doing here. So we can stop you.”

  The voice chuckled. “Of course, you are. The foolish always think we can be stopped, but you never know where to look.”

  Karen strained against her restraints in her chair. “If others keep coming for you, I’d think you’d eventually take the hint.”

  “You really are more spirited than most. Or very stupid. If you truly underst
ood who I am, you’d never speak to me in that tone.”

  “Then tell me!” Karen glared into the darkness.

  Finally, a light faded on in front of her. The chancellor stepped forward.

  “You shouldn’t meddle in what you don’t understand.”

  Karen glared into the woman’s green eyes. “If you think I have so much potential, then try me. Maybe I’ll see it your way if I understand.”

  The woman stared back. Karen could feel her assessing her mind. “No, you’ve already decided. There’s no swaying you.”

  “Then just kill me.”

  “Oh, Karen, no.” The chancellor took two more steps forward. “Don’t you get it? You’re still a Coraxan. The rest of you don’t have nearly the potential of the Readers, but you’ll do just fine.”

  Cold realization closed in around Karen. “You want to turn me into one of those… Hochste.”

  “At least you’re trainable, I’ll give you that.” The chancellor stepped forward until she was only fifty centimeters in front of Karen. She extended her hand and ran her index finger down Karen’s face. “I hope you can also learn to be patient.”

  They’ll come for me soon. I can get out of this. Karen tried to keep her thoughts to herself.

  A smile touched the chancellor’s lips. “Yes, they’re already here. But no, Karen, there will be no escape for you. We’ve been expecting your friends. It’s what we counted on.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Ava couldn’t shake the feeling that her team was being watched. “These hallways are too empty,” she said into her comm.

  “It is the end of working hours,” Samantha replied. “But yeah, I know what you mean.”

  They had made it out of the wing where they’d initially entered the building and were now traversing a hallway on the ground level that would lead them to a stairwell. The chancellor’s administrative chambers were on the second story, but the maps indicated an underground facility centered below.

  According to the information Karen had passed along, the meeting with the Sovereign would take place in an underground conference space. However, considering that Karen was now strapped to a chair, and Ava’s team had been welcomed by armed guards, everything they thought they knew going into the op was clearly bad intel.

  Ava had to trust her instincts, and those told her to check the chancellor’s office. This is probably the very trap they want us to walk into, but these aliens are also cocky bastards. The chancellor will want to witness our supposed defeat herself, and that’s when we’ll get her.

  Four warriors against an unknown number of Nezaran soldiers would make for difficult odds. However, Ava was confident in her team’s superior tech and training.

  “Shit!” Nick froze behind her.

  A second later, Ava noticed the issue. The stairwell they were headed for wasn’t a closed stairwell the way it had looked on the map—it was actually an open lobby, and it was filled with people.

  “Ah, fuck.” She evaluated the lobby on her HUD, expanding the view to see the upper level. It appeared that the people on the ground level were office workers getting ready to leave for the day, while there were at least two armed guards posted outside a sealed door upstairs, which led to the chancellor’s chambers.

  “Your orders, ma’am?” Edwin prompted.

  Ava weighed the options. “We need to get upstairs. The guards are almost certainly looking for us, but I doubt all of these workers are in on it. With the stealth suits, we should be able to slip right through the crowd and walk up the stairs.”

  “That’s… a little crazy,” Nick replied.

  “Hiding in plain sight, right?” Ava said. She wasn’t sure she believed it, but they didn’t have a lot of options. If nothing else, it was unlikely the Nezaran soldiers would open fire in a crowded room. At least, she hoped they wouldn’t.

  Samantha shifted on her feet. “Maybe there’s a back way?”

  “No, there isn’t,” Nick admitted. “I don’t like this plan, either, but this is our only way up there.”

  “Problem with one way up is there’s only one way back,” Edwin chimed in. “The chancellor might not even be up there.”

  Ava nodded. “You’re right. It’s a worthwhile risk if we know we can get to our target, but we don’t. Is there any way we can determine the chancellor’s position before making a move?”

  “That really depends on the computer system,” Nick replied. “If they were expecting us, all of the information we’re seeing may be fabricated to tell us what we want to see.”

  “There has to be something that can’t be faked,” Ava insisted.

  Samantha tilted her head. “Well, there may be.”

  Ava turned to her. “What do you have in mind?”

  “We can trust the sensors on our suits. We’d have to compare those readings with what we observe on the central computer system,” Samantha explained. “Of course, we’d need a significant boost to see through that many layers of concrete.”

  “I see where you’re going with this,” Nick mused. “I have an idea.”

  “I’m all ears,” Ava said.

  “I think I can patch my suit into the facility’s internal security system. Based on what I saw in the communications room earlier, the security authentications aren’t very sophisticated. We can use the facility’s sensors to collect data, and the suit will reconcile the inputs.”

  Samantha nodded. “Yes, that could work. Reports can easily be doctored, but the sensory processor in our suits can tease out what’s real.”

  “And how does that get us Heizberg?” Ava asked.

  “Oh, you’re forgetting how good I am,” Nick replied. “Once we narrow down where she might be, we just look at the video feeds until we see her.”

  “And if there aren’t video cameras in that room?”

  “There will at least be a computer or desktop with an integrated camera we can activate remotely. If there isn’t, then we scan for audio and locate her voice signature.”

  Ava nodded. “Okay, try it.” She followed Nick back in the direction they’d come. “If this doesn’t work, we’re going to have to shoot our way in.”

  “When have I ever led you astray?” Nick grinned back at her through his helmet.

  The warrior did have an exceptional record of quick thinking and creative solutions. At present, Ava was far more inclined to trust him than herself, even if the plan did sound a little crazy.

  Nick led them to a private office he’d spotted on the map, which was equipped with a terminal that offered direct access into the security system, likely belonging to a security officer. Getting past the firewall would take some work, but that wouldn’t be a problem for the tech-savvy warrior.

  “Give me a few minutes,” Nick said as he got settled in at the workstation. He began pairing his suit with the console in anticipation of the sensor integration.

  Ava kept an eye on her HUD while she waited. It still didn’t seem right that there had only been guards at the entrance and they hadn’t seen others since. Moreover, the stun effect of the sonic blasts would have worn off minutes before, yet there had been no general alarm. “What the fuck is going on here?” she muttered to no one in particular.

  “Is there anything Nezar offers over other worlds?” Samantha asked.

  “This planet’s resources are a bigger topic than what’s happening in this facility,” Ava countered.

  “Maybe not,” the warrior continued. “If the aliens made a point of placing people in key positions of power within the government, maybe it was for some other end.”

  Ava considered the statement. “For the sake of argument, yes, Coraxa or Alucia are far more habitable worlds. Nezar is different in two ways—its people, and the amount of metals in its soil.”

  “What do you mean about the people?” Edwin asked.

  “The culture here,” Ava continued. “It’s more… aggressive than the other worlds in this system.”

  “Just like the neural chemistry in Kurtz
and Jared,” Samantha completed for her.

  “When I was inside Kurtz’s mind, I sensed Nox’s hunger. I didn’t know for what at the time, but I’m beginning to think the aliens feed on—this is going to sound weird—negative energy.”

  “It does sound a little weird,” Samantha agreed, “but too many observations are stacking up at this point. So, couple a chronically bitter population with an abundance of metals and that sounds like evil aliens ramping up their forces.”

  “Come to think of it, all those coded logs did point at much higher mining activities than would be needed for a population this size,” Nick interjected without looking up from his work at the desk.

  “Mining Nezar and manipulating its people, but for what end?” Ava questioned.

  “Expansion or war, most likely,” Edwin speculated.

  All the pieces began falling into place in Ava’s head. “The Gidyon System is close enough that it wouldn’t take too much effort to transfer materials from Nezar to there. So, this is just an outpost.”

  Samantha crossed her arms. “Great, so taking out Heizberg won’t even get us the real bad guys.”

  “Not necessarily. She’ll likely have all the information we need to locate who she’s working with,” Ava said. “I never thought this would end with her.”

  “Good,” Nick cut in, “because she’s not alone.”

  “You located Heizberg?” Ava rushed over to look at the monitor on the desk.

  Nick pointed to several dots on the map, displaying the data that had been filtered through his suit’s sensors. “She is up on the second level, but not exactly where we were headed. This section is walled off from the rest of the building and appears to have direct access to the underground levels.”

  Ava studied the map. “Is that a doorway from the chancellor’s chambers?” She indicated a break in the fortified wall.

  “I think so,” Nick replied. “If we go in that way, we’ll need to pass by two sets of guards. I suggest we go down and come up through here.” He traced a path with his index finger along the screen.

  “The way in isn’t too far from here,” Ava observed.