Frontline sf-4

by Randolph Lalonde

  Ayan started jogging, taking point. Everyone followed her, keeping up with her brisk pace. “If it weren't for the war and all the running, I'd actually be enjoying this. I've never seen anything like this field up close before, it would be nice to stop and taste the sugar cane.”

  “You have a point. We'll have to find an interesting place or two to visit when we're clear of this,” Minh agreed. “I've been in space my whole life and feel like I haven't really seen anything.”

  “There was Zingara, now that was an impressive space station,” Oz said.

  “Interesting place if you happen to be a geologist, maybe. It's really nothing but a big rock,” Jason replied.

  “A big rock with three pongo ball teams and more entertainment than you can take in. Hell, you could spend two years there and not see everything once.”

  “Who would want to? You can get a holo with all the best stuff and move on to a luxury port like Argyle where there's a blue sky and great big forests. We were snow boarding in the morning and sunning in the afternoon.”

  “So you and Laura had a good honeymoon?” Ayan asked.

  Jason was reminded of Ayan's rebirth, he had forgotten that she had no memory of anything after his wedding. He didn't pause long, however. “Once we got used to the gravity, it was only point eight five of standard.”

  “Oh man that had to be fun. I've seen grav-boarding footage in low gravity, I couldn't imagine what doing it with nothing more than a flat board on snow would be like.”

  “Cold. It was really, really cold,” Jason replied.

  “Still, I'd have to give it a try.”

  They were across the empty space surrounding the space port and running alongside the tall, transparesteel wall. The windows had been blacked out. As the first sign of the west entrance to the port started coming into sight silence settled over the group.

  Instead of reaching out with entrance ramps, transportation terminals and vendor booths, there was a completely clear space outside of the port, continuing the two hundred meter wide paved ring around the structure. The doors hung open and slack, bent and burned by combat.

  “Why is there so much empty space here?” asked Minh.

  “Security. The flatter, more featureless an area is around a land based building the easier it is to scan and control. I wouldn't be surprised if there are automated guns mounted somewhere that can pick off anything that sets foot here.”

  “Oh, that's reassuring. Still, shouldn't there at least be a few vehicles around? I see dents and impact marks in the surfacing.”

  “You're right, it's like they removed everything to make it harder to approach without being noticed, like whoever is holding out in there is getting ready for a siege. At least our cloaksuits are doing their jobs, it doesn't look like we've been spotted.”

  “I'm still not going to stand still if I can help it. Suddenly I feel like a duck in a shooting gallery.”

  “Okay, decision time. We either go through and try to help any resistance inside or go around and try to get to one of the express tubes that run underground,” Ayan said as the bank of doors drew nearer.

  “I vote we lend a hand,” offered Minh.

  “I agree,” said Oz.

  “That's if we can find them, it's huge in there, something like ninety levels, we might not be able to get to them in time,” Jason said calmly.

  “But what would you rather do?”

  “If there's friendly life in there I'd rather help. Besides, there should be a lot of transit tube access points in the station.”

  “Good, then we're going in,” Ayan said with finality.

  The signs of a firefight and the indiscriminate murder of thousands inside the main lobby were impossible to ignore. A hole had been blown in the center of the polished granite floor, there were scorch marks along the scroll worked light red and blue walls and the main lift shaft was blocked off by a brutally crushed air vehicle. In every corner, across every wall and coating the floor was smeared and strewn all manner of biological remains, evidence that the Holocaust Virus had hit suddenly, and no one had time to run from the automated security. To the relief of the foursome the bodies had been removed so there were no faces in the widespread gore.

  Minh took their attention off the scene, walking towards the crashed air car. “Whoever flew that thing in had to be an ace, it would have barely fit through the doors,” Minh mentioned as they paused near the wreckage. “Guess we're not taking any elevators in this section.”

  “Guess not. The control panels here are either fried or offline,” Jason said as he looked at one of the primary consoles in a long island in the center of the lobby, it stretched from the main doors almost all the way back to the interior windows overlooking the large docking and landing sections at the station's center. “No corpses, I wonder what happened to them?”

  “Maybe the survivors had a chance to take care of the dead?” Asked Ayan.

  “We can hope, but it makes more sense that someone was getting the port ready for use again.” Oz trailed off.

  “I know, just trying to be optimistic. Let's start looking for whoever's fighting those soldiers. Regent Galactic doesn't seem to care much about securing this entrance at the moment, so I'm guessing we won't find anything here.” Ayan and Oz took point with Jason and Minh behind.

  They kept a quick pace. Everyone felt exposed crossing open areas made to accommodate thousands of travellers at a time. There were empty outer security stations, where guards were given a place to screen and run detailed scans on people coming and going, gift shop stands with cheap electronic entertainment pieces, jewellery, stuffed toys, miniatures of various ships, landmarks and many other mementos all on display, deactivated and waiting to be purchased, brought to synthetic life.

  Minh brushed his shoulder against a candy cart loaded down with packaged candy cane and other sugary treats. “Sorry!” he whispered reflexively.

  “Watch your step, our cloaksuits can't cover up that much noise or interference with our surroundings,” Jason reminded him, looking at the slight disturbance Minh had left behind.

  The toys in the booth just to their right all turned their heads and stared at the disturbance. “Could that be creepier?” Minh muttered. “This virus has gotten into everything.”

  “Yeah, but toys don't turn themselves on. Something activated them,” Ayan said quietly. “They might be sending something this way to check it out right now.”

  “This doesn't add up. If those toys are active that means that someone or something is taking advantage of them, using them as lookouts, maybe even sentries but the scanners in this section should have run a few hundred passes over the whole place,” Jason said, looking around as he reviewed his own sensor data.

  “You're right. Ports like this have aggressive scanning tech everywhere, especially right behind the front door but there's no active electromagnetic activity here except for the lighting and a bunch of trinkets. Something or someone shut the security down from inside,” Ayan agreed.

  “Way inside. That kind of control can only be assumed from primary security sections and if I designed this station I would have put it much deeper inside the structure. Anyone who tried to fight their way in from the outside would be committing suicide.”

  “What about people in cloaksuits?” Minh asked as they continued through the cavernous pedestrian reception lobby. “Or people coming in from the subways?” He continued, nodding at a ramp leading down towards a tram, it was strange seeing such an entry way empty, silent.

  “Our cloaking systems have a good chance at working against those kinds of scanners, but they're not perfect. If this port has anything that can measure micro gravity, then those sentry guns would have started firing the moment we got to the top of the stairs,” Ayan said.

  “Ah, guess it's good you didn't let me in on that detail before we strolled inside. I'm still going to blame you if I start turning grey before my time.” Minh replied quietly.

  They approached the main
interior observation window and stopped to look inside. The low lit yawning pit was several kilometres across and beneath them were retractable landing platforms, heavy grappler arms and wide docking bay doorways for as far as they could see. Two storeys above their level were dozens of collapsible lift tubes, made to extend to the smaller starliners and other public transit vessels as they stopped above to take on or drop off passengers. There were many observation areas as well, thick transparesteel windows that overlooked the normally bustling innards of the space port. As they looked on it was like seeing it frozen in time. Some ships were half docked, still in the grip of heavy grapplers, while others were still linked to boarding tunnels. One hung precariously over the side of a landing platform, held up by nothing but umbilical cables. Several of the vessels had been broken into or out of, their passengers either killed or free to roam the massive interior of the spaceport.

  “Wow, I've never seen anything like it,” Minh said.

  “Pretty cramped design up top.” Ayan commented. “I'd hate to direct traffic for this place.”

  “I'm assuming only high priority transports get to use the upper linkage points, there's no way that could service all the starliners that come through the system,” Jason said as he closely watched the landing platforms for any movement at all. “If there are any resistance fighters they're hiding as well as we are.”

  “I see three dropships down there on a southern platform, three levels down,” Oz pointed.

  “Looks like someone put the boots on them. They're locked down,” Minh added. “Maybe the resistance actually got control of the port control systems?”

  “That would be encouraging, but if that's the case why didn't they manage to get to the transmission bunker we just busted?” Oz asked.

  “Movement!” Ayan interrupted. She highlighted it on the secondary display shared on their visors.

  They all looked on at the aftermath of a small explosion and saw over twenty fully armoured Regent Galactic soldiers pull back, pressed onto a large, half extended landing platform with an older forty meter long, boxy general purpose starship. They hid behind the landing struts and several large crates as one of their number was picked apart by several blue bolts of weapon fire. At the same time over thirty Regent Galactic soldiers came into view through a transparesteel window, they were moving down a hallway towards the ramp leading to the platform, obviously coming to the rescue of their comrades.

  “Quick, map the easiest way down there. If we hit them from behind it'll give whoever's firing on those soldiers a better chance,” Ayan said as she unslung her rifle.

  “On it, this way,” Jason replied as he started running to the left.

  They kept the same pace as they did when they were outside, though it seemed they were moving much more swiftly as the lightly gilded walls and hard granite floor passed by. Jason led them down two broad ramps and through several heavy bulkhead doors, the last of which was jammed half closed.

  The firefight was in full swing as the first of the enemy came into view. From the cover of desks and counters, upturned heavy work tables and tool chests four squads of Regent Galactic soldiers, all marked with a green tree with three branches on their shoulders tried their best to keep whoever was just around the bend in the broad main corridor at bay.

  “Position behind, looks like their armour is sealed so we won't have any luck with stun weaponry,” Oz said as the four of them spread out several meters behind the soldiers. It was easy to pick out the commander, he was at the rear with two other officers who were feverishly working at a terminal built into the wall with the assistance of a computing unit they had wired in through a busted panel.

  “You're right. Looks like we'll have to use lethal force here, don't use your rifles unless you have to. Jason, what do you think they're trying to do here?” Ayan asked as she stopped to stand three meters behind the commanding officer, pointing her rifle at him and activating her black nanoblade with her free hand.

  “Looks like there's some kind of software creating encryption layers as they break through. I can't see how they'll ever hack in.”

  “Does the Holocaust Virus do that?”

  “Not that I've seen. It's only as smart as the artificial intelligences that it corrupts, so who knows. Maybe the virus got lucky and infected something with an encryption speciality.” Jason stood at the ready behind two soldiers who had ducked behind a thick desk.

  As the firefight continued Oz and Minh crept into the group of soldiers so they were standing behind troops closer to the center of the large reception area. As they crouched low to avoid being shot, Minh raised his hand and looked through the digital eye built into the middle knuckle, a feature he hadn't used since the All-Con War. “What the hell?” he exclaimed in a whisper. “Did you see that Oz?”

  “Yup, that was an andie, stepped right out, took a shot to the shoulder but managed to gun down two Regent soldiers before it stepped back behind cover. Something's got that thing working on the right side.”

  “Are you sure? We don't want to kill these soldiers without being sure they're not somehow working to free this world,” Ayan questioned emphatically.

  “Do we really want to wait? These soldiers are marked with Regent Galactic emblems and the tree marking on their shoulder, that's West Watch. There's no question, these soldiers aren't on our side,” Oz replied.

  Minh kept watching and after several moments saw an unarmoured human face, she looked nothing like the android police force that had, until then, been seen in control of the the virus infected machines they'd encountered on the planet. “I'm with Oz, I think I just saw a real resistance fighter.”

  “Jason?” Ayan asked.

  “I'll go with your call on this but my gut is telling me we should cut the Regent boys down.”

  Ayan watched the lead officer carefully. She couldn't hear what he was saying, they were speaking over a private encrypted channel. His armour, with it's thickened under layer and dark grey plating was exactly what she'd seen of Regent Galactic while looking over recordings of fighting on Mount Elbrus. His gear was top notch, high end military equipment and from the looks of his soldiers they had had at least a few weeks training. She nodded to herself; “Go for the neck, it's the thinnest part of their armour. On three. One, two, three.” With a swing of her arm and a flick of her wrist the blade passed over his armour, cutting his neck half through, leaving a microscopic army of nanobots to finish the cut and leap back to her nanoblade.

  She moved on to the nearest officer, cutting below his neck, into his shoulder instead. Her quarry spun on her heel, one hand going up to cover the growing wound as she looked for her invisible assailant.

  Ayan's blade moved on to the last of the trio she stood behind, using her shortened blade to cut his head cleanly from his shoulders. She looked to where Oz, Minh and Jason were at their own grisly work in time to see Minh running towards her as Oz felled a fourth target. “Drop a grenade on your way out!” he told Oz as he took up a position beside Ayan.

  “Frag grenade!” Oz called as he pulled one from inside his long coat and dropped it behind a crate, running as fast as he could towards the inner entrance to the reception area. Ayan, Minh, Jason and Oz at the rear ran back the way they came and ducked behind the corner.

  The silence begged a question; “How long did you set the fuse for?” Ayan asked.

  An explosion that shook the wall and floor was her answer.

  “Eight seconds. The soldiers at the front were starting to turn towards the rear, they should have been right on top of it by the time it went off,” Oz replied.

  The four of them peeked back around the corner and saw that the timing of the explosion was indeed perfect. Only five soldiers remained and they were already putting their rifles down, raising their hands in surrender.

  Two damaged security androids stepped out from the other end of the hall and slowly walked towards the reception desk. “Take off your helmets!” called a voice from behind them, loud enough
to be heard over the more distant gunfire.

  The West Keeper soldiers complied, removing their bulky Regent Galactic helmets with some hesitation. In true military form the andies fired stun rounds at all of them, knocking them out completely.

  “Anyone remember to bring a white flag?” Minh asked with a snicker.

  “We can detect you. If you disengage your obfuscation devices you will not be harmed,” said the nearest android in a low, authoritative tone.

  “What are we doing here Ayan?” Jason asked.

  “We shut down cloaking, set our suits to combat armour mode and bring up personal shielding, do you agree Oz?”

  “That'll do,” Oz answered. “Looks like we're joining the real fight one way or another.”

  The four of them did exactly as Ayan had indicated and were visible to the naked eye, wearing black vacsuits that thickened in sections, protecting all the critical areas from attacks. Each of them had a glistening sheen thanks to the molecule thin energy shield that came online as soon as their cloaking systems disengaged.

  “Your advanced cloaking systems will be ineffective here. The soldiers have come with sensor suites and pulse generators. Now that they have lost people to stealth units they will ensure their advanced detection systems are always active. I recommend you activate your thermal and audio dampeners, those will assist you effectively while you're out of their immediate line of fire.” Said the blonde woman in a powder blue Far Track Spacelanes customer service uniform. “I'm Ariel, one of Dementia's resistance fighters,” she grinned broadly, mechanically.

  “I'm Ayan, with me are Oz, Minh and Jason, we're from Freeground, a space station far from here,” Ayan said as she allowed her faceplate to disappear. The protective mass of the dense plate shifted and changed so it extended her headpiece into a deep hood. The micro projectors built into it were invisibly re-mounted so any important data could be displayed in front of her field of view, including extra peripheral vision and a view of what was behind her.