“Fuck,” he hissed. “Fine. Be careful. I’m pretty sure my contract says ugly things about losing senior officers!”
“I was born careful,” she promised lightly.
“I’ve met the people you date,” the Marine replied. “Stay alive, Ms. LaMonte. We’re coming in after you.”
Nodding wordlessly—for herself more than Skavar—Kelly stepped up to the hatch. She left the channel open so the security detail could trace her, but her focus was on the here and now.
The hatch should have been sealed, requiring the codes she’d got from Cobalt to open. Instead, it opened at a touch, not even properly closed.
Someone else was definitely aboard.
The lack of sound had been irrelevant before. Now it was nerve-wracking, an additional factor to edge on Kelly’s fears as she stepped through the door, looking for any sign of the intruder.
Other than the unlocked hatch, nothing was immediately obvious, and she was concerned she’d spent too much time checking in with Skavar—and then her light flicked down the hallway and over an open hatchway.
All of the hatches on the station pieces should have been locked and secured against acceleration. Red Falcon had been dragging them along at ten gravities for most of the first day, after all, and that was enough to cause serious damage if anything wasn’t secured.
Kelly made her way down the hall to the open hatch, peering through to find an empty shaft that would eventually contain an elevator. The shaft ran the entire half-kilometer length of the smelter—it was missing its car primarily so the workers fitting out the chunk of space station could use it as a walkway.
She shone her light down the shaft, trying to see if she could find some evidence of her intruder—and then received a sharp lesson in why carrying a flashlight in a dark space wasn’t necessarily the best idea.
Some instinct caused her to jerk her head back out of the elevator shaft a fraction of a moment before the first bullets smacked into where she’d been leaning out. Her engineer’s mind cataloged them as frangible rounds—not the rocket-propelled ammunition her weapon was loaded with, but regular bullets designed not to damage the hull.
“Skavar, I’m under fire,” she reported swiftly. “What’s the ETA on my backup?”
“Six, seven minutes,” the Marine replied instantly. “Fall back, wait for support.”
She watched the metal of the wall vibrate. Someone was now moving up the empty elevator shaft.
“I’m not sure that’s an option,” she told him. “Going to see if I can buy some time.”
There wasn’t much point shouting. With no atmosphere, no one could hear anyone—and if their intruders had introduced themselves by shooting at her, they clearly weren’t planning on talking.
Kelly leaned out more carefully this time, with her flashlight turned off, looking in the direction the gunfire had come from.
She couldn’t see much. A hint of movement. Maybe a glint of light. It was enough to return the favor, her MARP-15 vibrating sharply as she sent a trio of rounds back at the people who’d fired at her.
The light from the tiny rocket engines was enough for her to pick out someone in an unusually bulky vac-suit—not the armored exosuit used by Marines or hazardous-environment workers, but much thicker than the standard suit she wore—before they raised a weapon of their own and she ducked back out of the line of fire.
“So, Skavar, any idea what a suit halfway between a vac-suit and an exosuit would be?” she asked sweetly. “Any relation to why our friend wouldn’t show up on thermal scanners?”
“Cooled stealth suits,” the Marine said instantly. “They’re used for commando ops—and while not exactly secret, aren’t really public knowledge, either.”
“So, not regular saboteurs, then?”
Skavar chuckled bitterly.
“No, just expensive saboteurs,” he replied. “We’re moving in; get out of their way, XO!”
That turned out to be easier said than done. Kelly had a decent idea of at least where to start looking for their stowaway now, so she began moving back toward the control center and its attached computer core.
She needed to make sure that whoever these people were, they didn’t get into that core. Every other component of the station could be worked around or just delay the final product. If the computer core for the smelter was damaged or destroyed, the entire refinery would be disabled until a new one could be manufactured and shipped out.
The silence of vacuum betrayed her, however, and Kelly didn’t realize that the person shooting at her had been a distraction until she ran into their partner. She turned a corner and found herself with the barrel of a carbine poking directly into the chest plate of her vac-suit.
The bulky stealth suit the intruder wore concealed their face along with everything else. Kelly could see them clearly through her own transparent faceplate, but either their faceplate was one-way or they were viewing the world through cameras.
Keeping one hand on the trigger of their gun, their other hand pointed at her gun and then away. The message was clear enough and Kelly released the rocket pistol, giving a slight shove so it drifted away.
“XO, we show you stopped,” Skavar’s voice sounded in her ears. “What’s going on?”
If she said anything, her captor would see her speak and know she had an open channel. She could see that ending poorly for her as the stranger gestured for her to keep walking toward the control center.
She obeyed, her captor keeping pace with her as she moved. They wore the same kind of military-grade magnetic boots she did, carefully keeping one foot on the ground as each broke clear.
“Kelly?” Skavar sounded worried now. “Telemetry shows the channel is open but I’m not hearing anything.”
“Ambushed,” she muttered, keeping her lips as still as she could. The one word didn’t seem to catch her captor’s attention, but she couldn’t risk more.
Skavar was silent for longer than she’d expected.
“Okay, took us a second run-through of the recording to catch that,” his voice finally replied. “Listen, a fire team of Marines just boarded. They’re headed towards your position now, but if they’re wearing commando stealth suits, SmartDarts aren’t going to cut it.”
SmartDarts were the auto-calibrating taser rounds loaded into a modern stungun. They assessed their victim and delivered a carefully calculated nonlethal shock—but given the bulk of the suits she could see, the darts wouldn’t penetrate to the skin.
That meant Skavar’s people were coming in with real guns, and if they accidentally shot her, she’d be bleeding out.
In a zero-gee vacuum.
“I’m going to keep talking you through their approach,” Skavar told her. “When I give the word, I need you to shut off your mag-boots and kick off, you hear me? It’s risky,” he admitted frankly, “but less dangerous than you being in the line of fire.
“If you can hear me and understand, tap your chin against the mike.”
With a careful look at her escort, Kelly obeyed.
“Good,” the Chief of Security said with a sigh of relief. “Our guess is that these guys are corporate mercs, black hats for hire sent in by Cobalt’s competitors.
“Their main plan went out the window the moment you saw them, but these guys will have a backup plan and it could very easily involve blowing the entire cargo—and Red Falcon!—to hell.”
He paused.
“Fire team is on the same deck as you; they’re moving in your direction. How many of them are there? Tap the mike with your chin for each one.”
She was about to tap once, and then saw her escort glance back. The second intruder, the one who’d shot at her in the elevator shaft, stepped up on her other side a moment later.
She tapped the mike twice. Whoever these people were, she doubted this was going to end well.
“All right, XO, the Marines are just around the corner,” Skavar said quietly. “When I say go, go.”
Seconds ticked away in s
eeming eternities as her captors suddenly stopped, trapping her between them as they presumably carried on a conversation via encrypted channels of some kind.
Trapped as she was between the two intruders, Skavar’s original plan wasn’t going to work. If Kelly just kicked off, one of them would be able to grab her. She needed a new plan and fast.
“Okay,” the Marine breathed in her ear. “Go.”
She killed her mag-boots, pushing off into the air. The intruders turned to grab her—and she turned her mag-boots back on, locking one foot onto each captor’s chest.
It wasn’t a long-term plan. Kelly certainly wasn’t getting away with her boots magnetically locked to the intruders’ armor.
But it put said armor—and the intruders it contained—between her and Skavar’s Marines as they came around the corner. Their flashlights were invisible to the naked eye but were clearly enough for them to see everything.
And aim.
Gunfire flashed in the corridor, and locked to Kelly as they were, the intruders couldn’t twist around to return fire in time. Both jerked as bullets struck home, then went limp.
With a sick feeling, Kelly released her mag-boots and launched off the intruders back toward the floor—carefully ignoring the globules of blood slowly starting to be pumped out into the corridor.
8
“Corporal Spiros,” the senior of the three Marines introduced herself immediately as she linked into Kelly’s channel. “Are you okay, XO?”
Kelly didn’t know Sylvana Spiros well—she’d really only had the chance to get to know Skavar and the squad leaders—but right now, she was ecstatic to see any of Red Falcon’s security detail.
“I’m fine,” she said shortly. “Anyone else coming?”
“I just boarded,” Skavar told her briskly over the radio. “With the rest of First Squad. Anyone want to place bets on whether there were only two?”
“Not a chance,” Kelly replied sharply. “I want this segment swept from top to bottom, Chief Skavar.”
“I agree,” he said. “I don’t think that the XO needs to be here while we do that, though.”
“How well do you know the layout of a refinery smelter core?” she asked.
He coughed.
“Not well,” he admitted. “You?”
“I studied the specifications and have them loaded in my wrist-comp,” she told him. “Which, given where I ran into our commando-outfitted friends, means I think I know where they were hiding.”
“Okay,” the Security Chief replied as he came around the corner, the now-visible flashlights from the half-dozen Marines with him lighting up the corridor as bright as daylight, “that’s a legit reason to stick around.
“Behind the guys and gals in exosuits, you read me?”
“I read you, Ivan,” she admitted. Technically, she could give him orders. In reality, Skavar could spare the single exosuited Marine it would take to haul Red Falcon’s vac-suited-but-petite executive officer back into their ship.
“Good.” The Marine was probably nodding, but there was no way to tell through the ceramic helmet of Skavar’s exosuit armor. He crossed to the two dead intruders hanging in the strangely limp way only the dead or unconscious in mag-boots could.
One armored finger poked at the closer one, causing the body to twist and spurt out several more globules of blood. Kelly swallowed her gorge, trying to focus on the armor.
She’d directly or indirectly killed several hundred people who’d been chasing her crew over the last few years, but this was the first time she’d seen someone die right in front of her.
“Not Marine-issue,” Skavar said absently. “Same tech, though. Either someone saw them in action and copied the idea, or Corps Logistics needs to have some long talks with their suppliers.
“Wouldn’t last forever, though,” he continued. “They need to recharge coolant every twenty-four hours, tops. They couldn’t rely on knowing when we’d be sweeping.”
“I figured,” Kelly pointed out, looking away from the bodies. “The core has a water reserve tank near the bottom. It’s supposed to be empty, but it’s double-walled and could have been partially filled without us noticing the mass.”
“That would definitely work,” he agreed. “All right, XO, point the way. From behind the armor.”
The repetition wasn’t necessary. Kelly had no desire to get shot at anymore today.
The passage down the elevator shaft went smoothly enough, the Marines sweeping the path ahead of Kelly and Skavar as they moved toward the theoretical “bottom” of the station segment.
“Scans aren’t showing anything,” Spiros reported. “Are we sure there’s anything down here?”
“The scans weren’t showing anything before, either,” Kelly told her. “Whoever these jackasses are, they’ve done a good job of hiding from us so far. I’m guessing they weren’t planning to be caught at all.”
“Which means they probably have an escape ship,” the Marine reminded them. “And that would mean…”
The realization that the boarders had to have at least one Mage came about half a second too late, light flickering up and down the corridor as magical lightning flared to life.
“Back, back!” Skavar snapped. “Counter-Mage protocols; locate the target!”
Gunfire added to the chaos now. Kelly couldn’t tell how many shooters were backing up the Mage—but she quickly realized that their attackers had badly underestimated Red Falcon’s security detachment.
A trained Combat Mage could burn through exosuits and take down even prepared and ready Marines in the heavy battle armor. But that was an entirely different level of training and power than most Mages had access to, and the Jump Mage down the hall was no Combat Mage.
The Marines were shaken and shocked but uninjured—and the enemy gunfire was mostly frangible rounds that shattered on their armor.
“Move up,” Skavar ordered, reversing his order of a minute before. “Before they go for bigger guns!”
Kelly was going to suggest they try to take prisoners, but shut herself up before she started giving unnecessary advice. Ivan Skavar knew his job better than she did.
What she knew was starships and space stations, which meant she had the schematics and could find another way around the boarders’ position—especially as they rapidly demonstrated that, yes, they did have at least one gun capable of punching through exosuits.
“Akkerman is wounded,” Spiros barked, yanking her subordinate back and out of the immediate line of fire. “Suit sealed around it, but they’ve got at least one man-portable penetrator rifle.”
“And they’ve fallen back into the halls and the Mage knows what they’re dealing with now,” Skavar agreed grimly. “One way in and I guarantee the buggers have set the penetrator up to cover it.”
“One way into that level from this elevator shaft,” Kelly interjected. “There’s a way around, should let us drop onto that level near the access to the water tanks.”
“Not bad, XO,” Skavar replied. “Spiros—keep Chau, Reyes and Smith, cover Akkerman and keep the pressure up.
“Everyone else, come with me. We’re following the XO.”
“All right,” Kelly agreed with a sharp sigh. “But what about their ship?”
“What about it?”
“Get our pilots out looking for it,” she told him. “It can’t be big or we’d have noticed it being attached to the station segments in port, so your assault shuttles should be able to cripple it—and if we know where it’s coming from, Jeeves can shoot it down if they try and run.”
“And if we know where it is, we can make sure they can’t run,” Skavar said with satisfaction. “Prisoners would be nice. This headache will be much more worth it if we can hang it around the neck of the pricks who hired this lot.”
Levering open the doors to the level three floors up from where the boarders had dug in proved harder than expected. The hatch Kelly had first found had already been opened, and she’d presumed her access codes from
Cobalt would work.
They didn’t. The elevator, it turned out, wasn’t hooked into the reserve battery power that had been put in for the surveys. Fortunately, she had Marines in exosuits who were able to take care of that, but she now understood why the earlier access had been left open.
There was no way to close the hatch behind them.
“All right, people, this is Bravo Flight Leader,” Mike Kelzin’s voice cut into the channel. “We’ve got three of these bad girls out in the air, and we are beginning our sweep of the smelter. Any thoughts as to where they may have attached their ship?”
Of course Kelly’s boyfriend had decided to take one of the assault shuttles out himself. She was suddenly glad that they hadn’t asked for Mage support—her girlfriend was about as capable of staying out of trouble as her boyfriend.
Or, well, herself.
“I’m guessing they’ve set themselves up around the base where they could hide themselves,” she told Kelzin. “The ship will be docked close to the water reserve tanks, probably covered with some kind of camo fabric to make it blend in to all but the closest scans.”
She considered for a moment.
“Run both infrared and radar scans in parallel,” she ordered. “If they’ve done it well—and I see no reason to think they haven’t based off everything else they’ve pulled so far—it’ll look perfectly normal to both…but you’ll inevitably have some discrepancy between them.
“Not enough to show up normally, but…”
“But enough for us to pick it out since we’re looking for it,” Kelzin replied instantly. “Especially with three scan sources. Swinging down—and if they try to run for it, we’ll stop them.
“I promise.”
“Thank you,” Kelly replied softly, then turned to point the Marines towards a hatch covering an emergency ladder. That, at least, was hooked up to the reserve power and opened to her codes.
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