***
A chartered freighter takes Illuria away the next afternoon. You watch from your room. Staying well away from the window. Its thrusters fire as the repulsors lift the well-cut craft off the landing platform, and then it’s speeding off toward the sun, and some jump to one of the core worlds for unlimited shopping. Nothing’s too much for the great man’s concubine.
Illuria will get your message through.
Now that you know where the rendezvous is going down.
You know now.
You’ve given her an actual handwritten message and a dead drop on the RepubNet to get it through to. Any hotel concierge will be able to accomplish that for such a pretty woman. Even without the pheromones.
“Is there anything else we can do to make your stay at the Epsilon Maximus more enjoyable, Miss…?”
Illuria in gorgeous silk, every eye in the lobby either coveting or outright lusting after her. The bodyguards Scarpia has hired to carry her packages keeping a respectful distance.
“Oh…” She leans in close. Smiling. The man’s skin flushes. The guards know this is how she is. It’s why people bend over backwards for her. “Could you possibly send this message for me?”
Unseen, she presses it into the concierge’s hands.
If the guards do see, they’ll think it’s a tip. Commerce. Business. To ensure proper service.
“Of course,” the man says, his voice catching in his throat. “I’ll take care of it personally.”
And that’s all you have to do, you’ve told her. Not Tom, because Tom would want the fixed rate. You told this to Illuria. Get the message through.
And so as the ship is well and gone from the deck of Smuggler’s End, this is what you’re hoping. Because that’s all you’ve got now.
The MCR generals were gone in the morning.
The morning after, as you lay in bed. Exhausted and still smelling of her. Thinking of her.
You return to your room, take a shower, and try to remember the other people, the people in your real life.
But all you can think of is brave Illuria, beneath you and on her way to save the Republic.
And the message she carries.
Sign and countersign code words. Hijacked corvette rendezvous with target in Makchuria. Stop at all costs. Will be used in terror incident on Utopion. Immediate use of kill teams recommended. Highest priority.
The water in the shower cascades off you. But you’re not even you anymore.
It’s like you never were.
***
The mood is somber in Illuria’s absence. And for a second, as you wander the quiet ship, you see Frogg in the gym working out. The look on his face determined. Far away. Murderous.
Vicious and dangerous.
And then he sees you and smiles back. Suddenly. But not sincerely. That’s all gone now.
Maybe that’s just your guilt.
Maybe.
You find Scarpia, or rather he finds you.
“Tom!” he cries almost too emphatically behind dark sunglasses. “Missed you last night. And this morning. Luria says goodbye.”
Is he watching your face for a reaction?
She told you. Told you where the rendezvous was going down because she knew. Because he’d told her. And then she told you after you asked her to help you. During. One last time for the both of you with the lie that there would be another time on the other side of this.
“Tom… I know…” she whimpered.
But you didn’t care at that moment because you were drowning in her and trying somehow to make it all right one more time. Or make it, that other life that you really are, go away.
“It’ll be at Makchuria,” she cried.
You tell Scarpia you weren’t feeling well.
“Well, Tom…”
No “dear boy.” Uh-oh.
“We’ll be jumping out tonight. Got to prepare to make the rendezvous. Be ready. And frankly…” He pulls you aside on the pool deck. Within sight of the sauna.
Where she told you everything.
Where you promised more than you should.
Did she really believe you?
“You’re the only one I trust, Tom. Froggy’s getting a little weird lately. Just between you and me. I don’t expect anything to go sideways, but you never can tell with these rebel types. They might want to keep as much money as they can. So bring any weapons from the locker you think you need, and a couple of holdouts. There’s been a development…”
You raise your eyes.
You wonder if the water was hot enough to wash the scent of Illuria from you. And then there’s that other part that never wants it to go away.
He, Scarpia, must be rife with her.
You don’t treat me the way he does, she said. To him I’m just a toy, Tom. With you… I am real.
“The zhee are insisting that they not only crew the ship, but bring an entire battalion on board. Smelly dangerous things’ll be armed to the teeth in the best gear and tactical equipment I could sell them, and it’ll all be a big old waste.”
“Why?”
“Suicide battalion, Tommy. They consider this mission so great an honor, so important, that they’ll be there until their last moment of existence. That way the Legion can’t storm the ship before it hits, and they get to live vaingloriously in the next chapters of their holy books. Not that the Legion would have had the time to board the ship had my plan been followed to begin with. But… I’m in the business of pleasing my customers. And this is what they want.”
So there’s that.
And later that evening Scarpia’s ship comes in and everyone boards. Gear and all. It feels like the end of all things. Or rather… the beginning of the end of all things.
Everyone, even you, Tom, is silent. Grim and determined.
Dangerous and vicious.
24
I’m crouched outside a blast door leading to the bridge of a Republic corvette, attaching two red bands of det propulsions. Blowing a door inside a starship is a tricky proposition. You’re in a confined space, and the blast has to go somewhere. The hope is the force of it blows the door into the bridge. But these doors are tough, designed to withstand an incredible amount of force, because they’re ours. You sort of don’t figure to fight against your own tech. But maybe that’s a chink in planning. We should have.
There are slice-boxes and override commands, but these security systems have redundancies and protections. Meaning that if the right person were to be on the bridge, they could stop any override command. An independent slice-box could take upwards of forty-five minutes, if not longer. And by my bucket’s internal chrono, we’ve got exactly eight minutes, twenty-eight seconds left before mission failure.
So blowing the door is the only option. And while six det-bricks would do the trick, I can’t guarantee the blast wouldn’t wreck us as we hide behind bulkheads. Or worse still, tear open the hull so we get sucked out into the vacuum of space. Some good we’ll do out there, six floating leejes in the darkness, waiting to die of oxygen deprivation.
That’s what this det propulsion band is for. It works like a rocket booster. I attach it to the door, doubling up to make sure, and when triggered, it will shoot a constant propulsion. So much force that the door’s internal mechanisms are forcibly reversed. As if a giant grabbed the thing and forced it open, locks and gear brakes be damned.
My hands are trembling. I should be cool, I remind myself. But we went through hell just to get to the bridge.
Masters was dusted almost immediately. Moments after we breached and landed on the deck. Too many zhee. We cleared the corridors and breached the engine room. That’s what ate up most of our time. By the time the disabling charges shut the corvette’s engines down, we had only twenty minutes to spare. And we lost Wraith to injury. So he’s sitting back there with a pistol in each hand, popping any zhee that come looking.
It’s a matter of survival now. How long can we make it? Can we get the job done in the time we have left?
/>
Captain Owens made it clear: we do this or we die trying. No second chances. No Quick Reaction Force.
I get the det propulsion bands in place and signal for the operational members of the team to get back. I run behind the nearest bulkhead and activate the device. “Going hot!”
The corridor fills with the white-orange glow of the bands’ localized thrust. Smoke billows, and our buckets change optics so we can see through it. Filters work. I smell no trace of what’s going on outside. Within a second, the blast door’s internal mechanisms groan. The groaning culminates in a snap, then the sound of gears being stripped out as the sheer power of the bands pushes the door open.
“That’s an opening!” Exo calls out. He tosses a fragger through the open door just as I kill the propulsion bands.
Boom!
I follow Exo into the breach. The door is maybe half open, still plenty wide for a leej to move through. Exo fires once, and a cacophony of return fire sounds from within the bridge. A blaster bolt hits Exo square in the bucket, and he goes down hard. I want to stop and pick my buddy up, pull his body out of the line of fire, but that’ll just get me killed, too. So I rush in past him, firing my NK-4 and dropping three zhee, all of them firing from the hip, in rapid succession.
These guys are barely aiming. They trust their gods to guide their bullets. Exo just wasn’t lucky.
No time to dwell on him. I assess the room. There’s hardly any crew, just a few humans in MCR uniforms. Where helmsmen, navigators, and sensor techs should be stationed, I see only armed zhee, their dead eyes lusting for my death.
The fragger Exo threw landed just to the right of the door. There’s a ring of dead bad guys where it detonated. I dive in their direction, because the incoming fire is too hot for me to survive standing up and shooting it out. Kags and Twenties haven’t come through the door yet, though they’re still showing up in my HUD as in the fight. My only thought is that the zhee fire is so thick through the door, they just can’t move.
I don’t have a lot of room to maneuver myself. I duck behind a sensory relay station It’s being chewed up by blaster fire, but it’s something. I pull out a fragger and toss it toward the zhee. I’m up the next second, firing my blaster rifle on full auto. That means I won’t have much time before my charge pack goes black, but my hope is the firepower is enough to let Twenties and Kags join the fight.
One of the zhee stoops to pick up the fragger. A better choice would have been to kick it away, because it explodes and blows off his arm and donkey face. A few more of the aliens go down from the secondary fragmentation blast. Pieces of shrapnel pepper my armor, and the pain issuing from between my shoulder and chest boards tells me some of it got through.
Stupid. But at the same time, I’m not sure what else I could have done.
I keep firing as Kags and Twenties burst in. Twenties reaches my position, but Kags gets lit up, taking multiple blaster shots. My HUD shows him as dead before hitting the ground. Twenties and I are both hugging the relay station for whatever cover it can provide, but the donks are whittling it down with blaster fire.
“Changing packs,” I announce, dropping my spent blaster pack and slapping home a fresh one.
Just the two of us left, with Cap Owens watching somewhere, unable to assemble anything that will help us. There are maybe six zhee out of what began as twenty donks, plus a few MCR. We’re pinned down, but we can handle six zhee.
We have to. This is what the Republic pays us for.
“Let’s pop ’em and drop ’em,” I say to Twenties over the L-comm.
“Yeah,” he answers, changing out his own charge pack. “On three?”
“Let’s go on four,” I say. I have no idea why. Just being a smartass in the last moments of my life.
Twenties counts down, quickly. The idea is to be synced, not dramatic. “Four-three-two-one.”
We pop around our corners. As I drop a zhee with my NK-4, I feel searing blaster bolts rip through my armor and into my torso. The pain drops me like a sack of spun osmioid.
I’m dead. And as if the pain weren’t enough, my HUD makes sure I’m aware.
LS-55, Lieutenant C. Chhun: KIA
About all I can do is watch Twenties finish the fight. He dusts the last of the zhee and makes his way to the corvette’s helm. Just when he’s about to enter an override code, the lights go bright and an alarm rings. Above us, in the catwalks, Legion instructors shout and scream. All of them providing feedback on our training evolution. At the same time.
“Way too much time spent in the engine room! That needs to be cut by a minimum of five minutes!”
“One of you pansies damn well better muscle up and carry an SAB next time! I don’t care how much you love your tiny little guns!”
“Congratulations, gentlemen. The galaxy is screwed.”
It’s like being at Legion training all over again. But Captain Owens was right in bringing these guys, all of them squad leaders and seasoned leejes, in to observe. They’re looking down at a roofless replica of a Republic corvette, doing everything they can to make this training evolution a success. And none of us are too proud to accept constructive criticism from a fellow leej.
I pull myself up from my “death” position on the corvette’s deck. The dead zhee lying all around me turn back into target bots, their holographic projections ceasing with the conclusion of the exercise.
The failure. Again.
Exo pushes himself up from the deck. “That sucked. Shot in the face, are you kidding me? Donks couldn’t shoot that good.”
“Hey,” Masters says over L-comm. “At least you made it that far. I got dusted like—what?—two steps outside the assault shuttle. I’ve been lying on this deck for the entire run. What’s worse, this stupid shock technology didn’t let me at least catch some sleep. Stupid Republic engineers and their combat optimizations.”
“Group up on me,” Wraith orders. “Let’s run it again.”
“Hold up,” says Cap Owens. “I think we need to get you some chow first. Talk through it. Try once more after that, then we’ll call it a day.”
***
We’re having chow in our squad room, buckets off and shoveling empanadas stuffed with some kind of bird-fish hybrid shuttled fresh to the ship’s stores this morning. Or at least, that’s what the guys in the galley told us. Generally, those guys know what’s going on, though. And whether it’s fresh or pulled out of a six-year-old stasis pack, it tastes good. I’m feeling ravenous, so I bite one of the meat pastries in half and chase the mouthful down with a big swig of black caff. I drink more caff than water since joining Dark Ops.
Cap Owens belches a benediction for his finished meal, then reaches for a bottle of water. He takes a swallow and summarizes the points of consensus reached over the table. “So priority alpha is shaving time off of the engine room, because that’s non-negotiable. The exercise is an immediate failure if those engines aren’t shut down.”
“Most of the donks are in that room,” notes Twenties. “Maybe we need to toss in some satchels of det-brick. Take them and the engines out at once.”
I nod. “That would be easier, but the risk of causing a secondary reaction that would result in hull breach is too high. Fraggers, ear-poppers, and blaster fire are as much as we should bring. Even then… it’s volatile.”
“Agreed,” Owens says. “If you leejes get sucked into the vacuum before taking the bridge, it’s the same mission result as a total team kill in the corridors. All the steps have to be met.”
“Access to the engine room is significantly better than to the bridge,” Wraith says. “We all know what happens when we storm through the bridge’s blast door. The engine room has far more entry points, and the donks can’t defend them all en masse. We know we can take them down given enough time, we just have to fight our way to the reactors and then shut them down with a pulser charge.”
We all nod. He’s right. The engine room fight is one leejes will win fifty times out of ten.
�
�We can take the engine room without a full team. We saw that today. Masters got taken down in the corridors right away—”
“Thanks for reminding me, jerk,” Masters says, eliciting chuckles from the rest of the group.
Wraith continues as if the interruption didn’t happen. “And I went down in the first thirty seconds of the fight. But the rest of the team pretty much took care of business on their own.”
“Yeah,” agrees Exo, “but then by the time we fought through the corridors and onto the bridge, the clock was too wound down.”
“So what I’m saying,” Wraith leans forward and taps his fingers against our shared meal table, which is really just a coffee table cleared of all its crap, “what I’m saying is that we establish a foothold in the engine room and then split off. Three of us stay, and the rest of the team moves to clear the corridors and begin breach preparations for the bridge.”
Owens listens intently. I think he’s waiting to give his opinion until the rest of the squad has voiced their own.
“There’s an assumption there that Masters doesn’t keep getting shot in the face on exit from the assault shuttle,” Exo barks.
“Dude!” Masters yells. “You’re giving me a complex. I’ve only died like three times since we started this training cycle.”
It’s all in good fun. Or at least that’s how it sounds. But we’re not used to failing like this. Truth is, this evolution feels like it’s meant to be impossible. Designed for failure. I don’t doubt that there’s some buried truth behind every joking comment. Exo really does think that some of us will die before reaching the engine room. And Masters really is getting skittish about the fact that he’s been dusted three of the seven times we’ve run this scenario today.
“I think this plan can work,” I say, deciding at that moment to lay it out on the table. “Here’s the reality. We haven’t been at top form during these training exercises. Masters, you’re so psyched out about getting shot on these exercises that you’re overly cautious, and it’s getting you dusted. Exo, you’re trying to carry the entire team and rushing the donks like a bullitar. I barely had time to shut off the breach thrusters before you ran through the door. You could have been cooked. All of us are feeling the fatigue of doing this exercise over and over. But let’s suck it up and execute Wraith’s plan.
Kill Team (Galaxy's Edge Book 3) Page 19