by M. R. Forbes
“Blow it or break it, Sarge?” Abbey asked.
“We don’t need a Breaker to blow a blast door,” Coli replied.
Abbey smiled. “In that case, follow me.”
“Lieutenant?”
“You have to know they’re going to ambush us when we move in,” she said. “Breaking the door will buy us a couple of seconds, but there’s a better way. These places always have an escape hole.”
“With no external access,” Coli said. “Too small and too thick to blow.”
“No external access for a standard Marine platoon,” Abbey said. “But you have me.”
Of course, that didn’t mean the Sergeant was going to listen to her. Sometimes those same grunts who thought she was little more than a desk monkey found her capabilities threatening to their personal self-worth, to the point that they’d rather walk into an ambush than sneak in through the back door. Abbey didn’t think Coli was that kind of bouncer, but she had been wrong before.
“My people can handle it, Lieutenant,” Coli said. “Those shooters the tangos are using can’t pierce a battlesuit.”
Fool me once. Idiot.
“Aye, sir,” Abbey said, moving in closer to the small control panel on the exterior of the blast door. She reached into one of the tightpacks on her softsuit and pulled out a small disc the size of a fingernail. She tapped the top of it and then placed it against the panel.
A new screen appeared inside her helmet as the extender intercepted the control panel’s system and began filtering the commands to her. She put her left hand on her thigh, tapping her fingers against the suit on the invisible tactile receptors there. Those signals were sent to the control panel, appearing amidst the console output on her HUD.
“Twiddling your fingers, One Nine?” Private Illiard said.
“Shut your hole, One Six,” Coli said.
“Aye, sir.”
Abbey’s eyes twitched as she watched the code, trying to match it up with the data she had on the particular make and model of the panel. It was Outworld manufactured, and much newer than the compound it was protecting.
“Lieutenant?” Coli said a few seconds later. “I’d rather not find out if there are reinforcements inbound the hard way.”
“Aye, sir,” she replied, getting frustrated with herself. She should have cracked this bastard by now.
She entered a few more commands, smiling when one of them finally yielded something she could use.
“Squad One,” she said. “Prep for entry.”
“You heard her,” Coli said. “One Three, prep a flashbang. Standard ingress protocol.”
“Aye, sir,” Private Dis said, prepping the grenade launcher attached to her rifle. The other soldiers moved into position around the door, waiting for it to slide open.
Abbey raised her right hand, fingers open, using her left to keep entering commands. When she reached the system root, she closed it into a fist. When the door began to open, she dropped it.
Private Dis fired her grenade into the crack, the loud pop and bright light following a moment later. The other Marines filed past them, their TCUs painting targets, which passed immediately to Abbey’s HUD. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Three of them had fallen before the return fire started.
Abbey stood at the side of the entrance, gathering her rifle and prepping for entry. Coli motioned her to stay back and bring up the rear. She was supposed to survive to break into the compound’s network and see if she could pull anything useful.
The firefight intensified in a hurry, the battle easy to follow on her HUD. Fifteen red dots appeared, spread in what was likely a large antechamber beyond the initial access tunnel. The eight members of First Squad moved in formation behind that, painted green, three of them with her added marks beside them.
“One Four, sweep left,” Coli said. “One seven, cover.”
“There’s a lot more of them than we thought there would be, Sarge,” one of the tildes said.
Six more red spots appeared on Abbey’s HUD.
“Shit. Tango Twenty-one has an emgee,” Illiard said.
“Duck and cover,” Coli said, sounding a little nervous. “One Six, One Four, One Three, get on him.”
“Aye, sir,” the soldiers replied.
Abbey heard the high pitch of the electromagnetic railgun a moment later, spitting flechettes at nearly four times the speed of sound, easily packing enough kinetic punch to go right through both a battlesuit and the soldier in it. Handheld emgees were rare in the Republic military and unheard of among the Outworlds. What the hell had they just walked into?
“One Four is down,” Illiard said a moment later.
“I’m hit,” Private Dis said a moment later. “Shit, it hurts.”
“Two One, we need backup,” Coli said.
“Aye, sir,” Sergeant Ray replied calmly. “We’re on the way.”
Abbey looked out to Second Squad’s position, watching as the soldiers bounced to her at full speed.
“Sarge,” she said as they passed her by. She hated being a bystander. “I can help.”
“Negative, One Nine,” Coli said. “Standby.”
The firefight continued, the reinforcements forcing the opposition to begin retreating deeper into the compound.
“Position One is clear,” Coli said. “One Nine, you’re clear to move to Position One.”
Abbey stood at the entrance to the compound. Something in her gut was telling her not to move, to consider another option. Nerves? Instinct? She took a step forward and hesitated. How much trouble could she get in? Technically, she wasn’t required to follow Sergeant Coli’s orders. Technically, she outranked him.
She watched the HUD for a few more seconds. It showed most of the remainder of the two squads moving down a corridor at the back of the first chamber, while Two Three and Two Four were coming back, likely pulling the dead out with them. Damn it; they could have avoided the casualties if Coli hadn’t been such a stubborn furball.
She made her decision then, planting her feet and bouncing up the side of the compound, quickly scaling the rocky hill it had been planted below.
“One Nine, where the hell are you going?” Coli said a moment later, tracking her movement.
She didn’t answer him, focusing on the terrain ahead. She hated to disobey, but he was wrong to have gone in the front door. Possibly dead wrong.
Her fears were realized a moment later. The channel burst with chatter, the platoon coming up against a second emgee dug in behind a steel barrier. Coli pulled them back, retreating to the first position, forced to wait to collect the three soldiers of the Fifth Platoon who died in the process.
Abbey slid down the far side of the hill, pausing at a bare spot on the ground and pulling a short, narrow cylinder from a tightpack. She stuck it into the earth, capturing the reading and then heading eighty meters to her right. She leaned over and pawed at the ground there, quickly uncovering the escape hatch beneath it.
“One One, I’m at the rear hatch,” she said. “Hold tight.”
“Does chain of command mean anything to you, Lieutenant?” Coli said.
“Not when our people are dying, sir,” she replied.
3
She pulled another extender from her suit, slapping it onto the top of the hatch. It was much smaller than the main entrance; barely two meters across. It would have been a tight fit for a Sergeant Coli in the battlesuit, but he probably would have made it.
She brought the console up on her HUD, tapping her fingers rapidly on her thigh while crouched beside the hatch. Every few seconds she turned her head to look out at the landscape around her, making sure she hadn’t been spotted. She could see the outside colony a few klicks in the distance. It was a small haven, a collection of low buildings with rounded tops beside a hastily constructed network of electrical connectors and drainage pipes. She doubted much of anything that occurred on Gradin was legal, but that had been one of the biggest negative side-effects to the proliferation of terraformers. You could get a
used generator on the open market for a few million, and within a few years you could take a shitty rock in the middle of nowhere and make it your own private paradise.
If you considered mud, clouds, rain, and cold paradise.
The second hatch was easier to break than the first, now that she knew what to look for. She had it open within fifteen seconds, and it swung silently upward on damp hinges. The comm was quiet, the platoon pinned back behind the entrenched position. Maybe Coli was putting together a new plan. Maybe he was waiting on her. She didn’t know and didn’t care. She wasn’t doing this to be a hero, or make herself look good. This was the sort of thing she had been trained to do, and if there was one thing she believed it was that if you were going to do a job, you did it to the best of your ability.
She reached down and tapped a receiver at the bottom of her boots. The material expanded, covering the soles with a soft gel, enabling her to slip into the hatch and onto the ladder leading to the compound without making a sound. She climbed in, closing the hatch behind her, and then scaled it quickly, sliding a few rungs at a time, dropping nearly fifty meters beneath the rocky terrain above until finally reaching a small, open space. The two tangos in the room were near the far door and facing away from her, weapons up and at the ready. They didn’t notice her entrance, and they didn’t notice the draft from the open hatch.
She ducked behind a stack of containers, pausing to read the labels. They were written in Plixian, a series of lines that looked more like scratches than writing. She cursed silently as she translated it. These assholes had more than two emgees. They had at least a dozen, though most were still in their boxes.
Arms dealers, then?
She reached into a tightpack near her breasts, pulling out a pair of soft, round balls. She pressed them between her fingers, activating the chemistry inside, and then stood and threw them forward. The aim didn’t matter as much as the results. The balls hit the wall ahead of the two soldiers and began to glow brightly.
She vaulted the containers while the tangos were distracted by the light, bouncing to them in no time, producing a pair of nerve sticks as she did. They barely noticed her before she had slapped the sticks against their exposed skin, sending a jolt of electricity into them and knocking them out cold.
She disarmed them, turning back to the weapons crates and capturing a snapshot of them before heading out of the room. She knew from the TCU positioning where both her platoon and the enemy combatants were sitting, and she approached them cautiously from the rear.
The inside of the compound was as unspectacular as the outside. Bare metal walls producing warmth from the elements behind them, exposed pipes and wiring, heavy manual hatches and dim lighting. These places were meant to be temporary, built cheap and tough for bare necessities living.
Abbey navigated through it, pausing at each hatch and peering into the small slip of a window, noting the layout as she made her way across. She bypassed what appeared to be the command center, a room messy with wires and terminals spitting lines of data to nobody. She could hear the fighting now. The tangos had abandoned the use of the emgee, not wanting to waste the rounds if they couldn’t kill anyone with them. The two sides were trading lighter fire, where lighter meant dense-tipped flechettes on the Republic side and small caliber whatever from the opposition. Only the threat of the railguns was keeping Coli and his Marines honest.
She froze when she heard a soft voice behind her, crouched and turning, bringing her rifle into her arms. A taller human with dark skin and a soft build crossed the corridor behind her with a shorter man. They didn’t seem concerned that their base was under attack, or if they did they weren’t showing it. She let herself exhale once they had passed without looking her way. Whoever those two were, they weren’t the problem right now.
Enough stalling. She was moving too slow. Taking too long. She headed forward again, closing in on the enemy position. She reached the corner, peering around and finding a second blast door between her and the enemy. Damn. It would be hard to sneak up on them past that.
She leaned against the wall for a moment to think, and then padded across to the door, pushing herself into the corner while she dug a soft gray clay from a tightpack on her bicep. She began pressing it against the seams of the door as quickly as she could, doing her best to monitor the corridor while she did. It took nearly a minute to entrench the explosive, and she could hear running footsteps at her back as she pressed the last wad in place.
Had the two tangos in the storage room been discovered?
She bounced away from the door, pivoting as two soldiers turned the corner. They locked eyes with one another.
Then she tapped her thigh, triggering the detonator.
The explosion echoed through the compound, the force of the blast tearing the door off its moorings and sending it into the enemy force on the other side. Backwash flowed toward her, and she dropped to her stomach on the floor, letting the flames lick at the back of her softsuit while she aimed and fired, hitting the two soldiers in the chest. She was moving again before they had collapsed, getting to her feet and facing the no longer sealed doorway.
The blast created a lot of dust and smoke, but she could see the metal barrier beyond it, and the mounted emgee position ahead of that. The gunners behind it were on the ground and unmoving, as were the four other soldiers that had been defending the position with them.
“One One, you’re clear,” she said.
“Roger,” Coli replied. He didn’t sound happy, but he didn’t sound angry either. His big form appeared in the haze a moment later at the opposite end of the corridor. “Definitely not your first drop, Lieutenant. Two One, take your men and sweep the compound. Clean up any trash you find. One Three-”
“Be careful Two One,” Abbey said, interrupting. “Sergeant, I don’t know what else is going on here, but they’ve got a pretty nasty cache of weapons in the rear storage area near the escape hatch. We can’t be sure they aren’t toting some of them.”
“Roger,” Coli replied. “Two One, use extreme caution. Unless you want to finish dismantling this compound for us, Lieutenant?”
Now his voice was dripping with anger. She had made him look bad, and he didn’t like it. Too bad. They hadn’t lost any more troops. That was more important than his ego.
“Negative, Sergeant,” she replied. “I ID’ed the control center back that way. I’d like to go pick it for intel.”
“Roger. One Six, One Four, go with her. You can use the protection.” Again, he made the loud monotone sound that her translator informed her was a laugh. Compensation for his anger?
Abbey let the two soldiers escort her back the way she had come. They took a guard position outside the command center as she entered and headed to the most central terminal. She put her hand on the seat as she neared. It was still warm. She tapped the small mat in front of it, and a holographic display rose ahead of her. She reached into a tightpack and removed a silver puck, placing it on the mat. The projection wavered for a moment before stabilizing.
Inside her helmet, she began to receive the unfiltered computer commands as they executed. There was too much activity for her to follow it, but she didn’t need to. She started running the software embedded in her suit against it, filtering out the most common processes and damming the data river into first a stream, and then a trickle. Like all things military, there was a procedure involved, one that she could follow to a certain point before instinct and experience had to take over.
She isolated the data streams and then began using the projected interface, searching for data stores. She cursed under her breath after a few minutes of digging turned up nothing.
The data had been wiped.
She picked up the silver puck, putting it back in the tightpack, and then dropped onto the floor, finding the wire attached to the mat and following it into a small grate. She removed a laser cutter from her suit and sliced through the flooring, lifting a section up and reaching into where the main terminal
was resting. She grabbed it and pulled it out, a small black box with a sharp pair of wings etched into it. The sight of the logo gave her pause. It was a Republic box, marked as black ops. If General Kett was involved, this was the kind of thing that would further his implication.
She disconnected the wires attached to it and stood, carrying it out of the room and heading back to Coli.
“One One, I’m finished here,” she said on the way.
“Roger. Did you get what you came for, Lieutenant?”
“I don’t know yet. The data was wiped during the standoff. I’ll need the lab on the Nova to see if I can recover anything. I got eyes on two tangos on my way to you, a tall, dark man with a shorter, lighter skinned guy. Have you located them?” She had a feeling they knew a lot about whatever dealings were happening here.
“Negative,” Coli replied. “The compound is clear. There were a lot fewer of them than our initial ingress would have suggested, though they did their fair share of damage. We lost four good Marines today.”
“I’m sorry, Sergeant.”
Coli grunted over the channel, unwilling to admit she had probably kept him from losing more. She was okay with that. They were alive regardless.
“What about the weapons cache?” she asked.
“What weapons cache?” Coli replied.
“I told you, sir, it was in the rear of the compound. Plixian writing. A dozen emgees, maybe more, among other things.”
She turned the corner, reaching the Sergeant. He rotated to face her, his big eyes suggesting confusion.
“We didn’t find any cache,” he said. “The room was empty.”
Abbey stared back at him. “Sir, that can’t be possible. The arms were there thirty minutes ago.”
“One One,” Captain Yung said, his voice interrupting them on the platoon channel. “We’ve arrived at pickup station Delta, awaiting egress.”