by M. D. Cooper
Seething with anger she could barely control, Lyssa turned to face the people on the beach. Three people had stepped to the front of the crowd. Lyssa recognized them as the three Weapon Born Fugia Wong had brought to Sunny Skies when she arrived. One was tall and muscled, with fiery eyes and spikes of white hair on her head, the second a small woman with dark hair and an assassin’s grace, while the third was a malnourished-looking boy with a withered arm he held close to his body. The other Weapon Born stood behind them, as if automatically accepting them as representatives.
Lyssa had already tried to talk to them and failed. Their names were Valih, Ino and Card.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
STELLAR DATE: 11.22.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: TSS Furious Leap
REGION: Approaching Clinic 13, Terran Hegemony
Captain Smirt appeared to be very uncomfortable. She had been displaced from the head of her own conference table just off the command deck of the Furious Leap by Major General Moira Kade of the Mars Protectorate, a woman built like a bull-dog, with piercing grey eyes and a face as likely to break into a smile as it was to turn hard as iron as she crushed a subordinate.
Smirt had offered the seat, Kade had said thanks, and then the captain had been promptly ignored. With her personal command shuttle docked to the Furious Leap’s crew habitat, the general had seemed content to turn the TSF ship into her temporary headquarters.
Brit watched the whole exchange with a bit of amusement, realizing she was technically the third highest ranking person in the room, though Ngoba Starl didn’t seem to understand or care about rank. He seemed immediately smitten with the fifty-year-old general and took great pleasure in flattering her, saying things like, “Now, General, that’s a scandalous idea and I like it,” or “General Kade, she likes the spicy candy.”
The general seemed to love every ridiculous comment and rolled her eyes in spite of her otherwise grim expression.
On Kade’s other side, Colonel Yarnes frowned at a model of Clinic 13, an asteroid that had been pushed outside any known shipping route between Earth and Venus. Like most of the Heartbridge locations, there was nothing to indicate it belonged to anyone at all.
The dark site seemed a fitting destination for their unlikely coalition, unsanctioned by any Sol government.
Furious Leap, along with the four Lowspin vessels and now six Marsian long-range destroyers, was soon to pass within sensor range of the station. In twenty minutes, they could no longer hide their presence from the facility.
At the other end of the table, Jirl Gallagher sat staring at the holodisplay model with her hands clasped on the table, an expression of deep worry on her face.
“This assault would be a lot easier if you had brought more assets, Colonel,” General Kade was complaining. “If I’d known you expected this to be a Marsian operation, I’d have made more demands from the start.”
Yarnes didn’t take his focus off the model. He expanded the asteroid and turned it, highlighting various entry points as well as the communications array. To Brit, it looked almost exactly the same as Clinic 46. If Heartbridge was good for anything, it was uniformity, from the ceramic-walled facilities to their remote stations. All anyone would have to do to prove their involvement in these dark facilities would be a comparison of design schematics.
“Lowspin has your back, General,” Ngoba said, nodding toward the model. “You want me to take this one down for you? You can stay here on the TSF ship and get your feet rubbed down by the colonel here. I bet he gives some excellent foot rubs.”
Yarnes shot Ngoba an irritated glance. He looked like he wanted to defend his foot-rub technique for a second, then thought better of it.
Petral stifled a laugh.
“We’ll start with these breach points,” Yarnes said, pointing. “Combat teams will hit the surface during coordinated fire on the communications array and any outside defense systems.”
“You’re going to try and send my people in before you’ve taken down their defense systems?” Kade said.
“Not before. During. We will hold them in reserve until we’ve cleared the outer defense systems and then send them in. It will be nearly simultaneous.”
“Nearly is not a military term, Colonel. Is this how the TSF conducts operations? I expect precision.”
Brit smiled at their display. In reality, the only thing that mattered was shutting down the station before they had a chance to get a message out. Every plan Yarnes had suggested led with destroying the comms array. After that, Brit didn’t care how they breached the skin of the asteroid.
Petral said.
Brit looked across the table at Petral. In the time since leaving the Cho, she supposed they had actually become friends. Brit had become much better at reading Petral’s secret expressions, able to tell when she hid annoyance or anger behind a smile or, like a now, a flat mask of boredom.
She was also slightly jealous of the time Petral had spent with Cara on the Mars 1 Ring. The story hadn’t made her angry, only a bit sad—the kind of thing that made her eyes feel moist when she thought about it. She had to remind herself to be glad that someone had shown Cara kindness, had kept her safe, had taught her something important and encouraged her—all the things Brit should have been doing.
Despite her hard exterior, Petral cared deeply about certain things, and she had made it clear that she cared about the Sykes family, for reasons Brit still didn’t completely understand.
Yarnes and Kade went through another round of bickering over the attack plan, until they finally reached agreement and Kade sent the orders to her people. The Lowspin ships would open the assault with a long-range missile attack that would either destroy the stations communications array outright or trigger their defenses and draw them out. Once the enemy had deployed its initial response, the Marsian ships would move to the battle line and launch another wave of missiles and rail gun fire.
Once the enemy’s close-fire defenses had been neutralized, the Marsian Marine breach teams would launch for the entry points Yarnes had identified. Brit and Petral would follow the Marines to provide guidance on the ground for any unexpected discoveries inside the station. They were ultimately responsible for identifying and securing the cache of Weapon Born seeds, which Kraft had said was somewhere around two hundred.
It was a solid, brute-force plan and Brit didn’t see much reason for concern. The only thing that made her question their approach was the worried expression that Jirl Gallagher couldn’t seem to shake, even when she feigned interes
t in some random question from Yarnes.
Brit stood from the table. “I’m going to go get ready for the launch. I’ll monitor via Link.”
General Kade dismissed her with a nod. “Happy hunting, Major.”
“Thank you, General.”
Petral followed her out of the briefing room. They walked through the command deck where the navigator glanced up from the astrogation console and nodded a greeting.
“Any change to the plan?” the lieutenant asked.
“We’re going to make the asteroid go boom,” Petral said.
The woman grimaced. “You act like it’s going to be easy. It’s never easy. I half-expect those pirate ships to target their missiles on us when the time comes.”
Petral gave her a smirk. “I’m mostly pirate, you know.”
The lieutenant blanched. “I apologize. I didn’t mean to insult you.”
“I’m kidding you. I don’t think you need to worry about them, especially when you’ve got their crew leader on board for the attack.”
The officer glanced toward the open door of the briefing room. “That’s the guy with the bow tie?”
“That’s him. A real live pirate.”
“We should put him in prison once this is done, then.”
Petral’s expression turned sour. “We’re allies in this.”
“That won’t last forever,” the lieutenant said.
Brit stopped at the door and turned to walk back toward the navigator. “We’re working together, Lieutenant. Why don’t you pay attention to your console. I’m not sure you can focus on two things at once.”
“Yes, Major,” the lieutenant snapped. “I meant no offense.”
“Of course, you didn’t,” Petral said.
Out in the corridor, Brit shook her head. “That one’s not going very far.”
“This is only the beginning,” Petral said. “If they’re going to start showing stress now, we’re going to need another TSF crew. We could also just move over to one of the Lowspin ships, or even the Marsians. We don’t need them, really.”
“We need them to keep other TSF off our backs,” Brit said. “The clinic could always send out a general distress and try to play another TSF response team against us.”
“Why does everyone have to be so devious?” Petral asked, and then laughed at her own joke.
Brit connected to the temporary battlenet for the operation and checked their time to the point of no return, which was under five minutes now. The Lowspin crew were making dick jokes about their missiles, while the Marsians groused at them about wrecking the place before they got a chance to play. Overall, the TSF lieutenant seemed to be the only evidence of participants not getting along.
She and Petral left the crew section of Furious Leap and dropped into the zero-g cargo section where the shuttle was docked. Brit checked her armor and weapons load-out as they floated down the empty corridors and finally entered the shuttle. She strapped into the co-pilot’s seat as Petral ran pre-flight checks.
“You ready to launch?” Petral asked.
“Very ready.”
Petral passed the launch request to the Furious Leap’s command deck and then activated the release sequence. The main cargo bay airlock cycled open, and then Petral was guiding the shuttle out into open space using micro thrust controls.
On the battlenet, the Marsians announced their breaching teams were initiating full burn to follow the missile barrage. Petral re-checked her flight plan on a holodisplay in the center console, which now showed a flurry of icons echoing the information Brit already had through her Link.
Brit frowned as a second icon appeared to be following them from the Furious Leap.
“We’ve got a shadow,” she told Petral, pointing.
“Could be a sensor echo.”
“It’s not. It’s another shuttle.”
Petral whistled. “It’s Kade.”
A minute later, Major General Kade’s gruff voice filled the battle net. “Where are my Marines?” she shouted.
“In the sky! On the ground! On the beach! In the breach!” came a nearly synchronized response across the net. Brit couldn’t help smiling at their esprit de corps.
Kade chuckled, sounding immensely pleased. “You have your orders and I know you will execute flawlessly,” she said. “You don’t know how much it warms my heart to be back at the operational level. I wish I could be with you in the breach.”
The Lowspin missile barrage struck Clinic 13 just as Kade closed her connection. Small explosions burned blue across the model floating in the holodisplay, with other surrounding bursts as the clinic’s point defense cannons took on the initial attack. Brit noted which swaths of the station’s broadcast spectrum went dark with each new explosion, until the only signal traffic around the station were near-field systems. Noise filled the spectrum from malfunctioning communications equipment.
“They’ve gone dark,” she told Petral. “They’ll be clear to move in and take out the point defense cannons.”
“They’re blind without their sensors,” Petral said.
“They definitely should be.”
The three Lowspin attack cruisers leading the assault moved ahead of the smaller breaching shuttles to intercept the station first. Reaching a point just outside the attack range of any cannons, they started hitting the surface of the asteroid with rail gun fire, sending superheated bolts at the station.
“You think they’re going to surrender?” Petral asked.
“How are they going to make the call?”
“True. We kind of made that impossible for them, didn’t we?”
“We’re not here for a surrender,” Brit said. In the wake of the rail gun attacks, the first breach team had landed on the surface of Clinic 13.
Maintaining her flight plan, Petral followed the last line of breaching ships toward the station. The Marsian Marines had begun reporting in that they had access to the interior of the station and were encountering automated fire. The resistance sounded very similar to what Brit and Andy had experienced at Clinic 46.
As Brit monitored the battlenet, she observed a confusing ripple in the asteroid’s weak magnetosphere. Frowning, Brit dropped the comm net where she was listening to the Marine fire teams work their way down corridors, and focused her attention back on the station’s overall broadcast spectrum. In the absence of communications noise, a mass of magnetic activity had flooded the sensors of every approaching ship.
“Petral,” Brit said.
Before Petral could ask her what was wrong, Clinic 13 exploded. At first, the asteroid appeared to collapse on itself, then burst outward with a wave of energy that disintegrated the nearest breaching craft.
“Hang on,” Petral said. The shuttle flipped on its horizontal axis and initiated a full burn. Brit’s stomach went through her throat as the g-forces first yanked her toward the console and then drove her into her seat, only the harness keeping her from bouncing around the cabin. All lights went out inside the shuttle except for the console as Petral diverted all the shuttle’s energy into its drive system.
On the battle net, General Kade shouted a series of curses, followed by, “Burn, damn it! Burn!” before her comms cut out.
Brit tried to focus her eyes against the g-forces, staring at the quavering holodisplay in the middle of the console. Where it had shown the asteroid was now a mass of flickering material reflecting in the sensors. One of two breach ships appeared to have survived, or at least were still being tracked by the battle net.
In a ragged orb around the place where Clinic 13 had been, a series of icons blinked into exist
ence, marked danger-red by the battle computer. Brit started counting then stopped when the icons came faster than she could track, exceeding at least twenty, until the space that had been empty was filled with warning signs.
“Holy shit,” Petral said.
“Do you know what those are?”
“We saw the same thing at Cruithne. They’re combat drones. I think we found Kraft’s two-hundred Weapon Born.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
STELLAR DATE: 11.22.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: TSF Shuttle
REGION: Clinic 13, Terran Hegemony
“Damn it,” Brit growled, struggling to raise her head against the g-forces brought on by the shuttle’s hard acceleration. “Our cannons are no match for that many drones. We’re going to have to pull back and let the others lead.”
Petral shook her head with small movements, focused on the pilot’s console. “Hold on,” she said. “I’m adjusting course to take us back near Furious Leap and then cutting the power. We’re still going to shine like a heat beacon, but they might not pick us up among the other debris.”
“We’ll be blind.”
“Not for long. I’m calling Ngoba now to let him know my plan. We need to get him off the Furious Leap and back to the Ardent Wonder. They’re still back in reserve. The drones shouldn’t go after them at first.”
“Unless they’re moving in to save the forward ships.”
Petral’s face went flat as she focused on her Link connection. Brit checked her armor, which had short-term EV capability, including warming. She’d cut everything at first, but there wasn’t much worry of freezing or dying of asphyxiation as long as they were inside the shuttle. The smaller craft might be the safest place to be during the fight, but they weren’t going to get free of a deep space location in a transport shuttle. They would need to reach one of the bigger vessels to survive. Between the Furious Leap, the four Lowspin ships, and six Marsian destroyers, they might have a chance to at least hold the Weapon Born long enough to allow a few ships to escape.