Last Man Out (Poor Man's Fight Book 5)

by Elliott Kay

  Chen crossed the remaining distance to grab Jack by the shoulder. “No guards. These other guys have armor that stands up to lasers and they’re chewing through security,” he explained. “We got in on our own and we’ve got people to cover our escape outside. If your plan has anything better, it’s your call.”

  Jack shook his head vigorously. “Hell with it, let’s go!”

  Chapter Sixteen:

  Storm Clouds

  “Under most conditions, the search for artifacts and the removal of sediment is far easier with modern technology. Minos presents a challenge requiring us to blend new techniques with older, slower methods. No other world requires so much old-fashioned playing in the dirt.”

  --Joseph Vandenberg, Expedition Journal, August 2280

  Morales floated backward along the twisted wreckage of St. Jude. He reached for Tanner, pleading for help with bloodshot eyes.

  No. Not for Tanner. He reached for the helmet floating between them.

  Tanner was closer. His momentum carried him to within reach. He could grab the helmet and save himself. Or he could push it toward Morales and save him. Maybe.

  His fingers touched the helmet. They didn’t hook on. It drifted away, turning, still within reach. Morales kept drifting, too. Tanner could still save his own ass. He reached for the helmet.

  The drag on his arm broke him from the dream. The drag, and the dissonance of memory. It didn’t play out like that. He never had a chance to help Morales. Though hardly calming, the thought woke him from his cot to sit bolt upright.

  The shelter welcomed him with cool air and the barest light. Tanner shook hard enough to hear it in his breath. He forced himself to control the flow, inhaling and exhaling longer. Slower. His pounding heart dialed back the panic bit by bit, but not the frustration.

  “Damn it,” he hissed to the shadows. “God fucking damn it.”

  He looked to the other cots, hoping he hadn’t woken anyone else this time. Nigel appeared sound asleep. That was a good sign. To his other side, Tanner found Antonio sitting upright in his cot. He had his back to the wall of their shelter and his arms around his knees.

  “Sorry,” Tanner whispered.

  Antonio shook his head. “It’s fine,” he murmured. “Already awake.”

  Tanner looked to the clock. The sun wouldn’t be up for a couple more hours. “You okay?”

  He shrugged, never looking Tanner’s way. “You’re making another run into the city, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Alright if I come with?”

  “Sure.”

  Antonio nodded. He laid down again, pulling up the blanket as he turned his back.

  * * *

  “I heard ‘em blasting away up at the front end for a couple minutes. Heard a bit of shuffling or something. Must have been them moving away rubble. But then it was over. I couldn’t see what happened from my spot. Not unless I crawled out, and…” Seated on a bench along one of the building walls, her voice trailed off. The guard bowed her head, shaking it slowly.

  “It’s alright, Jamie,” said Dylan. She stood over the private, glancing back to the wreckage of the plant’s main building. “You were completely outmatched and outgunned.”

  “We shouldn’t have been, though,” said Jamie. “That’s the thing. I didn’t see everything that happened, obviously, but I didn’t get the sense we were outnumbered. Not even after the first few seconds. But we’d shoot at them and even hit them and then…nothing. Nothing happened. They ignored it. And they did all this.”

  By the morning light, the processing plant looked as if it had been hit by an earthquake. Walls stood with cracks or great holes. Others lay in piles of broken and charred concrete. Several of the outlying buildings near the main plant were now hollowed-out shells. The plant itself was half rubble. Smoke drifted from a dozen points in the ruins.

  Bodies lay strewn across the landscape. Some had been covered with bags. Others waited for tending. All of them wore security uniforms or other clothing common at the plant. Dylan saw pools of blood here and there apart from the bodies, but she saw none of the attackers. They had carried out all of their dead.

  “It’s not like we didn’t take any of them down,” continued Jamie. The guard’s voice was raw and faint, her eyes still distant. “I saw some of them drop. Saw a couple of them in the dirt with big holes in the back of their heads, too. But lasers only seemed to work if you got lucky. Mostly we might as well have been armed with flashlights.” Jamie managed to look the major in the eye, as if she meant to plead for mercy but she was simply too tired to put anything into it. “I was all alone before I hid. I could’ve kept fighting but it seemed so pointless. Didn’t know what else to do.”

  “Everyone else who made it through says the same thing, Private,” said Dylan. “I’d have no one to talk to if you had all made a last stand. And you’re right, it doesn’t sound like it would’ve done any good.”

  The hum of airvan engines drew Dylan’s attention from her conversation. She turned around to find two black aircraft settling into a deserted parking area. Doors opened before either vehicle shut down, releasing men and women in dark business suits. She recognized a couple of them as security escorts even before she identified any faces. The man they escorted emerged from the airvan in a suit and dark sunglasses.

  Dylan couldn’t entirely blame him for the bodyguards, particularly when he came to a scene like this. He looked around with a scowl, but before Geisler completed his first sweep he spotted Dylan with Jamie. Suddenly the bodyguards had to pick up their pace to keep up.

  “What the hell happened?” asked Geisler. “What did they hit us with, an army? I saw three crashed airvans before we landed! Why didn’t you send more?”

  “Those three airvans were the rapid response call unit,” Dylan answered. “It’s what we had to send. Everyone else needed time to assemble. And from the looks of things, if I’d sent more, I’d only have more wrecks on the ground.”

  “Maybe we need to re-think your ‘rapid response’ plans.” Geisler ran his fingers through his hair. “How bad is it? What have we got?”

  “Most of the security force is dead,” the major began. “Most of the night shift workers for the plant are missing. It looks like they made it out near the back of the main building and ran for their lives during or after the fighting. Whatever tracks they left outside the perimeter wall are gone now. Almost all the surveillance systems are dead. I’ve got techs trying to recover data but the system had some catastrophic failure. The attackers took advantage of a dust cloud in the upper atmosphere so the satellites were no good.

  “It looks like we’re missing stuff from the main building, too,” Dylan went on, gesturing to the plant. “The façade caved in but they moved some of the rubble out and grabbed something. I don’t know what.”

  “The front end of the plant?” Geisler asked.

  “Yeah.” Dylan watched him. “What’s significant about that?”

  Geisler turned back as if to answer, then noticed Jamie. “Who’s this?”

  “Private Jamie here was on site when the attackers hit,” explained Dylan. “She’s been telling me her story.”

  “What went wrong, Private?” he asked. “We had all this security. Did someone fall asleep at the switch?”

  “It wasn’t the insurgents, sir. Not unless they found a ton of new tech recently.” Jamie managed to meet his gaze, but her eyes fell again. “I’ve never seen weapons or armor like that. We weren’t ready for this. My team didn’t stand a chance.”

  “And then they cleared out the storage area at the front of the plant?”

  “I guess so. Missed that part, sir. I didn’t see everything.”

  “What’d you do, run and hide?”

  “Mr. Geisler, let’s step aside in private for a minute,” Dylan suggested abruptly. She resisted the urge to drag him away by the arm. Thankfully, Geisler followed. His escorts maintained a respectful distance.

  “We pay a lot of money for s
ecurity here, Major,” he fumed. “They’re not guarding some shopping center. What the hell—”

  “Mr. Geisler,” Dylan interrupted. She stepped in close, keeping her voice low. “Jamie isn’t the only survivor. You might want to think twice before you insult and antagonize a bunch of traumatized, heavily-armed soldiers. If one of them snaps, they’ll face the music for it, but you’ll be dead.”

  Geisler bit back a reply. Holding his tongue, he looked over the ruins again. “Fine. Then I’ll talk to you. What the fuck happened here, Major?”

  “You already heard the basics. They had unknown weapons tech and they were ready for our airborne reinforcements. We can’t find any remains except for some bloodstains and a little debris. They carried their dead out with them.”

  “So we have no reason to believe it wasn’t the insurgents.”

  “Come on. I want to show you something.”

  Dylan took the CEO across the compound to the main building. He seemed to want to go there anyway, given how his attention kept drifting to the collapsed front of the structure. All around, Dylan’s troops searched the area for evidence of the attackers or their tactics. She didn’t need outside help to collect blood samples or run material analysis.

  “Christ, they gutted this place,” said Geisler. He pulled away from Dylan’s path to look closer. “Do we know if anything inside survived?”

  “It’s possible someone might be alive under there, sure.” Dylan gestured to the men with sniffer units gingerly climbing over the rubble. “We’re looking.”

  “No, I see you’ve got search and rescue going. I mean storage units. We had big, shielded container units at the front end.” He noted Dylan’s questioning look and answered it with a lower, grumbling voice. “The relic crystals go through a different processing sequence than the stuff that comes out of the mines. Higher-grade stuff, but we have to cut them differently and clear off all the noise first.”

  “Right,” Dylan grunted. “Is there anything else you want to tell me about that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The raiders smashed the end of the facility where the higher-value materials are stored and processed, right? You understand the value. Apparently the raiders did, too. I still don’t.”

  Geisler shook his head. “Higher-grade means higher performance and higher value. Nothing more to it than that. Lots of companies have their industrial secrets. We’re no different.”

  “That wouldn’t be weird except for the way you guys avoid talking about your ‘processing.’ Sounds more like you’re trying to avoid a guilty secret than protecting some proprietary trick. But I figured every company has its quirks, just like every planet. I didn’t think too much about Minos on either score until this morning.”

  She brought him to the corner of the building, where load-bearing supports still stood close to her height after the rest crumbled. Black carbon scoring decorated the supports. “Anything about this stand out to you?” Dylan asked.

  “Should it? Looks like it got shot up a little. So does the rest of this place. Why?”

  “We’ve got a variety of damage here. This little line was carved out by a laser,” Dylan explained. She traced out the thin black mark with her finger. “You can see others like it here and here, right? This is a direct shot, this is a graze. Lasers are tightly concentrated. They leave thin marks.”

  “So what made the big marks?” asked Geisler.

  “The big marks came from the bad guys, but I don’t know what the hell they used. That’s my concern. Pulse lasers come out at about the diameter of a pen, maybe a little less. These things hit at half the diameter of my fist. The only energy weapon that expands like this is plasma, and these aren’t plasma scores. Laser weapons come out in reds and blues. Plasma typically comes out green. The bad guys fired something yellow.”

  “I thought that was a manufacturer’s decision. Can’t you tweak the colors on lasers to anything you want?”

  “You can. Sometimes it helps you differentiate who’s shooting at whom. It can help you tell friendly fire from the enemy. Some people find value in that. My concern is I’ve got an odd color along with a comparatively huge spread on the weapon’s output. And the fact that this was apparently all wrist-mounted. These weren’t guns, more like bracelets or something mounted in the armor. Nobody got a close enough look to give details.”

  Geisler frowned. “Powered armor? And there was a whole squad of them? Christ, how much does something like that cost to operate? Or to even get down here?” Though he wasn’t the military sort, the businessman in him understood costs and benefits. The implications dawned on him quickly. “Who the hell would go to that kind of effort to hit us?”

  “I don’t think it’s anybody you’ve got on your mind right now. There’s more.”

  Nearby in the rubble sat a stack of clean storage bins brought in by the search crews. One of Dylan’s men stood guard. With a nod, Dylan instructed the guard to open up the top container. Inside were hunks of shaped black stone in sealed plastic bags. She took one from the box, removing it from the bag to show Geisler. Tilting it in the light revealed the intricate pattern and texture of the piece.

  “Security here wasn’t entirely ineffective,” she said. “They inflicted some casualties and did damage. This is a piece of the armor the enemy wore. I’ve never seen armor like this, powered or not. None of these pieces have any sort of circuitry or hydraulics, so I’m guessing it’s not the powered sort. Pretty much all the armor I know of has a smooth face, too. This is practically a piece of artwork. I’m guessing this is a shin guard. Now here’s the real trick.”

  She tossed it to the ground and drew her pistol, looking around to make sure she was clear. “Test fire,” she called out twice to prevent alarming anyone. Then she put a laser blast into the small piece of armor.

  Red light glowed across the piece for only the blink of an eye, spreading as if to highlight the dense, intricate pattern along the surface. The glow quickly receded. Dylan picked up the piece once more to give Geisler a closer look. Her laser blast had left the slightest carbon scoring behind, standing out only as a darker mark on an already dark field.

  “This is half the thickness of any hard-shell armor I’ve ever seen, short of the powered stuff,” she explained as Geisler handled the piece with undisguised fascination. “Half the thickness and much more effective. Armor is built for deflection and diffusion, but you see wear and tear. The metal sags. Even if it holds up to the hit, there’s still some damage. This diffuses almost the whole beam. And you know what it looks like.”

  “Yeah, I do,” Geisler murmured. “Holy shit, I do. Have you put this under any kind of scanner?”

  “The simple stuff. We don’t have specialists out here, but we’ve confirmed the edging there is local stone. So I guess this is your metallurgical breakthrough.” She took the piece from his hands to compel him to look her in the eye. “Geisler, I’ve got a raid that smashed through a reinforced guard contingent with turrets and cameras and all the other shit. I’ve got bad guys using wrist-mounted weapons with fat yellow energy blasts. Nobody makes that kind of stuff. You understand what I mean? Not NorthStar, not Lai Wa, not any second- or third-tier manufacturer. Nobody. And nobody makes armor like this, but it wasn’t smuggled here. It’s from Minos.

  “I see only a few possibilities. Either somebody’s been running one fucking amazing R&D lab right under your nose, or this shit has been here all along. I have a hard time with the former. The latter means this is alien tech, Geisler. You know what that means.”

  She could see the wheels turning behind his eyes. “We don’t know anything,” he asserted, taking the piece from her again. “We need to study this. Our people have to break it down and figure out how it’s made.”

  “If by ‘our people,’ you mean human scientists working for the Union Assembly, sure.”

  “Are you crazy?” Geisler snapped. He remembered himself quickly, glancing around to make sure his outburst hadn’t drawn att
ention. “This is made for a human body, right? You think the ancient Minoans made their clothes on the same size charts we use?

  “Like you said, it’s half the thickness and still more effective than anything on the market. I can think of a lot more uses for something like that than combat armor. I’m not going to run it straight over to the Union for them to panic and put our whole operation on pause for the next ten years. This is exactly what this company has been trying to work out for decades.

  “We need to put everyone you’ve got on recovery duty. If there’s so much as a sliver of this stuff on the ground, we need to recover it. Everything about this goes confidential immediately. Whatever you have to tell your people here to keep this quiet, do it.”

  Dylan crossed her arms over her chest. “And the relic crystals?”

  Geisler flinched. Perhaps unwillingly, he glanced to the wreckage of the plant to his side. “If they’re gone, they’re gone. If they’re still here, they aren’t going anywhere. This takes priority, Major. This,” he said, holding up the armor, “and keeping it all quiet.”

  “You have a Union Fleet liaison here. He’s going to hear about the raid. His staff will hear about it. At least one of them is bound to be Fleet Intelligence. Is this a game you really want to play with them?”

  “Are you saying your company isn’t up to the task?” Geisler frowned. “You worry about site cleanup and security. I’ll worry about Captain MacDonald.” He turned to leave, taking the armor with him, but a thought stopped him. “It would be nice if you’d chase down my missing employees and whoever did this, too.”

  * * *

  “This is a lot of rope and a lot of tarp,” said Tanner. He scanned through the list again. “Are we planning on covering up the whole canyon?”

  “Only the parts we plan to work on the most,” said Naomi. She glanced toward Solanke to make sure he was out of earshot. The mercenary stood at the base of the path up the canyon wall, waiting for Tanner and Antonio to get on the road. “We can’t do anything about the babysitters spying on us, but if they’re here, maybe nobody will think twice if we put up a little shade from the sun. We can run the ropes across the canyon and lay the tarps over them. Once a little dust builds up over the tarps, we should have a little cover from any satellites overhead.”