by Rick Partlow
Whoever they are.
She looked around, pausing to frown at Illyana, who had ceased convulsing and was clearly dead, blood dripping from the corners of her eyes. Some of the security guards they'd overpowered were recovering, but not a one seemed interested in taking them on again. One had his helmet off and was staring at them in horror, his face blanched white, teeth clenched as if he were afraid to speak for fear of being noticed again.
"We can't go up the elevator," she decided. "Let's try the way they came in."
Deke nodded, moving to where the hatch in the ceiling still yawned open. He leaned over quickly and carefully, risking a glance to make sure no one was waiting above to blow the head off of anyone who approached. Instead, he saw a smooth shaft that led up a few meters through the ceiling and into another room.
Deke shrugged to Kara, crouched, and then sprang upward with all the power the byomer implant muscles in his legs could offer. He sailed through the shaft and planted his feet wide to catch floor at the top, his talons extended, arms wide.
But there was nothing. The room was empty except for a bank of monitors, a table and a simple couch. And a door.
Come on up, Deke transmitted to Kara over his neurolink, moving aside to make room for her.
Her ascent wasn't as smooth as his; she lacked the byomer muscle augments, fitted instead with bionic implant joints like the three assassins they'd just fought. She grabbed at the edge of the hatch and pulled herself up, her left index finger extended, scanning back and forth. He wondered how much charge the implant laser had left; without it, she'd be unarmed, though not helpless of course.
"After you," she said, nodding toward the door.
Deke snorted ruefully and moved to the exit, slapping the contact panel and ducking through. The corridor outside was narrow and dimly lit, leading past several closed and unmarked doors and ending in a steep and dark stairwell barely wide enough for one person to traverse. It brought out the claustrophobia in Deke, but he ignored it and charged up the stairs, hoping he didn't meet anyone heading downward: close-quarters combat in a stairwell so narrow his shoulders were only a centimeter from the walls could get pretty ugly.
He met no resistance though, met no one at all. And as he pushed open the door at the top of the stairs, he understood why. The door had been soundproofed, but as soon as it was opened he was hit by the blaring klaxon of an alarm, its warbling call only interrupted by an automated voice urging evacuation of the Rec Center facility through the nearest exit. Deke tried to shut the noise out as he checked up and down the wider, better-lit hallway that stretched both ways from the door.
He could tell it was a maintenance area from the holographic markings on the wall, and he caught a glimpse of a couple employees jogging away around the corner to obey the evacuation order. Seeing no threats, Deke retracted his talons and moved out, following the path the fleeing maintenance workers had taken and waving for Kara to follow.
"This is bad," he yelled to her over the alarms as they jogged through the hall.
She didn't say anything, but he knew she had to agree. If someone was clearing the whole facility, it probably meant they were getting rid of witnesses.
Deke called up the layout of the place from his headcomp and got an idea of where they were: the maintenance section was a floor down from the main casino, but there was still a ground exit not that far away. He turned right at the next junction and found himself in the flow of a few dozen workers as they all made their way toward the same egress.
They all seemed like your typical worker drones to Deke, all wearing identical light green coveralls fitted with an ID tag at the chest, and all seemed so caught up in the confusion that they didn't seem to notice him or Kara. Until one wide-eyed female with long red hair tied into twin ponytails glanced at him and her eyes got even wider.
"Oh my God!" she blurted, loud enough to be heard over the klaxons. "All that blood!"
Deke could see her about to shout something, perhaps a warning to the others, and he was microseconds from delivering a non-lethal chop to the carotid when Kara caught up with her.
"I'm Major McIntire, DSI," she told the woman, leaning in next to her ear and flashing her official ID. No one else could have heard over the alarms, but Deke's hearing was pretty far from Normal. "You need to keep quiet, keep what you've seen to yourself and vacate this building."
The redhead looked even more frightened than before, but she nodded energetically and kept silent as Deke and Kara hurried on past her. The hall widened as they made their way through the pack of workers, until it led into a loading dock where tubs of foodstuffs for the kitchen processors and plastic crates of raw materials for the fabricators had been brought in on pallets and laid out in neat rows. Large, double doors yawned open, revealing a wide ramp up to a service lot where cargo haulers would line up to drop off the pallets, though none waited just now.
The crowd had thinned out as Deke and Kara had wound through it, and there was nothing between them and the exit as they stepped out into the loading dock, weaving between pallets. Then something below the conscious, something instinctive that might have been a too-fast-for-thought warning from his implant sensors, made Deke grab Kara's arm and pull her down with him behind a motorized pallet jack. He heard the beginnings of a curse come from her just before a barrage of high-energy laser pulses passed through the space they'd just been occupying and sliced into a maintenance worker ten meters behind them. His torso blasted apart in an explosion of superheated bodily fluids and he collapsed, dead before he hit the ground.
Screams echoed louder than the thunder cracks of the laser and the crowd scattered, some taking cover while others ran back into the halls. Deke risked a look through a gap between two containers on the pallet shielding them and caught a glimpse of a gunmetal grey suit of powered armor advancing down the ramp, the multiple barrels of a Gatling laser still spinning down from the first burst. A ton of biphase carbide stomped heavily on the fusion-form ramp with spiked footpads and two more followed in a wedge formation twenty meters behind it.
"We're fucked," Deke declared, shaking his head.
The lead trooper spun toward them with surprising litheness for so much bulk and Deke and Kara sprinted to the right as the Gatling laser opened fire again, the spinning barrels picking up dozens of hyperexplosive cartridges per second and pulsing their heat energy through its multiple lasing rods. Dozens of kilojoules of energy ripped into the pallet they'd been hiding behind, vaporizing raw food and powdered metal in a cloud of polychromatic fire.
Deke heard shrapnel smacking into the stacked tubs and crates around him and felt a sharp sliver of plastic slice into his leg but didn't stop running. He had no thought to fight the armored troopers, not unarmed; he knew their only chance was to get out, and even that chance wasn't a great one. There was an emergency exit on the opposite side of the loading dock; he'd seen it in the plans he'd called up on his headcomp. It was thirty meters away and he felt as if it might as well have been on the far side of the planet, but he zigzagged a course through the pallets toward it anyway, knowing there was no choice.
The laser spoke again and more pallets exploded around them, fire alarms joining the already blaring security alerts as the air filled with a thick haze of multicolored smoke and the ear-shattering din of the sirens and warnings. Deke was thrown to the ground from the force of the blast, and sensed Kara landing next to him. He jumped into a crouch almost immediately, but he could see the Gatling laser swinging his way and the other troopers clearing the door, and he knew that there was no way they were going to make the exit.
Deke had never prayed before, not even during the war when he'd had his leg blown off by a Tahni mecha, but he considered for just a moment asking anyone who was listening to get Kara out of this alive. And someone answered.
Get down.
Deke grabbed Kara and fell on top of her, putting his back to the approaching enemy; and then there was a searing light that Deke could see even facing t
he other way and with his eyes closed, and a blast of heat and sound and pressure that buffeted him like a storm. Deke felt himself being thrown through the air and he lost his grip on Kara, slamming against the far wall with enough force to break a Normal's neck.
Deke ignored the moment of pain that even his headcomp couldn't totally shut out, rolling over onto all fours and trying to force his eyes open. The loading dock was a tableau of utter devastation, with a scorched and smoking wedge cut through the stacks of pallets. The wedge of destruction had consumed everything in its path, including the armored troopers, and penetrated the far wall before spending itself in the dense fusion-form of the building's foundation. He levered himself to his feet, frantically searching for Kara and finding her only a couple meters away from him, wedged beneath an overturned stack of plastic crates. Their load of raw silica powder had burst through and she was half buried in sand.
Deke heard a roaring as he stepped toward her to help her up, and he thought for a moment that the explosion had damaged his ears. Then he realized that there was a spaceship landing on the ramp outside the loading dock.
"Are you okay?" he asked Kara as he pulled her up, sending crates and tubs tumbling and sand spilling off of her.
"I'll live," she murmured, half in a daze, shaking sand off of her face. "What the hell was that?"
"I'm just guessing here," he said, feeling slightly light-headed, "but I think it was a plasma cannon."
"Yeah, sorry about that," a familiar voice called out from the direction of the loading bay doors.
Deke glanced around sharply, hand searching automatically for a sidearm he wasn't wearing, but then relaxed slightly. The figure emerging from the billowing smoke and wreckage was short and slender, and his gait was distinctively graceful and lithe, like a dancer's. He was dressed in nondescript civilian clothes but a heavy pulse pistol hung at his side with a familiarity that suggested it belonged there. As he approached closer it was easier to make out his lean, angular features and dark hair formed into a close-cropped Mohawk.
"Woulda' used something less catastrophic," Reginald Nakamura explained apologetically, "but there wasn't enough time." He shook his head. "There still isn't...we need to get the fuck out of here right now."
Deke didn't argue with him and, for a wonder, neither did Kara. He followed her as they picked their way through the carnage and fairly stumbled up the ramp with Reggie Nakamura trailing them, eyes open for threats. A dull grey delta shape waited there for them, stretching out far enough that its broad wingspan wouldn't have fit through even the wide loading dock doors. It was a missile cutter by design, just like his old ship Dutchman, and the sight of it triggered a pang of loss as he thought about her wreckage smoldering on an unreachable planet on the other side of the galaxy. His had been a war surplus vessel, though, while this one still retained the gleam of novelty.
He could hear the whine of the turbines idling as he and Kara walked up the boarding ramp into the utility bay of the Aurora, and before Reggie even hit the control to raise the hatch, the engines began to spin up and the ship lurched into the air once more. Deke and Kara grabbed for handholds to steady themselves as they ducked through the utility bay's hatch into the ship's cockpit. The woman in the pilot's seat was even shorter than Reggie, with spiked brown hair, a heart-shaped face and dark eyes that had always seemed to Deke to have the twinkle of some mischievous thought lurking in them. Unlike Reggie, she wore a Commonwealth Fleet uniform rather than civvies---and she still looked damned good in it, Deke thought.
"We have assault shuttles inbound," Commander Holly Morai informed them tersely, eyeing them to make sure they were strapped into their acceleration couches before feeding power to the engines.
Deke felt himself pressed into his seat as the jets sucked in air and ran it through the ship's reactor to superheat before ejecting it at supersonic speeds.
"Assault shuttles?" Kara repeated, disbelief strong in her voice. "Whose fucking assault shuttles?"
"I haven't run their transponder IDs," Morai responded drily, not looking away from the controls, "but given that they somehow have clearance to fly over Hesperides, I'm guessing they're military."
"That powered armor was definitely military," Deke put in, "but it wasn't Marine issue; I've never seen that configuration before."
"Shit," Kara swore softly. "The duplicates Cutter put in place are making their move." She looked at Deke. "Whatever you got from that download, we need to get back to Inferno and analyze it."
"We're not going back to Inferno," Reggie told her. "We got a message from the Bulldog: we have to head to Highland. Cal's going to meet us there."
"Why?" Deke wondered. "What's going on?"
Reggie let out a sigh and shook his head. "I hope you liked Tahn-Skyyiah as much as I did," he said resignedly, "because we're going back."
Chapter Three
The horizon seemed to stretch on forever here, Rachel thought. Highland was so different from Canaan, so open and rugged and just big. From where she stood on the roof of the Savage/Slaughter LLC operations center, Rachel Lowenstein-Mitchell could see the kilometers-deep canyons which had been cut through the soft sandstone by the fast-flowing current of the Tamanend River. The river was the longest on the planet, carving its way across the whole northern continent on its way to the Western Sea. It was breathtakingly beautiful, a landscape of deep reds and oranges, of arches and hoodoos and colorful strata; and yet it was also breathtakingly barren. Here and there you could see a patch of green where lichen clung to the loose rocks, sucking away whatever moisture was available, but not so much as a patch of grass decorated the plateau.
There was much more varied flora---and fauna---at the bottom of the canyons, where the river allowed life to spring forth; and she knew from what she'd studied in the databanks these last few weeks that there were actually forests on the extreme southern edge of this continent and over a larger portion of the one to the south. But life had a shallow hold on this world and there had been nothing to draw colonists to it after its discovery only a few decades ago. Sure, you could build the labs to grow the food you needed and send machines to collect the raw materials for it from the river valleys, but why would you bother with that expense on a world with not much in the way of mineral resources, in a star system with little else to offer?
So Highland had been a rare habitable planet with no large settlements other than a few research stations and the odd squatter. Until Vontez Slaughter, an officer in the Marines during the war, had come across it in the records and mentioned it to his childhood friend, who just happened to be Captain Keller Savage, one of the last few surviving members of Omega Group---unofficially known as The Glory Boys. The two of them had been looking for a way to use their wartime training to make a little money, and putting together a mercenary company had seemed like a good idea. There were always conflicts in the Pirate Worlds, and having a well-trained paramilitary force to guard shipments or pull security for construction on new worlds was a lucrative way to make a living. Highland had provided the perfect place to build a base to train that force. The intervening years had turned a mercenary company into a battalion and their reputation had brought them work first from the Corporate Council and now from its various successors.
She could see movement in the distance, where flyers were taking troops to training sites deep in the canyons. They were the only humans on this continent, a thought that scared her a little. She wondered how far they could trust these people.
Caleb hadn't talked much about Keller Savage. He'd told her stories about his partner and best friend Deke, of course, and Mat M'Voba, their Executive Officer, and about General Murdock, the infamous "Bulldog." He'd talked about the other members of his unit he'd thought were assholes, like Brian Hammer who'd wound up dying in the invasion of Tahn-Skyyiah, and Roger West, who'd later turned out to be a Corporate Council spy. He'd even mentioned that he and Holly Morai had once been involved, sort of, in a casual wartime sort of way. But he hadn'
t said anything to her about Savage, other than to comment once that the man had been good at his job.
Now that she'd met him, she understood what Cal had meant.
"Rache." She heard Cal's voice behind her and turned to see him emerging from the roof exit. He was wearing a gun belt, and she realized suddenly that she couldn't imagine him without one. The thought sent a shudder up her back for some reason. "They're ready in the briefing room," he told her.
She nodded, stepping over to precede him down the stairs. "Pete said you saw Jase while you were in Harristown," she told him. "How are he and Lisa doing?"
"Good," he said with a nod. "He's really stepped into the job. I knew he could. He's a better cop than I ever was."
"I miss them," she admitted, the words perhaps sounding more wistful than she'd meant them to.
Cal must have caught the tone, because he slipped an arm around her, giving her a comforting squeeze. "This won't last forever," he promised.
She looked into his broad, honest face, into those earnest, blue-grey eyes and believed that he believed that. She wasn't sure if she agreed with him, but she kept it to herself for now.
"I wish I could have gone with you," she said instead, as they reached the bottom of the stairs and took a left towards the briefing room, following a sign on the wall. The sign wasn't even holographic, she noted: this place had originally been built on a shoestring.
"Me too," he agreed, sighing. "But we were only feet-wet for a few hours anyway. It's probably better that way...if we'd stayed any longer, it would have been even harder to leave again."
She was saved from having to formulate a reply to that by their arrival at the Operations Center briefing room. Like the rest of the facility, it was pretty basic, built for function rather than looks or as a platform for bleeding-edge technology. A simple round table was surrounded by cheap, collapsible chairs, with the only amenity being a holographic projector mounted on the ceiling, dark and inactive at the moment.