by Rick Partlow
Major Del Toro looked as if she were about to say something when she was interrupted by the unmistakable dull thump and rumble of a distant explosion. Their heads all whipped around and already Cal saw a cloud of smoke rising from the direction of the base, glowing red just below the swiftly setting star.
"Something tells me they're going to be too busy for air support anyway," Cal commented, trying to keep his voice casual for the benefit of the troops around him. He pulled his heavy pulse laser from its holster and gave Holly a look. "You ready?"
Holly Ann Morai scowled at him and pulled her own handgun, checking its load with a practiced eye before she answered. "Told you we should have brought a vehicle."
Chapter Five
"I'm going to kill that bitch," Kara McIntire muttered, shoulders shaking as she tried hard not to slam a fist into the flimsy, bare buildfoam wall.
"At least she gave you some working space," Deke pointed out cheerfully, gesturing with his cup of coffee at the tiny, bare-bones office that confined them. There was a desk, two folding chairs and a years-out-of-date holotank...and a coffeemaker. "I think she would have been just as happy to tell you to get off the planet, if she could have gotten away with it." He shook his head, the corner of his mouth quirking upward slightly. "What the hell did you ever do to this Del Toro, anyway?"
"I've never met her before," Kara said sourly, settling gingerly into the chair behind the desk, as if it might collapse under her weight. "But she's Colonel Syke's XO."
"Sykes?" Deke repeated, eyes narrowing. "You mean that Fleet Intell guy back on Inferno? The one you basically insulted and treated like shit?"
Kara winced, but nodded. "Apparently, she has some personal loyalty to the man, God knows why."
"I'm surprised he survived the attack on the base," Deke said, eyes clouding with the memory of the Predecessor starship raining destruction down on the Fleet Headquarters on Inferno only a few months before.
"He nearly didn't." Kara's voice was grim. "He spent weeks regenerating organs in a tank and apparently, he and Felicia Del Toro both blame me for it personally."
"Well, you do make friends wherever you go," Deke said, making a face at the coffee and setting the half-full cup down on the desk. "So, do we warn Cal and Holly that Commander Pain in the Ass is heading out to arrest their priest?"
"I wonder if she's just doing it to spite me," Kara mused thoughtfully, fists clenching and unclenching in her lap, "or if she'd already planned this and we just forced up her timeline?"
"Don't know her well enough to say for sure," Deke replied, "but if you were right about the Intell office here not wanting to go out in the field, she might be doing this just to show you up."
"That would be awfully half-assed of her," Kara's tone was sarcastic, but her eyes were still deep in thought, “but not totally out of character." She made a decision in that moment, looked up to catch Deke's eye. "Call them, let them know," she said.
"Roger that," he confirmed and his eyes took an unfocused look for a moment...then too quickly came back into focus and widened slightly. "I'm not getting a signal from either of their neurolink transmitters. Someone's jamming them," he said decisively.
Kara came to her feet abruptly, hands braced on the desk. She quickly searched the current frequencies and call signs on her headcomp and tried connecting to Commander Del Toro's 'link.
"It's a full spectrum jam," she said, shaking her head. "Nothing is getting into that part of the city, not even satellite signals."
"Fuck me," Deke breathed, face twisting into alarmed fury. "That's got to be coordinated and planned, Kara." He turned towards the office door. "We have to go get them out of there..."
Before Kara could take a step around the desk, a sharp, crashing roar shook the room like the fist of God and tossed both of them to the floor in a cloud of powdered and flaking buildfoam. Kara landed catlike on the balls of her feet and palms of her hand, and saw Deke in a three point stance across the room from her, glancing around sharply with his sidearm already in his hand. The room's main lights had winked off, their power feeds severed, but the chemical ghostlights built into the floor cast everything in an unearthly green pallor. She heard alarms sounding even as the base's automated security systems announced via her neurolink communicator that there had been an explosion.
No shit, she reflected.
"Attention all personnel," an announcement came over her neurolink and the speakers outside as well, "the base is under attack and there are hostiles inside the defensive perimeter! All personnel to emergency defense stations immediately! All Tahni inside the perimeter are to be considered hostile!"
"Ah, for God's sake," Deke said with a sigh, coming to his feet. He seemed, Kara thought, less alarmed and more annoyed. He slapped the door's touch plate and waited for a moment before deciding it wasn't working; then he pulled open the emergency panel and yanked the manual release. The door popped aside a few centimeters, letting him grab it and shove it the rest of the way into its wall recess.
Smoke and dust drifted into the office as the door opened, and with it the sound of pounding feet and distant screams, and another explosion, this one further away. Deke started to take a step outside, but Kara put a hand on his arm, holding him back for a moment as she tried to access the base's security net...and failed.
"The security feed is down," she told Deke and saw from his reaction that he understood the ramifications of that: the automated defense systems would be inoperative and they wouldn't have any drone coverage.
"Guess we do this the old-fashioned way," he said, what might have been a grin passing briefly over his face. Then he ducked through the door and she followed him outside.
Kara didn't know what she'd expected when she reached the end of the corridor and the door to the compound, but what she saw was worse. The first explosion had been a shuttle: she could see the mushroom cloud from its destruction wafting high above the landing pad, blood red in the light of the setting primary star, and flames still licked off of burning wreckage scattered over a perimeter of hundreds of meters. Amongst that burning wreckage were the smoldering bodies of Fleet personnel and at least one ruptured suit of Marine powered armor.
The human part of Kara cringed at the human carnage, but the experienced intelligence operative in her winced at the damage the explosion had done to the other assault shuttle and the ground support craft which had been on the landing pad near it. There would be no air support unless there happened to be a shuttle on the way down from orbit.
And they really could have used some air support, she thought, catching glimpses of furtive movement between the base's temporary dome structures. Somewhere on the other side of the base, or maybe over in the spaceport, she could hear sporadic laser fire and another large explosion as the attackers clashed with Marines or Fleet security personnel; but around their building she saw nothing but running, panicked technicians and intelligence analysts...or their bodies.
"They're wearing Stealth armor," Deke said beside her, stabbing a finger at a tall figure running from cover to cover about fifty meters away, barely visible in the growing darkness.
Watching the black-clad runner through the thermal filters in her lab-grown eyes, she saw that it was the steady yellow of the background temperature, and nearly invisible on infrared. She didn't have the same quality of audio enhancement as Deke, but she knew that the specially designed armor would mask heartbeat and respiration as well.
Trying to keep one eye out for more of the infiltrators, Kara moved to one of the fallen Fleet security troopers a few meters from the exterior door and quickly and efficiently relieved him of his pulse carbine and magazine pouches. She tried not to look at his face, but couldn't help seeing the bloodshot whites of his eyes as he stared death in the face. Swallowing a mouthful of bile, she slung the ammo pouches over her shoulder and hefted the carbine, feeling comfort in its solid weight.
"Where are we headed?" Deke asked her, eyes scanning, handgun held at the ready.
>
Before she could answer, he spotted another attacker racing across the gap between a suite of offices and a buildfoam dispenser only thirty meters away and snapped off a burst of laser fire from his pistol. The pressure pulses struck the Tahni male in the neck, in the gap between the shoulder armor and his full-face helmet, and the helmeted head separated from the body in an explosion of superheated blood. The decapitated body began to slump to the ground...and then disappeared in a fireball of heat and pressure that swept past Deke and Kara and smashed them both to the ground.
Kara felt the breath squeezed from her lungs by the concussion, felt a burning on her exposed skin like she'd been out in the sun with no protection. Her head felt like someone had smashed it with a sledgehammer and she knew that if she hadn't been augmented, she would have been dead from the shockwave. Her vision had gone dark and she rubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand to clear the dirt from her face. A cloud of dust and smoke billowed around them, slowly clearing as a light, evening breeze swept across them.
"Jesus Christ," Deke coughed, rolling onto his hands and knees as he tried to get his lungs working again. "Fucking Heartbreakers..."
Kara nodded, still unable to speak. "Heartbreakers" were explosives worn on the body of an infiltrator and rigged to go off if the wearer's heart stopped, to try to take out the ones who'd killed him. Some troops called them "fuck-you's," but the official reports discouraged that particular nickname. She'd heard about the Tahni using them during the war, but never seen one till now.
"Ops center," she croaked, her throat feeling like it was full of broken glass, and Deke nodded. Unlike the storage buildings and offices made from cheap and quick buildfoam pours, the base's Operations center was a fortress ringed by biphase carbide walls and Gatling laser turrets. If anyplace on the base could hold, it would be the Ops center.
Unfortunately, the Ops center was in the middle of the compound, nearly a kilometer from her office, which was on the side of the base closest to the spaceport. Between it and them were a dozen other temporary offices and garages and at least one repair bay, along with a lot of construction equipment, which left a lot of places that could conceal threats.
"Let's go," Deke said, levering himself to his feet. His hair was singed and smoking and his clothes were blackened and covered in dust and she had to think she looked even worse, but she got to her feet anyway because there wasn't really any choice.
Another blast shook the ground, this one from the direction of the commercial spaceport, and Kara felt the claws of panic at the back of her mind, a feeling of inescapable fate stalking them. She tried to shake it off as she followed Deke, walking backwards for a few steps every few meters to keep a watch behind them.
After a hundred meters of that, a barely-perceptible movement in the shadow of an atmospheric condenser tower caught her eye and she nearly fired by instinct before her neurolink read the IFF signal coming from a Fleet uniform. She waved a signal to Deke, then sprinted the ten meters to the cage-like support at the base of the spindly tower.
Thick biphase carbide supports sank into an aggregate foundation that was fused on a molecular level with the soil and Kara had to duck under the crossbeams between those supports to reach the woman's hiding place. She was young, looking lost in her Fleet-issue utility fatigues, her brown eyes wide with fear as she hugged her knees to her chin. There were scorch marks on the legs of her pants and the ends of her light brown hair were burned short, indications that she'd been too close to one of the explosions.
This close, Kara could read her ID code from her uniform's transponder: Janice Claiborne, Technician Second Class, Communications Specialist. She'd enlisted in the Spacefleet six months ago and this was her first assignment out of training.
"Janice," Kara called softly, going down on one knee. The young woman's eyes widened as they darted toward her.
"Who are you?" the young enlisted woman asked tremulously, her voice sharp with paranoia.
"I'm Major McIntire," Kara told her, trying to sound confident. "Captain Conner," she motioned back at Deke, "and I are with the DSI and we're trying to get to the Ops center. It's the only place around here that might qualify as safe. You want to come with us?"
"I don't have a gun," Janice said plaintively, hand clenching as if she really wanted one right about then.
Wordlessly, Kara pulled her own sidearm from its holster and offered it to the young woman, butt-first. Janice Claiborne stared at it for a moment, then snatched it and checked its load with a practiced move that surprised Kara. Janice must have noticed it in her expression because the corner of the young woman's mouth turned up.
"My mother is a Marine Colonel," she explained, holding the gun at high port as she clambered to her feet.
"Well, let's make Mom proud then," Kara told her, leading her back out to where Deke was waiting, crouched behind a water pipe junction.
Deke glanced at Janice, cocking an eyebrow. "Don't shoot me," he commented drily.
"Not unless you deserve it," Janice promised gravely and Deke barked a laugh.
"I see you've found a kindred spirit," he told Kara before moving out again, this time with the young enlisted woman walking between them.
As they moved inward towards the center of the base, Kara could hear more concentrated gunfire, punctuated by chains of explosions, which she thought were more Heartbreakers going off. Here and there were bodies---all of them human, most technicians and functionaries, by their uniforms---and at intervals small, smoking craters where Tahni infiltrators had self-destructed upon death. Smoke drifted low in the humid air, obscuring the buildings of the base and the spaceport and isolating the three of them in a shifting pocket of visibility.
"I think the Tahni had the same idea as you," Deke said, nodding towards the sound of gunfire. "That sounds like it's coming from the direction of the Ops center."
"Or that's where they figured the survivors would be heading," Kara reasoned.
"They have to be seeing this from orbit, right?" Janice asked hopefully. "I mean, the Thaddeus Moore is in cislunar space still..."
"Assault shuttles from the Thad would take hours to get here," Kara told her, trying not to sound too harsh. "I suppose they could reach us with a missile strike quicker than that, but I'd just as soon they didn't."
Before Janice could respond to that, Deke raised his left hand in a fist and sank to a knee. Kara took a knee beside him, carbine at her shoulder, and she could see out of the corner of her eye that the younger woman with them was crouching down in imitation. Deke quickly went from a crouch to a prone, laying belly-down in the packed dirt, and Kara and Janice followed suit.
"Up there," Deke murmured next to her ear, pointing with the muzzle of his pulse pistol at the massive metal bulk of a buildfoam dispenser situated about halfway between them and the next temporary dome.
Drifting smoke and the gathering darkness did its best to hide the machine from view, but the thermal and infrared filters built into her eyes showed her a glowing red outline moving slightly against the blues and yellows of the inactive dispenser. The Stealth armor hid the Tahni infiltrator, but it couldn't hide the heat of a recently-fired weapon. Kara scooted backwards and pointed the shooter out to Janice, whispering a quick explanation.
"What's the plan?" Janice asked, almost seeming relieved to finally see a live, concrete enemy she could shoot at.
"Cover me," Deke instructed, then scrambled to his feet and started running before Kara could argue with him.
"Damn it!" she hissed, bringing the muzzle of her carbine up and cutting loose a burst near where the infiltrator was hidden...though not too near, since she didn't want to set off an explosion thirty meters away again.
Beside her, Janice extended her borrowed sidearm and fired carefully, though Kara knew the young woman could barely see the dispenser much less the Tahni behind it. The laser pulses from their weapons flared sun-bright as they ionized atmosphere in their wake and burned trails of white plasma through the smoke. M
etal from the dispenser vaporized in polychromatic flares and the crackling bangs echoed across the open field.
It looked damned impressive, Kara thought, like a Fourth of July fireworks show back home in Chicagoland. But apparently their target wasn't so impressed that he forgot to shoot back. Actinic flashes of superheated air passed less than a meter above them as the Tahni infiltrator blindly returned fire.
Wonder where they got the laser weapons, Kara thought as she tried to bury her face in the dirt. Then she answered her own question: Probably the same place they got the Stealth armor.
She rolled two meters to the left and started to bring her carbine up to fire again when suddenly the enemy's weapon went silent, leaving only a white thermal glow in its wake.
"Come on up," she heard Deke call.
She touched Janice on the arm. "Move fast," she cautioned the woman.
She held back as she crossed the distance to the buildfoam dispenser, trying not to outpace the younger woman too badly; they reached the machine together and ducked down beneath the shelter of a dispenser arm. Deke was there, pinning the black-clad Tahni infiltrator to the ground with a knee to his back. He didn't bother controlling the male's arms, since both of them were broken, bent at unnatural angles out at his sides. A low moan issued from inside the opaque visor of the helmet but the Tahni didn't attempt to move or fight.
Kara saw his laser rifle laying a meter away to the side, along with a shoulder bag that had slipped open, spilling out spare power crystals for the weapon. She sniffed with a bit of professional disdain for the Tahni design, which used crystal power spikes rather than the hyperexplosive cartridges the Commonwealth lasers used.
"You should have waited for me to give the go-ahead," Kara chided Deke mildly, knowing she was wasting her breath.
"Oh, you know you'd have sent me after we argued about it for a minute," Deke said with a shrug. "And we didn't have time to spare. Anyway, you think this asshole," he smacked the Tahni on the back of the helmet with a palm, "knows anything worth asking?"