by Rick Partlow
"Take that left," Cal directed the NCO. "Get us out the quickest exit to the next street over."
"Got it," Gutierrez' voice boomed through the hall on his public address speakers.
Cal could feel the floor shuddering with the footsteps of the battlesuits, could hear their booming stride echoing off the walls, and he knew that anyone listening would figure out where they were quickly. They had to get out of the building and clear of the trap they'd sprung. Cal forced back a thought from The Machine that he and Holly would be better off on their own, without the high-signature battlesuits of the Marines.
Gutierrez pounded around the corner into the broader corridor and Cal had a better look at what was ahead. The hallway was brightly-lit and wide enough for cargo carts to fit through two abreast and he could see one of them sitting up against the left wall about twenty meters down. Broad double-doors lined both sides of the hallway at evenly spaced intervals for deliveries, and fifty meters down at the far end of the building loomed the corrugated metal of the main loading bay door, but they were all secured and the long corridor seemed unoccupied.
Cal sprinted past the lumbering battlesuit, chafing at its glacial pace and feeling like the walls were closing in on them. He was fairly confident the insurgents wouldn't have suspected they'd break through the wall into this building, but it wouldn't take them long to figure it out. They'd need numbers to take out the Marines and he needed to get the group moving too fast for numbers to get in place.
He skidded to a halt next to the control panel for the cargo door, slapping a palm on the surface to wake up the display; it was in Tahni that quickly melted into plain English under the gaze of his headcomp's translation program. It was biometrically secured, but it was also decades out of date; a few seconds of cracking guided by his headcomp unlocked the controls and sent the door jerking upward with a grind of ancient and poorly maintained motors and a deafening clatter of metal on metal. Cal registered a presence beside him and suddenly realized that Holly was standing next to him and had been for a few seconds.
By the time the Marines had caught up with him, the door was open about up to his thighs and Cal dropped down and rolled under it, rising to a crouch on the ramp of the loading dock. He swore under his breath. The other side of the building wasn't really a street at all, just an alley less than a hundred meters long, where cargo trucks could pull up to unload---though none, unfortunately, were around at the moment. The next building over was devoid of windows and doors until about ten meters up, and the alley ended in another bare wall where the buildings connected to share a superstructure, which left them with two alternatives: stay inside and try to find another exit, or chance getting cut off in the dead-end alley.
If we stay in the building, we could wind up getting trapped inside it, he thought quickly. Wouldn't be bad if we had more ammo; but other than the lasers, these guys have mostly crowd control shit.
"So," Holly said from her position just to his right, "we keep moving."
It wasn't a question. "Yeah," he agreed, looking behind him as Sgt. Gutierrez and his Marines ducked under the fully-open doors. "I'll go check out the street."
"My turn," Holly said, shaking her head. He felt an instant's irritation as she sprinted down the loading ramp and out into the alley, and he wasn't sure why. Maybe it was because she'd been out of action for so long, while for him it sometimes seemed the action had never ended. Or maybe it was the concussion.
Rusty or not, Holly hadn't forgotten anything: her technique was textbook as she checked both ways down the connecting street before signaling the all-clear and beckoning for the others to advance. Cal felt like he was leading a marching band on a street parade back home with the battlesuits pounding the pavement behind him; but when he reached the end of the alley, he saw that the streets were empty.
They were warned, he realized. No cargo vehicles on the street either, he noted. Nothing they could use to un-ass the area quickly. Just shuttered windows and locked doors.
"We need to head north," Holly decided, indicating the street to their right. "That'll take us out of the metro area and into the city's green belt. They won't be able to roadblock us there and we can follow it all the way around to the base."
"You heard the Commander," Sgt Gutierrez barked. "Move it out, top speed."
Cal let the Marines push ahead of him, one of the junior enlisted taking point, with Gutierrez about ten meters behind him. Holly fell in beside Cal, jogging quickly to keep up with the Marines.
"Shouldn't one of us run point and scout for them?" she asked him softly, still unable to communicate via neurolink because of the jamming.
"You got a big-ass suit of powered armor?" he asked her, hearing his own words slurred still from the head trauma. "Cause I don't."
"You want them to spring any traps instead of us," she said, realization in her eyes---and perhaps a bit of horror, he thought.
Cal shrugged, unapologetic. "We're not mine detectors."
"I don't recall you being this...pragmatic," Holly commented dryly.
"None of us are who we used to be," he said dully. "Let's get out of this shithole alive and you can make me feel guilty later."
Chapter Seven
"There they are," Deke muttered into Kara's ear. "But what the hell are they doing?"
Kara shook her head, but didn't answer; Janice Claiborne didn't even look at Deke, her eyes fixed on the centimeters-thin gap between the two cargo containers that sheltered them. Through it, she could see what the other two were looking at: nearly two dozen of the Tahni infiltrators, anonymous and indistinct in their black Stealth armor, were gathered behind the cover of a storage shed only a hundred meters from the outer wall of the Operations center.
Most of them were pulling security, spread around in a perimeter with lasers pointed outward, while four of them maneuvered a cargo jack up a paved path that led from somewhere in the direction of the spaceport. On the bed of the motorized jack was a dull metal container about two meters long and nearly as wide, and by the depth the tracks of the cargo jack sank into the dirt when it left the path to take cover behind the building, it must have weighed several hundred kilos.
Janice was just happy they'd managed to get this far without getting shot. They hadn't seen any other enemy troops along the way, but they'd found plenty of friendlies. All of them dead. She'd known some of them and was trying very hard not to think about that.
"That box looks pretty heavily shielded," Kara said finally, "but I'm still getting a fairly high thermal reading on it."
"Yeah, I noticed that," Deke murmured. "And what do you think would put out that much heat even inside a shielded container?"
"What are you talking about?" Janice hissed, finally looking away from the Tahni to glare at the two of them.
"There's a nuclear weapon inside that container," Kara told her plainly. The woman's eyes went wide, her face pale, and she felt a cold lump somewhere in the pit of her stomach.
"They know they can't breach the Ops center before we get space support," Kara went on, nodding towards the structure beyond the storage shed, its walls looming twenty meters tall and nearly a kilometer around the perimeter, with Gatling laser turrets every ten meters paired with spotlights that threw the surrounding buildings into sharp relief. "So they're going to take a short-cut and nuke the whole place."
"But..." Janice trailed off, shaking her head in disbelief. "But even if it's low yield, they'll kill thousands of Tahni people in the city..."
"Then I guess we should be good Samaritans," Deke said, grinning crookedly, "and go kill all those motherfuckers."
"Just the three of us?" Janice asked, looking back and forth between Deke and the twenty-two Tahni on the other side of the cargo containers. "Why don't we alert the troops in there?" She gestured at the Ops center.
"If they think they're gonna' be overrun," Deke pointed out, looking more patient about having to answer that question than Kara did, "they'll just trigger the bomb now."
/> "Shit," Janice said quietly. She closed her eyes for a moment, trying to control her breathing and slow her pounding heartbeat, then pulled her stolen laser weapon into the ready position. "All right. What do you want me to do?"
Deke glanced at Kara and shrugged. "You're the boss."
Kara snorted, shaking her head slightly. "I'm the boss except when you want to run off and do your own thing," she corrected him. Her nose wrinkled slightly as she fell silent, calculations running behind her eyes. "All right," she said after a moment, "our primary goal is to get control of that nuke. The question is, are we worried it's connected to their Heartbreakers?"
"I doubt these guys are even wearing Heartbreakers," Deke said confidently. "They wouldn't chance having so many in one place...one guy gets capped, it could set off all the others."
"Okay then," Kara decided. "Janice, give us five seconds to get into position, then concentrate your fire on any of them who get near the bomb."
"And don't shoot us," Deke cautioned her, a stern look on his face. "It's really fucking annoying."
"Yes, sir," she said, moving off to the side of the cargo container and hoping to God that it was filled with something that would stop laser fire. She looked back over at Deke and Kara, who had taken up a position at the opposite end of the stacked containers. Kara gave a nod, and then they ducked around the other side, vanishing into the night.
Janice counted silently to five, then took a deep breath and spun around the edge of the cargo container, laser coming to her shoulder. The optics for the weapon were equipped with night vision, and it was dark enough now that she needed it. She settled the targeting triangle on one of the infiltrators guiding the cargo jack and her finger touched the trigger.
Janice had fired Commonwealth pulse lasers many times in training; this felt different, with less of a vibration since it didn't use a hyperexplosive charge to create the thermal pulse. There was just a barely-audible hum before a brilliant flash and the familiar snap-crack of superheated air. The Stealth armor the Tahni were wearing was designed more to mask their heat and sonic signature than to resist military-grade weapons lasers, so she didn't bother trying to aim for weak spots, just put the round right into the infiltrator's chest.
The Tahni male jerked as the two-shot burst penetrated his chest armor and Janice could see him falling to his knees out of the corner of her vision, even as she moved to the next target. She was dimly aware, somewhere below conscious thought, that she had just killed someone for the first time in her life.
The other Tahni were beginning to move, but she was able to track one more of the infiltrators who'd been operating the cargo jack before he could find cover. She touched the trigger pad for a heartbeat too long and nearly gasped at the long burst she let loose. Vaporizing metal and plastic sparked off the cargo jack as a couple stray shots hit it, but most of the burst chopped into the Tahni insurgent, hitting him side-on and taking off his left arm at the shoulder before slicing through his neck.
Janice felt bile rising in her throat but before she had time to feel grateful that it was too dark to see well, a sudden blast of return fire punched into the cargo container less than a meter from her head. She cried out as hot gas burned her cheek and neck, then she jerked back behind cover, gritting her teeth to keep from cursing with the pain. Her cheek stung but her neck felt like she'd been branded. She could hear laser blasts vaporizing material off the other side of the cargo container and she ducked down, running to the other end and sliding down into the dirt.
The wind went out of her as she landed on top of the Tahni weapon, but she forced herself to crawl forward, wheezing and gasping, until she cleared the opposite side of the cargo container. She swung the laser into place, pulling it up to her left shoulder and trying to focus on the light-intensifying optics. Then she blinked.
What was visible through the optics was a blur of motion highlighted periodically by eye-searing blasts of pulse fire or by Tahni bodies flying through the air in sprays of blood. She tried to find a target but nothing stood still long enough to shoot...or at least for her to shoot. Kara and Deke didn't seem to have to that problem. They moved like nothing she'd ever seen, like nothing human, not even the boosted humans she'd heard about. And where they moved, the Tahni insurgents died; some fell to laser fire, some to blades that seemed to come right out of Deke's arms, some to the brute force of kicks that broke necks or spines.
Finally, three of the insurgents broke and ran and Janice had a shot. She tracked the fastest of the three, missing with her first burst but finally slicing across the Tahni's legs with the second. He went down in a heap, thrashing in pain, and she hosed the rest of the rounds in the weapon's magazine in a swathe across the last two. One went down from her fire but the second kept running, until a burst from Kara's pulse carbine put him down only meters from the others.
You just shot two people who were running away from you, she heard something whisper into her mind. She ignored it, concentrating on trying to figure out how to reload the Tahni laser in-between furtive glances around to make sure there wasn't anyone else coming behind her.
"Goddammit," she swore softly, fumbling with the clip of spare power crystals as she tried to figure out how to fit it into the slot in the foregrip of the laser.
"You gotta' twist it to the right," Deke offered helpfully, somehow standing just behind her left shoulder for all that she hadn't seen him move.
Janice bit back a startled curse and tried not to glare at him as she took his advice and seated the power clip into the side of the carbine. She took a deep breath and tried to calm herself before she looked back up at him. His uniform was torn and bloodied, though she didn't see any obvious injuries on him, and he seemed as calm as if he'd just taken a stroll through the garden.
"What are you?" she asked him, shaking her head.
"I think we're fucked," Kara's voice came from over by the cargo jack. It took Janice a moment to realize the DSI officer wasn't answering her question.
She rose from her crouch and stepped over to the cargo jack, trying to keep a careful eye on the ripped-apart corpses scattered about it without actually looking too closely at them. She felt something wet and yielding under her boot and gritted her teeth but kept walking.
"What's wrong?" Deke asked, putting a hand on Kara's shoulder in a motion that was very much unlike what Janice would have expected from a junior officer towards his superior.
"I can't be sure," Kara told him, looking visibly shaken and also looking like it wasn't a feeling she was used to, "but I think this thing is on a timer."
Janice felt her blood run cold and saw Deke's eyes go wide.
"How do you know, ma'am?" Janice asked, her grip tightening on her carbine instinctively.
"There's wide-spectrum jamming still going on," Kara explained, one hand hovering just above the dull-grey casing of the bomb, as if she was afraid to actually touch it, "so they aren't triggering it remotely. But there are absolutely no external inputs built into this casing. Not even a laser line-of-sight receiver." She let a deep breath hiss out through her teeth. "I can't think of any other way they could detonate it."
Deke squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, looking like he was trying to wrap his thoughts around the situation. When he opened them, she saw a bit of clarity in his expression.
"We have to get it out of here," he said. "We don't have time to wait for them to crib together an EOD team."
Kara nodded, then paused as if she was trying to remember something. "The closest thing is a hopper, if it's still intact," she said, finally. "It's in the lot by the command barracks, back that way," she gestured in the direction of the city, "almost a klick."
Deke nodded, then handed over the pulse carbine and the spare magazines to Kara. "You'll need these more than me."
"Don't get killed," she told him sternly, but with a look in her eyes that belied the tone.
"You too."
And then he was gone, moving so quickly and quietly that Janice co
uld have believed he simply disappeared.
"Ma'am," she said hesitantly to Kara, "do you think the...the Tahni, the ones attacking, do you think they'll come after the bomb?"
"It's their main effort," Kara said coolly, eyes still searching that spot of darkness where Deke had vanished. "They'd be stupid not to."
"Shouldn't we get help from the Ops center, then?" Janice motioned in the direction of the fortified structure. "They're just right there. I could run over and tell them..."
Kara snorted in mild amusement and Janice trailed off. "No comms, remember?" she told the younger woman. "As wound up as they must be by now, they'd shoot you the minute you stepped around the other side of this storage shed."
"Fuck," Janice muttered, slamming a fist into the side of the bomb case, then blanching slightly as she realized what she'd done.
"Janice," Kara said, her voice warmer, less scornful than before. Janice looked at her and saw that the expression on her face had softened. "You did very well. Your mother would be proud of you."
"Thanks," Janice said. Kara smiled at her, then started stripping weapons from the bodies.
Yeah, Janice thought. Mom will be proud as hell...when they hand her my posthumous medal.
Chapter Eight
"We got movement up ahead," Sgt. Gutierrez announced over his public address speakers.
Cal was veering off to the side even before the three remaining Marines began to slow to a halt, trying to get a look down the street, as well as trying to keep clear of the huge target that the battlesuits represented. For all her earlier attempts to shame him, he noted Holly was also moving away from the Marines, trailing behind them and off to the left.
Scanning the surrounding buildings, Cal felt as if they were walking through the cyclopean ruins of some ancient city rather than an active, living metropolis. The streets were deserted, bereft of people, vehicles, even pets. No lights decorated any of the doors or the slits that passed for windows, and the signs that normally displayed the wares sold in various workshops were uniformly dark. The only illumination was the occasional glow of chemical ghostlights lining the roads, and many of those were dark as well: sabotaged in advance.