“If anything happens, no heroics; get your team to the shuttle station and your butts to the ship. Understand?” Mike ordered, looking at his three subordinate officers’ faces. They all nodded in return and quickly wished each other good luck.
Watching two of the trucks pull away for the infirmary and the mess hall, he said a prayer under his breath and wished them all luck. “Okay, Mister Daley, let’s go take a crack at the vault.”
Leaving a pair of guards with the truck, he followed Martin and his team as they headed to the bowels of Farragut Fitness Center. In the basement, there was a maintenance area, a weight room, an underwater observation booth for the pool, and, of course the armory. There were also several large storage rooms that had been changed into training rooms.
Passing the other rooms, they headed right for the armory’s vault. The large heavy door was a modern electro-magnetically sealed model. Made of two feet of poly-steel, it was a safe cracker’s nightmare. This didn’t include the anti-intrusion programs and internal alarm system.
Of course, they had a couple advantages of their own. The first was that they had the codes to open the door. Dover had been the senior midshipman assigned as the arms room officer. He had been entrusted with the locking codes so that during training hours, he could open and close the vault as needed. What he didn’t have was the alarm codes, these being reserved for the faculty officer assigned to the armory, and that was Commander Alfred Hutton.
Some of the midshipmen wanted to include the commander in their plans, knowing that he was a loyal Confederation officer. Unfortunately, his wife’s illness not only prevented him from accepting active service, but it now kept him from being trusted.
This left them with the problem of how to get to the weapons inside the vault without tripping the alarms and having a swarm of local police come down on them. Their solution was Mister Martin Daley. He had set up a series of intrusion programs and planned to intercept and reroute the alarms to a dummy receiver.
Each dummy receiver or blind would forward the signal to the next blind, keeping the alarm from being sounded until it went though each station. He estimated he could keep the signal, once tripped, from reaching its destination for an hour, maybe less. If he had more time, he could have set up an indefinite relay, but as it was, the most he could do was confuse the signaling computer and make it think its call was being answered.
“Let’s do it,” Mike said as they dialed in the code to open the vault. Martin had setup nearby and was waiting for the alarm to be tripped. It had a sixty-second time lag to allow the opener to enter the vault and activate the deactivation code.
As the door popped open, a voice from behind their fifteen-man squad bellowed at them. “What the hell is going on here?”
Mike looked back, saw a mountain of a man standing there, and knew that they now had a problem. "I’ll take care of it, just get the vault open and the weapons to the truck,” he said, moving through the underclassmen to confront their uninvited guest.
The hulking intruder was one Gustvoff Jansen. He was an Austro native, his father being one of the new planetary commissioners. He was a junior, and though a good student, he had not been approached to join them. His loyalty was to his planet and to his daddy, and they weren’t about to take the chance that he wouldn’t run to his old man.
In fact, his life at the school had become easier for him since the take-over. Commander Weaver took special care of those midshipmen whose parents had influence or position.
“I said what’s going on here?” he demanded, walking toward the vault.
“Stand down, Mister Jansen!” Mike ordered breaking through the crowd and stepping out, he entered into the light from an overhead fixture.
Jansen’s face contorted in a sour expression of confusion. “Mister Collins?”
“That’s right,” he replied, closing the distance between them. “Now turn around and go back to your workout.”
“What’s going on… sir?” he asked, looking past him to the vault, “And what are you doing here… you graduated?”
“I did graduate and that makes me an officer, so follow my orders and go back to your weights,” he said, using his best command voice.
Jansen’s frown deepened as he looked down at Collins. “You’re a Confederation officer, and you have no authority here!”
Mike quickly saw what he was looking at: his greatcoat had come open and the brute could now clearly see his Confederation uniform. “Fine, have it your way,” he said, reaching for his Krager.
One quick shock dart and the inquisitive junior would be out of their way. At least, that was his plan, but it didn’t turn out that way. As he reached for his pistol, Jansen charged him, tackling around the waist and causing Mike to lose hold of his pistol.
Jansen’s head was heading for his right hip, and his arms were reaching out to wrap about Mike’s waist. Luckily, his arms were free and he had some options.
Mike could have still used a move called O-Goshi, which was a beginner’s hip-throw in judo, and was sometimes called “the father of all hip throws”, since the box foot positioning was used in so many other hip throws.
He could have used another judo move also taught in karate called Tomoe-Nage, which was an over-the-head throw requiring the user to fall backward, place his foot in his opponent’s midsection, and catapult him over head. This was a move that required advanced skill, and though he was comfortable with it, he chose another technique.
There was a move he could have done from karate, which required him to cup his palm around his tackler’s chin and twist as he fell. This would have used his momentum and body weight to break his opponent’s neck.
As things go, he didn’t want to kill the junior midshipman despite his misplaced loyalty. Instead, he placed both of his hands on the back of Jansen’s neck and hopped backward, driving down with all his might.
This forced the junior’s head downward, and where the head goes, the body follows. Mike bulldogged him face first into the concrete floor. Scooting back, he waited as the big man started to get up. As Jansen used his arms to support his weight and push himself up to an all-fours position, his face looked up angrily.
Just as he glared up at him, Mike snapped out a Mae Geri, a straightforward kick to his face. The curled ball of his foot smashed into Jansen’s nose, splattering it over his face as if it was a tick to a match. The middy twisted and fell sideways from the impact and rolled to his back where he lay, unmoving.
“Damn!” a nearby midshipman swore from somewhere behind him.
Looking over his shoulder, he saw that most of his squad had turned to watch the fight and stood in awe of what had just happened.
“Holy shit, sir!” another underclassman said, stepping closer to get a better look.
“Get back to work! We don’t have any time for gawking!” Mike yelled, spurring them into action.
Leaning down, he rolled the junior from his back and onto his stomach so that his broken nose wouldn’t drown him in his own blood.
“Baker and Pendleton, drag Mister Jansen into the weight room, tie him up, but don’t gag him. We don’t want him to drown in his own blood, so just shut the door,” he ordered, getting big smiles from the two-sophomore classmen.
As they dragged the junior away, he could understand their shock and awe at his victory. Jansen was the best fighter in the junior class and was the predicted winner of his class’s Sword of Mars Award. Yet, there was also something different about the huge man. His classmates had reported that he was exceptionally fast and strong even for his size.
Ever since the twenty-first century, the ability to alter DNA had been available. Mostly it was used to screen out life-threatening diseases and hereditary birth defects. For those that had the money, it could also augment and alter a person’s genetic structure to give them physical and mental enhancements. In Jansen’s case, many people believed he had some kind of physical alternations.
Turning away, Mike joined the other
s in the vault. Gunny had already organized the young gentlemen as he called them and was having them take the weapons’ racks by handcart out to their waiting truck. Martin was still sitting with his palm pad monitoring the relays to the alarm signal.
Watching a pair of sophomores take a rack of old assault rifles through the vault door, Mike was surprised at what he found inside. He was wondering why they hadn’t taken the gauss rifles first, but what he saw when he got into the vault explained it all. The twenty needle rifles were gone as were the two sets of practice powered battle armor.
All that was left were one hundred old Colt M-21 assault rifles that had been retrofitted to accept caseless ammunitions. There was also ten Browning hyper-shot assault rifles designed in a bull-pup configuration.
In addition, there were twenty Colt 8mm caseless automatic pistols, one hundred standard ship swords, and fifty sets of seal body armor. Besides the loss of the needle rifles, the powered armor was a real tragedy.
With one suit, an individual soldier could take on a normal platoon and win. It was equipped with an anti-gravity flight system with thruster controls. It had an exoskeleton frame for strength augmentation and a fusion power cell for use with an energy rifle. It was also fully sealed and armored for space as well as for battlefront use.
It didn’t take Mike long to figure out that Commander Weaver probably transferred them out or had them removed to be used by his own forces.
Hurrying to catch up, Mike was the last man to leave the vault, carrying a box of cleaning kits and replacement parts. Exiting the vault, he saw that the others had already left and that beside himself it was only Daley left remaining. “Let’s go, Martin, time is a-wasting,” he said, rushing past his friend.
“Right behind you, sir!” Martin said, shutting down his palm pad just as a shout warned them not to move.
Looking to the person who yelled at them to freeze, they recognized that it was Commander Weaver. He was dressed in his brown Austro uniform and had his Browning Star-Master gauss pistol leveled at them. “What is going on here, and who let you back on campus?” Weaver demanded, pointing his pistol’s barrel at Collins.
Before he could come up with a viable excuse, a second figure appeared. It was Commander Hutton, the campus’s Master of the Sword. “Yes, Mike, do tell: what are you and Mister Daley doing here?”
Mike frowned. It would have been difficult for him to drop the box he was carrying and draw his Krager before Weaver could get off a shot. With the arrival of Hutton, it made his chances of winning somewhere between slim and none.
“We are just collecting our property, sir,” he answered calmly while noticing that Hutton appeared to be unarmed.
Weaver scowled at them. “By what right do you think you have claim to anything on this facility?”
Mike handed his box to Martin, who had finished packing up his palm pad and computer linkage. This now gave him two free hands to use. Carefully, he opened his unfastened greatcoat and revealed the Confederation Navy uniform beneath it.
“As a duly commissioned officer in the Emperor’s Confederation Forces of Earth, I hereby order you to step aside, stand down, and not interfere,” he said, watching Weaver and his Browning. By opening his coat, he hoped to distract him and at the same time give himself easier access to his Krager.
In response, Weaver laughed, “Stupid boy! The King of America has no power here, and neither does the Confederation or you!”
At that moment, Mike moved. He quickly reached for his Krager, cross-drawing the gauss pistol from his shoulder holster and leveling it on the laughing weasel. Even though it only took a fraction of a second for him to pull his pistol out of its holster, the fight was already over.
Whether he would have beaten the Austro commander to the draw would have to wait for another day. As he started his reach, Commander Hutton also moved, except he already had his weapon in hand. Mike had mistakenly thought that the Master of the Sword was unarmed, but the warrior suddenly brought his hand up and snapped his wrist downward.
Commander Weaver let out a cry of pain and his Browning Star-Master fell to the ground. Hutton had, in one fluid motion, brought a knight’s carbon sword up. Extending its blade, he struck downward, slicing a thin slash across the back of the surprised commander’s hand. A lesser swordsman would have completely missed or would have, at the very least, sliced off his hand.
“What are you waiting for?” Hutton said, his intense stare on Mike’s Krager.
It didn’t take Mike a second to understand his words or his gaze. The shock dart took the bellowing Weaver in the throat, dropping him in an electrified heap.
“Nice to see you, Mister Collins,” Alfred Hutton said with a smile as he retracted his carbon sword. Leaning down, he grabbed Weaver by his wrists and dragged him into the nearby weight room. “I see you’ve been busy,” he said, upon noticing Midshipman Jansen lying bound and bloody next to a weight rack of dumbbells.
“Yes, sir,” Mike replied, a little unsure about the Commander’s loyalties. After all, he had until recently, been bound by the Austro government. His wife’s condition tied him to obedience even if he was previously a decorated and respected Confederation officer. “Sir, what is your intention?” he asked bluntly. “After all, you’ll only get yourself in trouble by helping us.”
Hutton stood up after using strips of a discarded towel to bind Weaver’s hands and feet together in a rather uncomfortable position reminiscent of a pretzel.
“Don’t worry about me; I just hope you have a real plan and this isn’t some juvenile prank,” he said, still smiling as he put his right hand on the younger man’s shoulder.
“What about your wife, sir?” he inquired in a lowered voice. He looked at the older man’s face, inspecting his expression.
A moment ago, Hutton’s countenance had taken a sudden transformation when he had acted against Weaver and Austro Prime. He had gone from a plain unemotional, unfeeling automaton to a smiling and rejuvenated warrior. Now his face once more changed, but this time it seemed solemn and pained.
“She is in a better place,” he replied and then added, “My beloved passed away three days ago.”
Mike wanted to say something, and started with the obligatory, “I’m sorry”, but was interrupted by Martin, who was standing in the doorway.
“Sorry, sirs, but we have to get out of here and to the rally point,” he stated, holding Weaver’s Browning gauss pistol in his right hand and his computer bag under his left arm.
“He’s right, sir,” Mike said, turning to go.
Hutton unfastened Weaver’s pistol belt and handed it to Martin. “From the mouth of babes,” he said with a smile, following Collins as he headed to the waiting truck.
Reaching the truck, they found it already loaded and waiting for them. Standing next to the driver’s side door was a worried-looking Gunny. “Where the hell have you two been?” he started, sounding more relieved than angry. He stopped when he saw that there was a third person with them.
“It’s all right, Gunny,” Mike said, holding his hands up as he noticed the veteran reach for his Krager. “This is Confederation Commander Hutton, and he will be joining us.”
The old marine looked to the new arrival cautiously at first, but then nodded, accepting his judgment and standing a little taller. “Very good, sir!”
“Ensign Collins,” Hutton started as Martin and Masters jumped in to the front seats of the truck.
Mike turned and saw that the Master of the Sword had not moved to get in. “Sir?”
“I have to get a few personal things from my quarters,” he said, noticing the young officer’s frown. “Do you trust me to meet you at your rally point?”
He paused just long enough that Hutton realized that his doubt wasn’t of him, but of the safety the young men who he had been entrusted with. The lives of his men and their mission had to come first.
“I give you my Sword Oath as an officer and as a Knight of the Order of St. Michael that I will not r
eveal anything about your mission to the authorities,” he swore solemnly as he touched the carbon sword hanging at his side.
To Collins, that was as they say was that. A Sword Oath was never taken lightly. An officer would never take such an oath unless he was willing to die to keep it. To a knight, it bordered on a pact with God, in which if he didn’t keep his oath, not only was his honor lost, but also he would hope to die in his next battle.
Smiling, he nodded his head as he answered. “We are meeting at the shuttle terminal station on Hill Crest Heights.”
For a moment, the Commander looked confused and then his eyes widened with understanding. “That station services the repair dock!”
“Yes, sir, and you have to get there in the next fifty minutes or you’re going to miss your last chance to get off this windy rock!”
Hutton nodded once and took off at a sprint toward his quarters. He wanted to ask more questions, but that would have to wait. He would just have to have faith that his onetime pupil actually had the means to get them away from here and back into the war.
Mike looked into the crowded cab of the truck. “I’ll ride in the back,” he stated, and then asked, “What’s the status of the other teams?”
“Mister Cappilo’s team is already at the shuttle station, and Mister Dover’s team is just pulling out of the gate,” Gunny reported with a grin.
“Excellent, and don’t forget to stop at the guard post for Mister Rabb on the way out,” he said before turning to move to the back of the truck. Reaching the rear flap over the tailgate, he leaned back for a second and waved for them to go.
As the cargo truck barreled toward the main gate, Mike stood there in the parking lot watching them speed away. “Now it’s time for some unsettled business,” he said aloud as he hurried to the Gunny’s abandoned pickup.
Jumping into the old truck, he activated the starter and slammed it into drive. Over the last week, he had used the pickup several times to do errands for the Gunny and the rest of the ship’s crew. During that time, not only did he set up his own activation code in the truck’s security system, but he also worked on a plan.
The Log of the Gray Wolf (Star Wolf Squadron Book 1) Page 9