“I wonder what all this is holding up.”
“Something heavy. There was nothing like this in the other facility we hit.”
They quickly determined that there was little of interest on that level and ascended a ramp at the far end which led to the floor above.
“Holy crap.”
“Yes, sir.”
The chamber they entered was so large that the beams of their suit lights couldn’t find the roof: it was several stories above them.
That wasn’t what had made them swear, however. In the dim light a huge… something… hulked in the center of the room and occupied most of the space.
It was vaguely, squatly cylindrical—the exact shape was impossible to guess at in the shadows—and took up almost all the space in the chamber. Tristan took an involuntary step back. The sensation that the thing would collapse on top of him at any moment was overpowering.
“Can you feel that, sir?”
Tristan could. The floor, his suit, even the air around him was humming. It was a tiny vibration, but felt extraordinarily deep. The only thing that could possibly be causing it was the huge structure in the middle of the room. He took another step back.
“Looks like we found what we’re looking for.”
“What is it?”
“I have no clue. But anyone care to bet against me that this is why we’re here?” There were no takers. “Thought so. All right, let’s get some backup.”
He called the rest of the platoons over the Tacnet, but all he got was static.
“Damn. You and you, go up those ramps and see if you can find anyone. If you do, tell ‘em to get their asses down here pronto.”
Then he turned to his four remaining soldiers. “Let’s get the charges placed. I want them all around the base, and I want them slaved to my command. Got it?”
“Yes, sir.”
They moved quickly, placing the charges where the behemoth looked vulnerable. Tristan overcame his revulsion for the huge thing and tapped the metal structure with his suit’s gauntlet. It dented easily. “Doesn’t seem like it’s armored,” he told his marines.
No one answered. Even though his troops were less than twenty meters away, they’d already moved out of range. Here, at the source of all the strange energy fields and radiation, their Tacnet was worse than useless. Tristan shrugged. He had a job to do, so he did it. Once he’d placed every charge he’d brought with him, he returned to the base of the ascending ramps. His men had beaten him there.
“Can you hear me?”
“Loud and clear.”
“Good. Let’s get out of here. Up the ramps you go. I’ll do a fast lap around and set the charge timers. An hour should be more than enough. We need to stop at every floor and get the rest of the troops out. There are supposed to be a hundred marines in this assault. We need to warn them off.”
They set off up the ramps that led up and Tristan began his lap around the cylinder. His original plan had been to set the timers from the exit point, but he realized at the last second that the radiation would make that impossible. No signal could survive out there. He needed to be right next to each charge to get it to respond.
A subjective eternity passed before he finally finished. Just as he was about to mount the ramp, a sound from above made him glance upward.
Two of his men were halfway up the ramp, engaged in a firefight with some kind of wheeled automated systems. They resembled wide blocks on treads with large gun orifices on the top which they were using to drive the marines back. As Tristan watched, a marine took a direct hit to the faceplate which vaporized his helmet.
“Get out of there!” he called to the remaining man, but it was too late. The defenders ignored the fire that the suit’s weaponry flung at them and simply shot him to pieces.
And, pausing only to push damaged machines off the ledge to make room for the ones behind, the column of defenders advanced down the ramp. The foremost took a bead on Tristan, missing him only because he was already on the move.
Chapter 8
Tristan ran toward the center of the room, thinking to take cover behind the cylinder that dominated the space. He knew it was hopeless; he wasn’t moving fast enough to avoid being hit, and he needed to run halfway around the thing before his assailants would lose their clear bead on him.
He cringed, certain that each step would be his last.
Strangely, the killing blow never came. To his amazement, the treaded defenders had stopped shooting at him. They advanced down the ramp without firing another shot.
It’s the cylinder, he realized. They don’t want to hit it. Then the cynicism that was either bred or learned in every marine kicked in. Probably because they know that, if it explodes, it will blow this entire moon to kingdom come.
Wasting an unexpected opportunity was a good way to get killed. The right thing to do was to keep running. The defenders looked robotic to him, which meant that they might be programmed to shoot if they got close enough that the risk of hitting the cylinder became negligible.
The elevator shaft, still sealed on this level, appeared ahead of him. Tristan approached at a dead run, firing all his guns at it as he went. The door was still quite solid when he arrived, but it exploded inward when his suit made contact.
Once inside, he moved up. The remains of his platoon might be in any of the levels above the colossal one that contained the cylinder.
Or they might all be dead. Either way, had to try to look for them.
He used his jets to ascend to the door he needed but refrained from simply blowing it off its hinges. The ease with which the defenders had cut through the marines in the room below gave him pause. Shooting the door would be a good way to advertise his presence and get himself hurt.
So he carefully cut through the thin metal, wondering how long it would take the robots below to figure out that he’d escaped up the shaft and begin shooting at him. He didn’t think they’d miss. Hell, in the narrow shaft, it would be extremely difficult to miss.
With breath fogging on his visor, he kept working on the door until it finally gave way.
Seeing that the door emerged into the end of an empty corridor similar to the ones they’d encountered in the installation on the ice giant’s moon, he quickly exited the shaft and hoped the robot defenders would have to climb up the ramp. He nearly crossed the first intersection but remembered how Cora had been gunned down and stopped. Toggling the Tacnet on an open frequency, he tried to reach out to any of the other shock marines inside.
“This is Tristan Polaris Han, can anyone hear me?”
He inched forward, careful not to cross the intersection and set off any booby-traps, but there was no answer. The radiation must still be too strong.
Finally, he took a running start and dove across the intersection. To his relief, it seemed that this crossroad wasn’t supplied with a concealed cannon. He made it to the ramp and looked down to see a line of defenders coming up after him. One of them took a bead on him and Tristan dove for cover behind a column, wondering what to do next.
The ramp continued to the upper levels. The stretch he could see was littered with pieces of robots and marine exoskeletons. His heart sank when he saw that most of the missing troops from his unit were among the fallen, and there were also several suits that corresponded to other units. His men hadn’t died alone, but the numbers hadn’t made much difference.
Whatever the defenders were using to shoot people with was pretty serious ordnance. The suits were armored against all small caliber weaponry as well as a number of particle and electromagnetic beams. Even so, they were being torn to pieces, marines and all.
He hesitated. His first instinct was to go up the ramp, pick up any stragglers, and fight their way out, but two things argued against it. The first was that the way the bodies were strewn made it look as if the marines—the ones from his unit and the others—had been executing a fighting retreat down the stairs. Which meant that they’d encountered the enemy on the upper levels and
worked their way down, defending themselves from the tanks as best they could as they ran from them.
Which begged the question: were there more defenders above, or were the robots coming up the ramp the main enemy force?
Either way, the second problem with going up the ramp was that the armored tanks would cut him to pieces from behind.
The only real option was to get his ass back to the elevator shaft and try to get out of the facility before the robots wised up and sealed it.
But Tristan still didn’t move. Could he really run out and try to save himself while the rest of the shock marines got shredded by the defenders? It was bad enough that he’d lost his entire platoon without really having much to show for it. All he could really hope for was that the defenders would be too busy trying to kill humans in exoskeletons to realize that their precious cylinder was surrounded by explosives that would be going off in about fifty minutes. The loss of life in this building could never be justified, but at least it might be tolerable if the explosion happened, and disabled the facility. Whatever it was. He hoped it wasn’t a water treatment plant or something equally non-strategic.
He toyed with the idea of going back down and setting much shorter timers on the charges until the robots cut him down.
Tristan suspected that he was dead either way, so it might be best to make it count. Besides, he had no more time for deliberation; the defenders had nearly reached the top of the ramp.
Sprinting back to the elevator door, he looked down, only to have an enemy positioned at the bottom of the shaft nearly take his head off. Before he could even think to turn back, a bolt caught the elevator door next to him, punching another hole into the metal with a shower of sparks.
What now? he thought, but before his mind could process the question, much less answer it, his training had taken over and he was already in motion.
Tristan jumped into the gaping hole he’d made on the way out of the shaft, careful not to catch on the jagged metal. Then, swerving as wildly as the limited space in the shaft permitted, he shot upwards towards ground level and escape.
Shots bounced off the walls of the shaft, but his erratic motion kept the defenders from scoring anything more than glancing hits. He was very far underground but he should be able to make it out long before the charges went off.
The firing slowed to a trickle and stopped. He seemed to be out of range. The shaft wasn’t quite straight: it curved imperceptibly, which meant that after several levels, the shape of the shaft made it impossible to obtain a decent firing angle.
Safe for the moment, Tristan stopped to consider his position. His heart told him to pierce another of the doors and try to find survivors, but his mind told him that the only marine who’d entered the building who was still breathing was Tristan Polaris Han. And if he kept dawdling, even that was an iffy proposition.
He looked up, trying to gauge the distance to the exit. A dim red light moved towards him at high speed and every single threat and impact light on his helmet display flashed on at once.
“Oh, crap,” Tristan said. He hadn’t wondered about the elevator during the descent, hadn’t even considered how odd it was that there was no car inside the shaft. Where it had been when they came in would remain a mystery, but there was no doubt whatsoever that, right now, it was coming towards him at full speed.
Again, he acted without thinking, gunned the boosters on his soles, and used the suit to punch through the thin metal of the nearest elevator door, half-expecting the mad lift to cleave him in two as he struggled to escape.
He rolled out of his dive and shot to his feet, ready to make a last stand against any defenders in the place. But there was no one there, just a space split into what seemed to be work areas. None of them would have been remotely comfortable for a human, but all the elements were there: flat surfaces, buttons, and pads that looked to be computer interfaces. Of defenders, there was no sign.
He caught his breath. The elevator car hadn’t hit him. In fact, it didn’t even pass by. He looked back into the shaft to discover that it had stopped two landings above him.
“No, no, no,” he groaned to himself. The only reason for stopping the elevator car would be to keep him penned in the building. They wanted him to use the ramps—and that probably meant that whatever was waiting for him was confident in its ability to take him down.
Tristan had known when he volunteered that this would be a suicide mission, but he was in no particular hurry to bring about the inevitable.
The momentary lull meant that it was possible to take stock of the situation, though he knew he didn’t have much time. Despite the action, he still had nearly four-fifths of his ammo remaining. No more explosive charges, of course, but he could probably hold out for quite a while against the defenders on the floor he was on. The place was a warren of nooks and crannies where, he assumed, workers of some description had once toiled. It was a layout that would favor his suit—large and cumbersome as it was—against the even less nimble tracked defenders.
His principal concern was that holding out wasn’t a good option for him. In a few dozen minutes, the entire building would be blown to pieces by the charges his team had planted. If he wasn’t out, he would be taken with it. A glorious, fitting exit for a shock marine, certainly, but not one that appealed to him.
The only option was to take the fight to the defenders. He strode purposefully towards the ramp on the other side of the floor, but halted midway; his suit’s sensors had identified a group of holes similar to the ones they’d encountered on the building’s façade. Gun ports... six of them.
There was no way he’d be able to deal with that. It had taken his entire team to take out the four guns on the door. Six were much too many for a single marine to face, so he made his way back to the elevator door to evaluate the lay of the land. It looked pretty favorable for a last stand. He chose a nook to his left with a straight shot down the corridor and two directions he could escape in when the bad guys got too close.
His breathing echoed inside the helmet as he settled down to wait. They had to come for him eventually, didn’t they? They’d been following him around relentlessly—even using the elevator to block his path—so they wouldn’t let him get away now.
Tristan quickly double-checked the shaft, just to verify that the elevator was still there and that the robots weren’t somehow using it to sneak up behind him.
All clear.
Another look around allowed him to fix the place where he was slated to die firmly in his mind. He’d always thought that shock marines bought it on barren radiation-bathed ice fields around pulsating stars fighting incomprehensible aliens. He, on the other hand, was about to be killed by pedestrian-looking robots that might have been designed by an engineer on Earth, and they would kill him in an office building. The place was carpeted, for God’s sake.
That tore it for him. He decided that he wouldn’t die there.
Tactics and common sense be damned, Tristan returned to the shaft and began pouring all of his ammo, every single high-caliber slug, into the elevator car. Cursing his lack of explosives, he just let his main guns do their work.
The car began to disintegrate under the barrage. It looked to Tristan as though it was made of the same thin material as the doors to the elevator landings were. It made sense: even in the low-G environment of the moon, a shaft this long would require lightweight cars.
The elevator began to look like lacework in the strong light from his helmet as it lost more and more material to the barrage. Less than a minute after his assault began, large chunks of lift were dropping down the shaft. He would be through soon.
But his time ran out.
A direct hit to the right arm of his suit shut down one of his weapons and served notice that the defenders were there. It took off the huge metal gauntlet that made up the end of the arm and only fortune kept it from removing his hand, in the control sheath that ended just short of the fist.
Tristan dove into the shaft and to
ggled his jets. Spooling them to full thrust, he shot upward and rammed into the stringy remains of the elevator.
He almost made it. As the suit punched through layer after layer of metallic string barely solid enough to hold its shape, Tristan actually believed that he would be able to break through. His head actually cleared the roof of the car.
The upper levels held firm, however, and only his right shoulder, useless without the hand structure, made it past the roof panel.
He hung there, held in place by the metal and the furiously pushing suit thrusters. His eyes flicked unconsciously to the upper right of his helmet display, where the timer for the charges was steadily counting down the seconds, but in the rush to get out of the office area, he must have toggled something accidentally. That display area was showing him that his oxygen regenerators were working at full capacity—information that was worse than useless to him.
Panic rose. He started thumping the left gauntlet into the elevator car, not aiming for sensitive points or strategic weak areas, just attacking anything in reach. Thump. Thump. Thump. He could feel the vibrations in his suit. If there had been any air to carry sound, it would have been extraordinarily loud.
And how did they manage to keep office workers alive in a vacuum? he thought. And then he focused on the task at hand.
Thump.
This was taking too long.
Thump.
At any moment, the defenders would begin burning holes in his ass from below.
Thump thump thump thump thump.
Something finally gave and his left arm tore free. Tristan pulled himself through the roof of the elevator car and shot up the shaft, fearing that he’d encounter a second mysteriously appearing obstruction as he rose.
But the coast was clear. He made it to ground level and exited through the mangled door, ran across the hangar, and out to the frozen regolith. Only when he was behind a ridge and could cover the door, did he stop and get his bearings.
Incursion: Shock Marines Page 9