Esther didn’t think that the Palomino came from their target—that was too far of a trip on a bike. So there had to be others out there, people a lot closer. But her hands were tied, and now, aboard one of the Porto’s shuttles, she was heading out with Tantou and his sidekick Dr. Polonov, the Port Section, and SFC Juarez and four troopers.
Esther was still angry at the mission creep. The Marines were there to provide security, not go arrest interlopers. Technically, while they could take prisoners of war in a battle, the restrictions concerning posse comitatus made it illegal for the Marines to arrest anyone, hence the IS team. They had police powers as part of their charter, so they were the point of main effort for the mission. Juarez had been so excited and full of himself that he was running around like the proverbial chicken with his head cut off, going as far as trying to give Esther orders—orders she ignored.
“Two minutes,” the shuttle crew chief passed.
Esther checked her M99. She had no idea what they’d be facing. And while her Marines were among the very best in the Corps, they had not worked together in standard infantry ops, nor had any of them been regular infantry for quite some time. Individually, they were superb, but as a unit, they were largely untested, and that could prove fatal if they encountered a determined and well-trained opponent.
Esther watched the repeater as the shuttle pilot swept around the small, shielded dome. It looked barely more than a storage unit, the same kind used on hundreds of worlds. The entry airlock looked to be a low-grade commercial lock, and it was pointed to the dark side of the planet.
“Bring us in here, if you can,” she passed to the pilot, touching the repeater at a spot corresponding to a cleared area about 20 meters beyond the airlock’s entry.
The repeater display was in front of her, and SFC Juarez was leaning in to see, but the troopers were not the ones who were going to breach the domes, so Esther used her hands to indicate the lock’s position to Gunny and her section at the back of the shuttle.
The pilot made one more circle as his scanners relayed data to the Porto. Both the shuttle’s and the Porto’s weapons systems would be searching for any threat, she knew.
Esther’s hand strayed to her harness quick-release as the shuttle flared in, the G’s pushing her deeper into her sling seat. The back ramp started to lower before they landed, and while still five or ten meters up, the Marines released their harnesses and stood. The shuttle hit with a light thud, and Port Section ran out the back, followed by Esther, the troopers, then the two civilians.
The five troopers fanned out in reasonably good form, oriented outwards, away from the dome. They hadn’t picked up any bad guys in the surrounding area, but a complacent soldier became a dead soldier all too often.
Esther followed Port Section as Sergeant Ganesh, who was ready to blow the lock, tried to cycle it. To Esther’s surprise, the outer door opened.
“Do we have your OK?” Gunny asked her.
There were two considerations. The first was tactical. Cramming Marines in an airlock made them easy targets. Someone with a crew served could mow them down as the inner door opened. Marines, in general, did not like to enter a building through a door or hatch. They had brought enough ordnance that could blow a hole in the outer wall, but depending on the configuration inside, that could destroy the dome’s integrity, and it could injure or kill anyone just on the other side of the wall.
The second reason was more on a political level. At the moment, Esther could cancel the mission and leave. No harm, no foul. There would be little, if any, legal ramifications. The moment they entered the outer door into the lock, they would have crossed the line. Their actions could be considered something as mild as trespassing or as major as an act of war.
Esther was half-tempted to cancel the mission. She couldn’t see any advantage to continuing, and as the ground commander of the operation, she supposedly had the authority to do so. But higher-ups had deemed the mission necessary, and she’d have to explain just why she’d failed to comply. She’d been hoping to find a valid reason once on the site, but nothing was jumping up and grabbing her attention.
“Proceed,” she told the gunny.
The plan had been for the Port Section to enter the dome en masse, using tried and true clearing techniques. Once clear, the rest of the people, short two troopers who would remain outside, would enter. SFC Juarez would arrest anyone inside, and the civilians would poke around to get an idea of what the prisoners were doing. At the last moment, though, Esther joined the other Marines in the airlock just before the outer door closed. With nine Marines in HED’s, it was an extremely tight fit, which made them a very tempting target.
There was no decontamination spray or irradiation. As soon as the lock pressure reached equilibration with the inner dome, the inner door opened, and the Marines darted in, moving in their assigned directions, ready to engage.
Which was overkill. Fifteen civilians were lined up in the middle of the front compartment, hands in the air. They were not in environmental suits, and they were offering no resistance.
“I’m Doctor Angela Boran-Smith, chief of mission. We are Confederation citizens,” an older woman said after taking one step forward. “This lab is the property of Jindal-Fergusson, and you are breaking intergalactic law with your entry.”
“Get Juarez,” Esther told Sergeant McConnaughy.
“Please stay where you are for the moment,” she told the civilians, not that she thought they would move a muscle with seven Marines holding down on them.
Most of the civilians looked positively terrified, and Esther couldn’t really blame them. None of them had the “military” look, and to have nine weapons-bearing Marines barge in had to be disconcerting.
“I said, we are Confederation citizens,” Doctor Boran-Smith said, her voice on the edge of cracking.
“And you are trespassing on Federation territory,” Esther told her.
She shouldn’t be saying anything, she knew, leaving that for SFC Juarez, but it was rather awkward just standing there. The Confeds were standing quietly, but she didn’t want them to try anything in a panic.
“But we’ve got authorization!” the leader protested.
At that moment, the inner door opened, and Juarez and his troopers, rushed in, weapons drawn.
Esther pointed at the leader, and Juarez almost ran to her, making her flinch, and said, “I’m Sergeant First Class Enrique Sanderson Juarez, Federation Civil Defense Corps. I am placing you under arrest for Criminal Code 2002.1, trespassing on restricted Federation property.”
“But we’ve got authorization! I just told her that,” she said.
That seemed to confuse Juarez for a moment, so Esther stepped back into the mix and said, “I can assure you that you do not. But if by some stretch of reality you do have authorization, and that has not filtered down to us, then you have nothing to worry about. Until then, I suggest you comply with whatever Sergeant First Class Juarez tells you to do.”
“Where are your labs?” Dr. Tantou, who’d come in with the troopers, asked.
Esther had to keep from rolling her eyes. The building was a pre-fab dome, and this front section was living spaces, to include racks that folded up into the bulkheads. The hatch leading to the rest of the dome, with the convenient handwritten sign on the door that said, “No food in the lab!” was a pretty good indication as to its location
“That’s private property,” one of the prisoners said. “You have no right to enter it.”
Tantou started to argue back, but Esther pointed at the hatch, so he and Polonov disappeared inside. Two of the prisoner tried to follow but were restrained by troopers.
“Do you think they really work for JF?” the gunny asked her as they watched.
“Probably, or at least as much as all our civilians work for Allied Bio,” she answered. “Not that it matters. Jindal-Fergusson’s got offices and factories within the Federation, so the Federation can reach out to them if fines are part of what happens
here.”
“Uh, Skipper? I think you might want to see this,” Sergeant Ganesh said from the far side of the compartment.
With one last glance at the troopers processing the prisoners, Esther, followed by the gunny, walked over and into a surprisingly roomy locker that was serving as an armory. The weapons racks were two-thirds full with an array of rifles, but right in the middle was a crew-served hadron beam cannon of the type that Gunny Chun had destroyed on Calcutta.
“Gunny, put four Marines outside and send Rheumer and Ford back in,” Esther ordered.
Rheumer and Ford were FCDC, and she’d assigned them to take the outside. They made their living guarding installations, so it seemed like a natural choice. But if a third of the weapon’s racks were empty, and as she was positive that none of the civilians were military types, that meant that there were probably others out there, armed Confed soldiers or mercs. If someone was out there and planning a counterattack, Esther wanted Marines out there, not guards.
But if there was anyone out there, they held off. Four hours later, the prisoners, the weapons, and quite a bit of scientific gear and samples had been loaded up on the shuttle. Juarez put an official-looking lock on the airlock and posted a form that placed the building under Federation investigation. The lock wouldn’t stop anyone who was determined to enter, but forms had to be followed, Esther guessed.
As the shuttle took off, Esther’s mind tried to make sense of what was slowly coming to light. The sniper who had hit Alfayed had probably been Brotherhood or was Brotherhood-trained. The crew-served that Gunny Chun had slagged now looked to be from the Confederation.
For three supposedly friendly governments, there seemed to be a lot of confrontation going on.
Chapter 18
Esther followed in trace of Staff Sergeant Kneffer. She knew Gunny Chun was probably chaffing at having her with him again, but she couldn’t stay cooped up in the station. If she did, she’d probably kill Tantou before the day was out. The man, with his petty demands, was driving her crazy. There was a very evident divide within the geeks, as the Marines and troopers called them, and Esther was getting sick of it. Ever since she’d thrown Tantou up against the wall, Williams, Verone, and Veer seemed to think that they could go to Esther to complain, and while she liked them, particularly Williams, she not only couldn’t do anything about their issues, she adamantly did not want to get involved. Going out with the Starboard Section was just her way of hiding.
This was the second time in two days that she’d gone out with Starboard, but the last time was on another raid, one that ended up far differently than the one on the J-F installation. This installation was 500 klicks to the south and just at the twilight line at the edge of eternal night. The Marines had to breach the wall of the small building, and inside, they found the bodies of three men, all dead. They had suicided, complete with brain wipes. There would be no resurrection, no recovery for them. Some of the equipment in the installation was Brotherhood, but not enough to make a declarative statement as to their origin one way or the other. Even in death, their bodies screamed military to Esther. Without uniforms, while they probably were not officially in a military service, they had the look about them that they’d served. Their DNA was scanned and forwarded, but if they were from the Brotherhood PHM or another high-level security organization, there would be no record in any public data base that they ever existed.
The patrol was trudging to a small spot that both gunnies thought would make a decent sniper firing point. They were going to check it first for any sign it had been used, then emplace some ground sensors. They’d identified 112 such potential FP’s so far and investigated 47 of them.
Esther brushed against another of the tall, brown, fanlike funguses. She tried to avoid touching any of the vegetation, but sometimes, it couldn’t be avoided. Many of the fungus-types exuded either a white or a dark liquid where they were touched, a liquid that could burn naked skin. The snipers loved it, as they could tell if someone had passed by recently. But that went both ways. It could also tell anyone else where the Marines had moved. On a more personal level, though, was that any fungus-sap had to be removed in the airlock before entering the station, and the stuff was uber-sticky. It was a royal pain-in-the-ass to get off, even with the biojets blasting away at full strength.
“Cougar-Six, this is Cougar-One,” Sergeant De Vries’ voice came over—broken, but readable—over the net.
“Go ahead,” Esther responded.
“The station has been hit with a rocket. There’s been extensive damage, but no one’s been hurt.”
“Is the station secure?” Esther asked, her heart pounding.
“Roger. There was a breach, and there’s contamination, but the breach self-sealed. The gunny’s in the lab now assessing the damage,”
“Understood. We are on our way back now,” she said, with Gunny Chun, who was listening to the comms watching, twirling one finger in the air and then pointing back in the general direction of the station. “I’m setting Alert Condition Alpha. Stay inside the station until our return unless the situation forces a reaction.”
Gunny Chun had already started turning the patrol around. Esther checked her AI. They had almost 2000 meters to cover before they arrived.
Esther had been wondering if there was going to be a reaction to the two raids. She now had her answer.
Chapter 19
Esther was seething as she waited for the airlock to cycle, Juarez standing beside her.
It should never have gotten this far.
Since the first rocket attack that destroyed the lab four days ago, the station had been hit five more times. There was more activity in the surrounding area as well. Esther had sent out the Marines in a cordon to try and keep the bad guys at bay, but with the rockets being fired at up to ten klicks, that hadn’t done much good. One of the enemy crews got too close, though. Two days earlier, Gunny Medicine Crow and Sergeant De Vries had engaged a team setting up a launcher with the gunny getting kills at 4,565 meters, which was going to be a new record, if the data analysis held up. But one kill did not stop the incoming.
With the lab destroyed, all personnel were now living in the commons, suited up 100% of the time. Esther had tried to send the civilians to the Porto, but she’d been overruled. They weren’t getting anything accomplished from a scientific perspective anymore, so the decision had to be symbolic.
And that symbolism had just cost them a life.
The door opened, and Spec 4 Deledriay and Private First Class Lum entered, each holding an arm of the limp body of Corporal Vicky Espinoza as they dragged her in through the front hatch. The corporal was face up, her head, or what was left of it, hanging down, leaving a trail of blood and brain matter dripping onto the white deck. Esther felt her anger mount. The corporal was KIA for good with no chance at a resurrection. Whoever was out there was now playing for keeps.
Juarez cried out and rushed to help, lifting her up and laying her on the table.
“No POO,[2] but I’ve got an azimuth of 290,” Sergeant De Vries said, from where he was looking at the sensor array.
If the Porto were still in orbit, her sensors could have pinpointed the POO, but now that it had been confirmed that there was a man-of-war in the system, she couldn’t risk the vulnerability being in orbit created. She’d pulled out of orbit and could not provide much in the way of support. With only three Eagle Eyes the Porto had left and their own dragonflies, Esther was glad they had at least determined the azimuth the round had taken, letting her know from what direction the round had come.
She stood over De Vries, looking at the map taped up on the bulkhead. Reaching up, she ran her finger along a rough 290 degrees azimuth away from the station.
“Right there, that’s where I would be,” she said, pointing at a slight rise about 1700 meters away.
“Captain!” Sergeant First Class Juarez shouted out from where he was standing over Espinoza’s body, tears rolling down his face. “What are you going to d
o about this?”
This has gone on long enough. We can’t just sit here as a punching bag.
Esther slowly turned to look at the IS team leader and said, “We’re going to kill the bastard.”
Chapter 20
Esther monitored the display as her Marines started out on their stalk. She hated sitting inside the station while the teams were in combat, but they had all gone through sniper training, and she knew if she just injected herself into the mission, she could be a liability.
Memories of Saint Teresa where she’d watched her Marines die while she stayed safe and sound back at the CP kept trying to force themselves to the front, and she had to fight to keep them at bay. She had to focus on the task at hand.
SFC Juarez stood beside her. He would not have any input into the counter-sniper mission, but she thought he, and through him, the rest of the troopers deserved to observe.
Dr. Tantou, however, was a different case. He was hovering, just behind Esther, seemingly eager to watch. If the lab were still intact, she would have sent all of them back into it, but with that not happening, she tried to ignore the man, choosing that over a confrontation.
“Re-calculate the optimal coverage for Dragonfly Two,” she instructed the AI. “Emphasis on Goa.”
The AIs used extremely complicated algorithms to determine where the Dragonflies should surveil, but sometimes, maybe often, human intuition was needed. “Goa” was a ridge far to the right of where the AI had calculated was the most probable POO, but before she left, Gunny Medicine Crow had told her that she didn’t think the sniper’s FP was where the AI gave the highest probability.
The array picked up a shot, and a moment later, Staff Sergeant Mahmout Brooke’s avatar shifted to light blue.
“Shit!” Esther said, watching while hoping the avatar would not gray out.
Unlike the more robust 3’s, or even the bulkier enviro suits the troopers wore, the HED 2’s did not have the same degree of ability to close off breaches. They were designed for hazardous environments, however, so they had to take potential breaches into account. The school solution for the suits was that if the damage done was great enough, the suits attempt to save the life of the wearer by closing the wearer down—by killing him or her. Exposure in a toxic environment could be more damaging and decrease the likelihood of a successful resurrection and regeneration, so stopping all bodily functions kept the poisons from contaminating the body further.
Esther's Story: Special Duty (The United Federation Marine Corps' Lysander Twins Book 4) Page 10