by Ian Whates
He was still a few paces short of his ideal position when he heard the guard above say, "Will do," followed by the squeak of oil-thirsty hinges as the door opened completely. He stopped moving at once, gun pointed towards the emerging man. He just hoped those below him, the two techs in particular, held their nerve and remembered how effective the shimmer suits were so long as you stayed still.
Thankfully, the guard didn't even look their way beyond a casual glance. Instead, he reached inside his uniform and withdrew a small but bulky pen-shaped object, which he thrust against his stiffened left arm, not bothering to lift his sleeve, and held there for a handful of seconds. Leyton smiled - the man had not been alerted by any noise they made at all, but had slipped away to shoot up! A narcotic micro-spray fired through uniform and skin alike; possibly a stimulant, much needed towards the end of a long shift when energy was flagging, but definitely something not allowed in the job description, or he wouldn't have sneaked away in the first place. With a sigh, the guard relaxed his arm and slipped the applicator away again.
He stood for a few seconds, breathing deeply and puffing his cheeks out, before straightening his uniform and turning, obviously preparing to go back to his post. Leyton made a quick calculation. The guard's hands were now empty and there was nothing obviously loose about the uniform, nothing to clatter noisily should he fall. Could Leyton reach him in time to catch the body and prevent it from tumbling down the stairs? Probably.
He squeezed the trigger. Fully silenced, the gun made little more noise than a person spitting. The eyegee was on the move even as the bullet smashed into the guard's skull.
He made up the distance easily, catching the guard's body as it began to wilt towards the stairwell and laying it gently down onto the small landing, being careful not to block the door.
He waved the others forward, exiting the stairwell with Black close at his heels. There were now three red dots left in the control room.
Against all sense the room's door stood open, perhaps left that way by a guard who expected to be returning soon. Leyton, Black and the remaining marine ghosted into the room, each taking station behind one of the three civilians - two men, one woman - intent on their work. One of the men was just finishing a conversation, apparently with somebody aboard one of the two ships parked in orbit around Holt. The trio waited for him to break the connection and then struck. These were civilians, so they applied a non-lethal approach. Three stun guns, weapons using electro-muscular disruption, fired simultaneously. The three Holtans collapsed, to be dragged away and quickly bound and gagged.
Black's remaining marine took station by the door, looking alert and ready for anything, while the two techs came into the room, gratefully pulling back the hoods of their shimmer suits. They both sat at one of the terminals, and the older man sighed. "Oh well, I suppose it was too much to hope for."
"What was?" Leyton wanted to know.
"Oh, nothing. We just hoped that by catching them with screens running it might give us an easy way into their systems, but no such luck." He placed the valise, carried with him throughout, on the workstation and popped it open. "Not a problem, it'll just take us a little longer, is all."
Hardly the most welcome news, but it couldn't be helped. "Quick as you can."
"I know, I know. You do your job, we'll do ours."
"An alarm has been sounded," the gun's placid voice informed him.
"How? We didn't give any of them a chance to touch anything."
"More a case of what has not been done rather than what has. The alarm was caused by inactivity at one of the work terminals."
Really? That was interesting, and seemed remarkably sharp of the locals, which came as something of a surprise given what they'd encountered here so far.
None of which altered the situation they found themselves in. "Look lively," he said to everybody; "an alarm's been triggered, so we can expect company sooner rather than later."
He looked across at Black, who nodded his understanding. At the door, the trooper adjusted the grip on his gun and somehow looked even more alert.
A tense moment passed, with the techs working silently and Black fiddling with something on his suit.
Then came the chatter of automatic gunfire from outside. Leyton was a little surprised at the speed of response, but red dots were suddenly blossoming from two directions. So many that the visor apparently gave up trying to represent them as individual dots and settled for expanding red smudges.
"Shit!" Black said from the window. "There's a small army out there,"
Leyton crossed to join him. The sergeant was right. Where the hell had this lot materialised from? Well-disciplined troops advanced towards their position, covering each other in classic style and utilising the available terrain effectively as they converged on the front door. Difficult to judge numbers, even with the visor, but he estimated half a platoon or more in each direction, perhaps as many as fifty in all.
What was it he'd been told to expect? 'A poorly trained and inadequately equipped militia; slow to respond and unlikely to offer significant resistance.' That was one part of the briefing he had listened to.
Where was his fellow eyegee? "Boulton?" He broke radio silence; little point in maintaining it at this stage.
"Not now. I'm busy!"
She had better be. They only had one man guarding each entrance, and neither stood a chance against this many hostiles.
Black seemed to have reached the same conclusion. "Pull back to the first landing," he ordered, presumably speaking to the two soldiers guarding the doors. He then turned to Leyton. "I hope you eyegees are all you're cracked up to be, because at this precise moment we don't have a clear way out of here."
Leyton made no response, but instead looked across to see how the techs were doing. What he saw was far from encouraging. The younger tech had gone white as a sheet; in fact he looked petrified. His colleague just looked resigned. Neither seemed to be doing a great deal except staring at the screen.
"Problems?" He hurried over to them.
The older man nodded, staring at the screen before him as if it had tried to bite him, while his companion looked up to flick a wide-eyed glance towards Leyton. "This has much higher-grade defences than we were told to expect."
The eyegee snorted. He was beginning to sense a pattern here. "Which means?"
"Which means that I can't guarantee we can get inside its safeguards and blocks before every scrap of useful information is erased."
Black chimed in, before Leyton could voice a suitable expletive. "But you can still recover it even then, right? I mean, nothing on a computer's ever irretrievably lost, is it?"
"Don't believe everything you hear," the older tech replied. "Given the right equipment and enough man hours, we might be able to get to it, depends on how the erasing was done, but I wouldn't like to bet on it."
"Besides which, we don't have either the equipment or the time," the younger man added.
"Right," the first tech confirmed.
There had to be something they could do. Leyton's inherent stubbornness wouldn't allow him to give up on any mission so readily, especially one which was shaping up to be such a total pain in the butt as this. "What would make the difference?" He addressed the more experienced of the two, who at least seemed to know what he was doing.
"Sorry?"
"What would you need to breach the system's defences in time to preserve the info, to prevent it being erased?"
"More computer power than we have here." The man tapped his valise.
If it was computing power they needed... "Could you help?" Leyton sub-vocalised to the gun.
"Perhaps, but it would mean shutting down all higher defensive and offensive capabilities while I did so. I would just be a simple chunk of inanimate weaponry."
Leyton digested that, a little surprised at how vulnerable the prospect made him feel, but he knew that, if the mission were to stand any chance of success, he had no choice.
"I might be a
ble to help you there," he told the tech, and conveyed the gun's offer.
The man looked dubious but said, "We'll give it a go."
"Make sure you're on projectile and do it," he instructed the gun.
"We'll need to hook it up to my gear," the tech said, holding out his hand. Leyton hesitated and then passed the gun over.
His visor went dead. Red and green dots disappeared to leave just the room and its occupants.
The gunfire seemed suddenly louder, closer. The sergeant had crossed from the window to take station with his man by the door. Both were braced with weapons drawn. Leyton felt abruptly lost, impotent. His hand itched to be clutching a gun but he didn't carry a spare - why would he? And he resisted the temptation to ask either of the soldiers if they had one, which would have sounded too much like an admission of weakness.
As he watched, the stance of the two soldiers altered - a subtle readjustment but a telling one, as both sighted along their guns and started firing. Bullets hammered into the door frame above Black's head, causing the sergeant to duck back inside. Only for an instant, then he was leaning out and shooting again, but this time in the opposite direction. So the attack was coming from both sides, the local troops must be emerging from the stairs and the elevators simultaneously, which didn't say much for the chances of the marines designated to guard the building's doors and stairwell.
Leyton looked around the room, futilely searching for a weapon. Then the marine beside Black spun half around, stumbling into the room and clutching his shoulder. Leyton started forward, intent on claiming the injured man's gun and replacing him, but as he went to do so, a voice whispered, "Did you miss me?" and at the same instant the tech declared triumphantly, "Got it!"
The world came alive again. Doubtless only a matter of seconds had passed but it seemed far, far longer to the eyegee. Red dots appeared in his visor, concentrated in the corridor outside. Leyton snatched the gun up, almost yanking the tech's still-attached unit from the desk as he did so before the connecting lead fell free. The walls to the corridor were partition, which, to a gun of this calibre and at this range, might as well have been tissue paper. The eyegee squeezed the trigger and held it flat. Chewed-up shards of wood and plasterboard flew in all directions and screams came from the corridor beyond as the bullets tore into soldiers who had been attempting to storm the hard-pressed sergeant's position. Leyton moved his aim steadily along the wall, away from the door. Several dots winked out while others withdrew. The clip emptied, was ejected and replaced. He was at the door now, peering over Black's shoulder. The charge had been halted from one direction, but soldiers were edging forward from the other, using office doorways as cover.
Where the hell was Boulton? She was supposed to be ensuring this sort of thing didn't happen.
"Explosive," he sub-vocalised. At the first squeeze of the trigger one of the built-in grenades spun away down the corridor, at the second, with the gun held at a slightly greater elevation, its twin did the same. He grabbed Black and pulled him back into the room, clipping a replacement brace of explosive shells onto the gun even as the first explosion shook the building. The second followed an instant later.
"Energy," he sub-vocalised. He hated running the risk of depleting the gun but they had to force a way out of here, which meant clearing at least one direction of enemies, and 'energy' offered the precision needed to do that.
He tapped Black on the shoulder and pointed in the direction of the elevators, where the two shells had just exploded. "Cover me that way."
The sergeant nodded. The injured soldier pushed himself upright, as if determined to help, but Leyton waved him back.
As Black started laying down covering fire in one direction - his automatic chattering through the bullets - Leyton took careful aim in the other, using a combination of eyesight and visor to pick out even those targets hidden from view. With great deliberation, he squeezed the trigger, releasing it as one red light winked out before moving on to the next. He was a little surprised there weren't more of them, based on what he'd seen from the window. Perhaps Boulton had done some good after all. Either that or the other marines had sold their lives dearly.
After Leyton took out his fourth target, the remaining Holtan troops must have realised that staying where they were just enabled him to pick them off one by one. While two laid down covering fire of their own, causing Black to duck hastily back into the room, the others - five in total - again attempted a charge.
"Explosive."
The blast left one groaning, the rest unmoving and silent.
After the eyegee reverted to 'energy' and killed the soldier nearest him, the final defender chose the better part of valour and ran for the stairs.
"Glad you're on my side," Black murmured, with more than a hint of respect and perhaps a similar measure of envy.
The techs had gathered their equipment and were now crouching by the wounded marine. Leyton turned to them, whispering, "Ready?" Nervous nods all round. "Sergeant, lead the way to the stairs on my order. I'll cover. Be careful - one of them made a break for the stairwell."
Black grunted his understanding. The others clambered to their feet and bunched forward.
Leyton leaned out, catapulting his final explosive shell in the direction of the lifts, where some dozen red dots still showed.
"Projectile." He started firing even before the shell had landed, saying, slightly louder, "Now!" The others charged past him.
Leyton backed out, still firing. Contrary to his instructions, Black lagged behind the others, crouching where Holtan troopers had stood seconds before and firing towards the lifts and the remaining enemy. Needing no further urging, Leyton turned and ran, leaping over the bodies that littered stretches of the corridor, until he was past Black and able himself to stop to provide cover for the sergeant in turn.
There was now very little fire coming back at them. Leyton noted that only four red dots were showing on the visor, and there was no telling how many of those might be injured. Maybe they were going to get out of this after all.
One of their own troopers lay dead at the top of the stairs. The shimmer suit must have been damaged when the soldier was hit, because the body was clearly visible to the naked eye. Leyton saw the black shoulder flashes and realised this was the stubble-haired girl who had sat nearest him on the shuttle. Strange, but in the brief second they'd locked gazes he had felt a connection, professional to professional. He'd never even spoken to her, which was a fact he now briefly regretted.
He was about to move on when something caught his eye. One of the local soldiers sat slumped against the wall, blood staining the front of his uniform from a row of bullet holes. The man wore an unusual visor which had a faintly orange tinge. In fact, all the local troops seemed to have them. On impulse Leyton reached for the nearest one, pulling it off the dead soldier's head.
He slid his own visor up and held this orange one to his eyes, and cursed. "Sergeant!" The man glanced back from the top of the stairs. "These visors negate the effect of our shimmer suits."
"Shit!"
Which just about summed up his own feelings. The goggles on shimmer suits were designed to allow wearers to see each other, but intelligence hadn't suggested that Holt's defenders were equipped with anything as sophisticated as this. Either somebody had got things badly wrong in the preparation for this mission or there had been some major changes around here very recently. Whatever the case, their intel was clearly screwed across the board as far as this outing was concerned. It was beginning to look as if cutting short the gun's crash-course mission briefing during their approach had been the best decision he'd made all day; most of it would have been even more worthless than he'd feared. He didn't blame Black in the least for broadcasting the news about the visors over the radio for the benefit of his surviving men.
Now he thought about it, there was somebody Leyton wouldn't mind contacting as well. "Boulton, are you still with us?"
"Still here, still busy," came the clipped r
esponse.
Doing what, he wondered.
The number of bodies sprawled across stairs and on the landing below paid testament to how hard the stubble-haired girl had fought. They had to carefully pick their way around the fallen to avoid tripping over. Hampered by the wounded soldier, the two techs had not gone far ahead and Black was soon able to resume his position at point. Leyton stayed at the back, keeping a wary eye on the red dots on the fifth floor, but they made no attempt to follow. No sign of the one who had fled down the stairwell, either. In fact, the visor showed no other hostiles in the building. So, had they successfully dealt with everything the locals had to throw at them? Judging by the occasional burst of gunfire from outside, not yet. Who were the Holtans engaging? Was it the two men Black had assigned to cover their retreat or had Boulton finally decided to pull her weight? They'd find out soon enough, no doubt, as the sergeant led them from the fire exit stairs towards the front door. Again, a good choice; the side door was almost bound to be smaller, less easy to escape from and the perfect place at which to get pinned down. The more Leyton saw of Black the more he approved of him.
It looked as if the marine left to guard the front entrance had chosen to make a stand behind the security desk on the gallery floor. At least, that's where they found his body. A big man, whom the eyegee remembered from the shuttle due to the smashed remains of an overlarge gun which now lay beside him on the floor.
Black was already halfway down the front stairs, the others behind him. The visor didn't show any hostiles in the immediate vicinity but Leyton still felt uneasy. There could be a ring of snipers outside the visor's range all targeting the front door for all he knew. Gunfire still sounded sporadically, a reminder that they weren't home and dry yet, as if any were needed.
"Boulton, what's your status?"
"Bruised and dirty, with a compromised shimmer suit. You?"
Compared to her previous communications this was almost a speech. Leyton didn't respond immediately. He joined Black who had paused at the front door.