by M. D. Cooper
Darla snorted and then let out a bubbly laugh.
Tanis couldn’t help but join in.
Tanis looked over the room once more. There was nowhere to hide upon entry, so she simply pushed the door open and walked in.
“What the heck are you doing in here?” she asked Kameron via the suit’s audible vocalizer. “Don’t you know? There’s a contaminant leak in one of the cooling systems. Radioactive isotopes have bled into the environmental processors.”
The man standing behind the bomb gave Tanis a rather incredulous stare and then whipped out a pistol—a mid-caliber slug thrower, from the looks of it.
“If you know what’s good for you, you’ll get the fuck out of here,” Kameron said.
“No can do, mister…uh…Kameron. Oh wow, you’re TSF, an officer. Out of curiosity, what makes a TSF officer decide to blow up a city filled with millions of people?”
“What?” Kameron’s eyes narrowed. “I’m—”
“A mass murderer. I can tell an antimatter bottle from a hole in the ground. You’re going to blow this pontoon. Not that it will do anything.”
Kameron shook his head. “That’s where you’re wrong.”
Tanis wished she could sigh, or perhaps groan, through the suit’s audible systems.
“Look, Kameron. I know about Tori and the antimatter he has to blow the other pontoon. It’s not going to work. Another team is going to stop him, and I’m going to stop you. Besides, even if one of you succeeds—as unlikely as that is—it’s not enough to sink the city.”
Lieutenant Kameron shook his head. “Wrong again. Taking out either pontoon will be enough.”
“Not by my math,” Tanis replied. “You’re wasting your time.”
“Wish I could see your face right now,” Kameron chuckled. “Yeah, we’re all going down. Nothing you can do about it.”
PONTOON 4
STELLAR DATE: 03.02.4085 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Interplanetary pinnace, New Amsterdam
REGION: Saturn, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
Leona sent back an acknowledgement as she consulted the facility’s layout, double-checking that she’d selected the best route to the reactor, which was four levels up.
Leona gritted her teeth. This was her least favorite type of op. No intel, massive risk.
Alexi sent an acknowledgement from his position at the closer of the two staircases that led out of the docking bay, and disappeared through the door.
Stefan followed after, and when Alexi signaled that the first landing was clear, Leona entered the stairwell, covering their rear as the team climbed to the reactor level.
The facility was spare and utilitarian. There were no automated defenses that Leona could see—which didn’t surprise her. No one really expected an assault team to hit the facility from the bottom. Braving Saturn’s storms had been more harrowing than she’d expected—though she kept that to herself. It was surprising that there was even a docking bay on the pontoons to begin with…. She couldn’t imagine that it saw much use.
Stefan laughed, and Alexi signaled an affirmative.
A minute later, Alexi and Stefan were formed up on either side of the door that led out to the main ops level, while Leona was covering them from the stairs below.
He slowly pulled open the door, and they waited a two count before moving out into the corridor, while Leona rose and took up a position next to the door.
Leona nodded at the AI’s word.
Ahead, Alexi reached the intersection and signaled that it was clear before continuing his advance, Stefan close on his six.
Leona moved up into the corridor, stopping when she reached the intersection.
Leona had turned down the corridor to check the scene out herself, when Pearl called out.
She’d just reached the Main Ops room, where the bodies of six people were draped over chairs and consoles, killed before they’d even had a chance to flee, when Pearl yelled
into her mind.
Leona bit her lip.
The two men nodded and moved back into the corridor, Leona following.
Pearl’s words cut off, and for a moment, Leona feared that the antimatter had detonated, but then realized her continued existence indicated otherwise.
Leona fervently hoped so. She reached the stairwell herself, right on Stefan’s tail. Alexi had just reached the landing below when a pulse blast hit him, flinging the man against he bulkhead.
A shot came from Stefan’s mass driver, and the machine exploded.
Stefan said as he ran past him.
A minute later, they had reached the pinnace. Chelsea had the bay doors open, and the torrential storm whipped into the bay as Leona stopped and stared at the far stairwell.
Leona gritted her teeth, but didn’t respond, staring out the forward viewscreen at the far stairwell, willing her two teammembers to appear.
The seconds ticked down, and when they were at five, Chelsea whispered,
The AI’s impassioned plea jarred Leona into action, as she realized her inaction would condemn Alexi and Stefan as well.
Clenching her jaw so tightly it hurt, she fired the thrusters, lifting the pinnace off the cradle, and spun the ship before boosting out of the bay. The pontoon flashed by beneath them, and Leona toggled a side holodisplay to show a rear-view of the strut and the pontoon as they shrank behind the pinnace.
They were thirty kilometers away when a broken call came in from Pearl.
A tear made its way down Leona’s cheek as she angled the pinnace upward, pouring on more thrust to get clear of the impending explosion.
The cry was cut off as a brilliant flash of light appeared on the rear-view display, lighting up the clouds all around them before the shockwave blasted the clouds away. The pinnace bucked and slewed to the side as the energy washed over it, and Leona fought to maintain control.
An energy wave arched through the clouds in the blast’s wake, and bolts of lightning hit the pinnace. An engine went out, and half a dozen systems went offline as alarms blared loud enough to drown out the winds.
Leona had a momentary fear that her hesitation in the docking bay had condemned them all, but then the auxiliary systems came online, and the pinnace righted itself, resuming its course toward the surface.
Behind them, Saturn’s dense clouds were already rushing back in toward the site of the explosion, but through the storms, Leona could still make out the sight of the massive pontoon peeling away from the strut and falling into the inky black depths.
KABOOM
STELLAR DATE: 03.02.4085 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Pontoon 5, New Amsterdam
REGION: Saturn, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
Tanis began edging toward the man at the far end of the room. “Why are you doing this, Kameron?
“Why? Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because I’m tired of being fucked with and it’s time for me to get back at the TSF.”
“The TSF?” Tanis asked, confused by his response. “I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but that’s a Jovian city above us. There probably aren’t more than a dozen Terran soldiers on this place.”
Kameron nodded. “You’re right about that. But the man I want to destroy is here. Dr. Simon Scarborough.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell,” Tanis said as she edged closer.
“Probably wouldn’t. He specializes in treatments for early onset Kronos Disease.”
Tanis knew of Kronos, everyone did. It was how humans died. While a person could be kept alive indefinitely with both biological or synthetic replacements available for every part of the body, there was no replacement for the brain.
At a certain point, it started to lose cohesion. The connections from dendrites to axons became too widely distributed, chemical memory systems too full, and new neurons were unable to take their place in the great thinking web.
Ultimately, the brain degenerated, and the person slipped into a vegetative state or went insane.
Many people had their minds transferred to new brains at the first signs of Kronos. ‘Transfer’ was the word that was used, but everyone knew that the old person died and the new entity was just that, a new entity.
After centuries of life, many Kronos sufferers opted to simply allow death to finally overtake them. Some became new people, others became AIs of sorts.
But early onset sufferers had none of those options. Their brains were not good candidates for transfer, so they usually ended their lives before insanity ensued.
“So you have EKD, and this Doctor Simon won’t help you?” Tanis asked. “I bet we could convince him…unless you’re already too far gone. Is that why you’re doing this?”
“I don’t have EKD,” Kameron hissed the words. “My wife did. She was a colonel in the TSF, but they wouldn’t pay for her to try the doctor’s treatments because he said she wasn’t an ideal candidate and his treatments were still experimental. So she died. Took her own life the day his final rejection came in. Now I’m gonna take his life.”
“Shit, that’s really awful,” Tanis said, now only ten meters from the man. “But all those people above us…. Do they deserve to die, as well?”
Kameron shrugged. “Why should they all get to keep living when my wife didn’t? Maybe this will be a wake-up call that we can’t withhold treatments like this.”
“No, it won’t,” Tanis replied.
“What do you mean, ‘no’?”
“No, it’s not going to be. I’m going to kill you, and then you’ll to be with your wife while I disable the bomb. What do you care, anyway? You just want to die. I’ll give you that death, and save the people above.”
Kameron’s eyes widened in surprise and then narrowed once more. “Do you really expect me to fall for that?”
“Was worth as shot.”
They stared at one another for a moment, then Kameron’s attention was momentarily drawn to his equipment.
Tanis fired two shots with her pulse rifle, weakening the ES shield, and then rushed toward it, breaking through the field and lunging toward Kameron.
He whipped out a handgun and fired a trio of shots at her, two striking her in the torso while the third thankfully missed.
She was just five meters from him now and continued her mad rush.
Darla’s question was cut off as Tanis activated her lightwand, even as Kameron fired two more shots at her. One hit her in the shoulder and another in the cheek, snapping her head to the side.
She ignored the pain and swung the li
ghtwand down, slicing off Kameron’s extended arm.
He shrieked in pain and staggered backward until he collided with the observation window, blood seeping from his partially cauterized arm-stump.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said through gritted teeth. “It’s going to blow. This city is going down.”
Tanis took the final three steps toward Kameron and slammed a fist into his temple before turning to the antimatter bottle.
The deck shook violently beneath Tanis’s feet, almost knocking her over, and she grasped a console to steady herself as the floor turned into a slope.
Tanis stared at the antimatter bottle.
Tanis stepped up to the antimatter bottle.
Darla set a g-force meter on Tanis’s HUD that was connected to her hand motion, and Tanis got a quick—and very frightening—lesson in just how many gs the act of lifting up a heavy antimatter bottle created.
Given that they were near Saturn’s equator, the gravity was currently only 0.93g, but even lifting the bottle out of its socket jumped her meter to 1.7g.