Fire ripped through the ceiling, as a droid on the roof fired downward. Dale sidestepped, blew it off the roof, then ran as new fire hammered the spot he’d been standing. Reddy hit that new source of fire as Dale reloaded, then a heavy-caliber round blew a hole in a nearby wall.
“Sniper drones,” said Dale, running onward and leaning as the train rounded a bend. “Keep moving, there’s no way those things can be accurate from an unstable platform.” Another shot blew a window behind — sniper drones were designed to fire at stationary targets from a stationary hover, not at moving targets from long range while racing at high speed. At least the train was still running well, Dale thought. Being a maglev, all the propulsion tech was in the base that connected it to the rail, while all the fire was aimed at the hollow passenger body above.
“Two more stations,” said Jokono, and Dale could see the rear of the train ahead through the transparent nose of this one. “I have assistance arriving at your disembark station, but you’re not going to reach it before this next train blocks your path.” Another shot blew a hole in the nearby roof. “They’ll engineer a low-speed collision and use the first train to block and stop the second.”
“Can you take control of the second train?”
“Only one at a time, I’m afraid.”
“I can do it,” Kadi announced. “Joker — you keep control of this one, I’ve got the one ahead.”
“I copy that,” said Jokono.
“Good, go!” Dale told Kadi. “Everyone stay low and spread out, don’t give them a target!” He took cover again by a door, thankful that at least the flyers and drones were staying well clear, wary of what had happened to the others.
Kadi scampered on, staying as low as possible as he reached the transparent nose, then lay flat and aimed his handheld at the oncoming rear of the train ahead. Even as Dale watched, the closure speed began to diminish, as whoever was centrally controlling the train ahead began to accelerate it, preparing for a low-speed impact that would stop this runaway.
“I got it!” shouted Kadi, and sure enough, the train ahead continued accelerating, until there was no closure speed at all. And he thumped the floor with his free hand in triumph. “I got it, I didn’t know if this damn thing would work on an entire train, but it does!”
“Jokono,” said Dale, “bring us to a stop at your station and see if you can get us a visual feed on the platform. You said you had assistance there…”
A massive explosion cut him off, as a fireball engulfed the train’s midpoint, and sent debris spinning up the tube. Dale shielded his face, and when he looked again, the middle of train was nearly cut in half, and everything was burning. The train shuddered and squealed, as though threatening to throw itself from the rails.
“You’re losing power on the propulsion!” Jokono warned. “The whole propulsion system is failing, you’re going to come to a halt short of the station!”
“Kadi!” Dale yelled as he realised the only solution. “Drop speed on the train ahead! Smack us into its rear, we’ll jump ship and ride that one to the station!”
“I got it!” said Kadi, and suddenly the rear end of the forward train began getting bigger again. Another set of platforms rushed by, prospective passengers staring in amazement as two trains rushed by in unison, the second ablaze and full of holes. “Hang on, we got ten seconds until…”
Something else hit the train, and Kadi yelled, clutching his side. He put a hand before his visored eyes, and stared at the blood on it.
“Kadi’s hit!” yelled Reddy, and scrambled to help. “He’s bleeding bad, I gotta patch him!”
“Do it real fast, you’ve got fifteen seconds!” Dale retorted, as the rear end of the train ahead came rushing up. He could see puzzled passengers in the rear, through the transparent end-cap, already wondering why their train hadn’t been stopping at the last stations, and now staring at the second train rushing up behind. “Everyone brace!”
The trains’ two ends met with a heavy crunch that sent Dale skidding up the floor. When he looked again, the two transparent domes were caved and cracked. Beyond the impact, a train full of passengers also fallen to ground, many now scrambling up to put some distance between themselves and the collision. Dale got up, ran to the front and angled his rifle to shoot down on the interlocked, shattered canopies — like two hardboiled eggs that had been rammed together, and were now completely fused. Repeated shots blew whole chunks of hard plastic away, and he kicked the rest with augmented strength until a large, three-meter section fell away, hit the rails and disappeared. But now the vibration beneath his feet was like an earthquake.
“I’m about to lose the train!” Jokono announced in his ear. “You have to go now!”
“Spots!” Dale yelled. “I need your rifle up front!” Because there was no telling if this train, too, had infiltrating droids aboard.
“Yeah, got it!” Reddy replied, finishing a field-dressing in rapid fast time, having taken a knife to some of Kadi’s clothes.
“I will help him through,” Milek insisted, grabbing Kadi’s arm and hauling him up. “You go.”
Dale took several steps back for a runup, then leaped through the hole — a simple enough jump, and landed in the next train to screams and alarm from passengers there to see an armed and ferocious-looking human landing aboard. Dale covered with his rifle levelled at the crowd, but saw no threat. Reddy landed alongside and did the same.
“You cover!” Dale told him, and turned back to help Milek and Kadi. On the far side of the shattered intersection, Kadi was standing with Milek’s help, though barely. Milek spared Dale a grim look, then picked the fading Petty Officer up, with doubtless-augmented strength. Then, with a crash and eruption of sparks from further down the train, something broke, and Milek and Kadi’s train began to slow.
Milek barely avoided falling, as the intersection of glass-shell began to separate, and a gap opened between the two trains. “Now!” Dale yelled, tossing his rifle back and preparing both hands to catch. But he knew it was too late — Milek could not leap that expanding distance with Kadi’s weight. The look in the parren’s wide, indigo eyes showed that he knew it too.
He ran and leaped anyway, twisting in mid-flight to propel Kadi flying onward, at the cost of his own momentum. Dale grabbed Kadi’s jacket in mid-flight as he half-landed on the lower broken-glass, and saw Milek hit the maglev rail and disappear beneath the onrushing train in a flash.
Dale pulled Kadi aboard, the young man unconscious from the pain of being ragdolled about, and dragged him a safer distance from the rear. Reddy spared a brief glance back from his cover position. “Where’s Mystery Boy?”
“Dead,” said Dale. “Went under the train. Joker, can you stop us? Kadi’s hit and I can’t use his damn contraption.”
“Yes I can stop you, I’m acquiring control of this train now. Just one more minute.”
It seemed far longer than a minute, with huddled passengers staring at them ahead, and Dale double-checking Reddy’s blood-soaked bandage, and adding an extra pressure-wrap from his own first-aid. Kadi still had his glasses around his neck on their strap, and his handheld stuffed into a pocket. Most importantly, he still had the com module. Damn stupid, Dale berated himself — that had been the first and only priority, and by ordering Reddy to jump second, leaving Milek and Kadi behind, he’d put the whole mission at risk. But if there had been combat droids in this train, he’d have needed two rifles up front or the mission would also have failed. Milek should have been enough to handle Kadi, and as it happened, he had been. And if he’d left Reddy behind instead, then he’d now be dead instead of Milek, because Reddy would have realised what had to be done just as Milek had.
It wasn’t a worthy thought to feel relief at. Obviously he was far closer to Reddy, who’d been with him in Alpha Platoon for years. But it made him regret that he hadn’t shown Milek more respect when he’d had the chance.
“Joker,” he said, “you’d better have something on that platform I don’t k
now about, or we’re going to get slaughtered as soon as we get off.”
“The station is temporarily secure,” Jokono assured him. “And the presence of civilians on your new train is holding off their heavy weaponry, for now.”
Finally the train slowed, coming to a humming halt at a station built into the side of a tall, red-brown mesa cliff. Passengers poured off in a wave, yelling at others on the platform not to enter. Dale picked up Kadi with Reddy’s help, put him over a shoulder and moved quickly, rifle in his right hand while Reddy provided cover, moving quickly from the covered platform to the entry hall beyond. And they stopped, at a sight Dale had never thought he’d be pleased to see — the entry hall, filled with perhaps a dozen heavily armed tavalai. Leading them, and now using a big rifle in place of his usual staff, was Tooganam.
“Well,” said Tooganam, waving him on. “Come with us if you want to live.”
Dale and Reddy followed. “There’s no security here?” Dale asked the gruff former-karasai.
“There was,” said Tooganam, indicating to the tavalai ahead who fanned out with rifles ready, leading them down stairs to the entrance below. More civilian passengers stayed well clear as they passed. “Some droids at the entrance, in case you got off here, and a few more inside.” As they ran over a droid on the downward steps, sprawled amidst bullet holes that pockmarked the stairs and walls. “No issue now.”
“And who are all your friends?”
“No time for talking,” Tooganam retorted, limping heavily down the stairs. “Questions later. We have to get you home.”
26
Trace waited. About her, the descender’s hull creaked and groaned like some tormented thing. She’d thought somehow, in her imagination, that being inside this murderous atmosphere, even inside a heavily engineered descender, would be a more violent experience. But the descender was built for this, for short periods at least, and there was no buffeting, or howling of the furnace-temperature winds to be felt. Just the groaning of the hull, like an old wooden ship at sea, flexing in the waves. If it failed, she doubted there would be much warning. If that happened, she figured her armour would keep her alive for perhaps a minute, and no more than two… but only if the descender didn’t turn into a ball of fire first.
Her timer showed that Aristan had been gone for twenty-two minutes and fourteen seconds. Fifteen seconds. Sixteen. Seventeen. His air would have run out two minutes ago, so he’d been holding his breath for that long at least. Trace tried it herself from time to time, partly as a test of her meditative skills and aerobic capacity, and partly for the practical knowledge of how long she’d have if her suit failed. With augmentations, the human all-time record had gone up to half-an-hour, but those were deep-divers who’d turned their sport into an obsession, and conditioned their bodies to match. Marines had too much muscle for those extremes, and burned through oxygen too fast, irrespective of meditative practise. Lately Trace had been managing about six minutes, sitting cross-legged on her bunk, doing absolutely nothing. In her youth she’d managed eight, but she’d been skinnier then. She’d also been calmer, and better at meditation. It wasn’t supposed to work that way, she knew. Kulina were supposed to get better at meditation as they aged — calmer of mind and sounder of practise. But in her youth, life had been simple. With adulthood, for her at least, the certainties of her life had slowly faded, and meditative calm with it.
By Aristan’s estimates of his own capabilities, he should have about eighteen minutes left, at least. It was possible he’d be done much faster, one way or the other. Sard were not tavalai, with whom one might expect delays from endless bureaucratic procedure. Sard were efficient, and procrastination was psychologically unknown to them. But even so, given how her missions had played out recently, Trace was expecting things to be cut very fine.
The guard room atrium had five sard, tavalai Fleet intelligence had assured them. They were armed, but obviously not expecting trouble to get past their entry scans. Vault security was predicated on the presumption of a non-clandestine assault — a hostile ship arriving in Kamala orbit and sending down an equally hostile descender or two, followed by a violent breech entry. Vault defences were designed to buy time against such an assault, until State Department or Fleet reinforcements could arrive. Clandestine assaults, given all the security hurdles that needed to be jumped just to get to this point, were considered nearly impossible. Which they were — unless one had the assistance of tavalai Fleet.
Sard had often surprised the Spiral’s non-insectoid races with their imagination, and with tactics that became more ingenious and creative the more sard that became involved. But totally outside-the-box imagination remained a struggle for them. Sard could anticipate future events well by observing the flow of current events, and extrapolating where that flow might lead. But human commanders had observed that when sard were utterly surprised by something, such as a military-infiltration of the Kamala Vault for the first time in who knew how long, they struggled to adapt.
Trace had sparred with Aristan personally, and found his unarmed technique formidable. Sard were not particularly well suited to unarmed combat, and she thought that with surprise, five sard should not be beyond him. But she also knew that plans like these so rarely went as they should. There could be more sard on duty this day. They might have firearms prominent, despite the apparent unlikelihood, opening a delivery canister in which any sard, tavalai or human combatant would have expired after ten minutes. The various airlock and override controls could have changed since tavalai Fleet got their last good look at them. Plus she had made it her personal policy on operations to always expect the worst, in all its unexpected varieties. And so she was moderately astonished that at twenty-six minutes since they’d sealed Aristan in, the access tube that had retracted after Aristan’s canister had been deposited, began extending once more.
“Here it comes,” Rael said tersely, peering at the external feed by the airlock. “Looks like he did it.”
“Or someone inside is inviting us into a steel trap,” Kono growled. “Easier than destroying this descender, leaving another wreck on their pads they can’t clear.”
“If it’s a trap,” said Trace, “we’ve got enough firepower to blast through, or cut through.” She indicated to the kid, waiting patiently behind, the laser-cutter prominent behind his fore-legs. “Kid, you go first. If we need to cut through the airlock doors, lasers are best and there won’t be enough room for you to get by.”
The kid rattled past, peering at Rael’s display, then at the inner airlock doors, which would remain firmly closed until the docking tube was connected. “We’ve got room for him, Chenk and First Section,” said Trace. “Rael, you’re with Second Section immediately after.” And she checked her suit visor graphics, where a sub-section showed her the uplink connection to the kid’s weapon systems, and the safety that kept them locked.
Trace followed the kid into the airlock, and he pulled his legs in a little to make room, Kono on his right, Chenkov, Terez and Zale behind. Chenkov looked scared, the faceplate of his exo-suit visor more transparent than a one-way marine suit. He clutched his handheld device, which fed to a display projected on the faceplate. Styx insisted it should be able to take control of multiple systems within the vault, whose extreme high-tech could not save them from drysine technological dominance. Trace extended an armoured fist at Chenkov, who bumped it with his own. Scared, Trace judged, but functional. Hell, everyone was scared, even her. The trick was doing the job in spite of it.
The airlock inner door sealed behind them, a tight fit with no windows or light save the displays in their helmets. Like being locked into a steel coffin. “Connection commencing,” said Rael on coms, and the airlock thumped and shuddered as the docking tube arrived. Creating a seal in this atmosphere was a heavy-duty process of interlocking fasteners and triple-redundancies, and as much whining, rattling machinery as the insides of an industrial trash compactor.
“Good seal,” Rael said finally. “Docking
tube outer door is open, pressure differential is within tolerance. Good luck First Squad, we’ll be right behind you.”
The descender’s outer airlock door opened, with a sizzling blast of heat that shimmered the air about Trace’s visor. Her display showed her external temperature spiking briefly to a hundred degrees celsius, then fading as the heavy airlock fans blasted cold air in.
“Kid, go,” said Trace, and the drone went, head jerking around in a manner that indicated caution. Ahead was a dark, dim-lit tube with a floor grille above a canvas insulating sleeve that lined the tube’s insides. Along the ceiling were runners for the suspension cradle that had taken Aristan’s canister inside, after Chenkov had hooked it up. The mechanism had been interrupted then by several more heavy doors, but those were open now, and the way was clear. “Aristan must have disabled the doors, let’s go fast.”
The kid scuttled with that peculiar, multi-legged grace, and again Trace saw her visor spike to eighty, then ninety degrees. Beyond the clanging of the party’s footsteps, she could hear the throbbing pulse of coolant servos, pumping fluid through the sleeve, and stopping things from melting or catching fire. The tube itself was advanced ceramic of the kind used for shuttle reentry, capable of taking thousands of degrees without damage… but the systems that operated the extendable arm were not. Too long in this extended position and the coolant would fail, and systems would melt.
The kid rounded a bend, temperatures increasing past the boiling point of water as Trace’s suit began to whine, powerplant striving to drive the suddenly-toiling life support. She could feel the heat radiating on her face through the visor, causing sweat to bead on her forehead. Then ahead, a doorway, heavy and impenetrable.
Trace edged past the kid and gave it several hard thumps with her fist. “Aristan, are you receiving on any channel?” She got no reply. God knew what was going on in there. If things had gone to plan, Aristan would have disabled the immediate guards, then locked the rest out of the security atrium. But things so rarely went to plan, and though well-instructed, Aristan was no tech to operate all of the guardroom controls. After several seconds, Trace indicated to the kid. “Cut it.”
Kantovan Vault (The Spiral Wars Book 3) Page 40