Retribution

by Troy Denning

  And then there were the cryo-jars to consider. Whatever their true importance, the Sabara woman was willing to sacrifice her freedom to keep them away from ONI . . . and that argued for quick action.

  “Lead the way, Orsun,” Castor said. “We will meet the infidels as they return to their shuttle.”

  Orsun bowed his head. “I am graced by your trust, Dokab.”

  The second-in-command tapped the control pad, and the ramp descended. He activated a thruster and drifted out through the portal . . . and then the air was torn by the roar of a rocket-propelled grenade.

  “Incoming!” Orsun roared.

  The detonation hurled him back across the boarding vestibule into the security station, and the last Castor saw of his old friend was a spray of flame erupting through the backplate of his armor.

  CHAPTER 21

  * * *

  * * *

  0327 hours, December 16, 2553 (military calendar)

  Storage Area 20, Fabrication Ring Delta

  Pinnacle Station, Moon Meridian, Planet Hestia V, Hestia System

  The first M19 surface-to-surface missile struck the Jiralhanae in his chest armor and drove him back through the True Light’s boarding portal. The charge detonated inside the vestibule, and Oriel watched through the wide-angle lens of a Papa-10 headset-mounted camera as the target’s torso flew apart. Flames covered the security station behind him, and clouds of blood and smoke filled the vessel interior.

  It always troubled Oriel to dispose of reliable assets. But her generator aspect, the archeon-class ancilla Intrepid Eye, had been clear: Castor had reached the end of his service life. His capture of the Dark Moon operatives in the Contemplarium, and his relentless pursuit of their hidden masters, had rendered the dokab an untenable liability. His entire cell was to be eliminated at the first opportunity, before he learned any more about Dark Moon Enterprises and placed Intrepid Eye herself at risk.

  For a thousand system ticks, Oriel continued to watch through the headset camera . . . and waited. She caught glimpses of shredded flesh and blood-spattered armor. Displays shattered, bodies fell, smoke billowed out over the boarding ramp, and still nothing.

  Lieutenant Bartalan Craddog did not fire the second missile.

  “Lieutenant Craddog.” Oriel was transmitting directly into Craddog’s earbud from the Pinnacle Station utility skiff, where she had taken residence in the craft’s master control system. “Is there a reason for the delay? Please fire the second missile now.”

  “At what?” Craddog was currently in Storage Area 20, adjacent to the berthing bay where the True Light was tethered, clinging to a cargo net full of laser-welder gas cartridges. With his free hand, he was holding on to the trigger housing of a shoulder-firing M41 SPNKR missile launcher. “I can’t see a target!”

  “Fire it into the boarding vestibule.” Oriel was careful to keep an even tone. Intrepid Eye had realized that Craddog would be unreliable under pressure, and Oriel had sent him into combat only because Papa-10’s other teammembers were busy with the cryo-jar recovery. “It is important to keep the survivors disoriented. We need to delay them for another forty-two seconds.”

  “Survivors?” Craddog’s gaze was fixed on the smoke pouring out of the transport’s boarding hatch, and he made no move to aim the M41 SPNKR. “Are you crazy? We’ll be lucky if that freighter doesn’t blow now. If I hit it again, it could take out the entire station!”

  As Craddog spoke, a massive silhouette appeared in the smoke, just inside the True Light’s boarding portal, then floated through the hatchway into the berthing bay.

  Craddog gasped in disbelief, then released the cargo net and raised the M41 SPNKR to fire. Unaccustomed to maneuvering in zero-G, he sent himself spinning, and Oriel watched through his headset as the missile went wide of the True Light’s boarding portal and struck a dozen meters aft.

  The silhouette emerged from the smoke and resolved itself into a Jiralhanae clad in power armor. He raised a Type-25 spike rifle and opened fire into the storage area toward Craddog, who left the SPNKR to float free and lunged for the cargo net with both hands.

  The maneuver sent Craddog’s feet tumbling over his head, and Oriel had to activate an image-stabilizing routine. The spinning blur resolved into a gleaming spray of spikes, coming from a Jiralhanae with a burn-blistered face. His expression was so contorted with rage and loss that Oriel required seven system ticks to recognize him as Castor. His long gray beard was matted with blood and tiny bits of charred flesh, and behind him followed three more Jiralhanae, all wearing blue shock-plate armor with gold trim.

  Craddog caught hold of the cargo net and began to pull hand-over-hand, trying to reach cover. Only five seconds had passed since Oriel had ordered him to fire the second missile, so she knew that Castor and his companions would have ample time to prevent the Papa-10 recovery squad from returning the cryo-jars to the utility skiff.

  Craddog screamed and whipped his head around, and Oriel’s view of the departing Jiralhanae was replaced by globules of blood, rising through a gash in the lieutenant’s pant leg. She tried to keep Castor and his warriors in view by analyzing the distorted images around the rim of the headset’s fish-eye lens, but her line of sight was blocked by the contents of the cargo net.

  Oriel opened a channel to all of Papa-10. “Lieutenant Craddog’s attack was only a partial success,” she transmitted. “You should expect to be engaged by four armored Jiralhanae.”

  “Brutes?” said Bhu Zdenyk, one of the team’s three female operatives. “Those cryo-jars better not be vital to humanity or anything.”

  “Can the chatter.” The order came from the Papa-10 commander, a square-faced ONI officer named Porter Sahir. “Appreciate the warning.”

  “I am glad to be of service,” Oriel replied. “Lieutenant Craddog will provide support.”

  “Support?” Craddog replied, gasping. “I’m wounded!”

  “It is only a flesh wound.” Oriel could tell by the elongated gash in Craddog’s pant material that the spike had grazed his calf without embedding itself. “You are quite capable of fighting, especially in a weightless environment.”

  “I’m in pain!”

  “Lieutenant Craddog, we need any assistance you can provide.” Sahir’s tone bordered on the derisive—clearly, he was not expecting much from Craddog. “Four Brutes in shock-plate armor are a lot to handle, even for us.”

  “I’ll try,” Craddog said, fighting for breath. “But I’m not sure what I can do.”

  “Perhaps you should retrieve the M41 SPNKR,” Oriel calmly suggested. “And reload it.”

  As Oriel spoke, she was tapping into Sahir’s headset camera so she could observe the Papa-10 preparations. The commander had stopped his team about thirty meters from the Liang-Dortmund cargo transport where the Dark Moon Turaco had been concealed, and as he issued assignments, his camera shifted from one operative to the next.

  They were all grim-faced soldiers with steady gazes and confident postures. The men had heavy brows and square jaws, while the women had small noses and taut features. There were more brown eyes than blue. Zdenyk’s eyes were green, her complexion tawny brown. Oracle could see that the execution of the Dark Moon couriers had left everyone’s coveralls flecked with tiny droplets of blood, but the stains were causing less alarm among the spectators than the M7 SMGs and M45E short-barrel shotguns being drawn from the Papa-10 equipment satchels.

  Construction workers were now fleeing on all sides, clunk-running down maglanes or floating into nearby berthing bays, using cargo nets and tether straps to pull themselves behind cover. There was no sign of a security response, though Oriel expected that would soon change. She was monitoring all of Pinnacle Station’s security channels and knew that Administrator Sloan—the station’s AI superintendent—was assembling a force up to the task.

  Sahir deployed Papa-10’s forward element in an L formation designed to catch the enemy in a crossfire kill zone. He led this element himself, leaving Bhu Zdenyk in charge of
a three-person detail that would follow with the cryo-jars.

  Back in Storage Area 20, Craddog was returning to the cargo net with his errant M41 SPNKR. He failed to activate his braking thrusters in time and hit hard. The entire load shifted, but he managed to hook a boot through the mesh before the tether reached full extension and rebounded. He flailed around and barely kept himself from flying off, then finally began to fumble with the weapon, trying to find the barrel release so he could insert the reload barrels he wore slung across his back.

  The boom of a shotgun sounded over the Papa-10 communications channel; then a Jiralhanae tumbled into Sahir’s field of vision. The Brute’s maneuvering thrusters were still firing, and blood globules were flying from his head in a wild helix. It took only a hundred system ticks—a tenth of a human second—for the channel to erupt into screams and small-arms fire. A steady flow of casualties tumbled into view, all human. Most appeared to be construction workers hit in the crossfire, but at least three were Papa-10 operatives still wearing their headsets.

  Realizing Papa-10 would never fight its way past the Jiralhanae without help, Oriel checked on Craddog’s progress. He had finally found the release catch and removed the SPNKR’s expended barrels, but his headset camera was panning about wildly as he tried to pull the reload barrels off his back without letting the weapon drift away. By the time he could reassemble the weapon and move into position to use it—assuming he ever managed that—the battle would be over.

  Oriel scanned the cameras of the surviving members of Papa-10’s forward-element squad and glimpsed an incoming mauler blast—then only Sahir’s feed remained. He had three Jiralhanae soaring toward him, all firing weapons while still expertly maneuvering. Sahir’s own response from an M7 SMG was for the most part simply ricocheting off his attackers’ armor—though one Brute had a taken a hit to the face and was missing part of his jaw.

  Oriel consulted a station schematic and saw there was no longer any way for Zdenyk’s squad to reach the utility skiff with the cryo-jars. She considered trying to contact Castor and demand that he stand down, but the consequences were dire. Even if she were able to command his attention in the middle of a firefight, she would risk revealing her connection to Dark Moon. Castor would feel used and betrayed, and he was 3.72 times more likely to lose faith in the Great Journey than to accept her deception as a test of devotion.

  And if Castor lost faith, his Jiralhanae pride would demand revenge. There was no predicting what he might do. He might undertake a relentless war against Dark Moon’s ONI masters, or he might see through Intrepid Eye’s layers of deception and see that ONI was as a much a victim as he had been. The only thing Oriel knew with certainty was that a vengeful Castor would be a dangerous Castor—which meant that Intrepid Eye was correct. The time had come to stop taking chances and eliminate him.

  “Petty Officer Zdenyk, please take your squad and the cryo-jars and board a personnel shuttle.” Oriel transmitted the order across the entire Papa-10 comm channel so that any survivors would understand her plan. “Proceed to Meridian’s surface and remain concealed until reinforcements arrive.”

  “No way,” Zdenyk replied. “We’re not leaving without Papa—leader.”

  “Do it!” Sahir was yelling, but even so, his voice was nearly inaudible over a long burst of automatic fire. “That’s an order, Bhu!”

  There was a half-second pause before Zdenyk replied, “Affirmative, Lead . . . and thank you.”

  If Sahir replied, his answer was lost to the roar of a mauler blast tearing through his concealed body armor. Oriel switched to Zdenyk’s headset camera and found her soaring down a concourse, toward the shuttle station at the core of Fabrication Ring Delta. Ahead of her, panicked construction workers were hurling themselves off both sides of the maglane.

  Another burst of gunfire sounded behind Zdenyk, and her camera panned around behind her. The other two members of her squad were coming down the concourse on their backs. Each man was clutching a cryo-jar to his chest with one arm and operating a M7 SMG with the other. The combat-stabilization feature of their thruster harnesses was having trouble compensating for the sustained fire, so they were weaving and bobbing wildly.

  Sahir’s corpse was still floating in the concourse entrance. It was a contorted, spiderlike figure surrounded by a halo of blood globules. And moving past it were four Jiralhanae warriors.

  “Petty Officer Zdenyk,” Oriel said, “your squad must board the next shuttle. I will see to the rest.”

  “You’d better,” Zdenyk replied. “We’re running low on ammo.”

  Her headset camera turned forward again, and five paces ahead, Oriel saw the grime-streaked throat of the shuttle’s boarding tube. At the far end of the tube, inside the craft itself, a cluster of alarmed construction workers sat strapped into their acceleration chairs. Their eyes were wide and their faces pale.

  “Have faith, Petty Officer Zdenyk,” Oriel said. “You cannot imagine the extent of my capabilities.”

  Oriel used a Pinnacle Station security channel to access a schematic of the shuttle. A wedge-shaped model with an ultra-wide cabin, it was short-hop vessel designed to transport large numbers of personnel to and from Meridian’s surface with a minimum of maintenance. Although it was usually flown automatically by an onboard AI, during an emergency a passenger could assume limited control.

  “There is a pilot’s compartment at the front of the cabin.” Oriel was transmitting only to Zdenyk and her two squad members now. “Once you’re aboard, open it and activate the emergency override. That will allow you to seal the craft and leave the station.”

  “Then what?” Zdenyk was already floating down the shuttle’s boarding tube. “Could we rendezvous with the Fast Gus?

  “Negative,” Oriel said. “Your control will be limited. The shuttle will descend to Meridian’s surface automatically. You will be taken to an emergency landing zone a safe distance from the settlement. Once you are on the surface, you will then be able to open the hatches.”

  “Thanks . . . I guess.” Zdenyk entered the shuttle’s passenger cabin and turned toward the pilot’s cabin. “Papa-10 out.”

  Oriel continued to monitor the situation aboard the shuttle. After the rest of Zdenyk’s squad boarded, the petty officer used the emergency override to seal the hatches. Papa-10’s pursuers were only halfway down the concourse when the shuttle launched.

  In Storage Bay 20, Craddog had finally inserted the reload barrels into the M41 SPNKR and was just locking the release catch. His leg was still bleeding, and the air around him was filled with crimson globules.

  “Lieutenant Craddog,” Oriel said, “perhaps you should return to the utility skiff and tend to your wound.”

  “What about Papa-10?” Craddog asked. “I thought they needed support!”

  “It is too late for that.”

  Oriel detected a scratch in the signal and realized that someone—probably Pinnacle Station security—was attempting to eavesdrop on the Papa-10 comm net. She switched to a sequestered channel, then changed the encryption and continued to address Craddog.

  “Your support has proven quite useless.”

  Craddog’s tone grew indignant. “Well, I’m a scientist, not a soldier.”

  “There is no need to be defensive,” Oriel said. “It is my fault. Intrepid Eye warned me you would not perform well under pressure.”

  Craddog looked toward the shuttle stations. “So you’re just going to abandon the cryo-jars?” he demanded. “I thought Intrepid Eye needed them to develop the vaccine. I thought the vaccine was the only way to protect humanity from an asteroidea outbreak.”

  “That is correct.”

  It would have been more precise to say that the vaccine would control the coming outbreak, but Oriel was not sure how much Craddog knew about the long-term plans of her prime aspect. Given his flaws, it seemed unlikely that Intrepid Eye would consider his genetic line worthy of the Mantle of Responsibility. When the culling began, Craddog’s descendants would not
be among those who received an inoculation.

  “I will recover the cryo-jars, Lieutenant Craddog,” Oriel continued. “The best way for you to help now is to return to the utility skiff And leave the M41 SPNKR behind. It would be an unnecessary complication for Pinnacle Station security to find it in your possession.”

  Craddog immediately pushed the SPNKR aside and began to thruster his way back toward the skiff’s berthing bay.

  Oriel concentrated her attention on the Pinnacle Station security feeds and quickly realized the Jiralhanae had not given up their pursuit of the cryo-jars. Dozens of reports placed them at the fabrication ring’s shuttle station, awaiting the arrival of the next craft.

  Recalling the interference she had felt in the Papa-10 communications channel, Oriel reopened the channel and said, “I need to speak to Administrator Sloan. Now.”

  The scratch grew fainter, and for three hundred system ticks, Oriel awaited reply.

  When none came, she said, “It is no use hiding. My countersurveillance routines are impregnable, and if you compel me to force my way into your system, I will not be gentle.”

  The interference modulated itself into an input signal, and the image of a powerfully built man with a bald head and rugged features appeared on the communications holograph in the utility skiff’s cockpit. The pilot, an ONI contract-asset whose primary employment was with Pinnacle Station, let out a startled gasp and reached for the controls.

  Oriel quickly internalized the image and diverted control of the holograph to herself, then addressed the newcomer digitally. “Administrator Sloan, I require you to stop all further shuttle departures from Fabrication Ring Delta.”