by Rick Partlow
They were all professionals, the best that First Special Operations Command had to offer, and they each moved to fill in a position on the perimeter, scanning watchfully until, at last, Tom Crossman moved up beside Shannon, clapping her on the shoulder as he took a knee beside her.
“We’re ready to move out,” he told her, voice calm and easygoing, as if this were a weekend training exercise. She couldn’t see his face through the darkened visor of his helmet, but she knew he was probably smiling.
“EM silence from here on,” she ordered. “Keep the formation tight… I’m more worried about detection than I am separation.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he confirmed, then went to convey the orders via touching helmets, forgoing the use of suit comms.
Their point-man, a Technician Second Class named Von Paleske, moved out first with Shannon just behind him and Tom Crossman riding drag in the rear. Shannon let him watch for threats while she scanned for cameras or seismic detection devices that could pick up footsteps. It was tricky going-they couldn’t risk being detected, but they also had a ticking clock: they had over ten kilometers to cover and they needed to be inside before sunrise or the satellites would be able to pick them up on visual.
The night was fairly cool, but Shannon felt herself begin to sweat under her armor as she half-walked, half-jogged across the packed sand and bare sandstone of the high desert plain. They were in southeastern Utah, on the edge of a small pocket of privately-held land in the midst of the vast Southwest Heritage Preserve, and even in summer the temperatures at night were temperate, but the Stealth armor lacked the powered cooling systems of other modern body armor: the thermal signature of such systems was too visible.
Shannon sucked water from her backpack reservoir as their trail led over rolling hills of bare sandstone that offered treacherous footing and divided her attention from her wary search for sensors. At least, she told herself, they had the enhanced vision of the battle helmets. She would have hated to try to travel this path at night with nothing but her naked eyes for guidance. It took over an hour of careful, tedious, exhausting trudging before the slippery rock mounds gave way to plains of scrub and sand and they were able to pick up their pace.
They were almost on top of the old structures before Shannon saw them; they were dead and falling apart, the newest of them over a century old. Shannon looked down at the ground beneath her feet and saw for the first time that the sand was covering broken and crumbling pavement rather than natural rocks. She waved Crossman forward and touched her helmet to his.
“We’re at the edge of the old military base,” she told him, motioning towards the looming skeleton of an ancient administration building, only sections of concrete block and bare rebar still standing. “According to the old maps, we need to follow this road,” she shrugged, “or what’s left of it anyway, east around the edge of the base about another klick and a half. Keep your eyes open: I don’t think they know about the emergency exit tunnel, but they might.”
“If they know,” Crossman pointed out reasonably, “they’ve already seen us and we’re FUBAR.” She could hear the grin in his voice. “So we might as well assume they don’t.”
Shannon clapped Tom on the shoulder, then turned and motioned to the point man to head out.
* * *
Larry Gianeto stepped gingerly into the ship’s medical bay, trying to be quiet. The lights were off inside: it was the designated sleep period, and he didn’t want to wake the Captain…
“Come on in, Larry,” he heard her voice from the darkened bed against the far wall. “I couldn’t sleep.”
At the touch of a fingertip on a control, a gentle light went on over her bed. Gianeto smiled as he stepped over to her. “You’re looking better, Captain,” he told her honestly. She wasn’t as pale as she’d been a few days before and she no longer looked like a stiff breeze would blow her over. Her loose, grey medical bay gown covered it, but he knew from the doctor’s reports that her wounds were closed and swiftly healing with the aid of bio-engineered bacteria, though it would be another couple days before she recovered from the trauma and massive blood loss enough to go back on duty.
“Thanks,” she chuckled, sitting up cautiously. “The gravity helps.” They’d spun up the habitation drum once they’d gotten settled in their observation point and she did look less frail without the restraining straps holding her to the bed.
“I was… uh, just about to grab some rack time, ma’am,” he told her, “and I thought I would check in and see how you were doing.”
“How goes the refueling?” she asked him.
“Good,” he told her. “We picked it up from where that robotic freighter dropped it and engineering has the canisters loaded in the drive chamber. We’re up and ready.”
“Something’s bothering you, Larry,” she said in flat declaration. “Come on, out with it… I’m convalescing, I haven’t the energy to drag it out of you.”
“Oh, it’s nothing important, ma’am,” Gianeto assured her. “It’s just that… now that we’re refueled, it feels like we should be doing something. So much is going on, on Earth and back out there,” he waved a hand expansively at the hull and the wormhole jumpgate outside it, “and we’re just sitting here.”
“It’s what Major Stark wanted us to do,” Minishimi reminded him. “I think we’re her hole card if things go badly, to be honest. She doesn’t want to come out and say it, but… if it comes to a civil war, we can do a lot of damage and she knows she can trust us.”
“Do you really think it will come to that, ma’am?” he asked her quietly, an edge of misery in his voice.
She moved a finger underneath the edge of her gown and touched the bright pink spot on her chest where the knife had gone in. “It’s already come to that, Larry. Let’s hope we can avoid it happening on a planetary scale.”
Gianeto went stiff, hand going instinctively to his ear bud.
“What is it?” Minishimi demanded sharply, fighting an urge to leap out of the bed.
“Something just transited the gate, ma’am,” he told her as he listened to the report from the bridge. “Two of the Eysselink drive ram-ships. They came out at around a quarter light, then hit their drives and warped out at 200 gravities!” His eyes were wide. “Captain, they’re heading for Earth, and at that rate of acceleration…”
“Even if we get everyone into the g-tanks, we’ll never catch them in time,” Minishimi finished for him. She grabbed her ‘link from the table next to the bed. “Communications,” she said, “get me a secure line to Fleet headquarters.” Her eyes met Gianeto’s. “We have to warn them.”
Chapter Thirty-One
The tunnel was narrow, no more than a meter across and two meters tall, and as dark as a tomb. Even with the infrared illuminators and the night vision optics in her helmet, Shannon could barely see two meters in front of her and what she could see was nothing but bare walls carved out of bedrock and narrow steps constantly leading downward. They’d been trudging down those stairs for an hour and the view hadn’t changed; Shannon knew that it had to be nearing sunrise and a part of her subconscious nagged at her over it, even though she knew that it made no difference anymore. They were underground and their target was underground and the time of day outside was no longer relevant. If only she could force herself to really believe that…
She suppressed a sigh. At least they hadn’t found any indication that the tunnel was being monitored, and the entrance looked as if it hadn’t been used in decades: it had taken them nearly a half hour to dig it out of the rubble and then several more minutes to burn the rusted and bent metal door off of its hinges with a portable plasma torch. She had felt so relieved when it had finally crashed inward and they’d been able to get under cover, but now the doubt was beginning to close in on her like the walls of the tunnel.
Finally, the stairs ended and they found themselves on level ground again, though just as narrow and dark. Ahead of her, Von Paleske held up a fist, indicating a security halt.
Normally, that meant that the rest of the unit would take a knee and watch in all directions, but in the cramped darkness, everyone just stood in place as Shannon stepped up to the man, touching helmets so they could speak without using the radios.
“We’re getting pretty close to the exit, ma’am,” he told her quietly. “Another thirty meters according to the plans.”
“Stay here,” she instructed him, then squeezed past the man and moved down the tunnel, her infrared illuminator gradually revealing an abrupt end to the passage.
There wasn’t a light at the end of this tunnel, but there was a door. It wasn’t twisted and crushed like the entrance door had been, nor was it as covered and ruined by rust, but it still bore the unmistakable air of age. She let her carbine hang from its sling and pulled a hand-held sensor from her belt, holding it a few centimeters from the metal surface of the door and running it from the top to the bottom and then around the frame.
The sensors read nothing that indicated that the door was being monitored. She frowned, re-casing the device. There was always the possibility that the door was under visual surveillance, which her sensors couldn’t discern… but hell, they hadn’t come all this way to turn tail and run. She unslung her carbine and waved Von Paleske forward.
The Tech-2 pulled a portable cutting torch from his backpack and went to work, setting the plasma cutter for low and aiming the white-hot jet of ionized gas into the locking mechanism of the door. Shannon watched impassively as the torch slice slowly through the ancient, rusted bolt, running scenarios through her mind so that nothing that stood on the other side of that door could take her by surprise. Death she feared not at all, but failure was a terror that didn’t bear consideration.
Von Paleske shut off the torch and replaced it in his backpack, then held his rifle at the ready and nodded to Shannon, his gaze calm and businesslike. She grabbed the rust-coated handle of the heavy, ancient door and gave it an experimental tug; it didn’t budge. The bolt was severed, but the hinges resisted, frozen by nearly two centuries of inaction. Shannon slung her rifle again and grabbed the handle with both hands, planting a boot against the wall and giving a hard, breaking yank. The hinges squealed loud enough that Shannon was sure the racket could be heard from orbit, but finally the door swung open and Von Paleske ducked inside, followed closely by Sergeant Morales, the next in line behind him.
Shannon crouched low, her back against the wall just outside the open door, waiting for what seemed like hours until finally Von Paleske emerged from the dark chamber and signaled “all clear.” Shannon waved him back inside, then turned and motioned for the rest of the team to follow her as she stepped through the door.
She emerged from the tunnel into what looked like a small storage room. Ancient plastic tubs, warped with time, were stacked in one corner, taking up about a quarter of the space in the chamber. She scanned the room carefully on IR and thermal and saw nothing else significant: no active electronics, no sensors, no monitors; just the door from which she’d emerged and one other opposite it. Sergeant Morales had already posted herself next to the other door and was still scanning it with her own hand-held sensor for any electronic signatures. After a moment, she turned to Shannon and signaled that she wasn’t detecting anything.
Shannon felt a touch on her arm and looked around to see Tom Crossman standing next to her. He leaned in to touch helmets. “I’m leaving Reynolds here at the tunnel entrance to watch our backs,” he told her. They could, she knew, have left a remote drone to do the same thing, but that would run the risk of the control signal for the machine being detected. Better to do things the old-fashioned way until they secured the facility.
“Keep someone on the EM sensors scanning for power conduits,” she told him. She didn’t have to tell him why: they had no detailed plans for the part of the bunker that Riordan had rebuilt, so they were going to have to try to intuit which way to go by tracking electricity usage. He nodded confirmation then went to instruct their point-man.
Once everyone was in position, Morales put her hand on the door’s latch and shot a questioning look at Von Paleske. He nodded and she slowly pulled the door open, allowing him to angle through it; she followed him out while Crossman waited against the wall beside the opening. After a moment, Morales leaned back inside and waved for the others to follow.
The hallway outside was still the ancient stone passages of the old bunker and Shannon began to wonder if they were actually in the right place… until they followed the corridor around a curve to the right and it abruptly ended in a decidedly modern hermetically sealed barrier of opaque grey polymer. Shannon felt a momentary chill run through her and she was sure they’d been spotted by sensors at the door… but a quick glance at Sgt. Morales and a horizontal slice in the air from her hand told her that there were no active electromagnetic signals present.
Shannon paused for a moment, reminding herself that there was always time to think. There was no EM signal and the door had no obvious keypad or handle. Perhaps it wasn’t as much a door as a simple seal for the bunker’s climate control. They had two choices: blow the door and storm in or take the risk that the other side wasn’t being directly monitored and burn through slowly and quietly.
She almost waved for Von Paleske to come forward with the cutting torch, but she stopped herself in mid-motion. There was a tickling in the middle of her back, a strange feeling in her gut. She turned and motioned for Tom to come forward, then touched helmets with him.
“Set charges,” she instructed. “We’re blowing this door. I want people on either side ready to toss in grenades.”
“Flash-bangs?” He asked.
“Frag,” she corrected him. “I’ve got a funny feeling about this one, Tom. Once we’re through, we charge through whatever’s in our way until we reach Antonov.”
He moved to pass on the orders and Shannon took a deep breath, closing her eyes for a heartbeat as she prayed silently that she was making the right call. The squadron deployed in a stack around the door as Morales and Von Paleske placed the charges and the two others closest to the door, Jurgensen and Wellington, pulled out frag grenades from pouches on their chest.
Everyone was set in seconds and Tom gave Shannon a questioning glance. She nodded, then moved to the side of the stack, her carbine held muzzle down. From the other side of the door, Sergeant Morales held out her hand and did a silent count-down: three fingers, two fingers, one… and then she mashed the button on the remote detonator and ducked her head.
The shaped charges detonated with a thump that Shannon could feel in her chest, shaking the walls and drowning out the clatter of the wreckage of the door in the corridor beyond. Smoke billowed through the room, obscuring Shannon’s vision as Jurgensen and Wellington immediately tossed their grenades through the jagged, gaping hole where the barrier had been and ducked back again. The explosions of the fragmentation weapons were kettle drums to the snare of the door-buster, but to Shannon they sounded louder and harsher, the tinny echoes of their fragments bouncing back into the room like off-key notes from a piano.
Tom slapped Von Paleske on the shoulder and the point man swung around the jagged edge of the hole created by the breaching charges and led them into the roiling smoke beyond. Shannon’s helmet automatically switched to thermal and infrared, seamlessly integrating the scene into a visual representation for her: beyond the barrier, the walls ceased to be bare rock and were instead lined with modern polymers, lit by glowing panels in the ceiling-some of them were cracked and broken, sparking or dark from the force of the explosions.
A body was sprawled on the floor just a few meters past the breach, clad in nondescript dark-colored armor, a rifle on the floor by its outstretched hands. A shard of polymer from the door had been driven through the rear armor plate by the force of the blast and the ballistic cloth that held the armor inserts together had been shredded by the grenades. Blood pooled around the body, though not as much as Shannon would have expected. She was about to order one of the squad
to check the man-she assumed it was a man, from the broad shoulders and nearly two meters of height-but then he lurched onto his knees, reaching in unnatural, jerky motions for the rifle just beyond his grasp.
Shannon acted without thinking… the rifle was closest to her. She kicked the weapon away, then turned on the ball of her plant foot and smashed a heel into the man’s chest. Blood splashed as he sprawled away and Shannon stumbled backwards; she felt as if she’d kicked a brick wall. Crossman stepped up beside her and leveled his carbine, squeezing off a burst. Three rounds of tungsten-core ceramic jacketed 8mm impacted the helmet’s splintered visor, one snagging the edge of the helmet and ripping it off his head.
Shannon froze, breath catching in her throat, eyes wide. The face beneath the helmet was ruined and bloody from the impact of the rifle rounds, but it was also just as obviously not the face of a human. From behind heavy, boney brow ridges stared the black eyes of a biomech, no more cold and lifeless in death than they had been in life. Tom hesitated as well, all the implications of what he was seeing running through his thoughts, until Shannon slapped a hand on his shoulder.
“Just go!” she told him urgently. He nodded sharply and moved out down the hallway with Shannon and the remainder of the unit behind.
Shannon gritted her teeth and swore to herself in the privacy of her helmet. They had those fucking things here, on Earth… they were already producing them. How many more did they have? An army? Were they all here or did Riordan already have them in Capital City to support his coup attempt? She felt an overwhelming urge to run, to get them all out of the complex and call down an orbital strike, but she fought it back: nothing had changed. They still needed Antonov alive and this was their only chance at him.