by Rick Partlow
No audible alarms were sounding as they moved through the complex at a trot, but she knew that was meaningless: they had to assume that the place was on alert. Tom fell behind her to watch the rear and she moved ahead, coming up just behind Von Paleske and Morales near the front of the unit. The halls were wide and yet she felt increasingly claustrophobic, paranoid that the enemy was going to burst through the featureless white doors that lined the corridor. Yet those doors remained closed and they didn’t bother to investigate them: their plan was to head straight for the holding cell.
They came to a fork in the corridor and Shannon waved Von Paleske to the left, both on instinct and an overlaid computer rendering based on the data mined from Fourcade’s ‘link. They had barely rounded the corner when Von Paleske pulled up short and Shannon and Sergeant Morales nearly ran into his back. Shannon had the briefest glimpse of three hulking, black-clad figures thirty meters away down the corridor before a hail of gunfire slammed into the wall behind them and Von Paleske went down in a heap.
Shannon lunged back around the corner, grabbing at Von Paleske’s harness and dragging him back with her, not realizing until he was behind cover that Sergeant Morales had a hold of the other side of the man’s armored vest. Tom Crossman and Sergeant Jurgensen moved up quickly from the rear and leaned out from behind cover, laying down a wall of return fire. The medic slid in beside Von Paleske and Shannon rolled out of the way to give him access to the wounded man, then scrambled to her feet and joined Crossman and Jurgensen at the corner.
Tom Crossman was ducking behind cover to swap magazines, so Shannon crouched down and lunged into the corridor, bringing her carbine to her shoulder. One of the three biomech troopers was down, but the other two stood their ground, lacking any sort of instinct for self-preservation. Shannon’s weapon sight linked automatically with the reticle in her helmet and she lined up the aiming crosshairs with the faceplate of the biomech on the right and squeezed the trigger. The carbine bucked slightly against her shoulder and a three-round burst punched through the tough polymer over the biomech’s face, blood spraying out among a scattering of polymer shards as the manufactured humanoid collapsed forward.
The last biomech fell just moments after as Crossman and Jurgensen concentrated their fire on it, and just as suddenly as the cacophony had begun, it ended in a ringing echo and then dead silence. Shannon jumped up and stepped over to the medic, who was kneeling down beside the prone form of Von Paleske, wrapping a smart bandage around his left thigh.
“How is he?” she asked, using the external speaker on her helmet.
“I’ll be okay, ma’am,” Von Paleske answered for himself. “I can make it.”
“He caught a couple in the chest,” the medic told Shannon, ignoring the man’s protestations, “but the armor stopped them… got some bad bruising there, maybe a cracked rib or two. But he’s got a through-and-through on the leg that might have nicked his left femur. The smart bandage should stop the bleeding, but he won’t be running anywhere for a while.”
“Gunnar,” she said to Von Paleske, putting a hand on the wounded man’s shoulder, “I want you to get back to the tunnel entrance and tell Reynolds that we’re facing biomechs. Make sure he communicates that to the lander, and make sure the crew of the lander knows that anything that tries to fly out of this installation needs to get shot down, no questions asked.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Gunnar Von Paleske replied with a resigned sigh. Shannon and the medic helped him to his feet and he began limping gingerly back the way they had come.
“Move out!” Shannon ordered the rest.
“Morales, you take point,” Tom Crossman ordered the junior Sergeant.
Now we’re down to twelve, Shannon thought, worry gnawing at her. Going up against God knew how many biomechs, was that going to be enough?
Morales led them off down the left hand corridor, past the sprawled and motionless forms of the biomechs, moving even faster than before: she knew, as did Shannon, that their best bet was to get to the target as quickly as possible and get out. The long corridor was lined with open doors, Shannon saw as they jogged through it, all of them living quarters for installation personnel and all of them empty. Shannon wondered if they’d been evacuated prior to Riordan’s decision to run or if they were hold up somewhere else in the installation, alerted by some silent alarm after the explosion had breached the door.
Shannon slipped a rifle grenade from her tactical vest as she ran and slid it home into the launcher mounted beneath her carbine’s barrel; she nodded to herself as she saw Morales do the same. The corridor turned sharply to the right just ahead and Morales slowed as they reached the corner, lunging into a crouch then extending her carbine around the corner to use the connection between her rifle sight and her helmet reticle to check for enemies.
“Clear,” she announced, rising from her crouch and scrambling around the corner. Following her, Shannon saw that the hall ended just twenty meters down in a security door, bare but for an ID scanner.
“Breach it,” Shannon ordered Morales curtly, waving the rest of the unit forward and into position. “Four frags inside once it’s down,” she told Crossman. She winced at the realization that the missing personnel might be on the other side of that door, but shrugged the thought away: those people knew exactly what they were doing and what the consequences could be.
Morales shrugged off her backpack and retrieved the remaining breaching charges from it, pealing the backing off of each block to bare the strong adhesive and then sticking each to a key point on the door.
“Set,” she announced, slipping her pack on and backing away from the door. Tom Crossman, Sergeants Jurgensen and Wellington and Tech-2 Martinelli all took out grenades and armed them, waiting to the side of the door, while the others stacked up and made ready to charge inside.
“Blow it,” Shannon ordered, her grip tightening on her carbine as she looked away from the door to keep her visor safe from shrapnel.
In the scant second before Morales hit the switch to ignite the explosives, everything seemed to come into sharp focus in Shannon’s vision, down to the dust motes dancing in the air beneath the ceiling light panels and the antiseptic white of the polymer liners that coated the ancient stone of the walls.
“Detonating!” Morales announced, mashing her thumb into the control.
A wave of backpressure forced Shannon against the wall and she could feel the plastic lining vibrating like a drumhead. She took a step forward to keep her balance and turned in time to see Tom and the other three NCOs throwing grenades through the smoke-filled gap where the door had been. The grenades went off so close together that they sounded like a single, massive blast and the light shining through the haze of smoke dimmed as ceiling panels were blown out.
Morales and Martinelli were moving forward to enter the smoke-shrouded room when a burst of gunfire came through the opening, barely passing between them and sending them both diving for cover. Shannon angled her carbine around the edge of the jagged hole where the door had been and used its thermal sensors to see through the thick smoke and dust: there were at least a half dozen figures laid out and broken on the floor, but another four were still standing, heat glowing white on their weapons as they fired.
“Tom!” Shannon transmitted over her helmet radio to be heard over the shooting. “Four Gomers, between one and three o’clock! With me on two!” The NCO took a position at the edge of the doorway, carbine at the ready. “One… two!”
She and Crossman leaned out and the NCO sent a trio of quick full-auto bursts at the two biomech troopers on the right, while Shannon launched her rifle grenade at the other pair. They were only about ten meters away, but the grenade’s integral ballistics computer accounted for the distance and when it struck the biomech trooper in the chest, it used internal baffles to focus the explosion forward and to the sides.
The grenade exploded with a gut-punch concussion that blew the biomech into chunks of flesh and bloody armor; the jets of plasm
a from the side burned fist-sized holes through the neck and chest of the one next to it, blasting it off its feet and sending it plowing into the other two troopers. All three went down in a heap and Crossman emptied his magazine into them, putting burst after burst into the faceplates of their helmets until they stopped moving,
Fire control systems sprayed a fog of chemical foam into the room, adding another level of haze to the smoke that still wafted through the room, until an emergency ventilator activated and the mix of white chemical cloud and black smoke spiraled into a pair of large fans set in the walls. As the room cleared, Shannon became aware of several things in a moment: first, the room was the same one that Jameson had seen them holding Antonov. The transparent cell walls bisected the room; the other half was filled with monitoring and control stations, many of them blasted into charred and shattered pieces by the grenades.
The second thing she noticed was that Antonov was standing behind that clear wall; shadows playing across his craggy face in the patchy light from the few surviving ceiling panels, arms crossed as he watched them with what she could have sworn was amusement. And she also saw that he was not alone: also in the cell, flanking him, were half a dozen biomech troopers, their weapons trained on the former dictator of the Russian Protectorate, and beside them Kevin Fourcade and Brendan Riordan. Fourcade seemed impassive, as if he were watching a movie, his face bland and expressionless; while Riordan’s was flushed with anger, frustration and fear. His big right hand was filled with a pistol, pointing back and forth between Antonov and the general direction of Shannon and her troops, but that hand was shaking.
Slowly and almost casually, Shannon rose from behind cover and stepped through the doorway, her carbine held across her chest. She could see out of the corner of her eye Tom Crossman rising to join her, but she motioned for him to stay on the other side of the doorway.
“This is Colonel Shannon Stark of Fleet Intelligence,” she announced, amplifying her voice over her helmet’s external speakers. “We’re here to take General Antonov into custody.”
Riordan’s mouth curled into a ferocious sneer and he remarked aside to Fourcade, “Well, Kevin, I suppose I owe you an apology: Jameson was a plant.” The comment was picked up by the intercom system in the cell and audible over speakers set in the ceiling outside of it.
“Actually, Director Riordan,” Shannon corrected him, “we found this place by tracing Mr. Fourcade/s ‘link.” She grinned slightly as Fourcade seemed to cringe at that and Riordan’s face flushed. “But that’s not important… we just want Antonov. We know what you’ve done, but we are facing a civil war and an imminent attack by the Protectorate and Antonov is behind all of it. If you turn him over and cooperate with us, you won’t be charged and your role in this never has to be made public.”
“What the hell do you mean Antonov is behind it?” Riordan demanded, his grip tightening on the handgun. “He’s been sitting here in a cell since the fucking war!”
“Yes, he has… but Kevin Fourcade hasn’t. Right after the war, Mr. Fourcade travelled to Aphrodite on the Patton along with current Vice President Dominguez. That ship was hijacked by Protectorate forces and taken back to their homeworld and everyone on it was systematically brainwashed. Most were just made to forget what had happened, but a few were turned into active sleeper agents for the Protectorate.” She purposefully didn’t mention the duplication of Dominguez… it would only have confused the issue and made Riordan more incredulous. “Including Mr. Fourcade here, who has been taking Antonov’s orders ever since.”
Fourcade’s eyes went wide and even Antonov seemed surprised at how much she knew: the man brought his hands together in sarcastic applause that Riordan didn’t notice.
“I’m not a fucking child, Stark!” Riordan bellowed, slamming the butt of his gun against the transparent polymer wall. “Don’t feed me fairy tales! This is what’s going to happen: you and your people are going to put your guns down and let me fly out of here, and you’re going to call whoever you have outside and tell them to let me go. And if you don’t do that, Colonel Stark, I will use this,” he held up a small control unit in his left hand, “to detonate the charges I had built into the walls of this place and bring a few thousand tons of rock down on all our heads. And don’t think you can get to me before I do it… these cell walls are ten centimeters thick. You don’t have enough explosives to penetrate them.”
Shannon paused for a moment and reached up to pull her helmet off, stepping closer to the cell and looking Riordan in the eye. “So,” she said, a bit of amusement in her voice, “let me get this straight, Riordan. You are threatening to commit suicide in order to kill us, just to avoid getting caught?” The half-grin vanished, replaced by cold fury. “You stuffed shirt son of a bitch, you are already caught! You aren’t leaving this fucking cave you built alive unless you leave with me. We’d like to have Antonov and Fourcade alive to question, but at least if they-and you-are dead, we don’t have to worry about them doing any more harm.”
She took another step closer, her nose nearly touching the surface of the cell wall. “Listen to me, Riordan… President O’Keefe doesn’t want you. He knows that going public about you would just make things worse.” It was a lie, of course-she knew that O’Keefe was about to go public later that very morning-but Riordan couldn’t know that yet. “This is bigger than your coup. You’ve been used: Antonov is playing you, with Fourcade’s help, to try to finish what he started in the war. Believe me when I say, Riordan, I would be happy to put a bullet in your head. You’re a fucking traitor as far as I’m concerned. But I follow orders and I have been ordered to give you the chance to cooperate. So make your choice, die here with me or live and give up your coup in exchange for keeping everything you have.”
Riordan frowned as he stared back at her, trying to determine if she was telling the truth. He looked back at Fourcade, doubt in his eyes. “Kevin, tell me this isn’t…”
“Enough of this shit” Antonov finally spat, visibly losing patience. He turned to Fourcade and nodded. Riordan’s face showed sudden alarm and he tried to bring around his handgun, but Fourcade had already raised a small stunner and before Riordan could react, he fired.
Shannon lurched forward instinctively but came up against the impenetrable polymer barrier, her cheek pressed against it as she watched the directed electrical charge course through Riordan’s body. The thick-muscled executive jerked and twitched spasmodically, his face contorted into a mask of helpless agony until Fourcade released the trigger and Riordan’s eyes rolled up in his head and he collapsed against the wall, sliding down to slump on the floor unconscious.
Shannon took a step back from the wall and watched as Antonov leaned over and picked up the detonator and handgun from where Riordan had dropped them. Seeing him up close and in person for the first time, Shannon noticed a psychotic intelligence glowing in his eyes, like an ancient demon staring out from behind a face carved in stone. The Russian paused as he sneered at Riordan’s motionless form, spitting aside at the man.
“That’s much better, don’t you think?” he said in mildly accented English, smiling broadly at Shannon. “I only wish I could kill the mudak.” Asshole, she knew that meant.
“Why didn’t you?” she asked him, trying to sound more calm and confident than she felt, watching intently as he casually tossed the remote detonator up and down in his palm.
“Because I may yet have need of the fool,” Antonov admitted freely, “and I am a man who likes to keep his options open, my dear.”
“What options do you have, General Antonov?” she asked him, waving a hand around them. “Whether you or Riordan is in charge down here, the only way out of here alive is with me.”
“You know, Colonel Stark,” Antonov mused almost whimsically, “I believe you are correct.”
Shannon felt a prickle of fear run up her spine and even before she heard the hiss of a door opening, she was on the move, pushing away from the cell and bolting for the doorway where Tom and th
e others waited. Some remote part of her mind realized that she had dropped her helmet, but most of her attention was on the main entrance to the chamber, opposite the one they’d blown through. That door had opened and armored biomech troopers were pouring through it, two by two… there didn’t seem to be an end to them.
Shannon opened her mouth to tell Crossman and the others to run when her vision suddenly went white and she felt her muscles jerking out of her control; she could feel herself falling, feel the floor striking her shoulder but she couldn’t make her mind work to figure out why it was happening. Her muscles ceased spasming after what seemed like an eternity, and her vision cleared enough for her to see a blurred, skewed double image of the biomech troopers advancing through the room, their weapons firing with a sound that reverberated through her head like a jackhammer.
Her brain was still filled with a dense fog, but she was fairly sure she saw a figure in grey stealth armor dart through the blasted-open doorway, trying to reach her… and going down face first as a burst of gunfire sliced into him. The man slid across the ground, leaving a trail of blood, stopping only a meter from Shannon. Just before blackness swallowed her, she saw through the helmet’s visor Tom Crossman’s face, his eyes closed, mouth twisted in agony. Then she slipped into unconsciousness in a bitter haze of failure.
Chapter Thirty-Two
First Lieutenant Drew Franks, Republic Space Fleet Intelligence, eyed the walls of his office distastefully, feeling like a caged animal. His Academy graduation photo hung on the wall beside his desk, a hologram of a strong-jawed, fair-haired young man only a couple years younger, but with an optimism and enthusiasm in his freckled face and green eyes that he no longer felt. After he’d graduated, he’d pushed hard for a slot in Intelligence-hell, everyone wanted Intelligence, after the war. He’d envisioned himself running a covert operations team or infiltrating terrorist cells…