Hostile Takeover

by David Bruns

  “My child was never part of the bargain, Tony.” She smiled wryly. “You have me. That’s enough.”

  “That child is SynCorp property. We spent—”

  “The child—my child—is not part of the deal.” Elise’s holo image disappeared.

  Tony threw himself against the back of his chair. “We’ll see about that.”

  Adriana frantically tried Fischer again with no answer. If the child was killed by Fischer and traced back to her… She stood. “I’m going to see what I can do to help.”

  Tony laughed. “Sit down, Adriana. You’d be worse than useless.” He cut his gaze to Ming. “You on the other hand are quite a badass, I’m told.”

  Ming got to her feet in a blur of motion. To Adriana’s eye, her black suit seemed to absorb the light.

  Viktor made a noise that distracted Adriana for a second. When she turned back, Ming was gone.

  Chapter 34

  William Graves • Medical Deck, Olympus Station

  Graves didn’t like the feeling brewing in his gut one bit. A twisting knot of unease born of years in high-risk situations gave him a sixth sense of when things were about to go sideways—and he was rarely wrong.

  Graves followed the medical team at a wary distance, watching Cora with the baby. The tech had insisted she put the child in the warming incubator for the trip to the medical deck. She walked close to the incubator, her hand always touching the clear plastic, her eyes on the bundle of snowy white blankets.

  The baby returned the favor, watching Cora with her calm, golden eyes. It occurred to Graves that he hadn’t heard the child cry, not even once. He was the farthest thing from an expert on infants, but that just didn’t seem right to him.

  The hallways of Olympus Station were wide and carpeted with thin material that flexed under his feet. The latest in fixed and drone security cameras were everywhere and the security people he’d seen were all openly carrying sidearms. He knew this station had been built over a decade ago, but everything looked brand spanking new to him. It looked to him like Anthony Taulke and his council were settling in to a new home base.

  The knot twisted tighter.

  It wasn’t just the newness of the place that bugged Graves. It had been hours since dinner and not a single person had even called to check up on Elise and the child. Judging by the reaction from the medical team, a live birth on Olympus was a rarity. Surely Anthony the Showman would want to work this miracle birth into his sales pitch for the new council that was expected to go live in the next few hours. Even Graves could see a PR angle on that story.

  They passed a narrow window, affording Graves a clear view of the planet. He could see the space elevator tether run all the way down to the tip of Australia, the brown continent uncluttered with cloud cover. He paused. The station was much higher than most of the orbiting traffic around the planet and he could see the normal buzz of small craft zipping around like fireflies in the larger tableau below him. Something about the scene bothered him, but he could not put his finger on it. Like searching for a temporarily lost word, the idea was obvious, but just out of reach of his mental processes.

  Cora was getting farther away—too far away for comfort. He wanted to keep her close. If the stuff hit the fan, she was the only one he could trust. He hurried after them and was rewarded with a quick smile.

  “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Cora whispered. “Even more beautiful than I ever dreamed of. She’s the one, William. I can feel it.”

  Graves stopped in midstride. Security, or rather, lack of security. That’s what was missing. Graves spun and rushed back to the window he’d just left. He pressed his face against the glass to get the widest possible viewing angle.

  On the way up, in Taulke’s private space elevator car, he’d seen multiple security patrol craft. Anthony had even commented on how they were taking no chances with external threats.

  But now, he couldn’t spot even one. Graves waited as the seconds ticked by. Nothing. The roiling in his stomach churned into high gear. Why would someone remove the security patrols?

  An attack.

  As if on cue, a pair of shuttles veered from the traffic pattern toward Olympus Station. That wasn’t odd, he told himself. They could be supply ships or any number of innocuous other craft authorized to approach the space station.

  Then they changed course, exposing the far side of the shuttle, and Graves swore under his breath.

  A half-dozen space-suited marines clung to the side of the shuttle. As he watched, the line of armored soldiers broke off from their carrier ship, using the ship’s momentum to carry them toward the lower levels of Olympus Station.

  The marines called the maneuver the Pain Train. Assault teams of six marines in armored space suits, deployed at high speeds from shuttles with the goal of getting inside a station’s point defenses. Once on the skin of a space station, a single marine could wreak all kinds of havoc, from venting airlocks to placing shaped charges on cannons. If they got inside the station, things got even worse. The armored suits carried a small arsenal and the soldiers inside were well trained on how to use the enhanced power of their battle mechs.

  Graves raced to catch up with Cora. He slid inside the elevator just as the doors were closing. The tech sighed that he had to wait for the door to cycle closed again. Graves ignored him. Cora saw the look on his face. “What?” she mouthed with an accompanying frown.

  He gave her a slight headshake.

  When the elevator door to the medical deck opened, a security guard met them. “We have a security situation. I’m here to escort the child.”

  The tech hesitated. The guard grabbed the edge of the med pod and yanked it forward. “Move!” he said.

  Inside of the medical unit was all chrome and glass and blinding white. The security man walked them to an exam room as far from the single entrance as possible and indicated they should get inside.

  “What’s going on?” Graves said to the security man.

  “Not at liberty to say, sir.” Graves could see the updates flashing on his data glasses and the steady pulse of a red alarm in the corner of the lenses.

  “It’s an assault, right?” Graves insisted. “Who is it? Are they inside yet?”

  The security man paused. “I’m here to guard the child, sir. That’s all I can tell you.”

  Graves tried to get Cora to stay out of the room, but she refused. “I’m staying with the baby,” she whispered when he took her arm.

  The tech, clearly annoyed with being ordered around by security, steered the incubator unit into the room and left. Graves followed Cora and the baby into the tiny exam room. The door shut behind them, cutting off his view of the hallway outside.

  As Cora busied herself cleaning and feeding the infant, Graves tried to reason with her. “We need to get out of here. There’s an assault going on and we’re going to be caught in the middle of it.” He racked his brain to make sense of the situation. Who would attack Olympus? If Anthony Taulke held to his promise, tomorrow the governments of Earth would be getting everything they ever wanted—why attack now? The only thing that had changed in the last day was…

  Cora placed the baby on her chest and rocked her gently, turning her back to Graves in the process. The child’s piercing gaze studied Graves over Cora’s shoulder.

  The child. They were after the child.

  “We need to leave, Cora. Now. I think the baby is in danger.”

  Still holding the baby to her chest, she turned to face him. “What do you know?” she said.

  A knock sounded on the door and the door opened. A slight man with thinning brown hair entered. A paperback novel stuck out of the wide pocket of his white coat. “Hello there, I’m Doctor Eugene. Mr. Taulke asked me to look in on you.”

  Graves had another déjà vu moment where the doctor’s face seemed like someone he’d seen before, but he could not place where. Cora laid the baby back down in the bassinet.

  Dr. Eugene looked down on the child. “My, what an a
lert little girl we have here.” He drew a small hypo gun from his pocket. “She needs a quick shot to make sure she stays that way.” He reached down, but Cora stopped him.

  “So soon?” she said. “I normally wait a few days before any shots.”

  The doctor laughed. “Well, we can’t be too careful up here. Nothing but the best is what Mr. Taulke ordered.”

  Graves watched the conversation with a certain level of detachment, still trying to place the doctor’s face. Maybe he used to be in the army? He dismissed that idea; the guy was too young to be a military doctor. His gaze settled on the paperback book. Who read real books anymore? The last time he’d seen a real book like that was…

  His mind snapped into focus. This man worked for Adriana Rabh—and not as a physician.

  The baby cried as the “doctor” peeled away the swaddled blanket. A plaintive cry, weak, alarmed. Graves put his hand on the man’s shoulder. “Step away from the child. Do it now.”

  He never saw the man’s foot snake around his ankle and pull Graves off balance. The wiry attacker spun with surprising quickness and hammered a fist into Graves’s face. The general crashed backwards, hitting his head on the edge of the examination table on the way to the floor. He saw stars, then doubled over as the attacker landed a kick in his midsection.

  It was all over in less than a second.

  As the man spun back around, the hypo clutched in his fist, Cora smashed a tray across his face, opening up a gash on his cheek. When he took a knee, Graves lashed out with his foot and felt his toe connect with the man’s rib cage. Cora hit him again and the man sat back on his backside, stunned.

  Graves tried another kick and missed. He gripped the edge of the table and dragged himself upright, yelling for help as loud as he could. Where the hell was the security guy outside? They were making enough noise to raise the dead in here.

  Cora threw away the tray and picked up a chair. As she raised it over her head, Graves saw the man reach under his lab coat for a gun.

  He spied the hypo on the floor between them and leaped at the man, snatching up the hypo on the fly. The gun, a silver pistol, flashed up toward Cora, just as Graves hit him. The shot went off next to Graves’s head, blinding him, making him deaf, but Graves bore down with his full body weight on their attacker. In desperation, Graves stabbed down with the hypo, hoping with all his might he wasn’t just giving this guy a vitamin shot. He felt the hypo empty on first contact, then he used the snub-nosed hypo gun as a weapon, stabbing down over and over again until the body underneath his went limp.

  Graves rolled off the inert attacker, his ears still ringing, his eye swollen from the blast of the point-blank gunshot. He heard a baby’s screaming from very far away.

  He felt hands probing his face, gentle fingers. He opened his eyes to find Cora bending over him. Using the wall, he squirmed up to a sitting position. “Get the kid. We need to get out of here.”

  Graves rolled the man over and found his pulse. Steady and strong, with deep breaths. The bastard was asleep. He probably had some kind of sedative in the hypo. Enough to knock out an adult would probably kill a two-kilo baby. He nicked the guy’s gun, a 9 mm with a custom grip and nice balance. The weapon of a guy who knew how to use a gun. A killer.

  The paperback had slid out of the man’s pocket. The Maltese Falcon. He flipped open the cover and saw a name scrawled at the top of the first page. Eugene Fischer.

  He took aim at the man’s head with the gun. “Goodbye, Eugene Fischer.”

  Cora gripped his shoulder. “Please, William, no.”

  She was holding the kid, the bundle of white pressed against her shoulder. “Not in Her name, William. No killing.”

  Graves leaned on the wall for support. The shot or maybe the knock on the head had messed with his internal balance.

  “Is she okay?” he said, pointing to the baby. He could tell from Cora’s reaction that he was shouting but he could barely hear his own voice, just a damned ringing tone in his head.

  Cora nodded, her face solemn. “Where should we go?” she said.

  Graves opened the door. In the hallway, the security man was slumped against the wall, his head flopped at an unnatural angle. His neck was broken, but Graves felt for a pulse anyway. He took another look inside the room at the sleeping Eugene Fischer. This man was a pro, a killer who wanted no witnesses. He hefted Fischer’s gun, but as if reading his thoughts, Cora shook her head again.

  Graves used the security man’s ID to lock Fischer in the exam room. When he woke up, that would at least slow him down.

  He felt a rolling movement under his feet, a slight tremble like he was standing up in a small boat. Graves and Cora exchanged a glance. Her response confirmed that the feeling wasn’t a side effect of his injury. He’d felt an explosion somewhere on the decks below them.

  “We need to get off this station. Now.” Graves was shouting again, but he didn’t care.

  He snatched the data glasses off the dead security man. The bottom of the display on the right eye flashed red.

  Intruder Alert.

  Good guys or bad guys? The only thing Graves knew was that right now, confusion was their only friend.

  “Where do we go?” Cora asked.

  Graves pointed down. They were headed toward the fighting.

  Chapter 35

  Ming Qinlao • Olympus Station

  As she left the council chamber, Ming felt the MoSCOW suit tighten around her muscles in anticipation of coming action. Her senses sang as Echo came online in her head and released a rush of adrenaline into her body.

  Find the child, Echo.

  A schematic of the station appeared in her visual, a blinking red dot in the lower third of the Olympus. The child was on the medical deck. Echo tapped Ming’s retinal implant into the space station security system and she was immediately overwhelmed by an onrush of alarms.

  The station was under attack.

  Give me a vid feed, Echo.

  Ming lost a step at the sight that filled her display. Space troopers in full battle armor executed a flawless drop formation from a shuttle, racing toward the station in a linked line right under the point-defense systems. Clouds of vapor surrounded them as the formation broke apart and executed a decel maneuver. They slid under the field of view of the external cameras. Moments later the vid feed went blank.

  She could hear Ito’s voice in her head. If your enemy is much larger, then use your speed to get inside his reach. Blind your enemy, then pick them apart, piece by piece from the inside.

  As if following her thoughts, the deck shifted under her feet. Her ears popped, indicating a sudden loss of pressure, then restabilized.

  The enemy was inside the station.

  Ming bypassed the elevator, heading for the maintenance shaft that ran along the outer skin of the station. She ripped off the locked access door and dove through the opening. She rebounded off the far wall, then threw herself down and across the open space to the opposite wall, leapfrogging her way down the wide-open shaft. She caught a steel girder, let the suit take the bulk of the strain off her shoulders, then pushed off again.

  Down she flew like a trapeze artist, leaping, grasping, then leaping again. When she got to the medical deck, she locked her grip on a beam above the access door and kicked it open with both feet. Ming rolled into a gleaming white hallway.

  A few meters away, a man dressed in an Olympus security uniform slumped against the wall. Even from this distance, Ming could tell he was dead. The door of the exam room next to him hung open. Inside, Ming processed the obvious signs of a fight—a smear of blood on the floor, a smashed hypo gun, an overturned chair—but her attention was drawn to a neonatal incubator unit.

  The baby had been here.

  Echo alerted her to sounds in the hallway. She heard the distinctive creak of body armor, the sound of deliberate footsteps. Ming flattened against the wall just as the muzzle of a handgun appeared in the doorway. She gripped the barrel, forcing it away from her and dra
wing the guard inside. The guard tried a head-butt, forcing Ming to throw her own head back.

  The wall next to her face exploded into shards of plastic as the guard’s partner fired through the wall. She threw herself backwards, securing the first guard in the crook of her elbow. She pressed the muzzle of his weapon against his eyeball.

  “Tell your buddy to back off,” she growled in his ear.

  “Wilson, cease fire!”

  “Show yourself,” Ming called out. “Show yourself and I won’t hurt him.”

  She could hear the near-panicked rasp of the second guard’s breath. The second man was actually a woman. She appeared in the doorway, handgun gripped in both hands, aimed at Ming’s head.

  “Do you know who I am?” Ming asked in a calm voice.

  Quick nods from both.

  “Then you know I’m on your side, right?”

  Hesitation.

  “Call it in,” Ming said in the same calm voice. “I’ll wait.”

  When the eyes of the female guard defocused to make the call, Ming acted. Three shots, dead center of her body armor, slammed the woman back against the far wall. She got off one shot as she went down, shattering the light above Ming’s head.

  The guard in her grasp struggled, but the weapon was already back poking him in the eye.

  “She was wasting time,” Ming said in his ear. “I’m going to let you go so you can take care of her. She’s not dead, just knocked out. Her body armor saved her.”

  The security man nodded and she released him.

  As he attended to his partner, Ming accessed the hallway camera outside the room and fast-watched it at high speed.

  Graves and Santos entered the room with the child and a security man took station outside. A doctor in a white coat approached, chatted up the security guard, then put him down with a single punch to the throat. The general, Santos, and the baby exited the room, locked it, and hurried away. Minutes later, the doctor sans white coat and sporting a nasty head wound exited.