Sinclair's Scorpions (The Omega War Book 5)

by PP Corcoran

  Shit! I’m walking into a war zone. Oh. My. God, Anna thought, then fought to bring her nerves under control. Bottling her fears deep inside, she answered Vega in a steady voice. “Understood.”

  * * * * *

  Chapter Sixteen

  Non Quarta

  Alastair Sinclair pored over the image in his display, relayed to him by Caroline Verley’s CASPer. Twenty yards along, the tunnel ended with a blank, reinforced wall along with an inset maintenance hatch.

  No chance a CASPer is getting through that hatch, thought Alastair, as he squinted at the display to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. Surely the Oogars designed this place? Alastair had reasoned that if the corridors could handle the dimensions of the seven-foot-tall purple bears, then the Mark 8 CASPers of the Scorpions would have ample room to maneuver.

  “OK, Caroline, make us a hole.”

  “Roger that, sir!” The lieutenant answered enthusiastically and took a step back to allow a trooper, holding a spray can in either hand, to pass her in the confines of the tunnel.

  The trooper reached up, his armored gauntlets scraping the roof of the tunnel, and began spraying.

  The white, frothing liquid spewed out of the containers and transformed to a rigid foam. The trooper spread his arms wide and sprayed vertically from top to bottom of the smooth facility walls. At ground level, he brought the two lines of spray back to the middle and finished, leaving a ten-foot square outline on the wall that blocked the Scorpions’ path.

  Caroline stepped forward. A mind of brilliance thought this one up! C6 explosive and aerosol…Caroline thought as she inspected the workmanship. Looks good, even, no breaks; should be clean, she thought. Satisfied, Caroline inserted a firing cap in the foam and retreated a few steps.

  “Ready, Colonel.”

  Alastair activated his command radio link, the blood pounding through his body on fire as he prepared to face those who bore at least partial responsibility for the loss of his loved ones. “All Scorpions, Scorpion Actual. When we breach, consider everyone you encounter to be the enemy. Remember our families on Earth and let our enemy share their fate.”

  In Anna’s ear, the gentle hiss of static broke the silence before Alastair continued. “Non quarta!”

  “Non quarta!” echoed each and every Scorpion.

  The blood drained from Anna’s face as Alastair invoked an ancient order declaring no mercy to the enemy, no matter if they tried to surrender.

  Before she recovered her thoughts, a loud explosion assailed her ears as the C6 charge cut through the facility’s wall, and the Scorpions charged through. The sound of their MACs and gun pods sounded again and again.

  Anna covered her ears to block out the screams of the dying and the Scorpions’ weapons’ fire which almost drowned them out. It seemed an eternity before silence reined.

  “Doctor! Doctor! Anna!” Vega’s voice broke through, and Anna opened her eyes, eyes she hadn’t realized she had squeezed tight.

  Anna looked up at the metal exterior of Vega’s CASPer, his hand reached out to her. Taking it, Vega pulled her upright in one easy move half guiding, half dragging her through the neat hole the shaped charge had made in the wall. Anna slipped off her goggles, seeing the carnage with her own eyes for the first time.

  A bloodbath. The mixed colors of blood from a number of races greeted her. Blue, green, and various shades of red pooled around the dozen or so corpses that lay spread out in various poses of death. One unfortunate must’ve been standing directly near the heavy metal access door. The door had embedded itself in the far wall of the corridor and from behind it rivulets of dark red blood ran down the wall to pool on the floor. Surreal…it’s all so…surreal, thought Anna.

  “Snap out of it, Doctor,” cautioned Vega. “Get your head in the game or somebody will take it off for you.”

  Anna nodded her head vigorously. “Which way?” she asked.

  Vega consulted Al’s map and overlaid the swiftly-moving icons representing his fellow Scorpions. Like an unstoppable wave, the Scorpions flowed through this level of the facility.

  Third Platoon under Lieutenant Verley moved at a steady trot toward the central core where they could move up two levels and secure what they assumed to be the main control room.

  Colonel Sinclair and Support Platoon, minus two troopers tasked to hold the breaching point, were moving to the west toward a heavily-shielded section of the facility, which Al and Anna had guessed to be the most likely place for a completed reactor.

  “Stay on my six and remember—” Vega’s CASPer twisted at the waist as if he was really looking at her rather than seeing her through his external cameras. “I’m wrapped in hundreds of pounds of armor so if the bullets start firing, stay behind me.”

  Anna gave him a thumbs up. “You bet.”

  Vega grunted and Anna swore the shoulders of the metal fighting machine shrugged as Vega set off at a relatively sedate pace for the giant machine, leaving her jogging to keep up and dodging the occasional cadaver as she went.

  * * *

  The frame charge went off, and before the last of the rubble hit the floor, Sinclair and Buchanan stepped through, one turning left and the other right, so they stood back to back.

  MACs blazed, laying down a withering fire while each man employed the 8-millimeter gun pods more selectively.

  Designed to destroy buildings, reinforced positions, and light- to medium-armored vehicles, the MAC rounds pumped out at a rate of two-hundred per minute and had an effective range of ten thousand feet. In the confines of the corridor it was like shooting fish in a barrel.

  Rolling smoke gradually cleared as air conditioning units battled to remove nitrogen and ‘contaminates’ from the air, and the Scorpions saw the damage they had inflicted.

  Alastair viewed his gruesome handiwork dispassionately and calmly finished off any wounded with a single round from his gun pod. The remaining Scorpions entered the corridor and none felt any remorse or guilt. The lives taken here were involved in the deaths of their innocent families and in the wider conspiracy to enslave Earth.

  Non Quarta. “Caroline, get your platoon moving. I want the control room secured A.S.A.P. and this level must be isolated before the Besquith get a chance to rally their forces.”

  “Roger that, Colonel. OK, Third Platoon, let’s get moving.”

  “Gonzalez. You’ve got point. Get us to that shielded section,” ordered Alastair.

  The Support Platoon commander tagged two of his troopers who immediately set off down the corridor, MACs swiveling left and right, like hunting dogs sniffing out a quarry. Occasionally, their thermal image or bio readers detected a scientist or engineer hiding in a side room and the trooper flung his feed to one of the following Scorpions who zeroed his MAC on the target and fired through the intervening wall.

  Death had come to Kathal, and it had no mercy.

  * * *

  “What in entropy is happening?” screamed Bre-ok, the duty watch officer. As the Besquith monitoring the internal cameras pointed at the image on his display, a metal monster emerged from a cloud of dust and smoke.

  Yellow flame flashed from a heavy weapon on its shoulder and where it touched the facility personnel the Besquith were paid to protect, they died.

  The officer’s jaw dropped to reveal sharp, canine teeth and saliva dripped to the floor. “Sound the alarm, you idiot!” Bre-ok shouted as he backhanded the junior man, his claws drawing blood.

  The third Besquith in the control room fixed his eyes on his air defense console and refused to look at his inept companion.

  “Of all the times for the company commander to take R and R on Moon 5. Curse him for leaving me to deal with this!” Activating his comms unit, Bre-ok placed a call directly to the small quick reaction force located in the Besquith barracks on the uppermost level of the facility.

  A Besquith answered the connection, but Bre-ok gave the unlucky bastard no time before he barked his orders.

  “Get your sorry asses moving
! We have a breach on the lower level, at least two intruders. Load up with armor-piercing, they’re in mechanical combat suits.”

  Bre-ok cut the line, too impatient to wait for an acknowledgement. Bre-ok cursed the company commander, for he had selected the uppermost level as the company barracks. Logical, at the time, but who would’ve suspected an assault on the facility would come from the lowest level?

  “The lowest level.” Bre-ok mused aloud. His eyes hunted the console displaying the status of the booby traps he had had placed in the old tunnels of the red diamond mine.

  Propped over the console lay a slate, a colorful screen displayed the joys of gambling. Bre-ok shrieked with anger. The junior Besquith lowered his head, cowering from his enraged officer.

  “I’ll deal with you later,” growled Bre-ok, swiping at the slate and sending it crashing against a wall.

  All the booby-trap tell-tales showed green, but that couldn’t be. Bre-ok let out a low mutter as his claws tapped a command which sent a fresh interrogation command. He watched as each tell-tale blacked out for a split second before coming back online. One by one the system confirmed their viability. All except a perfect line reaching from an emergency access on the surface, miles beyond the search radar’s limit.

  The line extended to, of course, the exact point the invaders had breached the facility.

  “Bre-ok,” called the junior man in a quavering voice.

  “What!” Bre-ok yelled as his mind raced to marshal his thoughts and come up with a plan to repel the invaders.

  “We are being hailed by the HecSha cruiser Striking Talon. A Captain Po. We were expecting them days ago, but they were delayed.”

  “Delayed! Who cares! They are here now, and they might just be our saviors. Put him through.” A tap of a control connected Bre-ok directly to Captain Po.

  “Captain, this is Duty Watch Officer Bre-ok. An unknown number of attackers are assaulting the facility; they’re equipped with mechanical combat suits. I believe they’re trying to steal the Raknar reactors. You must send reinforcements to my location immediately—as many as you can!” Bre-ok paused as he remembered the chain of disabled booby traps. “The attackers entered the facility via a tunnel which reaches the surface about—” Bre-ok checked the map on the wall of the control room. “Eight miles northwest of the facility. I believe they may have ships waiting there to extract them.”

  “Message received, Bre-ok,” replied the calm, controlled voice of the HecSha captain. “Our company of Jivool are loading up and will be with you shortly. Just hold a little longer; help is coming.” The connection terminated, with Bre-ok thinking he might just get out of the entropy-be-damned situation unscathed.

  The explosion which blasted the reinforced metal control room door off its heavy hinges also sent the door flying across the room like a giant’s Frisbee, and it decapitated Bre-ok neatly before embedding itself in the far wall.

  The compression wave lifted the other unfortunate Besquith from their seats and sent them sprawling to the floor. A giant fighting machine filled the hole where the door once was, raking 8-millimeter gunfire that punched into the bodies of the Besquith before they could draw their weapons.

  “Control room secure, Colonel,” radioed Caroline Verley as she stepped over the mess on the floor while Okoro, detached from Support Platoon to assist with the systems in the control room, made no effort to step over the headless corpse lying between him and the main console. Okoro’s armored nine-hundred-pound weight stepped squarely on the dead Besquith’s chest, and the alien’s internal organs squirted out like toothpaste from a tube.

  Okoro scanned the console rapidly but thoroughly. Finding what he looked for, he extended his arm and his left index finger hovered over a computer input port. The cyber-warfare specialist’s adapted CASPer’s fingertip slid to one side and a multi-function jack extended, then configured itself to fit the input port.

  “I’m in, Lieutenant.”

  Damn! That was quick, thought Caroline. She knew Okoro was one of Gonzalez Rivero’s best, but still…impressive work.

  “Elevators are locked out. That should hold them for a while,” said Okoro as he overrode the system. “OK, we have five emergency stairwells located at the tip of each corridor at the furthest point from the central core that were not on the plans supplied by Al that the Besquith will undoubtedly use to try and force their way onto this level.”

  “Show me,” ordered Caroline.

  Okoro pushed the updated floor plan to her.

  Inside her CASPer, the Scorpion lieutenant cursed softly. When she had discussed the assault plan with the colonel the possibility that Al’s layout for the facility might not be up to date had arisen, however, they had agreed that in that event they would…improvise.

  Looking over the floor plan hovering in her Tri-V, Caroline knew that was exactly what she had to do, although doing so would spread her forces dangerously thin.

  Including Okoro, she had brought only eight troopers to secure the control room. Nine if she included herself. Now, however, she was going to have to split her forces. One trooper per stairwell and two for the central core elevator shaft would leave herself and Okoro to hold the control room and to act as reserve force, which she could switch from pressure point to pressure point as required.

  “Yeah we can do this,” Caroline said to herself inside the confines of her sealed CASPer. Sending the new deployment plan to her platoon’s CASPers, she was grateful to see that not a single trooper hesitated; each headed for their assigned posts.

  While Caroline had been doing her ‘on the fly’ deployment plan, Okoro had been accessing the other Besquith systems. One of his priorities was the surface-to-air and orbital anti-ship batteries. If he were to disable those batteries then the Scorpions’ dropships would have a clear flight path direct to the Glambring which could move closer to the facility and cut their flight time to minutes rather than having to fly nap of the earth. Bringing up the search radar, the cyber warfare specialist’s eyes widened in shock as he caught sight of a pair of HecSha cruisers entering orbit.

  “Lieutenant, we have a major problem.”

  As Caroline pulled up the radar feed Okoro sent her, she did a double-take on seeing the two cruisers, and her eyes bulged. A half dozen smaller radar returns separated from the cruisers and in a flash, Caroline realized that what she thought had been a stable situation a minute ago had just gone to rat shit. Activating her link to Alastair she gave him the good news.

  “Colonel, two HecSha cruisers have appeared in orbit and have already deployed small craft.” Caroline’s tongue darted between suddenly dry lips. “Sir, my assessment is that the small craft contain reinforcements. I do not believe our positions are tenable once they arrive.”

  Through her suit speakers the toneless voice of Alastair answered her. “Keep them occupied as long as you can, Caroline, then blow the stairwells and get your ass to the extraction point.”

  “Understood, sir. Verley clear.”

  * * *

  Tim switched to his private channel once Alastair finished giving his instructions to Caroline. “How long do you think we have?”

  Alastair had done the math in his head; he was sure Tim had, too, and his friend was just being polite. “Call it five minutes for reinforcements to get here, travelling from orbit at max burn. Another five to disembark and get down here if they are good, ten if they’re average.”

  “Third Platoon will hold them,” said Tim reassuringly.

  “I’m tempted to order Caroline to blow the stairwells now and force the Besquith and their new friends down the central elevator shaft. A damn sight easier to defend,” mused Alastair, bouncing the idea off Tim.

  “Better to keep them from concentrating their forces. Splitting their assaults across five or more points will make it easier for Third Platoon to hold. If it looks like any assault will succeed, then we blow that stairwell and cut off that route to them.”

  Alastair grunted. Just as I thought. From
up ahead came the sound of a heavy weapon firing. Alastair’s eyes darted to his secondary Tri-V display where the unit’s battle effectiveness status reported that Trooper Liz Hawkins had gone from green to a blinking red to a solid red.

  “Trooper Hawkins is combat ineffective,” reported his suit in a dispassionate voice.

  The first sign of active resistance. We’re headed in the right direction; it’s got to be the reactor storage area, thought Alastair. If anyone could’ve seen through the thick armor plating enclosing the Scorpions’ commander they would have seen the grim face, the light of vengeance in his eyes as he broke into a floor-rocking trot and raced to the scene of the action.

  Seconds later, Alastair came up behind Gonzalez Rivero. “What’s the situation, Gonzalez?” asked Alastair.

  “We’ve got ourselves a bit of a bottle neck, Colonel. The Besquith have a strong point equipped with a high-intensity laser covering the approach to the entrance to a shielded section. Damn thing must be made of battleship armor cause our MAC rounds are bouncing off it like they were made of rubber. First we knew of it was when it took out Hawkins with its first round and punched right through her laser shield and armor.”

  “Caroline reckons reinforcements are on their way. The clock is ticking, Gonzalez, and we need to take that laser out sooner rather than later.”

  “Roger that, sir. The first sergeant thinks he might have a solution. He’s holed up with Jackson in a room across the corridor.”

  Alastair put a call into the first sergeant. “Hey Croll, what’s the play?”

  Ethan Croll checked the ammunition counter for his MAC before answering. “That corridor is a death trap, sir. Jackson and I are going to make our own path and come at the strong point from the flank.”