Renegades (Expeditionary Force Book 7)

by Craig Alanson

  The chief engineer had no way of knowing that the comm system itself was in perfect working order, the problem was that the entire base was encased in a powerful stealth field which bounced back all outgoing signals, and caused incoming signals to wrap around and be absorbed by the field.

  While the crew of the moonbase worried about the effect of the power surge coming from the planet, sensors on the planet and both orbiting battlestations had also noticed a power spike coming from the moonbase, and all three facilities contacted the moonbase to find out what was going on. The circuit failures that had thrown Colonel Smythe’s careful plan out the window provided a convenient explanation, an explanation that was almost too convenient. The problem was that Skippy thought using the circuit failures was way too obvious and boring and dull, and he could come up with a way more entertaining and clever explanation that would finally show that smug jerkface Joe Bishop that monkeys are not the only beings in the galaxy able to dream up clever ideas.

  Thus, the reply from the moonbase was delayed for an amount of time barely noticed by the meatsack Bosphuraq, but long enough to cause alarm in the AIs running the planetary base and the two battlestations. The delay was caused by Skippy arguing with that killjoy pain-in-the-ass Nagatha about whether he should just get on with it and explain the power spike by using the circuit failures or the original excuse of a reactor problem or anything so long as the beer can got his figurative ass in gear right now before his insufferable arrogance doomed the whole operation.

  The argument raged for nearly two nanoseconds before the Smartest Being in the Galaxy huffed that, after all, he had better things to do than argue with an overgrown communications submind that he created. A reply was sent from the moonbase, with none of the three recipients aware they were talking with a beer can aboard a pirate starship hiding behind the moon. One of the battlestation AIs, who was not convinced that cascading circuit failures could cause a power spike of the type detected, prodded the station commander to investigate the incident, and the station commander announced she was sending a dropship over to the moon. Rather than being insulted, the moonbase duty officer replied they actually would appreciate help diagnosing the problem, so could the station include an engineering team aboard the dropship? Skippy did not bother informing anyone on the STAR team that a dropship would be coming to the moon, figuring the operation would be over one way or another by the time the dropship was ready for launch. If not, one puny dropship would not make a difference anyway, right?

  The garage bay was pumped full of air again, which made Lauren Poole wonder if having the air filtered made any difference to the pungent smell of any place occupied by the Bosphuraq. That stray thought flashed fleetingly through her mind as she watched the inner pressure door open and three Bosphuraq technicians stroll out, their seemingly backward-bent legs making them awkward to her view. “On my signal,” she took a calming breath, “three, two, one-”

  The chief engineer’s most frequent complaint was that he was too often left out of the loop, or informed too late after everyone else already was aware of a problem. One technician had made a habit of delaying reports about problems, because he was always sure he could fix the issue before it needed to be brought to the chief engineer’s attention. After the third time the chief engineer heard about an issue through the base commander asking when the engineering team was going to fix something, that technician had been reassigned to the most awful duty station in Bosphuraq territory, and since then, incident reporting had improved measurably.

  That day, the chief engineer could not complain about being the last to know, because he was first to receive notice of an alien assault. That notice came in the form of an explosive-tipped round penetrating his breastbone and plunging another two centimeters into his chest cavity before detonating, ripping his torso nearly in half.

  In perspective, perhaps being first to know about the alien assault was not such a good thing.

  “Go go go!” Poole whispered, knowing her orders would be magnified by the team’s helmet speakers, and knowing that the effort of shouting might move her head and throw off her aim. Her first shot, leaving the muzzle of her superb Kristang rifle while she was on one knee in the airlock while the crawler’s side door was still sliding open, had taken out her first target, a scowling enemy officer behind glass windows in a gallery overlooking the garage bay. A useful feature of the rifle was that, almost without Poole having to do anything, it sent a targeting pulse combination of laser beam and particle beam to assess distance to, and any obstructions between, the rifle and the designated target. Return pulses indicated the target was behind a clear composite material, so the rifle switched to a mode the STAR team called ‘double-tap penetration’. Two rounds left the muzzle when Poole depressed the trigger, the first engaging its light-armor penetrating mode, burning a hole through the clear composite for the explosive-tipped killshot only ten centimeters behind along the same flightpath. Technically, the first notice received by the chief engineer was in the form of hot droplets of plasma and melted composite splattering his chest, but that hot pain signal had not enough time to reach his brain before the second round impacted and exploded and he ceased to exist. So, close enough, and it’s not like that Bosphuraq cared about the particulars of his death anyway.

  Rising smoothly from one knee to a standing position without taking a step forward or taking her eyes off her targets, Poole remained in the side doorway as the team rushed past her and down onto the garage bay floor. Even before the door opened, she had selected targets in sequence, using the crawler’s exterior sensors to preprogram her rifle. She swung the rifle right to left, firing above the heads of the racing STAR team and taking out six targets in four seconds. Her last action before hopping out of the crawler to join her team was to activate the under-mounted rocket launcher by flicking her right pinky finger, sending a rocket set to fragmentation mode through the shattered composite into the gallery above the garage bay. On the way into the garage, the crawler’s sensors had detected additional people in the gallery, but they were out of her line of sight and had escaped the tender loving care of rifle rounds. The rocket made sure the unseen aliens in the back of the gallery, who were scrambling toward the rear door, did not feel left out of the action. After the nosecone of the rocket crossed the plane where the composite windows had been, its laser sensor created a three-dimensional map of the gallery, detecting three moving objects who were approximately the size and shape of adult Bosphuraq. Accordingly, after traveling forward another two meters for an optimal spread pattern, the rocket detonated its warhead, sending hot razor-sharp fragments in a one hundred thirty degree cone and slicing the three unprotected aliens into squishy bits.

  “Good,” Poole acknowledged the rocket’s final report. Sensors built into the rocket observed and recorded the deaths of the three fleeing targets, and relayed that data back to Poole’s suit, which happily showed her a summary in the bottom left of the display. Six confirmed kills from rifle shots, plus three from the rocket, was nine less enemy to worry about.

  That left only, if Skippy’s count could be trusted, sixty eight enemy to be dealt with inside the moonbase. Lauren Poole certainly did not trust the beer can’s official count, because the AI was likely to have absent-mindedly lost track while he was counting, or just lost interest halfway through the count and decided that fudging the number was good enough for monkeys, or he knew the real count and decided to amuse himself by screwing with the STAR team. All Lauren knew for sure was the moonbase was a target-rich environment and her team needed to kill anyone along the way to their objective, then possibly clear the base room by room to hunt down and kill or disable any survivors.

  Her team was already ahead of her, the last person disappearing through the pressure door, as she sprinted to catch up. Her helmet display showed her the position and status of each team member and she could toggle between views from their helmet cameras and suit sensors, so she could have lead the team while she remained in
side the crawler. With her team consisting of only two other soldiers, she represented one-third of the team’s combat power- No, that was not quite true. Her team also included one of the two weapon-equipped Thuranin combots, and that machine by itself had more firepower than three soldiers, even three soldiers wearing Kristang powered armor suits.

  The Bosphuraq inside the base were not a major concern because ironically, the massive firepower of the facility had left the birdbrains vulnerable to the only type of attack that could actually threaten them; an enemy force gaining access to the base from the ground. The strong layers of energy shields, plus the offensive weapons installed under the moon’s surface, rendered the base practically invulnerable to attack from above. Enemy ships seeking to bombard the moonbase would be sliced in half by the base’s weapons, and anything sneaking up on the base by hugging the surface would be easily targeted by the two orbiting battlestations, or by the weapons of the research base on the planet’s surface. With the four facilities supporting each other, they could hold off any attack until the Bosphuraq fleet could be summoned. All the crews needed to do was hunker down behind their powerful energy shields and wait for the enemy to decide they had taken enough punishment.

  That unimaginative thinking is why the moonbase had only eight people on the security team, and why most of the personnel did not carry or even have access to infantry weapons. An assault on the moonbase was considered unlikely in the extreme, for the only valuable asset in the star system was the atomic-compression research base down on the planet. Any ground assault against the moonbase would come only after the base’s defenses had been destroyed by bombardment, and with the base’s weapons offline, what would be the point of risking soldiers to pick through the rubble? The prevailing thought was the base would never, could never, be attacked from the ground because with the base fully active, no enemy ground force could get through the sensor network that extended far from the base in every direction. Regular testing assured the Bosphuraq that their sensor network could detect even a stealthed object the size of a small missile before it even entered orbit around the moon.

  And that is why the base security team had a high turnover of personnel, no one wanted such dull duty with no chance of action or opportunity to distinguish themselves. According to records accessed by an arrogant beer can, the security team that had an authorized strength of eight, was only staffed with five Bospuraq at the time the STAR team entered the garage, and one of those five was combat-ineffective while being treated for a broken leg. The base’s robotic defenders, generally heavier and larger than the STAR team’s Thuranin combots that were designed for use aboard the confines of a starship, were according to official records a formidable force. In reality, most aspects of the moonbase and the two orbiting battlestations had been constructed quickly and cheaply, because the Bosphuraq military had little confidence in their scientists’ ability to make atomic-compression devices in useful quantities. Therefore, other than the truly powerful defensive energy shields and weapons, the moonbase was built of second-hand and second-rate materials, that is why electrical circuits kept failing and why the chief engineer had to prioritize the efforts of his maintenance team. Shields and weapons and other systems the base commander directly engaged with got priority. Combat robots, which were nothing but useless, showy toys in the opinion of the chief engineer, went to the bottom of the priority list. When the base commander insisted on a security drill, the security leader knew to select the only four functioning combots, the others all having failed due to lack of maintenance or having been stripped of parts to keep four units ready. On rare occasions when the base commander looked in the armories where the combots were stored, he saw shiny and lethal weapons that would protect his base.

  He had not seen the shiny things actually moving.

  The STAR team did not know the status of the enemy’s killbots when they entered the base, so they had to assume they might be facing eighteen killing machines rather than four. After Skippy gained access to the base’s main computer, he could deactivate the enemy killbots or at least sever them from the control circuit and render them useless. Until the beer can could work his magic, the humans and even their own combots would be vulnerable, so the routes the teams took to their objectives were planned to avoid going past armories where enemy killbots were stored, and to avoid killing zones where the teams could be pinned down. Speed meant everything, speed was life. Nothing could be allowed to stop or slow down the two teams, and the Pirates would hold their combots in reserve for use against the robotic killing machines of the Bosphuraq.

  Poole was already unhappy about Smythe and Frey jumping out of the crawler before it entered the garage, and to maintain communications secrecy she had not heard from either of them since they disappeared around the end of the garage wing. They could be alive, they could be dead, but one thing Poole was certain of was that splitting an already small force went against the principle of concentration of force, not that there was anything she could do about it right then.

  Racing through the pressure door, her right shoulder glanced off the wall there in a move calculated by her suit as the best way to turn the next corner. Having a suit that anticipated her needs and acted without her input or permission could be useful, it could also be dangerous. Skippy had enhanced the computer of her suit so it learned the particular biomechanics of her movements and knew how she moved in different situations, able to switch its power-assist from an easy Fuzzy-Slippers-On-The-Couch mode to Full-Panic mode when needed. Poole might have described the current operating mode as High-Speed, grateful for the ability of the suit’s smart brain to keep her upright and moving along the pre-selected route while her own meatsack brain was busy with more important matters like aiming her rifle. Nunnally and Rowe had each taken their three-person teams to the left and were no longer in her line of sight. Ahead of her was her team, with the combot taking up the rear. Someone had splattered a birdbrain all over a wall and parts of the body were making the floor slippery, her suit took care of keeping her footing as she leaned to the left to squeeze by the combot. Movement in a hallway to the right caught her eye and she reacted, swinging her rifle while her left pinky finger selected a three-round burst mode without her even thinking about it. The threat was a Bosphuraq wearing the robins-egg-blue coveralls of a maintenance technician. The bird-like alien’s mouth and eyes were wide open in fear, if its body language was anything like a human, and it held a small cylinder-like thing in both hands, bringing the device up toward Poole. The thing could have been an oddly-bulbous and short rifle, it could have been a rocket launcher, it could have been a fire extinguisher, it could even have been a Bosphuraq sex toy for all Poole cared, she wasn’t waiting to satisfy her nonexistent curiosity. Curiosity killed the cat, but a three-round burst killed the alien and snapped the device in half, sending it spinning back down the hallway in a showering spray of white foam.

  Huh, some part of her brain thought, so it was a fire extinguisher.

  Unless it was a sex toy, in which case she would rather not know.

  “On your left,” she announced to the combot though the words were not necessary, the thing had sensed her intention and moved to the right to give her room to run by. Once past the hulking machine that stomped along dutifully behind her, she took up position just off the right shoulder of Roark, with Burke three meters ahead in a cover formation. The three were racing along a hallway, ducking slightly to avoid cracking their heads on doors that had tried to slide down to seal the invaders from the main part of the base, doors that had suffered mysterious glitches that jammed them only slightly down from their normal recessed position. Inside her helmet, Poole smiled without realizing, pleased to see that whatever the fate of Smythe and Frey, the beer can had been able to interfere with the moonbase’s power systems.

  Burke in the lead sprinted at nowhere close to the suit’s full speed, as the hallway jogged left then right at odd places, preventing a full-on sprint. Twice he fired his rifle
and twice Lauren saw kills registered, she also noted he briefly aimed his rifle at a Bosphuraq who was cowering in terror on the floor of a side hallway, but let the poor creature live, as he had more important things to worry about and he would have had to skid to slow enough to bring his rifle to bear on target before he went by.

  With regret and advanced notice, Lauren had her rifle ready as she passed that side hallway, sending two rounds into the terrified alien. She had an afterimage of the bird-like creature’s head being separated from its body, then she had to concentrate on swerving around a bend in the hallway in front of her. The ghostly schematic projected inside her faceplate showed they had traveled two-thirds of the way to the core of the base where the control center was located, and the floor began to slope downward as expected. The point of greatest danger was just ahead, where a side hallway connected to the section of the base that housed the security team. In the original plan, Skippy was supposed to have established full control of the base computer before the team attempted to breach the core of the underground facility, but Poole had heard nothing from Smythe or the beer can, and the original plan had been shot so full of holes it no longer mattered what the team had optimistically dreamed about aboard the Flying Dutchman so long ago. Her job was to lead two soldiers and an advanced alien combat robot to seize the base control center, before the Bosphuraq could do something like launch a missile that would soar above the stealth field and alert the planet and battlestations that something was very wrong on the moon. That was her job and she was going to do it whether the unreliable beer can could help or not.

  Even in the original plan, the already small STAR team had been split into three units, with Poole taking the two Marine Raiders with her to cover for Smythe and Frey on their mission to plug the beer can’s presence into the moonbase computer. The three Delta Force soldiers were operating as a team to avoid communication issues, they were tasked with stopping launch of fighters or dropships from the east hangar bay, while Nunnally, Grudzien and Kloos were assigned to the west hangar bay. Poole appreciated that her team were all Americans and her teammates were Marine raiders who had served together. Nunnally, with a Polish and a German soldier, had perhaps the most potential for fatal miscommunications, but given the international nature of the renegade STAR team, that could not be helped.