Chapter 8
After the fact, Gabriel would come to realize that what saved him from the explosion was not his upgraded neuretics, or his augmented body, but his natural reactions — and his memory of the asteroid mission. His memories, as he thought later on, while painful, had saved his life.
As he stepped into the corridor, a flicker of memory from that mission flickered. He and his team, in microgravity, made their way between two of the prefab units. Gilly was point man, and Gabriel was a few dozen yards behind, with the gap growing. Gilly’s quick pace stirred up dust into a cloud that hung in the airless environment. They were maintaining comm silence, so Gabriel had no way to tell Gilly to slow his movement. He wanted to push forward, grab the young seaman by his shoulder, but his own heavy boots and reverse retro thrusters, designed to keep the team grounded in less than .02G, slowed him.
He was about to send a point-to-point neuretics burst when he saw a lump on the side of the prefab Gilly was passing. It was most certainly out of place; the color was whiter and the area was cleaner than the rest of the dirty, graying prefab unit. And Gilly didn’t see it.
Silence secondary at this point, Gabriel toggled the comm and shouted, but it was too late. The IED attached to the prefab detonated, probably a proximity sensor Gabriel later reported. Shrapnel tore into Gilly, throwing his body heavily into the prefab on the opposite side of the crude path the team walked. Gilly bounced off the plastic wall and skipped along the surface of the asteroid.
Gabriel yelled into the comm. “Active sensors, spread out! Rush all units, go!”
He switched off his retros and shoved off the surface. He angled his body forward and engaged the thrusters again, this time reversing them. They pushed him forward a few feet above the surface towards Gilly. He knew before he arrived the nineteen year old was gone. When he grabbed his drifting body, he saw Gilly’s face through his helmet visor locked in anguish. His skin was puckered with blisters from the decompression, and the blood that leaked from his mouth, nose, and eyes had frozen into dark stains.
The limpet mine on the wall of the corridor was thin, barely an inch in depth, and was all but unnoticeable. However, the color was a slightly darker shade of industrial gray than the corridor, and the overhead light strip cast the barest of shadows underneath its raised bump. But the corner of his eye caught it, just a split second before it detonated.
He turned his upper body away from the mine, taking his right hand off the pulse rifle and shielding his face with his forearm while he twisted towards the opposite wall and dropped to one knee. The mine was head-height, and he was counting on it being directional, like what had killed Gilly. If it was a wide-dispersal Claymore type, he didn’t have a chance.
The explosion was deafening in the narrow corridor. His ears instantly popped, and he felt multiple impacts on his right arm and right side of his face. He completed his twist and drop and felt heat wash over his upper back. He dropped to all fours, the rifle clattering to the floor, and coughed with the impact of the pressure wave.
His neuretics alarms pinged incessantly. His ears rang like a thousand church bells, and he shook his head to clear the noise. He opened his eyes and saw the rifle through the smoke that filled the corridor. The acrid tang of spent explosives mixed with the pungent odor of burned plastic assaulted his nose, and he coughed again to clear his airway. He grabbed the rifle and sent the arming command again, receiving an operational status.
His neuretics gave one more alarm: the closest gunman had entered his line of sight down the sloping tunnel. His vision was blurred from the shock and the corridor obscured with gray-black smoke, but his neuretics painted a perfect tactical picture in his Mindseye.
Energy pulses sizzled past Gabriel. The gunman fired blindly into the smoke, hoping his target was low and still near the lab door. Gabriel’s quick move away from the mine to the opposite wall saved him again.
He ordered the tactical scan projected into his internal heads-up, and a red icon appeared, just over a hundred feet away and moving rapidly towards him. He turned and rose on one knee, brought his own rifle up, and linked the sights with his neuretics. Though it was a cheap Chinese knockoff of the M-74, it still possessed the same electronic targeting systems.
Blue crosshairs centered on the approaching icon, and Gabriel pressed the trigger pad. Three coherent light bursts spat from the end of the blocky barrel, disappearing into the smoke, leaving twisting vortexes in their wakes. The incoming fire ceased immediately, and the red icon stopped moving.
He stood up and grabbed for the wall as dizziness washed over him. The smoke began to clear as Cielo’s environmental systems attempted to process the air. The sharp burnt odor was still present, and reminded him of the scorched mud he trekked across during the Canary Islands campaign. Smells were the most powerful triggers of memories, he had been told once. He’d just as soon get rid of the memories as well as the smells.
His right arm began to throb, and he felt something sticky on the right side of his face. He wiped the blood off his cheek and rubbed his hand on his pant leg to clean it off. He felt the sting of several small cuts, but no major damage, and his vision was no longer impaired. Glancing at his bloody arm, he wasn’t as confident, but for now it still worked, and he had two more targets that knew where he was now.
The ringing in his ears subsided to the point where he could hear the air recyclers whirring above him. The smoke had all but cleared, and he could now visually see the fallen gunman down the corridor. He was sprawled face-first on the floor, another M-74 copy lying a few feet in front of the body.
With a quick check of his pulse rifle’s charge, he took off at a run towards the gunman’s body when the lights went out in the corridor, plunging it into darkness.
Gabriel: Zero Point Page 9
