by Kal Spriggs
That meant that Marcus needed his bomb.
He rolled over, returned fire, and then as the enemy fire lulled for a moment, sprinted back the way he’d come.
***
Colonel Michael Frost grinned as main body opened fire, clearly having encountered the mercenary perimeter. There was less return fire than he’d expected, which made him suspect that his people had managed to catch them by surprise.
It didn’t really matter, of course, he and his best people had circled around to come at the mercenaries from behind, near where their shuttle had landed. He briefly considered splitting some people off to secure their shuttle, but he didn’t want to lose any strength. They had almost reached the meeting site.
His lead team had reached the doorway and they signaled him the all clear. He gestured at them to breach the door and it blew in with a satisfying concussion, followed a moment later by the whole team charging into the space, weapons ready. One of them shouted, “Objective secured!”
Colonel Frost followed on the heels of that shout. They might not have time. He doubted the fighting skills of his irregulars. Most of them were criminals and pirates he’d recruited with offers of money and loot, with side benefits of rape and murder. They were undisciplined rabble, so he didn’t trust them to handle the mercenaries guarding the perimeter.
He had expected at least a couple of guards for Admiral Rao, but apparently the mercenaries had overestimated their security. Admiral Rao was the only occupant of the area. In the near distant, gunfire rattled, a pointed reminder that this conversation had a time limit.
“Admiral,” Colonel Frost greeted the other man, “I’ve been looking to have a conversation with you for some time, now.”
“I’m afraid you have the better of me,” Rao glanced around, taking in details. “You’re not working with Admiral Mizra. Nor, I would guess, are you chartered mercenaries.”
“What makes you say that?” Colonel Frost asked cheerfully. He didn’t have much time, but the indomitable Admiral Rao had something of a reputation, he wanted to know what the man thought of his people.
“Your men are jumpy, inexperienced, and not particularly good at securing things,” Admiral Rao answered even as he drew out a pistol.
“Gun!” One of Frost’s men shouted, raising his rifle.
Colonel Frost slammed the man’s weapon to the side even as he fired, the bullet whipping past Rao’s head. “Idiot!” Frost snapped. But it was as much to himself as his man.
He had not expected Rao to have a weapon… and in stopping his man from shooting him out of hand, he’d told Rao that he wanted him alive.
Rao used that information right away… he put the pistol to his temple, finger on the trigger. “Well, then.”
Shit…. Frost took a tense breath, “Let’s not do anything hasty.”
“I’d guess that you’re not here to take me back to Harmony and rescue me,” Rao told him. “Judging by the company you keep and the… irregular training of your people, I’d guess you don’t really care about my long-term wellbeing. Admiral Mizra and the Guard Fleet Captain Ortega both would have settled for my death. I’d guess you’re Guard Free Now, and if I’m dead, your candidate has the best chance at winning, which means you should want me dead. The fact that I’m still alive means you want something, information that only I know.” Rao sat up straight, “You want Jormungandr’s Venom.”
“It exists, then?” Colonel Frost asked.
Rao laughed, “As much as I might wish it didn’t… yes, it exists.” His laughter was a hollow, pained thing. A tortured laughter that Colonel Frost knew only too well. He’d laughed that same laugh after successfully carrying out atrocities.
Colonel Frost smiled, “Let’s work something out.” The sound of gunfire was growing closer. Time was slipping away. He gestured at his people and they fanned out, establishing a perimeter, but it wouldn’t be long until he had to pull out.
“The weapon you want isn’t something I’m prepared to give to anyone,” Admiral Rao snapped. “We overthrew our government over this, do you think we’d give it to a terrorist organization?”
We? Colonel Frost wondered at that. Possibly Rao’s sanity had snapped. Who could blame the man, really, given the pressures he must be under? “Look, you have no idea what I—”
“This isn’t a topic you’re going to talk me down on,” Admiral Rao interrupted. “This is a weapon that could wipe out civilization as we know it.”
“They said that about nukes, but here we all are,” Colonel Frost sneered. “A doomsday weapon only needs to be used once, to demonstrate its power once.”
Rao stared at him, “I can see you don’t understand. This isn’t a targeted weapon, a nuke that could only destroy one planet. This is a weapon that once it is loosed, it will kill all of us. It gets loose on a planet or in a station, there’s no stopping it, no tracking it down. It’s a nanite weapon that learns, that adapts, that is programmed to wait and wait and wait… until it’s spread and populated to every corner of a planet. It communicates, it learns… it’s alive with a sentient purpose. A sole, singular, terrible purpose to extinguish all life… There’s no defense. A single little worker nanite on a hazmat suit could hitch a ride to another ship, another station, another planet. Then it starts over. Again. And again.”
Colonel Frost snorted, “I’m sure a quarantine—”
“They ran tests, scenarios based off of a number of factors,” Rao’s voice was drained of life. “This stuff persists. It goes dormant, drawing in power from heat and solar, surviving for decades. Sooner or later someone will brave a quarantined planet. To recover wealth or riches or lost treasures. Then they bring it with them. This stuff makes Old Earth’s Black Death look like a fucking wet dream. It is designed to poison the very skies, to linger in the clouds, on the ground, to lie undetectable until it can kill.”
Colonel Frost heard gunfire start up on his perimeter. I’m almost out of time.
“You want to talk about worlds dying? Fine, then, let’s talk about that,” Colonel Frost growled. “My people have modified several civilian freighters, we’ve cleaned out their navigational computers. I have a station in the Harmony system. If I give the order, they’ll initiate Plan Ragnorak… they’ll ram those freighters into your planet at warp speeds.” Colonel Frost finished in a snarl.
“So, your way of compelling you to hand you a weapon to destroy entire planets is to threaten mine?” Admiral Rao smiled sourly, “Oh, you’re a clever one. Tell me, did you wash out of Guard Fleet or Army?”
“Marine Recon,” Colonel Frost growled, “and I didn’t wash out I—” He bit his tongue. Damn it, how is this asshole so good at getting in my head?
Gunfire and shouts came from either side of his people. “We’re out of time, Admiral. Lower the pistol and come with me.” He drew his stunner, drawing a bead on Admiral Rao’s chest. “There’s a good chance this will make your trigger finger spasm and you’ll kill yourself. But I’m willing to take that risk.”
To his surprise, Rao began to laugh, “Have a look at my chair, will you?”
Colonel Frost shot a glance at his technician, who pulled out a sensor wand. A moment later, his eyes went wide and he swallowed, “Bomb.”
“How big?” Frost demanded, still not lowering his stunner. The device sent out twin lasers to ionize the air and act as a conduit for electrical discharge. It shouldn’t trigger a bomb…
“Big enough,” the technician had started backing away. “Could have a remote trigger or a dead man’s switch, this could be a trap, sir.”
Colonel Frost’s teeth drew back in a snarl of rage. He almost drew his pistol and shot the tech, or maybe the Admiral, he wasn’t sure which he would have killed. Maybe both of them. “Fall back,” Frost snarled, even as he turned and walked away.
This wasn’t over, but Frost didn’t have time to see it out, not now. He’d just have to come at this from a better angle.
***
I need to come at this from
a different angle, Rawn thought to himself as he opened another security door. This damned battlecruiser seemed to have hundreds of the hatches and each one opened on yet more access corridors and equipment rooms. Most of the hatches weren’t even labeled. It was maddening and he was having to fight a sense of panic as it just seemed to go on and on… like his worst nightmares from boarding Fenris.
He’d taken to pointing out differences between this and that ship. Subtle things like the armament, differences in the shape of its warp coil rings. This wasn’t the same ship, it couldn’t be the same ship. He’d seen the Fenris destroyed, he’d barely escaped its destruction, as the mad AI that ran it had been twisted into insanity by a program he’d written.
It had killed his sister. And this stupid ship reminded him of it everywhere he looked.
“Sir, we have movement in corridor three—”
The voice broke off in the sound of gunfire. Rawn felt some of his tension actually ease, though. Apparently, this wasn’t a ghost ship, there was a crew and his people had finally made contact.
Corridor three. That was fifty meters off to port, if his people had stuck to how he’d marked it. He could circle back to that corridor… or he could open the hatch to his right and try to flank them.
“Lieutenant Bell,” he barked, “get our teams moving there to reinforce.” He didn’t wait for her reply, he was already connecting to the maintenance hatch, pulling up his override program. As his second in command acknowledged his orders, the hatch slid open. He jerked his head at his team, “This way.”
***
Mel swore as a half dozen more people rushed down the corridor, laying down suppressive fire. She and Tank had hit the first team, the one closest to breaching one of the main access corridors, but it seemed that their enemies were reacting faster than she’d hoped.
“Fenris, what’s the status of the other teams?” Mel asked as she slapped in a fresh magazine into Maggie. She’d cued up its smart fire feature, which was programmed to recognize Fenris’s interior, uploaded into the small pistol’s memory. She aimed it at the deck and squeezed the trigger, then held it around the corner. A moment later, as the pistol’s sensor detected moving targets that didn’t match that background, her pistol fired. Once, twice, and then a third time.
She could see those targets as they fired, the image feed playing on her helmet as her pistol swept the corridor. A detached part of her noted that the pistol had chosen armor piercing delayed explosive rounds as it fired… and that the targets she’d hit would not be getting back up.
She pulled her hand back as return fire raked the corridor. “Fenris, we’re going to need help if we’re supposed to hold them.”
“I can send my maintenance bots…”
Mel shuddered as she thought about the mechanical spiders. Those were unique enough that they’d stand out and she really didn’t want any of these guys, whoever they were, to ask questions about why they’d used maintenance robots to fight them. Assuming we leave any of them alive. Mel wanted to reject that bloodthirsty thought, but it lingered all the same. These people had probably already seen too much, could she afford to let them live?
“Any idea who these jokers are?” Mel demanded.
“The sensors they haven’t disabled show them as irregulars. They’ve got a mix of civilian off the shelf and scavenged military equipment,” Fenris growled. “Under other circumstances I’d call them pirates.”
“Great, let’s get them,” Johnny Woodard snapped as he leaned around and opened up with his rifle. He fired in controlled bursts and Mel didn’t doubt that each one sent a body tumbling.
He dropped back as the enemy returned fire. They could only hold this position for so long, though.
“They’re using an override code of some kind on the hatches that’s locking me out of local access,” Fenris growled. I might be able to bypass it.”
“Get them trapped or bottled up and we can deal with them one group at a time,” Mel barked. Her heads up display on her helmet showed the enemy advancing again. She pulled a flash bang off her harness, thumbed it on to activate it, and lobbed it around the corner before ducking back. As it detonated, she and Johnny leaned around and opened fire again.
She just hoped none of their attackers were doing the smart thing and trying to get around them or she’d really be in trouble.
***
Fenris was doing his best to get past the sensor and door overrides that the enemy had used. It was damnably effective, though. The coding was very similar to what Colonel Frost’s people had used, but more refined, the coding doing everything short of physically severing the connections, and to make matters worse, it randomized the coding of the hatch controls on each door. In effect, Fenris didn’t have to get around one set of encryption, he had to fight through a different set of encryption on every single hatch that they’d overridden.
In the meantime, he couldn’t even open sections of the ship to vacuum and hope it would trip emergency procedures and close those areas off, because he couldn’t see what they’d done and if those emergency protocols would still function. If they didn’t, then only the unaffected doors would function, which would seal off Mel and Woodard as the hatches behind them closed, trapping them in a firefight.
It was a complex problem all the more so for the fact that he was also monitoring what he could of the fight on the ground and what looked to be headed towards a fight in space. Captain Ortega’s Task Group and the Harmony Task Force had both gone to active drives and the Guard Fleet Task Force had shifted position, forming a wall between both groups and the planet.
Here we are, in the middle of all of that.
Fenris was capable of doing multiple things at once, but focusing on in three different fights was creating a strain.
The worst part of it though, was how very familiar the coding felt. In fact…
Fenris hadn’t worried about identifying their unwelcome guests, he’d been focusing on trying to track their movements and update Mel and Woodard with their positions. Yet as he mapped out locations and movements, he zeroed in on video footage from his sensors, milliseconds here and there that let him put together an image of the different groups, pulling up faces and matching them against records in his database. He started to notice a pattern. Criminals, terrorists, freedom fighters… all of them working for Guard Free Now.
Fenris’s processors filtered data faster and faster, tracking transmissions and zeroing in on the leader of the group, whose transmissions seemed to be moving in a flanking maneuver right towards Mel’s position. He lined up a security sensor and got a partial view of the leader’s face before the sensor was jammed.
Fenris’s core processes froze for just as second as he recognized the leader of that team. At the same time, his systems indicated a hatch opening near Mel’s position. A small part of him noted that apparently, even artificial intelligences could be paralyzed by shock, even as he tried to figure out how to stop it.
***
Mel caught movement out of the corner of her eye. The access hatch beside her had slid open and she spun, bringing her pistol up to fire. Her weapon sights centered on an enemy at less than a meter away, his weapon aimed right back at her.
“Armstrong, stop!” Fenris’s voice snapped over the intercom.
Mel froze. His shout had startled her and she had a moment to realize that, for some reason, Fenris had killed her. There was no way that her opponent would hesitate to fire. She closed her eyes, waiting for the impact of a bullet.
That impact never game. She opened her eyes. Her enemy stood just as frozen.
Fenris didn’t speak over my radio, he spoke over the intercom…
The man opposite her wore a mix of civilian and scavenged military gear, just like the others. They could have been pirates or mercenaries… but they weren’t, she realized. There was only one other person who would have frozen at that command. “Rawn?” Mel asked.
He jerked, as if someone had struck him with a stunner. Be
hind him, she saw two or three more of the attackers, but he held up a hand to stop them. He reached up slowly and pulled off his helmet, his blonde hair sticking up, his blue eyes, a match for her own, wide in shock, “Mel?!”
She waved at Johnny, who lowered his rifle. She unbuckled the fasteners and pulled her own helmet off, taking a deep breath of gunsmoke and catching the coppery scent of blood. “I suppose we should probably talk about this.” Mel jerked her head back in the direction of the corridor, where the other Guard Free Now boarding teams were no doubt getting ready for another rush. “Maybe a cease fire?”
Rawn shook his head, looking a bit punch drunk, but he brought up his radio, “Stand down! Cease fire, I repeat, cease fire!”
***
Punatra hissed in disgust as he made his way towards the spaceport. He’d lost. He’d been outmatched and the inhumanly fast movements of his opponents, there at the end, had told him all he needed to know. He’d been set up from the very beginning. Someone from the Empire had undermined him, possibly to gain favor for themselves, but most likely to seize the same weapon he had come here for… and to destroy him in the process.
Having lost his contacts among the apru, lost his soldat bodyguards, and lost the weapon, Punatra had nothing left. To go back as he was, he would be luck to face execution for failure. More likely than not he would be given a hydati parasite and become nothing more than a mindless thrall.
At least he knew it was a fellow Chandral that had bested him, not an apru, even if he couldn’t prove it.
No... I won’t go back as a disgrace. The rage boiled up through him. He could still kill his opponent and accomplish his mission. Even if he wouldn’t live to see it through. He turned on his radio, clear of the jamming field in the kilometers he’d covered at a dead run. “This is Bhutto,” he snapped, “all ships, move to attack positions, open fire on Admiral Mizra’s ships and the planet, kill everything in orbit and destroy everything on the ground, leave no survivors.”
He had no doubt that the crews would follow those orders. He looked up at the sky, waiting, a broad smile growing on his face as he prepared for the destruction to come. He could see it now. The Guard would be disgraced, one of their officers having perpetrated the atrocity. Admiral Mizra would no doubt launch a retaliatory strike for the damage inflicted on his ships. The entirety of the Harlequin Sector would likely erupt in war and chaos. It was a war that would inevitably spread.
