“Hull Code? Who the hells...”
The lights winked out a hair’s breadth after the sound of the generator died away. A fwoosh could be heard across the hall where the criminal was being held. The low-light imaging of the helmet switched over just in time to see a rugged man barreling across the hallway toward him. Kel hit the corporal in the mid-section, tackling him through the other cell door as it shot open. The two men tumbled into the room, Kel on top. He sat upright on the lancer's hips and grabbed both sides of the man's helmet. He slammed the trooper's head into the stone floor with a savagery that would have made a gorilla jealous.
The force of the attack stunned LaGarron. Warning sensors blared in the helmet audio. A flashing proximity alert showed another threat was reaching for him from the floor. It was some sort of rotting robot. He used a foot to hook one of Kel's legs while shooting his hips up and forward. Rolling away from the broken doll, his attacker surrendered his balance. The trooper used his weight and momentum to gain a dominant position over him, forcing the thug to struggle to hold on.
He blasted a hand into the ribs of the thug, halting the assault. The armor of a lancer had the best in endo-frame technology. This allowed every trooper to go toe-to-toe with many of the stronger aliens in the galaxy, which did not bode well for his current adversary.
The force of the blow curled the man into a ball, like a bug under an evil child's sun-soaked magnifying glass. The lancer hoisted him from the floor and flung him into the robot. Both ended in a heap of tangled wires and struggling groans.
LaGarron turned to the center of the room. Floating in the middle were all the restraints that were supposed to be on the prisoner. They hung in the air, motionless, in the same position they would be if the prisoner was still there. A sharp inhale marked his surprise. A powerful grip took hold of the drag handle at the base of his neck, throwing him clear into the opposite wall.
Servo-motors from inside the armor strained against the impact. Corporal LaGarron felt that if he had been without it, he would have broken his neck. He whirled around to take stock of what had gone from bad to suck.
The man on the opposite end of the room was gigantic by human standards. The early dawn sunlight was just starting to threaten the darkness of the fort, making for an ominous silhouette. The prisoner was easily a head taller than the largest human lancer the corporal had ever seen. He was stretching out his arms, followed by shaking motions as though he were getting ready for early morning PT.
The lancer took a deep breath. “Don't make me do this.”
“I don't see another choice.” The shadow had a voice that sounded like dry leaves being rustled under foot.
“I have orders to take you down if I have to.”
“Do as you will,”
LaGarron thumbed the release for his pistol in its holster. He knew he would have to draw it faster than the prisoner could use his powers. He wanted to go toe-to-toe with the man but knew his chain of command would rain Hells down on him for it. “No powers?”
The dry leaves rustled into something resembling a chuckle. “No promises.”
The corporal snatched the pistol for a hip shot, falling back a step for balance. The target became a blur, allowing the bolt to scorch its way harmlessly across the hall and out of a window. As the blaster bolt screamed from the barrel, the restraints still floating in the room snapped around his ankles, dropping him in place. Buckles, leashes, and binders followed suit like a swarm of piranha trying to devour an animal that had strayed into their water. The last restraint snapped into place, posing the lancer in the same position the prisoner had been.
The man in the doorway crumpled to the floor.
A wheezing Kel acknowledged the man who had just come to his rescue. “Whoa, son! Glad they make ’em big where you're from! Still. I thought he said no powers.”
The giant opened his eyes. “I never agreed to that. Besides, my legs and arms were numb from being restrained for so long. He would have beaten me near to death.”
“You?” came the exasperated cry from the rasping criminal.
The apprentice got up. With a grimace borne from every step, he shuffled over to the lancer. Kneeling down, he removed the helmet from the young man's head. Raising it so their eyes locked, the prisoner-turned-captor whispered a quiet command. “Sleep.” The trooper's head dropped. His breathing deep, even, and peaceful.
The prisoner reached over and helped Kel into a sitting position. The two cooperated to right the android, propping it against the wall.
“Can you speak?” the apprentice asked it.
The robot seemed to come out of whatever stupor it was in while being tangled up with Kel.
“We are in danger. There are two Marshals Templar heading this way. Judging by their internal communications, they are sending a hover-skiff full of lancers to our window, cutting off our escape. They’re boxing us in.”
The two men looked to the machine. Both could easily sense fear in its voice.
Kel risked a peek into the hall. “How did they find out we beat him up, so quickly?”
The apprentice flashed a sinister smile. “We?”
“Hey.” Kel sounded legitimately wounded as he watched his new associate remove the tactical harness on the sleeping trooper's armor. “It was a team effort. You got a name?”
“Later. This armor has warning sensors that lets their team know when they are in trouble. That's why they're already on the move. There's a reason I came here. There's something I have to do. I could use your help.”
“Wait! You let yourself be captured? You're insane! Why would I want to help you when I can just help myself?”
Shadows fell across the apprentice's face, his expression dripping with venomous intent. “You want to help us because we're your best shot of getting past a lancer task force. Plus, I can make it worth your while.”
“You said ‘us’ and ‘we.’” Kel said.
“That was the deal. We all leave together. All of us.” The apprentice motioned with his hand to include the robot. “Are you going to help us?”
“Depends on what you think my while is worth.”
Three
The rising sun started to warm the walls of the stone fort, making the cool morning comfortable. Shafts of light highlighted the ever present dust in the air. The motes meandered around a squad of lancers moving silently down the hall to the cells. The mud brick walls were fairly uniform, allowing two lancers to travel shoulder to shoulder.
The veteran platoon from the 9th Lancer Regiment had traveled and trained under Marshal Brand for the better part of a year. They were a precise instrument of their marshal's will and he tried to wield them like a scalpel. This particular squad was designated a special group within the platoon. Each man was trained to take on extraordinary threats outside the scope of pirates or border disputes.
Brand walked behind his crew. He had shed the long cloak so that nothing would impede his movement. He longed to be in the front of the stack, to keep his men from potential harm. Carrying a force-shield meant that he could deflect incoming blaster bolts from them. His powers in the Way meant he could take the brunt of whatever the apprentice might throw at them.
Lance Sergeant D'Marco was second in the stack. As a seasoned NCO, he was tuned in to most of the men of the platoon. This included their commander, Marshal Brand. “I can hear that look on your face from here, sir. If you get blowed up because you were in the front, who is going to tuck us in at night? This platoon will go to Hells if someone isn't there to lead us to chow every morning.”
Brand smiled beneath the mask. He loved D'Marco like a brother. The man had saved his life on numerous occasions. He was the reason that Brand was wearing a respirator instead of a coffin. “I'm only in the back of the stack because the fear causing that rattling in your armor is messing up my concentration. If I can't concentrate, how am I going to cast a detection spell to find someplace good to eat in this hole?”
D'Marco raised his hand so t
he marshal could see it and made a point to show the man he was rubbing his stomach from mock hunger. “Meal ticket is this way, sir. Frazier. Williams. Don't cut that corner. Send a sneaker to check the space.”
The two lancers in the front of the stack stopped in place. All twelve men did likewise. Both men in the lead reached into a pouch behind their hip, pulling out a small metal ball the size of a marble. One tossed theirs toward the ceiling while the other tossed theirs to the floor. Spider legs, metallic and spindly, unfurled from the balls. Both crawled along their selected surfaces, keeping pace with each other. They relayed real-time sensory data to the two lancers, who simulcast it to D'Marco and Brand.
The hall looked clear except for the robot corpse the garrisoned lancers were using as a camera. All signs indicated that the bot was shut down.
D'Marco didn't like it. Something felt off. He was sure that LaGarron wouldn't have gone down without a fight. There were no blast marks or big scuffs in the floor to suggest a pitched battle in the middle of the hall. Then there was the bot. That was unnerving him most of all.
“Bots forward,” D'Marco ordered.
Williams and Frazier moved their hands in a forward motion and the tiny spiders moved about the hall. Both bots went into deep scanning mode, searching the hall for signs of traps, improvised explosives, and hidden sensor triggers. They stopped just short of the tattered robot set in the corner between the two cells.
D'Marco got a strange feeling on the back of his neck. He looked back at Brand. “Sir, I think we need to...”
The eyes of the tattered android came on and its haunted electronic voice echoed in the hall. “Too bad, so sad.”
A burst of high energy static filled the hall where the lancers were standing. The wave knocked out their armor systems, making the suits extremely heavy. Their heads-up displays went with it. They were unable to communicate via the net and sensors were down.
“O.C.I.!” Frazier shouted.
The term was lancer shorthand for overcharged ion grenades. By daisy-chaining a string of ion grenades together and then compromising one of the output regulators, the explosion could render even hardened electronic systems inert. The first explosion knocked the target powerless while micro-bursts from the strung grenades going off in sequence disrupted any reboot cycle. Too many rapid disruptions too quickly could short out the inducers, dead-lining the system. Lancer armor was hardened against most electromagnetic pulses and ion surges. Even their weapons had protection against such attacks. A rapid-fire EMP assault in such close quarters could have a crew of hard chargers fighting as though they were burdened and blind.
“Bloody Hells!” Commander Hylaeus shouted. He rose from his crate, the thing nearly cracking from the force of him pushing to get up.
He raced from the security room into the hall. Automatically linked into the Battle-net, the commander's voice blasted through the speakers in the room while echoing down the hall. “Second Squad will break through the cell walls and storm the rooms. Warn the other units.” He switched to a second channel and barked into it, “Marshal Truveau!”
“Go for Truveau.”
“The mongrel is making a break for it. I think he's working with that criminal the garrison pinned up. Second Squad is breaching the wall. Hug some dirt until it blows over.”
“Roger, out.”
Another few steps, another net. “Sergeant Corvin, this is Hylaeus.”
“Corvin, go.”
“Breach now! I say again, breach now!”
A massive shockwave permeated the three-floor structure. Dirt and dust fell from the ceiling and kicked up from the floor. The pressure from the blast knocked Hylaeus down to his knees. Through the noise and rumbling he struggled to make out the chatter over three separate channels.
“Up and over, Old Man,” Hylaeus ordered himself. “Stop whining, start winning!” he said, repeating the words of his teachers long ago.
Sergeant Corvin held up a hand with his fist closed. A hover-skiff floated in the air a few feet off of the ground on the rear side of the fort.
The lancer garrison was a reclaimed Tyth fort made of fortified mud brick. Three levels high, only two levels were accessible from the front and sides. The third level had been dug into a slope on the back side. The wall ended with roughly two meters of hard stone before dropping into a thirty-meter cliff as part of a large ridgeline.
Eight lancers were on the skiff, hovering above the drop, centimeters in front of the small stone lip. Dawn was coming over the top of the fort and the skiff had been angled in such a way to allow the lancers to have the benefit of the shade to keep their eyes on the wall. Three lancers were at the stern and aft sections of the ships, aiming their rifles at the wall.
Two more had just thrown spider-mines against it and were watching the things lock themselves into place. Tiny legs dug into the stone, spraying a foam that would harden into the crevices they created. This would allow the charge to be focused, only taking down a certain section of the wall.
Sergeant Corvin got a ping from the Battle-net, indicating the marshal commander was breaking into coms. “Sergeant Corvin, this is Hylaeus.”
“Corvin, go.”
“Breach now! I say again, breach now!”
“Siggs! Pull away deep!” Corvin shouted to the driver of the skiff.
There was no response, only action. The armored trooper beat the throttle like he would a petulant dog. The skiff shot forward, hugging the cliff in a dangerous fashion. The slightest updraft or miscalculation on the part of Siggs would clip the rock face and send all eight to their death.
“Hit it!” barked Corvin.
Private Tai Gosin, easily the largest of the bunch, activated a holographic trigger that was only visible to him through his HUD. He detonated all four mines.
As the skiff pulled into a hard loop, the explosion blew at a weird angle from the building. A small mushroom cloud blasted out from the wall, sending chunks of rock and debris flying at the same angle. The pressure wave rocked the whole building, threatening to take it over the cliff.
Lance Sergeant D'Marco hit the quick release on his armor. His equipment fell off in a heap at his feet. He had been trying to shed the armor since the massive daisy chain choked the hells out of their gear. He reached into the arm pocket of his myoprene suit. He turned on a cell-com and hit the tactical preset.
He dropped his helmet. Looking around the room, he could still feel the static charge in the air. His men were trying to walk to the wall so they could lean on it and pop the locks to shed the armor in a more dignified manner than he had.
“Everyone okay?” Brand called at the back of the stack.
Frazier was first to speak. “Anyone else feel like they were just cooked on high?”
“Stow it and sound off!” D'Marco yelled.
The members of the squad yelled out their last name and the word “green” if they were good. Frazier called out his last name and yelled “medium-well” after it. This elicited a punch in the arm from Williams.
D'Marco's cell-com came online to the Battle-net going ballistic. As he adjusted the volume of the earpiece, a strange look crossed his face while listening to reports bounding between the security room and Commander Hylaeus.
“Brand!” D'Marco yelled.
Marshal Brand stretched out his thoughts into the Way. A combination of training and psychic ability, the Way allowed a Marshal Templar to tap into the Crucible, the connection that forged all things in the universe. He saw a myriad of possibility for the next thirty seconds, none of them good.
The marshal thrust out his hand toward the bend in the hallway and time seemed to slow to a crawl. A wave of force flowed into the lancers, holding them upright and rooted in place. An explosion erupted from beyond the bend, blasting dust and debris at the unsuspecting troopers. Unseen walls of force kept the lancers from harm, separating them from the mayhem beyond the bend. Brand stood defiant. There was a wave of shock and violence on the other side of the bend an
d Brand was the rock that would break it. Time resumed its normal pace, the sound of explosions replaced by the tiny tapping of small debris hitting the floor. Brand dropped to a knee.
D'Marco rushed over to him. “Sir?”
Brand looked up, recited his last name, and said, “Medium-well.”
The squad broke into laughter as they looked to salvage weapons and go on the hunt for their target. The laughter died immediately when they heard a roar above them.
The blast wave knocked Marshal Truveau into the wall of the second floor above the prison cells. The walls above had been ruptured and blown in, leaving a gaping hole. The lancers had sheered most of this side of the wall from the fort with their blast. She would have to remind Marshal Brand bigger wasn't necessarily always better.
A breeze coming from the expanse outside was swirling the dust. Truveau hated getting caught in stuff like this. Habit dictated she rub her teeth with her tongue to clear the grit. For once, she envied Brand his face mask.
After righting herself, she stretched out her senses to perceive the Way. Reaching inside herself, she opened her mind so she could gaze into the brilliance that was the Crucible. There she could see the fires that were the lancers. Bright and powerful was the fire of Marshal Brand below her. For some reason, she could see a glimmer of fire from the android. She dismissed this as a strong connection to the criminal. She could see him as well, although his flame was oily and smoky. Strange that he was hiding behind a door on this floor, above the cells. It was when she looked up again that she saw her target.
His flame was hidden from her at first, not an easy feat. Once she peeled back the concealing smoke of the Crucible, his was a brilliant blue. Powerful torrents of red flickered in and around him. He burst through the smoke and jumped into the emptiness outside the wall. She didn't sense the harmony an apprentice should have prior to attaining the rank of marshal. She sensed predatory instinct and loss.
The Mongrel: A Military Sci-Fi Series (Hunter's Moon Book 1) Page 3
