by Terry Mixon
In fact, Andrea could see the woman watching the fight, and it seemed as if she was enjoying the spectacle.
What was her game? Did she just want to see Andrea get beaten up, or did she want to catch her doing something that she shouldn’t? The woman was devilishly hard to read.
The only thing Andrea knew for sure was that Gomez didn’t like her. What she intended to do about that was still a mystery.
They traded blows for a couple of seconds before he got a strike past her guard and his fist smashed into her chin. The blow half-stunned her, and he was on her before she could shake off the effects.
He definitely wasn’t playing around, and she needed to end this before he found a way to take her down.
Even half stunned, she blocked his next few strikes and then planted a fist in his sternum. To her annoyance, that didn’t slow him down at all. He’d obviously taken shots like that before and knew how to handle himself.
The problem was that she’d allowed herself to stand still too long, and now he had her just where he wanted her. In the midst of the exchange, he kicked her leg and spun her partly around before grabbing her arm and levering her over his hip and into the ground.
Pinned face down, she tapped out, expecting him to release her. Instead, he jammed her arm a little further up, making it hurt.
“That’s one,” he whispered in her ear. “I hope you enjoyed it because I’m about to serve you up another one just like it.”
Then he released her, hopping back out of any possible retaliation range.
Andrea levered herself up to a sitting position and shook her head to get the cobwebs out. She’d been acting like this was some kind of game, and she needed to stop.
Now that she’d seen Claudio fight, she thought she had a good idea of how he’d react to various attacks, and it was time to put her training to use. It would also be an excellent time to let her marine implants do some modeling and show him how a marine really fought.
Once she’d risen to her feet, she made a “come and get me” gesture and just stood there waiting for him to attack. He didn’t disappoint.
Claudio charged forward, stopping just outside of her striking range for just a beat and then dodging to the side, lashing out with another sidekick toward her body.
Her nerves and thought processes worked a little bit faster than an average human, and in conjunction with the programs in her implants, she had time to assess that slight hitch in his stride and guess at what was coming.
She grabbed his foot when it came into range and then dropped down low, sweeping his other leg out from under him. Even as he slammed onto his side, she was on top of him.
He still struck at her with his elbow, but she deflected his attack, using her other arm to snake around his neck and slide behind him, latching down into a chokehold even as her legs wrapped around his torso to keep him from tossing her off.
Claudio struck at her repeatedly with his elbow, but he couldn’t get a good angle and eventually had to tap out or lose consciousness. When he did so, she sprang away, not trusting that he wouldn’t try to hit her again.
“You know, you’re pretty good,” she said with a grin. “I don’t really understand why you felt you needed to hide those skills. Was that just so that you could get me into a fight? You didn’t need to do that. All you had to do was ask.”
“I wanted to wait until the time was right,” he said as he jumped back to his feet and tilted his neck to the side, making the bones pop. “And I didn’t want you using any of those enhancements on me. It wouldn’t be fair.”
“You mean like you used my lack of knowledge about your training against me? Sounds like bull to me. So, we’ve got one more fall to settle this. Are you ready to dance again?”
“Stand easy,” Drill Instructor Gomez said.
Surprised, Andrea took a step back and turned to face the drill instructor.
“You two seem to think this is all about you. What a bunch of towering egos. In the marines, we’re all about teamwork. I think we should settle this third fall with your bunkmates.”
The woman gestured for JR and Diana to come closer. “Basic fighting rules, recruits. We’ll do one fall. Get into positions and then begin.”
Andrea sighed. She had a deep suspicion that her team was about to lose another competition. Based on Diana’s resigned expression, she felt something similar.
Her friend dropped into what might loosely be called a fighting stance even as JR grinned and charged in.
And that was when her friend executed the throw they’d been practicing flawlessly, sending the surprised boy spiraling through the air as she flipped him over her hip. When he slammed into the ground, she was right there and pounced on him.
There was a lot of flying sawdust and a couple of squawks, but her friend came out on top, hooting her victory as JR tapped out.
“Well, well, well,” Gomez drawled. “Well done, Randall. The victory goes to your team.”
JR climbed to his feet with a half smile on his face. “That was actually pretty cool. Good job, Randall.”
When her friend came close, Andrea held up a hand, and Diana smacked her palm into it, a grin on her face. “Claudio isn’t the only one who can hold a couple of things back. Thanks for the instruction.”
Even as Andrea congratulated her bunkmate, she could see Claudio shooting daggers at them and knew that this had only elevated his rage toward her. Not only was the fight between them not over, she suspected that it was going to get even hotter moving forward.
She spared a glance at the rest of the platoon and saw that their opinions seemed neutral once again. They weren’t going to hold this victory against her, but they also weren’t going to give her any real credit for it either.
If she was ever going to find a way to get them to accept her, she would have to do something different. She just wished she knew what that was.
24
Fei leaned back from her desk and rubbed her tired eyes. The last few weeks had been exhausting. Not only had she had to do the mountain of paperwork required for a training platoon, she’d had to keep an eye out for trouble that could come from any direction.
Had Still Water been wrong? Had Dayton actually come to New Dallas? If she had, surely she’d have acted by now.
Over the last few weeks, Fei had spent uncounted hours watching video of the recruits in the barracks and around the training area. She’d slept with one eye open, waiting for someone to sneak into one of the areas under observation and do something nefarious, yet there’d been nothing.
Well, if nobody came for Andrea, she’d be able to finish her training in another couple of months. Then it wouldn’t make sense to go after her at all because the precedent would’ve been set. Basic training was Dayton’s one chance to stop this from happening. If she failed to act, so much the better.
Fei was about to go get lunch when her computer signaled an alert through her implants. Something had triggered one of the vid feeds that they’d installed almost a month ago.
It would have to have been more than motion because there was a rudimentary algorithm running in the network that she and Riggio had planted so that it didn’t go off anytime someone happened by. No, this had to be something unusual.
She quickly brought up the feed in question and saw that it was inside the barracks itself. It showed a drill instructor walking down one side of the bottom floor, his stride purposeful. Nothing unusual there, so what had triggered the alert?
Then the man glanced over his shoulder as he reached Andrea’s locker, and she realized that it wasn’t one of the drill instructors assigned to her platoon.
Fei ran a quick facial recognition scan against the marine database and got a hit. Only, the person in question wasn’t a drill instructor at all. He was assigned to the supply section.
That instantly raised more red flags than she could count. This was it.
She sent a quick message to Riggio, alerting him that they had trouble as she scanned the
other feeds to determine if the intruder had backup. She found none. The only person in the barracks beside the intruder was her.
He’d probably planned it that way, figuring the officer was unlikely to come down to the recruits’ level. He’d likely had the barracks under observation, but she hadn’t known to flag him.
Riggio responded that he was on the way and had summoned backup. That would be armed Imperial Intelligence personnel. She hoped not to need them, but it was always good to have reinforcements.
With only a single intruder, she made the snap decision to proceed before Riggio got there. She was a trained combat marine, and if it came to a physical confrontation, she could handle a supply guy.
She opened the drawer of her desk and pulled out her illegal stunner. She should probably get permission from the major to have an official weapon, but if push came to shove, she’d deal with the repercussions.
With her weapon in hand, she headed quietly down the stairs while maintaining watch on the vid feed through her implants. The intruder was still working on bypassing Andrea’s lock. He was definitely up to something.
Fei took a moment to access the official vid feed and discovered that it had been bypassed. It didn’t show the intruder at all. That wasn’t a shock, yet it was another sign that this was the action she’d been expecting from Dayton.
Since her rebooting the official feed might notify him that he was under observation, she left the situation with it to be resolved later. She was recording everything in her computer and through her implants, so if she needed evidence at a later time, she’d have it.
When she reached the ground floor, she moved slowly and deliberately as she exited the stairwell. She didn’t want to give the man any indication that he was about to be caught in the act.
In fact, she wanted to literally catch him doing whatever it was that he intended to do. That was going to tell her exactly how far Dayton was willing to go in these initial stages.
That being the case, she paused a couple of bunks away from where the man was working and waited to see what he did through the covert vid feed.
It took him another fifteen seconds to finish bypassing the lock. He again looked around to make certain that he wasn’t under direct observation, which did him no good because she had the unofficial vid feed to keep an eye on him.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a bottle of body wash as he opened the locker. It was the exact same kind that the recruits were issued. The man opened Andrea’s shower kit and quickly swapped her tube of body wash with the one he’d brought.
That was good enough for Fei. Now she had the evidence that she needed.
In two quick steps, she stepped around the wall lockers on the center aisle side and confronted him before he could close the locker door.
“What are you doing?” she demanded. “Who are you?”
She expected him to come up with some excuse, but he surprised her by lunging forward and striking straight at her head with his fist.
The move was a textbook marine hand-to-hand combat strike, and she blocked it automatically. Her counterstrike to his gut should’ve disabled him, but she discovered that he was wearing some kind of unpowered body armor underneath his uniform. The strike hurt her hand more than it hurt him.
The intruder followed up faster than she’d expected, as well, lashing out with a kick that forced her to dodge back to minimize the hit but still sent her staggering into the center aisle.
She quickly reassessed the situation and decided that he was more of a threat than she’d anticipated. She needed to end this right now.
Fei brought her stunner up to shoot him, but he struck her fist with his hand, sending the weapon spinning away. He then kicked her in the side, sending her slamming into a bunk across the aisle.
Her mass and momentum were enough to shove the bunk half a meter back and to the side, scarring the bright wax on the floor. He was on her in a moment, trying to end the fight.
With a grunt, she used an elbow strike at his head to force him back a step, and that allowed her to get clear of the entanglement. It wasn’t enough breathing room to completely reset the fight, but she knew that her training and experience were better than his.
All she needed was a couple of seconds to get her feet back under. She’d been overconfident and needed to break the cycle before he used that against her in a way that she wasn’t going to be able to block.
Her opportunity came when he tried to take her down. He struck at her head again, and she had just enough warning to twist to the side, grabbing his wrist as she threw him into the wall locker next to her.
He struck hard but had turned his body to take the impact on his upper back. The throw’s kinetic energy was transferred into the wall locker, tipping it into the bunk behind it with a metallic screech and a crash. That, in turn, went over and took out the lockers behind it.
Like a row of dominoes, everything from the impact point and past began falling over.
She was peripherally aware of the mess but was too busy trying to follow up on her strike to pay it much mind. That was a problem she’d deal with later.
The intruder recovered much more quickly than she’d hoped, lashing out at her with a kick as she tried to close in. One that didn’t connect because she’d been expecting something very much like it.
He might be wearing torso armor, but his legs weren’t nearly as protected. She grabbed his ankle and fell on his leg with her entire weight, hearing a satisfying crack as she hit the floor with all of her mass.
The man screamed but didn’t let the injury stop him from pulling a knife from the small of his back and slashing at her. She raised an arm to block the strike, and he opened her forearm from wrist to elbow.
It hurt like bloody hell and gushed blood.
The wound would cause her problems if she didn’t take care of this guy right now.
With his mobility impaired, she was able to jump back and grip her injured arm tightly to try to mitigate some of the blood loss. She kept her eyes on him as she backed toward where her stunner had ended up. He wasn’t going to be able to pursue, and she’d stop him here and now.
Only it seemed he’d prepared for that eventuality too. He dropped his knife and pulled a marine-issue flechette pistol from concealment, raising it with far more competence than she’d hoped to see as she threw herself behind Andrea’s wall locker.
Flechettes tore gaping holes in the locker itself but missed her as she kept moving, putting distance between the man and herself. That wasn’t going to be enough to save her. Nothing in the barracks was heavy enough to use as cover rather than concealment.
That was when Riggio raced into the barracks, firing a flechette pistol of his own as he advanced. The intruder jerked and spasmed as flechettes slammed into his body. Blood went everywhere, and he collapsed against the wall locker.
The unpowered body armor would’ve given the man some protection, but at least one of the flechettes had struck his head. There was no way that was survivable.
Still, Riggio was a professional, and she’d trained him herself. He advanced in a sliding combat step until he was able to reach out with the tip of one of his boots and kick the man’s weapons away from his body.
Only then did he verify the intruder was no longer a threat and holstered his pistol, though he didn’t turn his back on the corpse.
He yanked off his shirt and backed to her side, wrapping her bleeding arm in the makeshift bandage. “You let that yahoo get the drop on you, Sarge? I’m disappointed. I figured that even after six years, you were still too badass to let that happen.”
She sighed. “I underestimated him. The database said he was a supply guy. Who expects a supply guy to fight like a line marine?”
“I get you, but don’t think I’m ever going to let you live this down.”
Two women in unpowered combat armor, with flechette rifles at the ready, raced into the center aisle and began assessing the situation.
Riggio
jerked his chin toward the door. “Secure the building, but don’t shoot any of the first responders. We don’t want a friendly fire incident.”
The women nodded and began sweeping the ground floor to make sure that it was clear.
Riggio turned his attention back to Fei. “I can already see that some people from battalion are headed this way through the main feed. We’ve got maybe two minutes before you’re going to have a lot of questions to answer.”
Before she could respond, he walked over, grabbed her stunner, and stuffed it into his pocket. “I’ll just hold onto this so that you don’t have to explain where it came from. Since I’m working with Imperial Intelligence, that’s going to give me some cover.”
Fei stared at the wreckage of the first floor. Not only was it going to be impossible to clean up in time to hide the fact that something had happened, it was now a crime scene. There were going to be military police everywhere inside of fifteen minutes.
She had no idea how she could keep Andrea from finding out that something was going on.
The first thing she needed to do was let Page and Major Martelle know what happened. Then she was going to have to answer all those questions.
“Maybe they’ll let me get my arm fixed up before they start interrogating me?” she ventured.
Riggio laughed. “Keep dreaming.”
Sadly, he was probably right.
25
Page was about to send the recruits to the mess hall for dinner when he received a priority call from Lieutenant Na. He accepted it at once and found that she’d sent a voice-only, prerecorded message.
“There’s been an incident at the barracks. We had an intruder. You need to get the recruits to a safe place in case this wasn’t an isolated incident. I’ll let you know more when I can. Na out.”
He accessed the vid network and tapped into the feed coming from the barracks. Everything looked normal. That couldn’t be right, considering the message he’d just received. Had it been tampered with?
