Crusade (Exile Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  “And you think my Marines can get through that?” Amelie asked.

  “Their armor can. For long enough. Are you with me?”

  Amelie took ban’s hand and shook firmly.

  “My Marines would be furious if I turned you down. Show us the way.”

  By this point, the defenders had clearly realized there was something very wrong with their communications. Broken Chain operatives had inserted multiple different attack viruses into the systems in the Citadel, and several of the land trains that had been infiltrated were filled with jamming equipment to boot.

  The rebel attack wasn’t organized enough for losing communications to matter that much, but the defenders were. And without proper coms, large chunks of the First and Final Citadel’s defenders didn’t even know they were under attack yet.

  The prison security clearly did and were pulling back to guard block K.

  There was no standardized report when her lead Sonba troopers ran into the security troops. The sharp sonic booms of mag-kinetics firing were the only sign that the battle was joined, but it was enough.

  “Move up, move up,” Bush-Waving ordered, sending more of his people into the fray.

  It was probably stupid, but Amelie went with them. She was so very sick of standing aside while people died.

  She ducked around a corner and several bullets hammered into the wall above her head as she took in the situation. A dozen armored Sivar, their gear inferior to the EMC’s but better than her rebels had, were half-hidden behind a set of premade barricades they’d dragged out.

  As she was trying to assess the situation, a blaster cannon went off next to her as Dos and another of his people waded into the fight. The barricades could hold against mag-kinetic rounds, but plasma bolts were something else. One blasted to pieces and several Sivar went down behind it.

  Amelie hit the dial on her laser and cranked it up to maximum. Dos’s friend went down as she took cover next to the Sonba firing at the enemy.

  “Stay down,” Bush-Waving hissed. “You shouldn’t be here!”

  “Neither should you,” she pointed out calmly. Then she rose and fired.

  She’d only fired the weapon at its lowest power setting before. That had taken two shots to get through a security lock, mostly because she hadn’t realized the first beam had fired.

  The beam was no more visible at maximum power than it was at minimum, but the effect was much more obvious. The barricade she’d targeted exploded backward, chunks of it hammering Sivar troopers to the ground.

  Her pistol was a different weapon than the blasters, but it was apparently just as effective.

  She took a second shot at another barricade, then dropped behind cover again.

  The Sonba took advantage of her fire to charge forward. Mag-kinetics boomed in the confined space—ear covers had been a mandatory piece of equipment for this operation—and the plantlike aliens swarmed over the shattered barricades.

  It took a second for the echoes of the gunfire to fade enough for it to be clear the immediate fighting was over.

  “That should be all of them,” Shonin told her, the Siva appearing out of nowhere. There were clear marks on ban’s armor where the Knife had been shot, but ban seemed uninjured. “We’ve swept another dozen throughout the prison.”

  Ban pointed.

  “Your people are through there.” Shonin turned to the Sonba. “I won’t give you orders, Bush-Waving,” ban told the leader. “But take this.”

  Shonin passed Bush-Waving a bracelet-esque piece of electronics.

  “It’s loaded with the individual lock codes for every door in here,” Shonin continued. “I suggest you start unlocking doors.” Ban turned back to Amelie. “You and I need to go talk to your people.”

  Amelie inhaled sharply and nodded.

  “That door, huh?” she asked.

  The security door readily yielded to the overrides Amelie had been given, opening into a two-story row of cells that was presumably cell block K. The cells all looked similar to the one she’d been put in, though lacking the doubled security door and with the fronts open to the central space.

  “Minister? Amelie? Is that you?” Roger Faulkner shouted from the far cell. “I heard gunfire. What the hell is going on?”

  “I’d say it’s a prison break, Roger, but truthfully, I’m hoping it’s a revolution,” Amelie replied as a massive grin broke free. She started unlocking cells on one side—Shonin started on the other side of the cell block without her even asking.

  “Major Köhl, it’s damn good to see you, too,” she told the Marine when she reached the officer. Then she winced as Köhl struggled slowly to her feet, leaning on a crutch that had only been barely adjusted to mostly work for her.

  “What happened?”

  “I got shot,” the Marine replied bluntly. “We’re not good at standing down, boss. We’re Marines.”

  “Can you walk?” Amelie asked.

  “Slowly, with assistance. It sucks,” Köhl answered. She raised herself to as close to attention as she could manage. “Including myself, thirteen Marines remain ready for duty, Minister. I’d say we’re prepared to extract you, but it seems to be going the other way around.”

  “We apparently have twelve suits of power armor waiting for you if you can get to the prison vehicle pool,” Amelie told her subordinate. “Plus the pulse rifles for those suits. If we get you to them, can your people fight?”

  “Get me to a suit of power armor and I will kiss you,” Köhl replied with a laugh. “And then I’ll fight whoever you point me at. The armor would make a much better mobility aid than this stick.”

  “Shonin, brief her,” Amelie told the Sivar Knife. “I’m going to keep unlocking people.”

  Sergeant Choi wasn’t among the prisoners and neither was Sergeant Ryu. There’d been three Sergeants in the ground detachment, and none of them had lived. All of her staff was there, if a little the worse for wear.

  “Roger, I’m going to need you to keep everyone here and safe,” she told her aide. “I’m going with Köhl and Shonin over there to deal with this damn problem.”

  “Not a chance,” her battered old aide told her, his cybernetic eye glowing in the dark in a way she’d never seen before. “My eye has combat software. If you are going back into the fight, I’m going with you. I’ll need a gun.

  “We have lots. But I need someone to keep these people safe. Isaac is coming, but he’s at least ten days away. We have allies storming the First and Final Citadel as we speak, but I don’t know how well that’s going.”

  “Better than I was afraid of,” Shonin injected. “I’ll admit, even I didn’t realize you’d compromised the entire outer defense network, and that was my job.” The Siva clicked armor plating together grouchily.

  “I’m impressed with the resources and the Broken Chain’s penetration,” she continued. “The first three defense lines have fallen, and there are critical breaches in line four. Five and six appear to be compromised in multiple places, and there are pockets holding out above level six where the tributes have been armed by Sivar agents.”

  “The Kond and the Dynast found a lot of friends,” Amelie replied.

  “Agreed. But the Intendant still has enough loyal troops under the Eyes that he might be able to push back if we don’t take him out. Which is why we brought the armor for your Marines, Major Köhl.

  “Your power armor is much more effective than ours. From the testing we did, I don’t think even the Intendant’s personal guard have weapons that can penetrate it.”

  “You want us to punch in and take him out?” Köhl asked.

  “We won’t be alone, but yes,” Amelie confirmed.

  “EMC leads the way,” Köhl replied. “Let’s get to that armor, Minister Lestroud.”

  “All right. Leave the Marine you don’t have armor for to watch the civilians,” Amelie ordered. “I’m going to be enough of a problem on this assault.”

  “You don’t need to come with us, sir,” the Marine
said. “I have the same translator you do and it will work with the armor.”

  “Humor me, Major. I need to see this end.”

  63

  Amelie could see the relief in her Marines’ eyes when they saw their armor. Even she could tell that the Knives hadn’t taken perfect care of any of the gear, but they’d at least got it all in one place and charged the armor.

  Personal codes opened the armor, allowing the Marines to step into the two-meter-tall suits and seal themselves inside multiple centimeters of steel and ceramics. Not all of the Marines had their suit, but the armor could adjust for that. It wasn’t perfect, but it would still leave the EMC the deadliest twelve-being force on the planet.

  Even so, Amelie had to help Köhl into her armor, and the Major wasn’t the only Marine needing that help. Once the suit closed and the servos whirred up, however, it was clear that Köhl and the other injured Marines needed no more help.

  “System is detecting and auto-adjusting for the injury,” Köhl’s voice emerged from the suit’s speakers.

  “All right, people!” she continued loudly. “Set your systems carefully. We don’t need speed or fancy stealth today. We need battery life.”

  “We tried to charge them, but we had to rig up an adaptor without asking too many questions,” Shonin told the Marines. “How long do you have?”

  “You did good,” Köhl replied. “We’re at a hundred percent charge, but without backup cells or a shuttle’s fast-charge unit, that’s all we have.

  “And if we bring up all of the active systems, we can drain the batteries in an hour of heavy fighting. If we don’t go invisible or leap tall buildings, we’ve got most of a day.”

  Amelie was getting good enough at Sivar body language to realize that Shonin was not at all certain whether Köhl was joking about the suit’s ability to turn invisible or jump tall buildings.

  Both of those were exaggerations…but probably not by as much as the Sivar spy was hoping.

  Heavy pulse guns were picked up from the pile, with power systems hooked into the suits and additional power cells stocked into the designed compartments. Köhl’s dozen Marines now looked the part as they gathered around Amelie.

  “Who’s ready for war?” Köhl demanded from her people. Whatever response she got wasn’t acceptable.

  “I said, who’s ready for war?!”

  “E! M! C!” the Marines chanted back this time.

  “Hell, yes,” the Major concluded. The faceless suit of armor turned to Shonin. “You said we had a rogue dictator and some guards to dig out of a hole in the ground. You got coordinates and a path?”

  “System translations are a problem,” ban noted. “It doesn’t help that the entire Mountain is being jammed right now.” Ban shook ban’s head. “I’m surprised the Eyes of Sivar haven’t done better at taking out the jamming systems.”

  “How did you know so much about the status of the assault if everything’s jammed?” Köhl asked.

  “There’s a secondary com network that the Eyes don’t know about inside the First and Final Citadel,” Shonin replied. “It’s a secret that…certain people put together when the Intendant’s predecessor went almost this mad.”

  “The Keeper of the Citadel?” Amelie asked. “We’re well past the time for games, Voice Shonin.”

  “Yes,” ban admitted. “I have copies of her personal access codes. So far, I haven’t needed them, but for what we’re about to do, we need them.”

  Ban lifted a tablet and hit a command.

  “You should have got a map and directions,” ban noted. “I have an assault team of my finest standing by at the level seven security checkpoint. If we make an appropriate noise when we approach and distract them, we’ll be through that layer faster than anyone is expecting.”

  “The Intendant is behind level, what, nine?” Amelie asked.

  “Yes. And I have another trick for level eight,” Shonin told them. “But I’m out of games once we hit nine. I can use Keeper Rode’s codes to come at them from an angle they’re not expecting, but level nine isn’t really a level the way the rest of the mountain is.

  “It’s more of a sealed-off section. There’s a level ten and a level eleven that are similar. Nine, though, is near the top of the mountain and inaccessible from the exterior in a way nothing else here is.

  “Two official ways in that have heavy automated defenses as well as heavy guards. One secret way in that will give us a chance but might just doom Keeper Rode.”

  “You all have Rode’s image,” Amelie told her Marines. “Don’t shoot her by accident. We need her.”

  “My people know what she looks like as well,” Bush-Waving added, the Sonba jumping into the land train the armor had been stored in in a weird, flexing-stalk motion. “We’ll make the same effort.”

  “Bush-Waving…”

  “We all need to be at the end,” the Sonba told her. “Half my people will remain here to help protect your civilians, but the other half and the Toorgs are coming with you.”

  Amelie looked over at Köhl for support, but the Marine remained facelessly impassive in her armor.

  “All right,” she conceded. “But you follow the Major’s orders now, clear?”

  Bush-Waving’s head-fronds shivered dramatically as he looked up at the armored Marine.

  “Of course, of course!”

  They were probably overacting. It was hard to be sure.

  Even deep inside the mountain, the level seven checkpoint was clearly on maximum alert. They were on one of the few routes large enough for the land trains to travel this deep, after all.

  Amelie’s leading scouts—all Sonba, since Köhl and Shonin wanted to keep the Marines a secret a while longer—ran into Sivar performing the same role for the defenders.

  The firefight between those groups appeared to achieve what Shonin had been hoping for. Multiple new defensive measures activated as they closed with the checkpoint, with corridors closing off to funnel them into a killing zone.

  “Hold here,” Shonin finally ordered as they reached a corner that didn’t look any different. The land train rumbled to a halt just short of the wall as Amelie and Köhl followed ban out of the vehicle.

  “The next corridor is one of the internal vehicle tunnels the checkpoint controls,” Shonin told the humans. “They’ll have a clear field of fire to make sure no one can get to them.”

  “And you had a plan? We’ve already made noise,” Amelie pointed out.

  “Yes. And we’ll make just a little bit more.”

  Shonin removed a small black device from inside ban’s armor, twisted an arming switch, and then threw the grenade around the corner.

  It exploded. Then it exploded again.

  “Micro cluster bomb,” Köhl said approvingly. “Definitely gets attention.”

  There was a lot of gunfire being directed at the corner the grenade had been thrown around, with chips being dug out of cement as the supersonic rounds hit.

  “And makes for a decent signal flare,” Shonin replied as an even more distant round of sonic booms tore down the corridor.

  The gunfire continued for about thirty seconds, and no one was aiming at the entrance into the tunnel anymore. After silence finally fell, Shonin stepped up to the shot-up corner and shouted into the hallway in a language Amelie’s translator didn’t recognize.

  Someone else shouted back in what was probably the same language.

  “Checkpoint is secure,” Shonin told them. “There are a few more vehicles waiting for us. We’re running out of time.”

  An explosion sent new tremors through the mountain after ban spoke and the Siva winced.

  “More so than I thought,” ban admitted. “The explosion I was expecting of that size was the communications center. If my people destroyed it, then the Eyes had retaken enough control of internal communications to try for a message out.”

  “How bad is a message out for us?” Amelie asked.

  “If we take the Intendant out within a few minutes o
f it, not so much,” Shonin told them as they and their land train approached a pair of other trains that the Sivar were already loading themselves into.

  “If he declares the Commandants anathema and orders them executed and we can’t get someone in place to counter that order with proof of his death before the Commandants are dead…”

  Shonin trailed off.

  “Your battleships carry ground bombardment weapons, don’t they?” Köhl asked.

  “Most officers would hesitate to use them on Aris and the City,” Shonin replied. “But if the Intendant declares every Commandant in the system anathema and promotes whoever will obey him, someone will push the button.”

  “Right. Let’s get moving.”

  64

  Shonin’s plan for the level eight security checkpoint turned out to be as simple as it was terrifying. The barriers available to the interior checkpoints were significantly less substantial than the exterior bunker doors.

  One of the land trains was stuffed full of explosives and incendiaries and sent on ahead on remote control. The explosion rippled down the corridor, shaking the land trains they were riding in as the vehicles plunged deeper into the mountain.

  Sitting in the front of the third train, Amelie winced as the lead vehicle smashed into the flaming debris of what had been an antivehicle barricade with at least a dozen Sivar behind it. The bomb had wiped out at least a platoon’s worth of soldiers, and the entire checkpoint was still on fire as they pushed through.

  “We’re clear,” Shonin announced, ban sounding quite pleased with banself. “And, conveniently, I know that the level nine security armories are lacking in anti-armor explosives and incendiaries.”

  “Wait, how do you know that?” Köhl asked, then swore as she caught up. “You stole the explosives from the Intendant’s personal guards’ armories?”

  “I knew they wouldn’t do more than visually inspect their explosives,” the spy replied. “Why would they? They’re bodyguards. Who comes at them in armor that requires heavy explosives?”