The Galactic Arena Prequels (Books 1 & 2): Inhuman Contact & Onca's Duty

by Dan Davis

  synonyms: responsibility, obligation, commitment, obedience, allegiance, loyalty, faithfulness, fidelity, respect, deference, reverence, homage.

  a task or action that one is required to perform as part of one's job.

  “If you join this army, you’re taking combat duty”

  synonyms: job, task, chore, assignment, commission, mission, function, charge, part, place, role, concern, requirement, responsibility, obligation.

  How can we know ourselves? Never by reflection, but only through action. Begin at once to do your duty and immediately you will know what is inside you.

  ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best; it removes all that is base. All men are afraid in battle. The coward is the one who lets his fear overcome his sense of duty. Duty is the essence of manhood.

  ~ George S. Patton

  PART 1 – ONCA’S DEATH

  Onca leaned out of the side door of the AI-piloted stealth helicopter as it raced low over the jungle at dawn. The shining glass and concrete towers of Sao Paulo reflected the first rays of the morning sun in the distance and already the heat was making his armor’s cooling system whir into life.

  Their target was the HQ and manufacturing center for biotech giant Abora Biopharma. The sprawling factory complex had been taken over by a new terrorist group. They held over 400 employees hostage and also dozens of Artificial Persons worth millions of dollars. Before the site had been overrun, the security systems had detected large amounts of explosives being trucked inside the main buildings. At least twenty security guards had been killed in the opening moments and the employees who had escaped told of dozens of terrorists inside, perhaps over a hundred of them.

  There were no negotiations asked for and none offered. While the Brazilian Army and local police stood ready, the lives of all the hostages were dependent entirely on Major Onca’s private security firm, Sabre Rubro.

  A ten-year veteran of counter-terrorist operations, Onca knew that this one was going to be the toughest challenge he had ever faced.

  Onca’s AugHud overlaid the helo’s curving route over the ragged forest canopy, up to and between the distant factory complex. Over one of those buildings, the floating LZ icon counted down the time until his team would be over the target.

  4 MINS.

  His men had been standing on the tarmac at the international airport all night, waiting for the go from the Sao Paulo state government but it had come too late for the mission to be a night attack. Too late even for the half-light of dawn. They would be coming in stealthily, his two helos as low and as close to silent as it was possible to be but now they would certainly be spotted before they could engage. At least his ground units, two squads on foot and the other squad in the Beast were out of sight, advancing rapidly through the streets of the workers’ town attached to the south of the complex.

  But the situation got worse.

  Onca’s radio pinged in his ear.

  “Major,” Maria said, speaking from the temporary HQ at the airport. With the unbreakable encryption she had built into the comms system, there was no need for codes or call signs. “Update. The media blackout request has been ignored. Airspace over the factory is swarming with news drones and there are two chatter satellites trained on the complex. Live footage streaming online now showing you moving in. Both AI helos, plus ground teams at their ingress locations. And the Beast is under cover but its position is being reported.”

  Somebody has screwed us.

  The state government, or the Army, or the city or state police, or whoever.

  “Get those drones out of the sky, Maria, and the satellites off or pointed away. Put Matos on.”

  Onca cycled through his AugHud settings and looked up over his LZ. Drone icons swarmed, most at high altitude but a few buzzed around over the factory complex like insects over a stagnant pond.

  “Matos is with the Chief of Police right now. The cops are saying the terrorists have taken out the local power grid plus the mobile generators so there’s nothing to power the jammers at the perimeter.”

  Bullshit.

  Either the senior police officer or someone else must have been paid off. For a large-scale assault like the one Onca was leading, the online news sites could organize enough flash crowdfunding to bribe a dozen city officials almost immediately.

  “Tell Matos to forget the police,” Onca said, watching the LZ icon countdown and feeling irritated that he had to deal with a drone situation instead of focusing on his operation. “Get our own APs out here to shoot the drones out of the sky. Steal the military’s AA lasers and sonic batteries deployed at the airport. And launch the SR drone fleet, I’ll take the consequences. Do it now.”

  Already, the operation was a stretch for his small cooperative but the news drones giving away Sabre Rubro’s movements was putting his men’s lives in greater danger. It was Onca’s responsibility to protect them, even if it meant being prosecuted for flying armed drones inside the city limits and outside his contract’s engagement rules.

  Onca turned back inside the helo to the other three members of Alpha Team. Every operational member of Sabre Rubro—thirty in all—was on the mission. Each man in their custom-printed armor molded to their body, faces obscured by helmets, breathing apparatus and visors. Their names floated over their heads on the AugHud but he knew each of these men just by the way they moved, by their particular loadout, by the way they held their weapon or held themselves. He switched their name icons off.

  He glanced out the open door at the massive LZ symbol.

  “Two minutes,” he said on the squad channel as he held up two fingers and circled his hand.

  He almost told them about the news drones, almost summarized his command channel conversation. But there was no need. The plan was the same. Each of them expected heavy resistance and every man knew his duty.

  They came up fast over the outskirts of the factory, the outer perimeter cleared of trees for at least half a kilometer before the first fence and the grass was still in deep shadow. The flat roofs of the low-rise factory buildings seemed empty.

  No terrorists.

  They had been there overnight and Onca hoped to neutralize them on the way in.

  No matter.

  If the enemy wanted to fight it out in the tight corridors and doorways of the facility buildings, then that was no problem. It was Major Onca’s natural environment.

  Sabre Rubro’s other helicopter popped up from AugHud View into Real World View from behind two squat chimney stacks, its quiet blade whirring, the noise pitching down as the power eased off, just as his own helo was doing. Bravo Team would deploy right on time.

  His men could see on their own displays that they had reached the LZ. They opened the other door and leaned out against their lines.

  Onca looked down, the data from dozens of sensors, scanners, cameras and microphones analyzed in real time and fed seamlessly into his AugHud. It showed only two terrorists above ground in the building below him. Both on the floor below the roof. Both armed with assault rifles.

  Good.

  God grant me endless targets, unto the end of days.

  The four of them jumped as one, guided by the jump signal on the AugHud, coordinated with the helo’s AI. Two on each side of the chopper. They fell at full speed, breaking on their lines before their feet touched down. The moment the last of them detached, the AI-controlled stealth helicopter rolled and banked away, heading back out low, ready to invade any incoming missiles or lasers.

  No one fired on either helo.

  Now that the transport phase was over, the corner of his AugHud, the mission phase clock turned over and displayed: PHASE 2.

  His men spread out on the wide, flat rooftop. Weapons up, moving two by two. Onca dropped and drove the spike of a sensor block into the gravelly roof surface. It would provide additional local clarity to the data stream. His other team went to the west p
arapet, punched the anchors into the concrete with the grapple guns and prepped their lines.

  Onca and Ferreira headed for the door down into the building. It was a fire escape door, with access to the ground via an external stairway. The real-time scans relayed to his AugHud the image of two silhouettes with assault rifles on the floor below, turning and running for the internal stairwell.

  “Go, go, go,” Onca instructed his team, speaking calmly.

  Ferreira blew the fire escape door off its hinges and rushed through the rubble cloud flung into being by the blasted walls. Onca followed right behind.

  The scans showed no one inside and had revealed no traps set up either. But those scans were never one hundred percent effective, never could be. He clattered after Ferreira down the narrow stairway and into the top floor. Ferreira pulled open the internal fire exit door and Onca raced into the corridor beyond.

  All the lights were on.

  Most buildings that terrorists tended to take over had their own solar power generation and that was easy to blow out with EMP bursts prior to the assault. Other places were connected to the grid and the local power company would happily shut it down for the authorities. The factory site was different. It had a nuclear power plant on site.

  The terrorists had not taken the power station. This was a good sign as it suggested that they were not truly suicidal.

  Still, it was better when the lights were out. His men operated best in the darkness. Even if the terrorists had night vision augmented eyes, they tended to be less practiced than his own teams.

  On his AugHud he watched the terrorist silhouettes fleeing for the main stairwell, running like the devil. He and Ferreira would have to sprint in order to catch them but he expected one of the other two pairs would be able to intercept.

  He and Ferreira advanced rapidly, ready to support or catch a change in direction. On his AugHud he watched Blanco and Vasquez breach the west windows two levels below him. Both knew where their targets would be even before they breached and had timed it perfectly, shooting as they swung in through the cloud of blasted-out window glass, the sputtering of their guns softer than the sound of falling debris.

  “Targets, down,” Blanco said, voice distinct in Onca’s ear.

  Onca and Ferreira advanced to the top of the stairwell where the others were holding position.

  Bravo had made contact high up in Building A and had taken down four targets.

  “Matos,” Onca radioed to the temp command post. “You have to shoot those drones down. They can see us coming.”

  “He says he’s on it, Major,” Maria said then said no more.

  Strange that she had answered for him. Why was Matos not on the comms himself?

  A question for later. In the meantime, Matos could be trusted to defy the military. He’d been doing it all his adult life.

  Onca looked across the complex, through the walls and zoomed in to his men’s locations. The Beast was rolling in through the front gate. It would get past the physical security measures, the adaptable tracks would make light work of the tire spikes but it would have to traverse the largest of the anti-vehicle bomb barrier walls.

  No matter. The Beast was only part of the plan. It would draw attention at the least and, if they were lucky, RPG and laser fire from inside the building. The terrorists had grown increasingly well-armed over the last couple of years and for an attack of this scale—the largest ever in Brazil, perhaps the largest anywhere—he had no doubt they would have pulled out all the stops. Indeed, they had been detected trundling in trolleys of equipment and no doubt that included the rocket propelled explosives and laser batteries that intel said had been on the market until recently. Onca prayed the terrorists would waste their ammo on the Beast. It had cost him a fortune, wiping out Sabre Rubro’s bank account and most of its credit. It cost more than one of the stealth helos, AI system included. Designed and built in the United States, the Beast was an APC with a full suite of countermeasures and was as close to invulnerable as a vehicle of that weight could be. The plan was for the terrorists to shoot it with everything they had while the other four teams moved in. The Beast scared terrorists into reacting to it and, tactically speaking, that was priceless.

  Bravo Team made its way deeper and lower into Building C across the factory site. Delta and Echo pushed deeper into the compound via the maintenance access tunnels that ran from the workers’ town in the outer perimeter.

  His own team waited on him, stacked up on the stairwell door. He gestured to proceed and they pushed on down to ground level without making any contact. There was no one showing up on thermal or electric scans.

  The stairwell to the underground levels was on the opposite side of the building and they moved through the lobby, then the communal area, then an empty café. His other teams also advanced, all the while the mission clock counted up.

  The site was vast. For the first time in his short career at the head of a private security cooperative, he wished he had more men. Then again, to properly cover a place as big as the Abora Biopharma complex, he would need a battalion, at least.

  Audio scans were picking up a lot of noise. It sounded industrial. Whirring and grinding.

  “Maria,” he said quietly as they advanced. “Identify that audio.”

  “Algorithms processing,” Maria said, already working on the problem. She was almost as expensive as the Beast but Onca was glad he had invested in her. In truth, she was too young and he didn’t trust all the internal augmentation she had in her body and brain but he couldn’t deny she had been the best candidate by far, with the most glowing recommendations.

  They stacked up by the stairwell door.

  “Hold up,” Onca said and looked at Blanco. “Local scan. B-drones.”

  Blanco removed the scanner and ducked to the bottom of the door. He fed three of the tiny, spherical B-drones into the tiny gap.

  Ferreira looked at Onca, his head tilted a fraction to the left. Before they had left, Onca had repeated to the company the importance of speed on a large site like the Abora Biotech complex. They had a lot of ground to cover indoors and they needed to rush through. By slowing them down he was changing the plan and risked the coordination of the five teams. On the other hand, his men trusted him. The legendary Major Onca could do no wrong.

  Yeah, right.

  “Prelim results on audio. Confirm sounds consistent with drilling,” Maria said. “Likely from the access tunnel network.”

  “Trying to collapse the tunnels?” Onca said, watching Blanco checking the B-drone data on his pad. “Barricade themselves in?”

  “Affirmative,” Maria said, sounding certain. “Pattern suggests drilling consistent with methods for demolition charges.”

  Blanco watched the B-drones stream on his AugHud while the others covered the door.

  Delta and Echo teams were in the tunnels.

  He had a moment or two to make a decision on whether to pull those teams back.

  Demolition of steel reinforced concrete structures took days to do properly. On the other hand, if all they wanted to do was bring down a small section of tunnel in order to barricade the complex, that wouldn’t place his teams under much risk. The chance of them being under that specific section of tunnel when it collapsed was small and if the explosives were rigged to blow by proximity trigger or something similar then his men’s equipment would pick it up. If the tunnel section came down behind his men, so be it. They would fight through and walk out the front door when it was all over. If it came down in front of them, on the other hand, it put the whole operation in jeopardy.

  “Delta and Echo, come in,” he said on the command channel. “Double time through the access tunnels. Watch for hidden triggers. Maria, overlay probable drilling locations to Delta and Echo, all team members.”

  Once they repeated and confirmed the order, he saw through his AugHud that their pace increased. Fear of being crushed was a powerful motivation.

  “Blanco?” Onca asked his own team memb
er.

  “Seems clear,” Blanco said, arms’ length away but speaking through comms. Their armor blocked sounds of conversational volume. “Negative contacts on B-drone data.”

  Seems clear.

  Onca knew then that he wasn’t the only one unnerved by the change of behavior in the terrorists.

  He checked the status of the hostages. It showed all were still in the dining hall inside Building A. Workers separated from the APs, as was normal. Bravo descended toward them from above. Delta and Echo were close to position, coming up from underneath. The Beast was trundling up to the front door.

  “Alright,” he said to the rest of Alpha Team, stacked up at the stairwell door. He stopped himself warning them to watch the corners and watch for triggers. They knew their jobs as well as he did. “Blitz to the Target Ops CP doors then breach and clear on Phase Three.”

  The four of them rushed through the door into the stairwell, flowing down the levels by section, one pair covering while the other advanced. Down and down toward level UG4, each man in his team weighed down with weapons, ammo, equipment, and body armor and together they made a huge noise clattering down the stairs.

  And yet no targets came out to stop them.

  He could see them on the 4th floor below ground as they approached. A tight cluster of red dots throbbing as they moved about a single room.

  It was difficult to get quality data on below-ground interiors but they had the building layout plus audio data from the probes they had embedded on the roof plus the ones launched into the ground by their A-drones. Along with thermal sensors and electromagnetic analysis, they showed the targets clustered in the largest meeting room on that floor. That room had communications equipment and other electronic devices lighting them up like a beacon.

  A beacon that said, kill us.

  For all their changes in behavior, by barely contesting any perimeter, they still hadn’t learned how predictable their attacks had become to Sabre Rubro.