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

by Dan Davis

The executive meeting room they had chosen to hole up in would probably have little more than a single long table and a couple dozen chairs, maybe pushed to one side to make space for all the equipment. Either way, it was an open room with little to stop his men’s rounds from finding its target. Surely, they were not so stupid as to have only two men above ground to defend them from the incursion they could see happening online, thanks to the news drones that still flew high over the factory compound.

  What was Matos doing back at the airport? He had never failed so completely before, never.

  At the bottom of the stairwell, they pushed through a pair of fire doors and into a corridor that ran square around the executive meeting room, through the wall in front of them. The executive meeting room had two doors, one in sight, the other around the corner up ahead.

  Half of Alpha Team pushed on to the next door, moving quietly now and ready to respond if the terrorists reacted before Phase Three was triggered. Onca kept a close eye for any changes in the movement or audio coming from the room beyond the door he was at.

  The targets must have known the attack was happening, they must have done. They must know they had lost two men in this building and four already in Building A. And then they milled about in a big cluster at one end of the executive meeting room.

  Something was wrong.

  Onca checked in with his units, speaking softly. “Report targets or signs of drilling or demolitions.”

  “Delta. Negative on all counts. At checkpoint four-nine. Proceeding into Building A.”

  “Echo. Negative, sir. Checkpoint five-one-one. Holding at Building A.”

  “Bravo. Four tangos down. Proceeding to checkpoint two-two-zero.”

  Both Delta and Echo had made it through both access tunnels without seeing any terrorist drilling crews or additional guards.

  Where are they?

  “Ops,” Onca asked Maria. “My local audio data suggests drilling is continuing but they’re not in the tunnels.”

  “Sorry, sir, it’s difficult to pinpoint. Could be the floors above the tunnels or different sections, they are extensive.”

  Maria was the finest civilian operations coordinator on the market but she covered her ass just as smoothly, as if she had her answer prepared. He made a mental note to dock her pay. Civilians hated that.

  Aside from the six targets near the roofs, the rest of the targets had clustered in three locations over the entire, vast site. Why hide their operations HQ inside the meeting room on UG4, in a separate building and without holding hostages in with them? Why hold those hundreds of hostages all in the same, open place, and indefensible place, up in the employee restaurant? It was always easy to assume the enemy was tactically ignorant because they usually were. Was that the case here?

  The regular movement from inside continued. Male and female voices murmured. Maria’s AIs, performing real-time analysis on the conversations, did not pick up any words or tones of concern. Nine terrorists within, the leaders, perhaps, of the attack. Judging from the technical and communications equipment there, unquestionably the coordinators of it.

  That failure would lead to their deaths at the hands of Sabre Rubro.

  His AugHud showed his teams reaching their positions, just seconds after Alpha stacked up on the meeting room doors. He watched Bravo finish descending from the roof to their entry point outside the restaurant. He watched Delta and Echo come up the two emergency stairwells on either side of that same restaurant. The three teams would fill the space with flashes, bangs, high-frequency sound and ultra-low frequency waves, as well as gas grenades that choked and blinded everyone not in masks.

  He watched through the walls as the icon of the huge Beast rolled up to the front door with teams Zeta and Kappa ready to breach the main entrance and take out the dozens of terrorists that intel said guarded it.

  In the corner of his AugHud, the mission phase clock turned over.

  PHASE 3.

  “All teams,” Onca said. “Go, go, go.”

  Alpha blew both doors into pieces with their breaching charges. Even with his helmet and earpieces muffling the noise and his armor protecting his body, the simultaneous blasts shook the world around Onca.

  Before the debris had time to fall, Ferreira and Onca advanced inside at full speed, weapons up and ready to unload on the people inside while checking their fields of fire.

  There were terrorists inside, true enough. Clustered across the room from him, just as the sensors had described.

  But they were safe from harm, inside a protective box. The group of targets stood within a huge metal frame with transparent panels as the sides and roof. Like a cage sheathed in glass. A safe room with clear sides.

  Ferreira and the others fired as they advanced into the empty space in the center of the room while Onca slowed, hanging back and looking for threats.

  The defensive structure had been assembled in a hurry. Two mounds of discarded packing material had been heaped in opposite corners of the meeting room.

  Onca followed behind Ferreira but did not fire. He watched the rounds smash into the side of the clear panels. They did little damage, crumpling some of the outer layers of the glass panels.

  Immediately, his three men understood that the glass sides were bulletproofed and Ferreira and Barbosa unhooked grenades.

  This is wrong.

  Onca’s mind whirred, surveying the scene, calculating possible tactical responses. What purpose would a safe room serve? They had trapped themselves. All Onca had to do was cover it in charges and blow them to pieces or pump gas inside or just cover the ventilation until they passed out. The tactic served no obvious purpose. The terrorists inside were obscured by the smoke and debris cloud and cracked glass but Onca had the distinct impression they were anything but scared. Then, he was sure of it.

  They were smiling.

  A tingling chill rose up in his chest and neck, even as he shouted a warning.

  “Fall back,” Onca cried out, on all channels, scanning the rest of the room, sweeping back and forth with his weapon. “Fall back.”

  A familiar whirring sound started up even as he spoke. Flashes of light. The piles of discarded cardboard flashed and jumped and flew apart into a thousand pieces.

  Onca turned, ducking low and ran back toward the breached doorway.

  Two sentry drones, hidden in the mounds of trashed cardboard, opened up. Rounds spat from the rotating barrels in great gouts of flame and a deafening roar filled the room as the first rounds found their mark.

  Ferreira was a step behind him. As Onca dived for the safety of the entrance, the bullets slapped into Ferreira’s armor, the plate inserts clacking as they were hit with a stream of impacts.

  Sabre Rubro’s armor was the best in the world. It would resist a magazine of 10mm full automatic fire. Their helmets would resist a high-powered rifle round.

  But it had to be practical. A man had to be able to operate swiftly and with freedom of movement.

  And it could not resist belt-fed .50cal armor-piercing rounds fired at a rate of 2,000 per minute. That was over thirty rounds per second tearing into Ferreira. Onca barely reached the doorway as he was showered in a spray of blood and chunks of flesh and clothing and armor that had just been his team mate.

  Blinded by the mist of blood, Onca smacked into the ragged doorframe and rolled into the corridor, out of the line of fire.

  The drone tracked him through the wall, firing continuously into the masonry on the other side of where he lay, swiftly turning the bricks to rubble. He just had a couple of seconds before it chewed through like a power tool so he got to his feet and ran toward the stairwell.

  And he fell.

  The pain shot through his back and he collapsed onto his face.

  “Abort,” Onca growled into his radio. “It’s a trap. All teams fall back.”

  “Alpha…,” a garbled transmission came through from Delta. “… in. Repeat, all hostages… dead. It’s like… all dead. They… hours. No…” It ended
in rapid, jerking static.

  The noise was not static. He realized it was the sound of multiple drone sentries opening up on his men.

  “Abort,” Onca said, his voice weak. “All teams, abort.”

  One drone gun fell silent behind him. The other, trained on him, kept firing into the wall, traversing along it now.

  Onca reached behind him and felt a shredded hole in his armor at his lower back. His gloved hand came back shining with dark blood. The bullet or shrapnel might not have penetrated into his body cavity but it had at the least shredded the flesh of his back on one side.

  The one chewing into the wall behind him whirred to a stop.

  It was strangely quiet. His adaptive ear protectors dialed back the audio suppression and Onca heard footsteps crunching behind him.

  In one movement, he rolled onto his good side and fired a burst into the man approaching. The attacker came on in a crouched trot, his finger on the trigger and long weapon held ready but not in the firing position, like the amateur he was. He wore bulky, old-fashioned body armor vest and a military-style helmet, though it had no visor and the idiot had painted it white with a terrorist symbol stenciled on the front.

  It was a wild shot, weapon tracking and bucking while shooting from the hip and fired lying on his back. Still, the five-shot burst clattered in his hands and ripped the approaching man’s throat out. The dead terrorist dropped like water, his home-printed assault rifle bouncing once into the debris of the doorway.

  Onca rolled over, got to one knee and threw himself over to the wall opposite the door to the stairwell. He winced and cried out as his back touched the wall. Still, he kept his weapon up and he sighted down the corridor at the blasted entrance to the meeting room.

  His injury was bad. The worst he’d ever had and he knew it could prove fatal if he didn’t receive medical attention almost immediately. One or more of the huge AP rounds must have caught him after all. He’d thought he’d bumped into the door frame but it had been worse than that. The pain of it was still distant, suppressed by the adrenaline and terror and yet it came on over the next few seconds, more and more powerfully. He imagined the flesh of his back spread across the jagged ruin of his body armor, his blood gushing out freely.

  So, he was dead, then. His men, too. Not just Alpha, likely the others. Perhaps the teams in the APC were alright.

  He tried to raise them on the radio while he switched his magazine for a full one.

  Static.

  He tried Ops.

  “Maria. Come in.”

  Nothing but static. They were blocking his transmissions, flooding the electromagnetic spectrum with noise.

  All that was left to him was to take as many of the terrorists with him as he could before he died.

  They came at him from three sides at once. Even while it was happening he had time for a tiny thought that it was both unusual and impressive for a terrorist group to be so highly coordinated and aggressive in their maneuvering.

  The first man was a CyBioCon member. His eyes were covered in heavy duty spectrum lenses and he was one of the types that had his cranium fused with molded alloy sheets. For some reason, they thought such nonsense would make them better fighters but they never seemed to teach themselves the basics or wear anti-ballistic masks. Onca shot him between the eyes in the instant he appeared.

  But the other two…

  One came from the corridor behind him, appearing around the corner and opening fire with an SMG.

  The other burst from the stairwell doors and blasted Onca in the head from three meters away.

  How had they ever gotten behind him? Surely, there had not been enough time for them to leave the meeting room by the other entrance and circle back? Certainly, not the one in the stairwell. In that case, they had been in the building, lying in wait. Or had approached after his team had passed. How had his sensors not picked them up?

  The hostages were dead. All of them. They had been dead when his team found them but they had been showing on the AugHud as alive just seconds before. And the sensors had not detected the magnetic or electrical presence of the sentry drones.

  The sensors were wrong. Something had gone very wrong.

  When you are ambushed, the worst thing you can do is stay where you are. You pick a direction and punch your way through with extreme aggression.

  The first one that Onca heard was the one coming from the corridor behind him so he spun about and advanced, firing as he went. The guy wore a tactical helmet and a heavy armored vest but no throat protection. The tac-armored fool began shooting and, as Onca’s rounds punched through his throat and neck, the man squeezed his trigger and his body went rigid.

  It was just bad luck. When a man is hit in the T-zone, he usually goes limp all over. The problem with throat shots was the rounds just slipped right through without causing the kind of ballistic shock that will knock out a man’s nervous system.

  His target’s arm and body went stiff and he fell back, twisting and unloaded a whole magazine in a wild arc.

  A couple of the rounds pinged off Onca’s chest plates but he kept moving down the corridor, half leaning against the wall. Half a step after he passed the stairwell door, on the opposite side of the corridor, the final man burst through the doors and blasted the back of Onca’s head with a shotgun slug.

  His helmet took the full force of the impact and the shock absorbers at his neck prevented whiplash trauma. Even so, it was like being kicked by a mule and he fell against the wall, snapping off a burst as he did so that ripped into the man with the shotgun.

  Yet a stray round or piece of shattered masonry from the death-gripped SMG found its way into his body through the destroyed armor, smashed a rib. The round broke into pieces, sending shards of bone and shreds of metal into his body cavity.

  He fell.

  The last thing he was aware of as his world went dark was the sound of his men in all remaining squads being torn to pieces by automatic fire.

  ***

  Even before he opened his eyes, he knew he had been out for just a few seconds. The stink of fresh blood and the tang of cordite filled his face.

  And pain. His back screamed with pain.

  Two men dragged him, face down, by the arms. His legs and feet snagged on the rubble and wood debris of the door they had breached. After a few more steps, he was dumped face down on the ground, his helmet banging into the floor. The visor was out of alignment, blocking his vision.

  He could not think. All he knew was he had to get away. To fight.

  It hurt to take a breath and he coughed out something wet and viscous.

  “He’s awake,” someone shouted and they hit him again, in the head and back.

  Two of them held him under the arms and dragged him to his knees. They held him there while he hung limp in their arms, relaxing his body as if he was unable to move. Which may, for all he knew, have been the case. But he would assume that his body would obey when he needed it to. He eyed them with peripheral vision. Both had a machete in the belts and sidearm at the hips. One had a Kalashnikov over his back on a strap.

  They held him up so his knees barely touched the ground, their fingers digging into the Kevlar covering his armpits.

  Someone lifted his head. Onca found himself staring into the augmented eyes of Axiom of Extensionality, the nom de guerre of a Columbian pro-human extremist born Louis Balbo.

  “It is him,” Axiom said, his artificial corneas shining with augmented data. “I told you. I knew it and I was right and we have Major Onca himself.”

  Axiom held Onca’s head at arm’s length and looked down with a grin on his face.

  Onca was astonished to find the leader of Humanus Prosthesis actually on the ground, leading an operation. His shaved head glinted with the tech surgically implanted on his cranium and face. The Proths flaunted their augments. Fetishized them.

  “Well, well,” another voice said. “If there was ever any doubt that we were expressing God’s will today, you may be free of
those doubts now.”

  Onca saw, through blurred vision, the speaker step forward.

  Father Magnus. Born in North America as plain old Jimmy McGuire, he was ex-Catholic turned ascetic and proponent of the inherent divinity of true-born humanity and opposed the artificial human program around the world. He led the Sons of the Light, a group dedicated to wiping out all Artificial People, everywhere and arson was their favorite method for doing so. It was their vast incendiary explosive that caused the fire that burned down half of Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2115.

  “Bullshit,” Axiom said, sneering and still staring down at Onca. “We did this, you credulous old turd. We did.”

  It made no sense for both leaders to be in the same room. They hated each other. Father Magnus believed in the purity of humanity. Whereas Axiom’s core tenet was that humanity had to embrace technology to become our true selves.

  “He should be restrained,” Father Magnus said.

  Axiom scoffed. “He is almost dead. His kidney is hanging out. Look at the blood.”

  Magnus argued. “A soldier such as he-”

  “Is no more than human,” Axiom said. “And he is almost dead. We must inflict humiliation before his body gives up.”

  But then another stepped into view. Tall, severe lines on her long face and wearing urban pattern fatigues

  “We don’t have much time before they send in the regular military.”

  The speaker was a woman he recognized at once as Venus von Victory. No one knew V3’s real name but Onca knew what she believed in. The sanctity of Artificial Persons’ lives. The AP Liberation Front were Marxist-inspired AP Rights activists turned militant operatives and their MO was raiding labs to free the APs and smuggling them into normal society. They also enjoyed assassinating scientists and lab technicians.

  “Calm down, V,” Axiom said. “They won’t know what hit them for hours. They’ll never believe it.”

  Father Magnus edged closer. “Nevertheless, she is right to be concerned. Should they choose to act? They have a whole battalion out there. I would rather be gone.”

  All three organizations had been effectively at war with each other for years. Where the APLF wanted to save APs, the Sons of Light were killing them. Them being together made no sense. None.