by G. P. Eliot
But the thing didn’t even slow. Crunch! Its pincers crept closer—
“Five meters!” Even Lory was starting to sound frantic.
“Everyone back!” Hank was saying as the group gave ground. There was no need for the thing to have its red light any more, as the teams suit lights illuminated it perfectly.
Hank felt Lory’s body behind him as they bunched. They’d gained a few meters–but it wasn’t enough.
“No further! I’m at the door!” Cortez was shouting.
Come on–come on–come on! Hank swore. There had to be something that he could do…
There was actually nothing that he could do. But there was something that Madigan could do.
“Rargh!” With a bear-like roar, the giant of a man jumped forward pounding Hank into the wall as his own massive bulk passed by and seized the battle-droid’s pincers in his gloved hands.
Skreeeee—! There was the sound of grinding metal as the pincers jerked closer, and a grunt from the giant of a man as his arms shook as he tried to stop them closing on him.
The battle-droid’s tracks and gears whined with effort, and pushed forward a further few feet.
“Oof!” Hank was compressed behind Madigan now. He had never got so close to another man in all his life…
“I can hold it…” Madigan was gasping on the suit-to-suit channel. “I can…”
It didn’t sound like even he could hold it, as Madigan leaned in until his head was well within the arc of the pincers and his shoulders bunched and rippled with the effort of pushing back. Hank watched in horror as the man’s boots were starting to give, slipping backwards inch by inch.
“Help him out!” Hank shouted, throwing his shoulder and arms around Madigan’s waist as he felt Lory grab him, and more hands pile onto the back of the Madigan and the human pyramid as they added their force to his. There was a sudden grating, screeching sound that only grew louder as they all heaved at Madigan as he heaved at the battle droid. Hank had never really considered how strong Madigan was, but now he knew in very intimate detail as together they managed to gain a couple of meters back – but that was it.
“Boss? You’re sweating there…” Ida sounded worried in his ear. She rather unhelpfully pulled up Hank’s heart rate and blood pressure readouts on his HUD–all of which were alarmingly high.
“I can’t do this for much longer…” Hank whispered, as he felt both Madigan and Lory behind him start to shake with exhaustion as well.
The metal gears of the battle droid started to spin and whirr.
“Overhead!” Hank heard Cortez shout through their alpha channel, as something large and very uncomfortable thumped into the back of his head.
“What the…?” he shouted back angrily, and his loss of concentration meant they suddenly lost one of the very feet that they had gained.
But, lying half across his and Lory’s back was one half of the metal bench that Steed and Madigan had used to wedge the Displacement door. Its end was a twisted curl of chewed metal–but a good meter and a half was still in good condition.
“The tracks!” Hank saw immediately what they needed to do–and in that moment he let go of Madigan to seize the metal bench—
The battle-droid surged forward as Madigan roared in anger—
“Hgh!” Hank hurled the bench as best he could down at the robot’s tracks, not aiming for the studded, metal shod front that would only further mangle the bench; but instead for where the creature’s cog-wheels met the inside of the tracks…
More sounds of scraping and clanging as the droid lurched forward a further half a foot and then halted as the metal bench caught between the cogs and held. But for how long?
“Ugh,” Madigan fell backwards to his knees. There was barely any room behind them, and the thing was still crunching its pincers just a hand’s breadth from their face.
“Let me at it!” their cook was shouting, struggling to get to the front. “It’s a robot! I’m good with robotics!”
Which was all true, Hank saw as they manhandled the cook forward, narrowly avoiding decapitating him with the thing’s pincers, for him to awkwardly clamber onto the side of the bench. Cortez wasn’t exactly the largest of men by any stretch of the imagination, but even he had problems managing to wedge into the tight gap like a child’s game of jigsaw blocks. In his hands he had his mechanical module-unit taken from his suit’s utility belt, from which he hurriedly withdrew a tiny, micro-powered impact driver and got to work on the thing’s carapace.
Sckreeee…Crunch! The droid chugged forward another half a foot or so, earning a terrified yelp from Professor Serrano behind them.
“Almost got it, almost…” Cortez’s arms and head had disappeared behind the opened panel, and there was the sound of grunting and clangs, as Hank assumed he was doing something very technical and very clever to its innards.
Hopefully disemboweling them, he thought.
“Aha!” There was a burst of sparks and suddenly the battle-droid’s whines and screeched died down to a low murmur, and then a halt.
“The master control circuit,” Cortez managed to push himself back out of the hole, waving a mess of wires attached to a green-and-gold microchip board.
“Just as long as it’s dead, I don’t care what it is…” Hank muttered, every one of his muscles feeling as though they had been stretched on a rack. He slumped backwards against the sprawl of other exhausted bodies behind him and groaned in pain.
Oxygen Levels: 9 minutes decreasing
The Captain wondered when and if this day was ever going to end.
“Uh, guys?” Cortez sounded perturbed.
Oh please, not again…
“Can anyone help me get unstuck?”
7
“Gotcha!” murmured the strangely echoing, almost-electronic modulation of the Jackal’s voice as he looked down from the Bridge of his ship, the Pequod.
Below them was the icy mantle of the research planetoid, X3-2e. The plains glittered silver with frozen and re-freezing water vapor and was striated with black lines of basalt rock.
But there was one shape that looked very out of place on the icy world: the large, preposterous form of the Lordstar as it sat on its mooring legs just outside of the bulkhead entrance.
“Missiles ready, sir,” one of his seconds said gruffly.
It felt good to the Jackal to be surrounded by his own people once more. These were the Wolverines, the personal black-ops strike force, bodyguards, and ‘get-things-done’ for the highest of Union officials. The Jackal was comforted by the fact that they were all men and women mostly like him. Or all on the same spectrum, anyway. The Union psychologists would be hard-pressed to find another man quite so ruthless as the Jackal, but they had tried…
That was the difference between him and Captain Hank Snider, wasn’t it? The Jackal thought as the Pequod lowered like a predatory shark.
The Jackal had read Hank’s old Union files. He was special forces. He might have had the skills to make it as a Wolverine perhaps–but he was weak, wasn’t he? Hank Snider had been dismissed for taking battle-stims recreationally, and for turning up drunk to duty.
Not so for the Jackal and the Wolverines. They were all the sorts of people who lived for the fight. People who would do anything to make sure that they were the best. It didn’t matter what sort of target they had to walk through, either. The Jackal would just as happily shoot women, children and the elderly if he thought the mission required it–and sometimes even if it didn’t, either.
“No.” The Jackal said as he turned around, already latching on his own soldier suit, and nodding to the section of waiting Wolverines to do the same. “We’re not going to destroy the Lordstar, but you have my permission to scuttle her. I want a four-person away team to get into that ship, download its memory servers, and make sure that the Lordstar will never fly again.” The Jackal grinned as he led the way.
“Actually…” he paused by the door of the Bridge. “Lay a few claymores and magnet
-mines about the Lordstar as well, will you?” the Jackal grinned savagely. “Put them somewhere nice–under the crew beds maybe, or in the shower cubicles…” the Jackal said seriously, all trace of humor gone.
The trained assassin was done with underestimating Captain Snider and his crew. They had a surprising ability to stay alive–even in the most extreme of situations.
And this time the Jackal wanted to be certain that if Captain Snider and the others did manage to somehow escape his clutches, and if there was even the remotest chance that they might manage to get that heap of junk, the Lordstar, airborne again–then there would some nasty surprises waiting for them.
“Sir, yes sir!” the Wolverines chorused unthinkingly. “For the Union!”
“For the Union,” The Jackal said in a quieter voice, although in his heart he was thinking; for revenge!
“Here she is,” Lory breathed a sigh of relief as she saw that neither was the emergency escape chute guarded nor did it have crazy slicing doors–and thankfully no battle droids either.
At last, it seemed as though something had managed to go right for them.
The team stood in the generator room for the research facility–a complicated space of large ceramic and metal pipes attached to dull white units that hummed and flickered with electrical read outs. Lory had led the way to the back of the room, where the large chute door was surrounded by black and yellow signs.
“This leads us to the rest of the facility.” And the Message Center, she thought, checking the ammo count on her gun. It was low, so she swapped the clip for a full magazine now, just in case.
“How far?” Hank said, popping his head around the doorway to see a long, straight metal corridor that was dimly lit with orange emergency lights.
“Not far,” Lory confirmed, moving to take the lead despite Hank’s look of annoyance. “I know where I’m going, I infiltrated this place, right?”
“Right,” Hank murmured behind her, still managing to look completely put out.
“I still don’t get where everyone’s gone…” Steed whispered behind Hank. Lory didn’t care. Just as long as the scientists weren’t here, getting in the way of her kill-zone.
“Probably evacuated as soon as Cortez powered down the X3 A.I.,” Lory said, stepping forward into the area. She felt that same old spark of excitement and nervousness that she did every time she was about to enter danger. The beautiful Shimmering Path agent actually quite liked the feeling. It kept her on edge.
“Serrano?” Lory heard Hank whispering over their suit-to-suit channel as they lightly jogged forward. The tunnel ahead seemed to stretch on forever–but she was sure that she could see a lighter glow at the very end–that had to be the Message Center access way, right?
“Serrano–hold back with Madigan and Cortez. As soon as we’ve made sure the coast is clear, I want you and Lory working on downloading that message of yours, okay?”
“I know the exact terminal that we need to—” Serrano was burbling away, and Lory filtered him out.
Concentrate. This was it. They were almost there. All that they had done; everything that she had gone through to get here–they were finally about to get their hands on the Message that would bring down the Union itself.
And the day won’t come soon enough, Lory thought as she jogged. She thought about all her fellow agents whom she had known, and just how many had died, been captured, murdered–or even just simply ‘disappeared’.
With the Message she would be able to make everything right again. She would be able to even the balance between the human worlds. She would be able to put right all of the wrongs that she had seen…
Warning! Proximity Alert!
Her environmental suit was basic compared to the captain’s–she’d opted for the lighter-weight version which allowed her greater freedom of movement as she always preferred fighting with blades and hand weapons than she did with guns–but even she had to admit that bullets could be a lot more effective sometimes; thankfully, her lightweight suit did still have the Heads-Up-Display, and the suit-to-suit communicators–and motion sensors.
“What’s up?” Hank was saying as he almost ran into her.
“Watch-it!” Lory hissed, checking her HUD.
Blip...Blip...Blip…
On Lory’s Heads-Up, she could see the expanding circles of her sensors pinging off the mass of people behind her, the very noisy mass of people who know nothing about deep-cover infiltration, she thought angrily as she clicked off her suit lights, forcing the others to do the same but there was also, right out on the edge of her forward scan, a singular blip!
“If that’s another battle-droid, I swear to god I’m going home…” Hank groaned.
“Too small,” Lory ignored his attempt at humor. As if going home was an option for any of them. Lory didn’t even have a home anymore. Where would it be? Certainly not Cubanea, that was for sure! Distracted by the Captain, she wondered if she would ever make it to the Confederation worlds, perhaps starting out again somewhere…
Not while the Union still exists, she took a deep breath, raised her pistol, and started to slide her feet forward.
They were almost at the end of the chute, where it appeared to open out into a shadowed room. A matching generator room? Lory thought, as her suit’s microphones picked up the hum and whirr of machinery.
“Back up,” she held out a fist to halt the others, before pointing at Hank and Steed, and nodding for them to follow her. They might as well make themselves useful, she thought grimly–even though a part of her still wondered if she would have been better doing this alone, just with Professor Serrano behind her.
Ah well. Too late now, Lory thought as she reached the edge of the generator room and lowered herself to a crouching position.
Blip-blip-blip!
The movement sensors were coming a lot faster and closer together now. The person couldn’t be far away at all.
Lory could see, once again, a matching set of large banks of ceramic and metal pipes looping in and out of white metal units. The flickering electric lights of the generator displays created a firefly-like effect over the pipes and ceiling.
Lory started to edge forward—
“7! Report!”
Lory froze when she heard the sudden gruff voice of a man bark out from amongst the passageways made by the pipes. He was just on the other aisle from her. If he looked down, through the apertures and gaps then he would be sure to see her…
“Number 7–get your behind moving!” the man gruffly said again. “I don’t want have to come down here again just to make sure you haven’t fallen asleep!”
Lory was clearly listening to some kind of superior officer, and as for the unlucky grunt who had caught the man’s ire…
“You told me to keep to my post, sir!” said the answering voice of a man, on the other side of the pipe-passageway. Crap, Lory swore. She had managed to get herself surrounded. A superior officer on her right, and a grunt on her left—
“I said keep to your post–but also keep me updated, damn it!” the angry superior said. “You know there’s Confederates or terrorists or someone running around here. Did you activate the battle-droid? Did you send it ahead, just like I told you or is it still sitting back in the research facility, about as much use as a mouse’s fart?”
“Sir, of course I—” the grunt was starting to say, when two things happened.
One: Lory was sure that she had heard that guard’s voice before somewhere–but where?
Two: Hank and Steed stepped out from the chute passageway, raised their pistols, and pointed them at the first available target.
“Sayonara, sucker...!” Hank said. Such a cheesy line! Lory thought.
But the Captain’s love of drama had given the superior a moment to spin, bringing up his own rifle—
One of her team–Lory didn’t know if it was Hank or Steed, fired. Which was a stupid move, Lory swore as she leapt to her feet. The sound of the gunfire echoed in this small space, and j
ust a heartbeat later when her ears had stopped ringing, she could hear the scrabbling feet of the lazy guard racing past the pipes. And the shouts of alarm as more of the red-suited guards poured into the room.
“Sarge!” Lory could hear them shouting for their superior officer in alarm as she rolled, trying to get a bead on the escaping lazy guard.
Well, there goes our infiltration attempt, Lory thought, and fired.
Thwap! The bullet ricocheted off one of the pipes by the man’s shoulder, earning a snarl of surprise as he threw himself to the floor, and now the other red-suits were opening fire on them—
