Bound by Honor

by Terry Mixon

  “Belay that, Corporal,” Brad told her, even as he smiled. “I mean it. Anyone who goes on this operation is risking their lives for the chance to be declared rogue by Guild and Commonwealth alike. If you want to step aside, it will not be held against you.”

  No one moved. Sixty elite mercenary commandoes looked back at him with grim determination, and his smile broadened.

  “In that case, people, Colonel Kawa will go over what we know of the target.”

  They didn’t know much, really. They knew there was a facility inside the zone that Director Harmon had identified and Brad was relatively certain they’d be able to identify in a close flyover.

  That was it.

  There were more questions afterward, of course.

  “So, I’m in, but…this is Earth,” one of the pilots pointed out. “Not only do we need to dodge the Commonwealth, but we also have to dodge the local powers, too. How are we doing that?”

  “May I, boss?” Saburo asked. Brad gestured for him to go ahead.

  “I’ve been coordinating our plans with some trusted people at the Agency,” Saburo told them all. “The first part of this mess is that we’re going to be running special transponders the Agency has given us. They switch over who we’re supposed to be at random intervals, blending us in with civilian traffic.

  “The second part is that Antarctica isn’t actually part of any of the nations on the surface. It’s international waters and territory—so it’s UN jurisdiction.”

  Everyone, including Brad, gave the Colonel a blank look at the description, and he sighed.

  “Commonwealth jurisdiction,” he clarified. “Or close enough as makes no difference, anyway. There’s no official overflight by anybody else, no radar towers, nothing. Just research stations and, apparently, someone’s secret prison.

  “So, the Agency’s transponders will get us into Antarctic airspace, and once there, there shouldn’t be anyone to see us.”

  “What about the people we’re coming for?” Jimenez asked.

  “Well, it turns out that the same stealth coating we have for anti-radar in space works just fine in atmosphere,” Brad said brightly. “And the retractable wings are designed to keep our radar profile low. We’re not quite as stealthy as, say, the recon spaceplane we had scouting this out for us, but if they’re not expecting trouble, they won’t see us coming.”

  “Thermal sensors should be enough for us to find the target, at which we come in hard and fast,” Saburo told them. “We blow the roof in with explosives and hope like hell we come in somewhere near the cells. If Reece or our crackers can find a surface data access before we kick the door in, that would be fantastic, but we can’t rely on it.”

  “We’re going in blind, people,” Brad warned them. “We’re fighting in a full gee, which we train for but we aren’t used to, and we’re assaulting a fortified position.

  “It is entirely possible that the people we’re going after truly do have the legal sanction we don’t. This is a crap job—but our friend is in there. And so is the evidence of just who is funding the Cadre.

  “So, if we pull this off, we yank the rug out from under the bastards who’ve been screwing the System for years. We start the path to getting our justice. But it’s going to be a crap job,” he repeated. “You’re my Vikings. The best. But I need to know, are you up for it?”

  He shouldn’t have worried. The roar of assent that came back nearly deafened him.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  “We’re at our lowest point, twenty-five meters above the water,” the pilot reported. “Coming in low and fast; we are approaching the ice shelf at six hundred klicks per hour.”

  Brad had underestimated just how heavy he was going to feel on Earth. He regularly worked out in full gravity gyms, but that was noticeably different from actually being permanently in a one-gee environment.

  He could move in it, he could deal with it…but he was heavy.

  If it was bothering his shuttle pilot, the man wasn’t showing it. The spacecraft came screaming across the oceans of Earth and jumped slightly to stay twenty meters above the glaciers ahead of it.

  “This is like nothing I’ve ever seen before,” Saburo said over the radio. “Goes from near-infinite water to looking like an ice rock. Earth is weird.”

  “And yet it all feels kind of right, doesn’t it?” Brad replied. Heavy as he felt, that sense was there. He wasn’t used to this—and yet his body seemed to think it was right and every other weight he’d had his entire life was wrong.

  “Yeah,” the Colonel agreed. “It does at that. Almost feels wrong to be fighting here.”

  Brad snorted.

  “You’ve read more history than I have,” he pointed out. “Have humans ever not fought here?”

  There was a long pause.

  “No. Still feels weird to come home just to fight, though.”

  “Won’t argue that.”

  “Two minutes to the target zone,” the pilot reported. “Beginning slowdown for our first recon pass.”

  “Stay on passive scanners,” Brad ordered. “We’ve already run into one bunch of assholes with antiaircraft systems where there shouldn’t be any.”

  With their wings extended, the shuttles were lifting bodies and could fly in the air…to a point. Their minimum speed to avoid falling was apparently over two hundred kilometers an hour, though, which could be a problem for the survey.

  If he wasn’t trying to be stealthy, they could just hover. The shuttles had more than enough power and fuel for that, but they were actually sneakier in motion with their engines reduced.

  The Commodore pulled up a repeater screen on his helmet, showing him the sensor sweeps his shuttles were completing. There really wasn’t anything out there. They’d passed near a coastal research station—and that station’s weather scanners probably knew something was wrong.

  That was it. Even now, nobody lived there. Humanity had colonized even less-hospitable places across the Solar System, but those places didn’t have nicer neighbors an hour’s flight away.

  “Recon zone.”

  Brad focused on the sensor display. The computers and techs were grinding through visual and thermal scanners alike, but there wasn’t much yet. At their current speed, they’d cross through the target zone in just over seven minutes.

  It wasn’t long to try and find a concealed facility.

  “No visual contacts,” someone noted. “The surface is clear. Glacier looks like it moves about a shuttle length a decade; I’m not even seeing signs of a landing pad.”

  “At a guess, they wanted this place invisible from orbit and regular flyovers,” Brad replied. “If we need to use radar, we’ll do it on the second pass, but…”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Tisha Reece’s voice cut in. “They’re clever and sneaky all right, but someone wasn’t going to live without their internet connection.”

  Four red icons appeared on Brad’s screen.

  “Those are remote retransmitters,” she reported. “They’re probably linked to the facility by wire and kept well away, but with all four of them…”

  A new target area drew itself on the screen.

  “The base is almost certainly inside this area. Does that help, Commodore?”

  “Keep this up, Sergeant Reece, and I’m going to stick a commission on you,” Brad told her with a chuckle. Her new target area was less than two kilometers square, a fraction of the original recon zone.

  It was also, interestingly enough, just outside the original recon zone. That zone contained two of her relays, which had probably been the recipient of the tightbeam transmission Ghost Eleven had traced.

  “We’ve got them,” a pilot reported. “They’re buried hard, but we’re looking harder. We’ve got the thermal signature of an underground facility in Reece’s zone.”

  “Where in her zone?” Brad asked.

  The speaker swallowed audibly, and a series of red shapes began to fill in on the scanners. The boxes and cubes of pr
efabricated structures, linked by tunnels and power facilities, stacked next to each other…and then more icons filled in. And more.

  “All of it, sir. That facility is huge.”

  There wasn’t enough time for Brad and his people to set down somewhere, transmit the thermal imaging they had to the Agency, and have a team of analysts in a more relaxed environment go over the layout and identify where they wanted to make their entry.

  “There’s the landing pad,” Saburo pointed out, highlighting the closest set of structures to the surface. “Looks like a standard-opening dome from one of the asteroids, probably with some extra equipment to keep the ice attached and reseal it afterwards. We could go in there, make sure no one escapes.”

  “If we do that, we’ll have to fight through the entire facility to get to the prisoners,” Brad replied. “Consider what happened to Agent Mulroney on Venus. What are the odds any of their prisoners would still be alive by the time we made it to them?”

  “Wasn’t that Cadre?” his subordinate asked.

  “We thought it was Cadre,” Brad said. “What we know is that it was an outside force helping the pirates. What if it wasn’t the Cadre? What if it was these guys, this Red Diamond?”

  Saburo was silent.

  “Then they’ll murder their prisoners and set off a nuke if they can’t get out,” the Colonel finally said. “They won’t have a lot of fanatics, most likely, but they’ll have enough—and considering some of the crap the Cadre pulled, the nuke is probably activated remotely.”

  “So, we need to get to the prisoners ASAP—and make sure we have an exit they can’t block,” Brad concluded. “And if I had a super-secret hell prison hidden away inside my almost-as-secret base, I’d want to be absolutely sure no one escaped.

  “If I’m locking up Agents, I’m locking up some of the best-trained infiltration and hacking experts in the Solar System, so I want to be sure I have as much time as possible to short-circuit any attempt at escape or rescue.”

  Brad highlighted a structure on the map.

  “Which means I’d put it here,” he concluded. “It’s the deepest structure in the facility. There’s nothing directly above it, and there’s only one way in or out. It’s as secure as you can get, and you’d have to go through the entire base to get into or out of it.”

  “Makes sense to me,” Saburo agreed after several seconds’ thought. “So, what’s the plan?”

  “We didn’t take the guns off the shuttles this time,” Brad pointed out. “Or the missiles.”

  “We did put different missiles on,” the Colonel replied. “I signed for the Everdarkened things. Bunker busters, ground-penetrating weapons.”

  “Exactly. How rapidly can you sequence the twelve of them we’ve got to blow a hundred and fifty-meter-deep hole through the ice, big enough for us to take the shuttles down? Preferably without wrecking the bunker itself.”

  “Boss, if my gunners haven’t been constantly updating something along those lines, I’m going to be hiring some new staff shortly!”

  The snow swirling around on the surface of the Antarctic ice had been completely irrelevant to the Vikings’ operations so far. If it had progressed into a true storm, it could have become a problem, but right now the clouds weren’t even enough to help cover them.

  Anyone in the storm would have heard a sudden cascade of thunder, as if the Everlit themselves had decided to unleash the fury of the elements in this desolate place.

  Each of Brad’s shuttles carried two bunker-buster missiles, designed to punch through asteroid crusts to shatter hostile facilities buried underneath. They flew over the target zone in a neat line, each shuttle deploying their missiles one at a time.

  The ice beneath them shattered beneath the blows. The missiles themselves plunged through the ice without even noticing it, and then their warheads vaporized hundreds of tons of ice.

  Then the next missile arrived, blasting the hole deeper and wider—and the shuttles came around for a second pass.

  And a third.

  The third pass, however, they weren’t launching missiles. The hole they’d blasted was still filled with steam and superheated water vapor, but the shuttles could handle that.

  Brad’s spacecraft dove into the pit like avenging angels. Specialized plasma cutters mounted on the underside of the shuttles, intended to cut into starship hulls, hissed to life against the buried metal of the underground complex.

  Forty seconds after the first missile hit the ice, Brad led his people through a still-steaming hole into the secret base.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  The guards in the prison block never had a chance. The few seconds’ warning they had was hardly enough to account for the fact that they were armed with nonlethal weapons and wearing light body armor.

  Brad’s people swarmed over them in seconds, leaving the four men and three women trussed up like turkeys and thrown against the wall of their command center.

  “Saburo, secure that entrance,” Brad ordered. The prison block’s one way in and out was great for keeping prisoners locked in. It was also great for turning this chunk of the base into a fortified position against the rest of the base.

  “Reece, get into their computers,” he continued, gesturing towards the console that clearly controlled the prison block. “Find Falcone, see who else is down here.”

  Troopers followed Saburo towards the door, yanking a heavy desk that had clearly been used for intake with them.

  “Sir,” Reece murmured as she took a seat at the console. “The wall.”

  She pointed at the sigil emblazoned on the wall in boldly colored paint.

  He’d seen it. The same symbol was on the screens. On the guards’ uniforms…and on every piece of Commonwealth Fleet and government gear he’d ever seen.

  The sigil was a wreath made up of stars surrounding a polar map of Earth, all emblazoned in gold on a familiar pale blue. The emblem of the Commonwealth.

  “We knew what we were getting into,” Brad told Reece harshly. “Find those damn Agents.”

  One of the less-disoriented guards struggled her way somewhat upright and glared at him.

  “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” she snapped. “Do you know where you even are?”

  Brad crossed the room in a handful of steps and had his rifle barrel under her jaw.

  “I can guess,” he told her. “But what I know is that this facility was in contact with the Cadre and you have prisoners here I’m tasked to rescue.”

  “The Cadre?” The guard laughed in his face, gun barrel or no gun barrel. “Are you mad? This is a secure training facility for the Commonwealth Secret Service!”

  A chill ran down his spine. The Secret Service?!

  “What’s Red Diamond, then?” he demanded.

  “This base. Red Diamond Division, logistics and infrastructure for the CSS,” the guard told him.

  “I’ve got her!” Reece barked. “And…fuck me. Looks like at least half a dozen other senior Agency types, two of whom my files are saying are dead.”

  “I appreciate your forthcomingness, Miss,” Brad told the guard with a cold smile as he turned back to her. “It’s going to make charging the right people with treason so much easier.”

  He pulled his gun away and walked back to Reece. “Where?”

  “Cell B4. I can lead the way.”

  “I suggest you hurry up,” Saburo told them. “I’ve got drones out along the hallway, and they tell me we’re going to have company!”

  “Hold the line, Colonel. We’re getting our people out.”

  Brad and Reece made their way into the cells. There weren’t as many as Brad had feared…but there were more than he’d really expected, either.

  Six blocks of twelve cells. Seventy-two prisoners.

  “Can we let them out?” he asked.

  “Unlock codes are in everyone’s wrist-comps,” she confirmed. “Any of us can unlock any of the cells.”

  “Hear that, Saburo?” Brad asked.

>   “Yes, sir. I’ll spare two troops to start checking who we’ve got and letting them out. I need the rest out here.”

  As if to underscore the Colonel’s point, gunfire started to echo down the hallway behind them.

  “This is B4,” Reece told him. There was nothing on the door to separate it from the other cells. None of them were numbered individually. Presumably the guards knew by heart and had an augmented-reality overlay for new people.

  “Unlock it,” he ordered.

  Reece complied, and the solid metal door slid upwards, revealing a comfortable, if small and utterly windowless, cell. Kate Falcone was standing next to the door in a combat stance, the sound of gunfire clearly having triggered her paranoia.

  “Agent Falcone, report,” Brad barked, relying on age-old boot camp training to bring his friend into the present.

  She made it halfway out of the combat stance toward standing at attention—and then slumped in relief as she recognized his voice and face.

  “Fuck you, Madrid,” she replied after a moment, but there was only gratitude in her voice. “What took you so long?”

  “Everybody thought somebody else knew what had happened to you,” he told her. “Then we had to get your location from the Cadre and fend off a genocidal attack on Ceres. You know, the usual bullshit at the office.”

  “Speaking of bullshit, do you have any idea how deep we are?” Falcone demanded.

  “Well, this is apparently a Commonwealth Secret Service facility I just invaded,” Brad pointed out. “That fits with a bunch of other stuff I’ve heard and leads back to only one man who can be behind all of this.”

  “Did you know the President’s ‘blind trust’ is a major shareholder in TMF?” the blonde asked dryly. “Because I sure as Everdark didn’t. Not until Secret Service agents showed up to ‘protect me’ prior to my presentation to the Senate.”

  “I’m sorry,” Brad said quietly. “I’m so used to you going dark, it never occurred to me you’d gone missing.”