Close Proximity - An Aeon14 Space Opera Adventure (Perilous Alliance)
Page 15
“That’s the official word, though there are some conflicting reports that he escaped death by a hair. Either way, Harken’s pulling the strings for now. Girl’s always wanted his power and now she’s seized it.”
“To more pressing matters—the cops are gonna have a gunship here in no time,” Rogers said. “When we hit the end of this alley, we’re going to be a smoking crater.”
“You’d think this is my first high-speed chase through Jericho?” Betty laughed. “Hold on!”
As she spoke, Betty cranked the wheel, and the car fishtailed into through a narrow passage and into sizable garage filled with cars.
“Out, fast!” she hollered, and everyone piled out of the car like it was on fire. Once they were clear, the getaway car tore back out into the alley and continued on its way.
“Nice, a diversion,” Winter said with a nod.
“Yeah, let’s hope it lasts long enough to actually be diverting,” Betty said as she sashayed to a limousine and held open one of the back doors. “Get in, we’ll take this out the front, and be on our way.”
Inside was a bar, with bottles lined on top, and weapons lined below. In the front, a man peered over the divider.
“Where to, Miss Betty?” he asked.
“We’re going to head to that place down near the boulevard out of the dome, but take the scenic route,” Betty replied.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Do you mind?” Winter asked, gesturing to the bar.
“Hands off, Meathead,” Betty admonished. “That’s for paying clients. And you need to stay sharp. We’re not out of this yet.”
The driver eased the limousine around the dozens of cars before exiting the garage onto the street in front of the building. They didn’t spend long on the ground, as the car’s grav lifts powered on and pulled them into the air.
“Let’s just hope we don’t get shot down,” Rogers said as he looked at the police gunships hovering over the city.
“Not going to happen,” Betty said. “They know not to hit a car like this. Besides, they don’t know you have my kind of help.”
“They must be suspicious, though,” Grayson commented.
Before anyone could reply, a gunship only a few hundred meters away fired a missile at a ground target, and a fireball erupted in Montral’s night, reflecting on the dome overhead.
“Not for a bit,” Betty said with a smile. “Gonna take them awhile to sift through that wreckage to see if you’re in what’s left.”
“Damn,” Rogers whispered, “that’s some serious shit.”
“You should spend some more time in Jericho,” Betty said with a frown. “Stuff like that is getting a bit more common here. Gonna get a lot worse if Harken really is in charge now.”
“Sounds like a good reason to spend less time here, not more,” Winter said with a frown.
Betty laughed. “You? I thought you liked this sort of shit.”
“Not this much,” Winter replied.
They rode in silence for the rest of the journey, setting down outside a nondescript apartment complex near the edge of Montral’s dome.
“I’ve passed you the token to get in, Rogers,” Betty said. “Head into the basement, and then to the southeast corner. There’s a hidden passage that will get you into the maintenance tunnels. From there, follow my crew’s marks to the exit on the far side of the dome. You should be pretty close to the dock your shuttle’s at.”
“Thanks,” Rogers said and placed a light kiss on Betty’s cheek. “Now I owe you one.”
“Rogers, dear, this was on the house—for you at least,” Betty replied. “But you, soldier boy, Colonel Grayson, I’ll call on you sometime for you to return the favor.”
Grayson didn’t know what to say, so he simply nodded before following Rogers and Winter out of the car. They stood on the curb and watched it lift away into the sky before Winter laughed.
“C’mon, boys. That was the easy part. We still have to get our ship out of lockdown.”
LIFTOFF
STELLAR DATE: 08.38.8947 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: City of Montral, Jericho
REGION: Gedri System, Silstrand Alliance
Kylie cursed silently as the armor’s stealth system shut off again. Having unreliable stealth tech was worse than none at all, and she set the system to stay off. It took on a matte black sheen that was still better than nothing, and she prayed it would be enough.
Ahead lay her final obstacle before she got out of Montral’s dome: a fully staffed police checkpoint that guarded the road leading to the north docks.
She tried to reach Grayson again, but wasn’t able to make a connection. Rogers and Winter were offline, as well. There were only two possible reasons for it. Either they were dead, or they had made it to their shuttle and had severed their connections so they could approach Laerdo Station as stealthily as possible.
She prayed it was the latter. This mission had gone badly enough without her entire team getting captured by…well, by Harken.
Kylie pushed the worry from her mind and surveyed the police checkpoint. There were at least twenty cops in full armor patrolling the point, plus another six with sensor suites, checking over every vehicle. Autocannons tracked each vehicle on approach, and two gunships hovered in the air above.
There’s just no freaking way! Kylie thought to herself. She couldn’t engage them directly; the gunships would blast her into paste in seconds. Her armor’s stealth was too risky—it had let her down multiple times that night.
There had to be another way through the checkpoint.
As she observed the point from her rooftop vantage, a half-kilometer away, one of the gunships settled to the ground, and the pilot got out. He stretched and walked into one of the buildings near the checkpoint.
It could have been his dinner break, or he had to piss…or maybe both. Either way, that ship was her way out. The police gunships weren’t rated for vacuum—they didn’t have the power to break atmosphere, anyway—but there was a grav-shielded opening a dozen meters above the ground exit that air traffic normally flowed through. At least, when the city wasn’t on lockdown.
Kylie didn’t waste any more time. She dashed across the roof and leaped to the next building, glad that the armor’s muscle enhancers hadn’t shown any indications of running low on charge. In fact, they now showed a twelve-hour reserve, up from the initial ten hours.
The battery meter moving in reverse wasn’t especially comforting, but Kylie didn’t have many options.
She ran through the streets, praying she wouldn’t be seen, and two minutes later was at the entrance to the building the gunship pilot had entered. She peered inside and saw that it was a break room with a small lounge for the police who worked the checkpoint. The pilot stood at a counter, pouring himself a cup of coffee.
Kylie started to creep through the door when the man set his coffee down, and half turned. At first, she thought he’d spotted her, but he walked to a small hall and entered a restroom. She took a moment to regain her composure, entered the building, and crept to the restroom door.
She took a deep breath and raised her foot to kick it down—just as the man pulled it open. Kylie stumbled forward and crashed into him.
They both fell to the floor in a tangled mess of limbs and he got in a few good hits before she managed to slither behind him and wrap an arm around his throat. She prayed that her armor’s Link dampening field had worked, or his friends were about to show up really fast.
He went limp in her arms, and she waited for a ten-count before pushing him off. The man flopped onto his face, and she looked him over. He wore a loose flight suit and an open-faced helmet.
Worth a shot, she thought to herself and stripped the man before carrying him into a toilet stall. Thanks to the tight fit of her armor, the flightsuit was no problem to get on, but the helmet was a bit snug. Even a passing inspection would reveal her armor’s faceless visage beneath, and she hoped she could get to his gunship unnoticed.
Kylie swore in her mind and jogged out of the building and back to the waiting gunship, tossing a casual wave at the police at the barricade.
“Good, now get back up there,” the voice said, and she nodded, hoping her silence wouldn’t raise concerns. Her luck held; the pilot had left the gunship on standby—it didn’t require any tokens or auth commands to get it airborne once more. She pulled the ship back up to the altitude the pilot had previously maintained, and followed a lazy circle above the checkpoint.
The external portal was open, though two physical doors could slam shut at a moment’s notice. Kylie timed her ship’s path, and at the point where she was closest to the dome, gunned the engines and raced toward the exit. The voice called out in her helmet, angry and demanding that she get back to her assigned patrol space, then became more furious and insistent that she land the gunship.
Kylie tore the helmet off and lined the gunships’ cannons up on the mechanisms that operated the doors. Because the dome was pressurized, they would slam closed in case of any issues that could compromise the dome—like a loss of power shutting off the exit’s grav field.
Her armor’s targeting systems assisted her, adding a countdown to her HUD and, as she passed through the grav field, Kylie fired the cannons and prayed the ship would make it through before the doors hit it.
An audible FOOM sounded over the gunship’s engines and nothing on her board lit up, so she assumed she was free and clear. A moment later, an explosion shook the gunship, and the console before her showed a dozen angry red warnings.
She’d forgotten about the defensive turrets outside the dome. Apparently, the police were taking a ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ approach. She dove the ship down as low as she dared, ducking behind a row of warehouses outside the dome as projectiles and beamfire arced over the rooftops.
The ship’s console started flashing more lights, and a warning blared, ‘weapon’s lock!’. The system indicated that two missiles were on her tail, with only four seconds until impact. She didn’t think twice as she tore the ship’s door open and jumped.
RENDEZVOUS
STELLAR DATE: 08.38.8947 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: City of Montral, Jericho
REGION: Gedri System, Silstrand Alliance
Grayson peered across the dock’s concourse and examined the squad of mercenaries who guarded the airlock leading to the Dauntless. Of the dozen men and women, three were massively modded monsters. More mech than human.
The rest appeared more or less stock human—though it could often be difficult to tell. One thing was certain, they were all armed to the teeth. He caught Winter’s eye and could tell the big albino was thinking the same thing. This was going to be a blow-through. Maximum force, into the lock, cycle it, and tear free of the station.
So long as Rogers could get the lock-down clamps free.
“You sure you can get the ship out of there?” Grayson asked.
“Gray, for the third time, yes. I docked us in a way that I can get the ship’s grappling arms at the station locks. My girl out there has the best plasma cutters money can buy—or steal off wrecked hulls—but either way, those locks will be butter in no time. The tricky thing is that once we get aboard, we’re gonna have five minutes tops before the station’s autocannons cut us to ribbons.”
“We need to wait for Kylie,” Grayson replied.
“Except we haven’t had contact with her since you fed her that map to get to Montral’s north docks,” Winter said.
“I wouldn’t steer her wrong. We had no Link on the way up to Laerdo, and she probably didn’t either,” Grayson said with raised hands. “Given flight time, she should be back on our channel in just a few minutes.”
“Well, she better,” Rogers said. “Because I tapped the duty rosters for Laerdo’s tugs, and there’s a hauler slated to take the Dauntless to Valahalla in thirty minutes. We’re going to have to take that ship in twenty at the latest.”
No one spoke for several minutes, but the looks that Rogers and Winter shared spoke volumes. If Kylie didn’t show, Grayson wasn’t certain he wanted to get on the Dauntless with these two.
As Rogers’s informal countdown neared a its final minute, a breathless voice came over their private Link.
He felt Kylie sigh over the Link.
The three men shared a look, and Rogers replied,
The five minutes crawled by, and the three men checked and rechecked their weapons and ammunition. They had to take the mercs by surprise. Hit them fast and hard.
Grayson sent a swarm of microscopic probes across the concourse and situated them on the bulkhead near the mercs. When Rogers triggered the airlock, he would have the probes hit the mercs and disable their targeting overlays. Hopefully, it would be enough to keep them in one piece on this suicide run.
When the count hit zero, Rogers triggered the airlock, and Grayson sent in his probes. Then, the three men rose from their cover and charged across the concourse.
Even though he had told them not to, both Winter and Rogers began screaming and firing immediately. By some miracle, they didn’t hit any bystanders. Most of their shots were wild, and all they achieved was granting the mercs as much notice as possible that an attack was incoming.
Since there was no point in holding back, Grayson joined in the scream and fired his two pistols as he ran. With his military-spec targeting overlay and nano-enhanced reflexes, he found his mark each time he fired.
Even though he wasn’t missing, it took more than one hit to take these guys down. As they closed the distance, and several of the enemies brought their weapons up to return fire, he knew there weren’t going to make it. They were going to die somewhere between seven and ten seconds.
Then something happened.
It took Grayson a moment to realize what it was and he almost stopped running until it dawned on him that someone was unleashing beamfire on the mercs. The relativistic streams of electrons smashed into the enemy, cutting them in half, before slicing deep gashes into the bulkhead.
“Shit!” Rogers screamed and skidded to a halt. A merc directly in front of him had a hole burned through her chest, trying to scream as
her arms flailed wildly.
“Keep moving!” Grayson yelled and grabbed Rogers’s collar, dragging him forward. The mercs were scattering, even the heavies, and five seconds later, the three men spilled through the airlock door as it cycled open.
They turned to see a gray figure dash in behind them and palm the panel to close the outer door.
the figure said and gave a wave. “Kylie?” Rogers asked and the figure nodded. “So, we’re really leaving without Nadine?” Rogers asked with a scowl. Kylie replied. “Can’t you talk?” Winter asked. “No, she’s wearing Trylodyne IA90 armor—full stealth with a rebreather to keep hot gas from escaping. Also, means you can’t talk verbally,” Grayson said. “Must be working overtime,” Winter snorted. “Captain has a lot of hot air in her.”