When they reached the point where they had to exit the tunnels and switch to public passageways, they strode with purpose, just two extra-tall pirates going about their regular pirate business. No one paid them any attention. Since they left their swords behind for this job, other than minor differences in their spacesuits, they really didn’t appear that different from some of the other people strolling through the corridors. No one noticed that the holstered guns they wore were odd. For one thing, the general populace did their best to avoid them due to the fear instilled by the armbands they wore, indicating they worked for base security. In fact, they noted people did their best not to look in their direction at all. It was almost like being invisible.
The two Samues made it as far as the command complex before encountering their first difficulty. At least it was one they anticipated. The Command Central complex itself was merely a distinct portion of the base with two restricted surface entrances and a third from one of the service tunnels, also restricted. Unlike every other structure on the base, Command Central did not adjoin any other building, giving those inside a clear field of fire should they need one. At the moment, only remote sensors and robotic weapons covered the roof. According to contingency plans Urania uncovered, in case of an uprising, snipers would take up positions between the automated defenses.
While none of the entrances had standing guards, all were monitored from the security office inside the complex. All entrances required biometric identification, in this case, facial recognition by the software accompanied by a retinal scan. A manual go-ahead from the watch officer on duty had to be issued before the entrance could be opened. It seemed like excessive security for a sealed base that no one knew existed, although it did fit with the extreme vigilance this group exhibited. But then again, they were in the process of being invaded.
Regardless, there was no way they could bluff their way through the security measures. Because of that, they opted for the basement entrance as an easier point to breach, heading back down into the utility tunnels. While the basement passage had the same security protocols as those on the surface, the approach differed. A straight corridor ran from the doorway, back two hundred feet, before intersecting a cross tunnel. In theory, that allowed those monitoring in the security office ample time to notice anyone approaching, and trigger the automated defenses if they felt so inclined.
A single burst from Geena’s Zapper took out the sensor that covered the approach to the hatch. Since she shot through the corner of an intersecting tunnel, they were never seen. No alarms went off, but security immediately dispatched two men to check on why they lost the feed from the sensor. With the sensor more or less vaporized, the two infiltrators waited a moment before racing toward the door. Realistically, rather than sending guards to investigate, the security office should have set off the automatic weapons on continuous fire immediately. Sure, they might have slaughtered the pizza delivery guy and wound up having to order more. Not that there would have ever been a pizza delivery guy down in a maintenance tunnel. Even if they ate pizza on this base. But the sensors going dead couldn’t have been a normal occurrence. They should have assumed the worse. They didn’t.
Waiting on the hinge side of the hatch, Ron tossed a flash-bang over the top of an armored robot that was scooting through as soon as the opening was wide enough. The robot was no more than eight inches high and maybe a foot in diameter. Its perimeter was ringed with what appeared to be three small gun turrets. An equally small sensor package was built into the top. Geena zapped it as Ron followed his flash-bang through the open hatch. He fired twice, killing the two guards sent with the robot. It was cold, he knew. But the fact was, everyone left on this base was going to die when Urania lifted the flight deck into hyper. After pirates slaughtered the innocents on Hepca, the Aeolus team settled on a simple policy for dealing with them. Kill them all.
Now inside the security building itself, they closed the security door behind them and strode purposely through the complex. So far, they had raised no alarms. That was puzzling, especially in light of how otherwise efficient this group seemed to be. The security at the basement entrance had been taken care of expeditiously, but someone on a higher floor should have been monitoring as well. The lack of an alarm caused the two to move even more cautiously. They expected to encounter armed men and women purposely running around trying to find them. Geena finally held up her hand to stop them and commed Urania. “Urania, are you doing anything? There don’t seem to be any alarms.”
“Of course, dear. I’m maintaining control over the CC’s systems. I can’t cancel the alarms that are going off without the control room staff noticing, but I can keep them from getting to the people who would do something about them. As Lexi said, I’m your back office. Go on and be a good remote asset and take out the CC for me.”
Geena snorted. “Thanks, Urania. I think if this situation comes up again, we should know ahead of time.”
As Ron shot the seventh person he encountered, he briefly wondered if all of these people deserved being treated so summarily. There were close to a hundred times the number of people here than staffed Johnny Carson’s base near Grammin. Sure, Johnny’s people were murderers. All of them. Here, we’re inside a major pirate base. These security people don’t man the ships crewed by the men and women who rape and murder. What if I’m killing decent people who just needed a job and this was the best they could find to support themselves and their families coming from a pirate controlled world?
The thought of families led him to another very disturbing thought. It was so troubling that he held up his hand, causing Geena to stop and peer at him quizzically. There were thirty-four hundred adult men and women, all technically pirates, on this long-established base. Switching to his private channel, he asked, subvocalizing, “Urania, are there any indications of children on this base?”
Her response was immediate. “I’m sorry, Ron. It never occurred to me to check for anything like that.” As she spoke, she was running an analysis of the personnel files. “Quite a few of the men and women on the base have children. They live in what is referred to as family housing. I don’t know if the children are on the base with them or not. There are only records for adults. I have, however, located more than one area which has child-sized play equipment.”
“Damn.” He thought a minute. “OK, listen, I’m changing the plan. Let Lexi know when she’s not in the middle of something. We will not be blowing up the base when we leave. I want this base as intact as possible after we lift. Go over the calculations for how much of the flight deck we’re taking. Make the area as small as possible. We don’t want to leave them with any operational ships, but if we have to destroy a few around the periphery instead of taking them with us, that’s good enough.”
“Understood, Ron. I’m sorry I didn’t think to check.”
“None of us did, Urania. We all know pirates are nasty, evil brutes with no morals at all. I’ll tell Geena.”
He reached out and put his arm on his mother’s shoulder. “Mom, I changed the plan. We’re not destroying the base. In fact, we stop butchering the people here unless we have no choice. Some of these guys are parents with children here on the base.”
He watched as her expression cycled from shock to horror to a grim understanding. She holstered her Zapper and said, her voice as grim as her expression, “This many people, yeah we should have thought of that. Too bad we can’t set these things to stun like Kirk does. Hand-to-hand it is. Let’s finish this.”
Fortunately for the remaining humanity that stood in the way of their approach to the control room, none were armed. None were close to Ron’s size and strength. Nor were they any match for Geena, who had been training for this kind of situation since Lexi took over the leadership role of the team and decided they all needed to upgrade their unarmed-combat skills.
Making their way to the control room, they burned through the wall around the sealed hatch with Zapper fire. As it fell in Ron sent two flash-bangs
sailing through the opening. Four of the five disoriented people inside were relatively easy to knock unconscious. The fifth decided to pull a gun and start shooting in what she hoped was the right direction. Geena calmly shot her through the head, hoping she wasn’t leaving some child without a mommy.
Over the open comm channel, Ron said, “We have the CC. Urania, you’re on. Team Two to the flight deck.”
Chapter 21
Secret Agents
Lexi and the three Ostrieachians were already positioned as close to the flight deck as they could get without risking discovery when Ron gave them the go ahead. She listened as a man’s deep voice blared out over every broadcaster on the base, “Attention! This is an official Command Central notification. I need everybody’s attention. And I mean everybody. All property is to immediately report to the flight deck. Move now. You know who you are. This includes men, women, and children. No exceptions. Anyone who disobeys will not survive my wrath. All flight deck personnel report to conference B for an emergency briefing. That’s conference B as in Bertha. Security personnel, run around and look busy.”
Lexi was wondering if she should have reviewed Urania’s script as a small chuckle came over the broadcasters. “No, just kidding about that,” the announcer continued. “Security report to conference D. That’s D as in David. Maintenance, damage control and technical, remain at your stations and standby for further announcements. Medical, prepare for heavy causalities. Rathca base is now at Alert Level Two. Despite my little joke, this is not a drill. Move your asses people.”
Throughout the base, a continuous low-level beeping sounded and normally unlit ceiling panels began flashing orange, both indicators that the base had been taken to alert status. It didn’t hurt that this was the second time in five station weeks that Rathca had gone to alert status. The first being when they launched their interceptors to deal with Urania. Her announcement played into that. Besides, the team already knew from Urania’s hacking that this base had drills on a more or less monthly basis anyway.
Immediately following the announcement, Urania commed on Lexi’s private channel, “Lexi, Ron and I have new information. We’re not going to blow up the base when we leave. We’re also going to need to reevaluate the ‘kill them all’ approach as well.”
“Understood.” She wondered what the new information was, but as Urania apparently decided, it could wait. True, by common consent, Lexi led their team. Rescuing the captives and taking the flight deck, however, was Ron’s operation. Until the situation changed, her role was technical support.
Every four minutes a shorter version of the message was repeated with enough variation that no one would suspect it wasn’t coming from someone sitting at a comm-station in Command Central. Among other changes, the joke about security was removed from the subsequent announcements.
In the CC, Geena dragged the four unconscious bodies to one side of the room. She moved the dead woman over with them. She knew that when she had time, she would regret killing her even though it had been in self-defense.
Ron set to work disabling Command Central’s ability to coordinate the base’s defenses. He looked around at the screens and stations that monitored movement throughout the base, the panels that controlled the automated defenses on the roof, the comm panels, something that not only had Urania informed him was a self-destruct, actually looked suspiciously like it might be a self-destruct, and the network that linked the point defenses into CC control.
The assault on Command Central wouldn’t be enough to stop the base from firing at them. All of the defensive emplacements switched to autonomous control lacking the coordinating CC presence. Their controllers were isolated, preventing Urania from hacking into them. They weren’t networked in with any of the other systems on the base. Nor could they be accessed remotely, either through hard-wiring or radio waves. To keep them from responding, someone on the team would have to visit and destroy each one. They didn’t have time. Then too, the risk of attempting it outweighed the advantages.
Thinking about it now, it occurred to him that they expected to be inside a hyper-bubble where none of the base’s firepower could reach them. He’d have to point out to Lexi that she had just made the planetary defenses of every Accord world obsolete assuming a ship could drop out of hyper right on top of them rather than at the hyper-limit.
He still thought it was odd that the base didn’t have a backup CC. But they didn’t. Unless it was completely isolated like the automated defenses, Urania would have found it. If it was that isolated, it couldn’t control anything. Ron smiled as he had that thought. Considering everything else these guys had to defend their base, it just seemed like an unforgivable oversight. I still don’t understand the purpose of a self-destruct. Still, it made his and Geena’s jobs easier. At this point, it would have been difficult to get to and destroy a second command center.
Looking around the room, he couldn’t think of a single reason to leave anything in the CC functional. His Zapper, set to its lowest setting, agreed with him, leaving nothing but wreckage behind as he panned it across the room. Some of the stations, now with large portions vaporized, started smoking and sparking. There was nothing in here to catch fire, so he was concerned about it. That accomplished, he stood to one side next to Geena and said, “We’re ready Urania.”
Two feet in front of them, a three-foot-wide pipe opened, leading from the bottom of the control room down to Urania’s hull, forty feet below. They flew down, feet first, past several levels where people were gaping at the hole which had suddenly opened in their floor and ceiling. Both halted their descent with the suit thrusters, stopping just before hitting the solid shield wall. They could have stood on it without harm, it just seemed a weird thing to even attempt, much less actually do.
Ron walked through this type of shield for the first time when he was trying to get to Lexi on Johnny Carson’s pirate base. The shield setting was low enough to allow slow-moving objects to pass through it. The second time was when the whole team infiltrated Carson’s base to retrieve the Barossa Channel. Despite Lexi almost killing herself with her not-ready-for-prime-time performance-enhancing medication, that was a wildly successful mission. They recovered the Channel they were hired to find. They also managed to rescue the ten slaves serving as both domestic labor and sex-toys for the pirates, including the semi-aquatic Grammin woman Carson kept in a fish tank. Once they got back, Ron insisted that his grandmother, Queen Abree of Grammin, not abdicate her throne in his favor until after the agreed-upon payment was made to Aeolus Investigations. He just didn’t want to be in the position of authorizing payment to himself from the Grammin treasury.
This time Urania set her wall-shield to be totally impermeable to seal in the station’s atmosphere until the last moment. Alerting her that they were in position, she relaxed it so they popped through in a rush of atmosphere. Ron grabbed the spare plug he left on the hull, reached up and plugged the opening. As far as he could tell, they didn’t suck any of the people from the open offices into the pit.
Minutes later, the two of them were back inside Urania. As she opened her helmet, Geena grinned at her son and said, “Secret agents!”
Ron reached out and hugged her. “Secret agents, Mom,” he agreed.
Chapter 22
Team Two
Meanwhile, as a result of Urania’s announcement, chaos reigned on the flight deck. There were six-hundred people, Unity referred to them as property, on the base. Now, there was already about one-hundred confused, scared people, expecting to die at any minute, either from the pending attack or for not moving quickly enough to satisfy their owners, were either frantically looking for friends and family or milling around in small clumps. More were streaming in through the hatches.
“Lexi, at this range your life-form sensors are amazing. I can see everybody. I can also distinguish human from Ostrieachian. The differences are subtle. It might just be relative mass. I don’t know. Anyway, you have three humans still on the deck. They’re
probably guards and probably armed. Right now they’re in a small office almost directly in line with the nose of Transport-Three. They’re trying to radio Command Central for instructions. It seems that even in an emergency they can’t leave the flight deck unguarded. I’m instructing them to stay put.
Lexi was already moving in the indicated direction while Urania was babbling information she didn’t need right now. “I’m on it,” was all Lexi said.
Lexi saw the room, a guard shack apparently, that Urania referred to. Do I kill them all? Or are we not doing that anymore? Hell. Time for some acting? Holding her helmet, she ran up to the glass door of the shack. With what she hoped was a panicked expression, she banged on the door with her free hand, occasionally taking a quick glance over her shoulder. The guards were already confused. Seeing a suited figure, obviously terrified, dressed more or less like a pilot outside the shack, they forgot protocol and let her in. It might have helped them make that decision that the woman was beautiful.
Once Lexi was fully in the room, she said, “Thank you. Thank you. What’s going on? It’s crazy out there.”
Aeolus Investigations Set 2: Too Cool To Lose: The Continuing Evolution of Lexi Stevens Page 11
