It slid open to reveal two slumped figures. One was cuffed; the other was not.
{Where’s the girl?} asked Micah.
{Running scared, probably. I’m surprised we didn’t bump into her on our way here.} Jack stopped in front of the unsecured man, took a knee, and felt for a pulse. {Dead. The other?} he jerked his chin to indicate the man Micah knelt beside.
{Tagged and bagged. Don’t ask me what she used to secure him; I’ve never seen it before, and it just gave me a helluva shock when I brushed my fingers against it.}
Jack bent down to inspect the device. {Huh. Never seen one of those used to cuff a guy.}
{What is it?}
Jack stood, hefting the dead body. {Shock-lock. Used to keep meddling thieves from stealing mainframe cores. Avoid touching it and you’ll be fine.}
{Easy for you to say,} Micah grumbled, but he hooked his hands under the man’s armpits and dragged him into the tunnels.
Jack indicated a supply closet up ahead, and they dumped both bodies inside.
Micah stepped back, staring down at the two SS men. {Any idea how she did it?}
Jack chuckled audibly. {Yeah. She disabled automatic access control, and forced them to use the palmpad to open the doors. Then she bypassed the pad’s safeties and shocked the hell out of the one you carried. I’m no medic, but from the looks of it, she followed it with a point-blank directed energy shot. He’ll be out for a while.}
Micah indicated the dead body. {And this guy?}
Jack shook his head. {No idea. Likely the weapon she stole was set to deliver a killing strike. I’m guessing she either didn’t know, or didn’t have the time to check before having to defend herself. Either way, I’d be willing to bet it’s her first time.}
{That’s going to have a profound effect on her.}
{ No shit, Navy.} Jack shot him a grim look. {Another reason we need to find her, and fast.}
* * *
The team was huddled in the shadows just outside the control center when Jack sent them an update. His mental voice cut into their review of the center’s ingress points.
The news was met with various levels of surprise.
{She took them out all on her own?} Mike’s voice was tinged with surprise and a grudging respect.
{Not without some cost,} cautioned Jack. {I estimate we have five minutes, maybe ten, before those goons in control realize their patrol hasn’t reported in. Be ready; they’re not going to let that ride.}
Thad glanced around at the rest of the team. His HUD’s IFF painted each figure with a bright green outline as his drakeskin suit’s predictive system identified them as ‘Friend’ and not ‘Foe.’
Lane’s outline motioned to the team sniper. {Ell, you’re here.}
A pin dropped onto the diagram currently displayed over the combat net, landing on the control center’s downspin wall. On the other side was an empty conference room.
{Return air vent, shared by both spaces,} Lane explained. {It should give you coverage of two-thirds of the room. Go.}
Ell’s shadowed form nodded, and the sniper glided silently away.
Next, Lane pointed to the area beneath a bank of consoles facing the door. {Asha, you’re smallest. You come in from here.}
Thad caught Asha’s brief hesitation before she nodded.
Being the smallest often meant crawling through narrow spaces and cramming herself into tight spots. This time, it meant sliding between subflooring until she came to the underside of the console. Asha would have to wedge herself between bundles of wiring in order to fit into the spot, but it was the only way to cover that side of the control center, opposite the door.
The big Marine could only imagine how much fun those assignments were.
As Asha moved into position, Lane turned to Mike. {You’re on overwatch. Set up half a klick back the way we came, and let us know if anyone approaches.}
{Copy that, ma’am.}
As the demolition expert strode back down the concourse, Lane motioned Thad toward the control center’s entrance. They took up station on either side of the door and waited for the others to get into position.
* * *
Katie’s hands shook. Hell, her whole body shook. She recognized it for what it was: a delayed response to the action she’d just taken.
The situation had begun to take on the air of a challenge, almost a game. But it had suddenly become all too real.
She’d just killed a man, point-blank.
“Oh crap. Oh crap,” she chanted softly.
She sucked in a deep breath and forcibly shoved the mental image of the man’s body from her mind. She understood that she was compartmentalizing, and knew she’d have a reckoning later, but she needed to focus.
She fell back on the mental discipline that had been drilled into her as a pilot. There was risk in every flight. The very medium through which she piloted each vessel was one utterly inhospitable to human life. When things went wrong, it wasn’t like she could pull over and get out. She had to deal with her current state head-on and find a way through it to the other side.
Aviate. Navigate. Communicate.
The pilot’s mantra that had been drilled into her saved her sanity now. She would concentrate on stabilizing her situation, do what she could to eliminate the remainder of the intruders, and then figure out a way to call for help. In that order.
She forced herself to move on to her next destination, the central loading dock at the end of the east spar. As she did, she mentally reviewed the materials that were available to her there.
It was an area she knew well, having spent months in the mechanics bay during her ground school lessons, learning the ins and outs of the ships she would pilot before she flew them. The S&Ps—the spaceframe and powerplant engineers who maintained the ships—had been willing teachers when they realized how eagerly Katie soaked up all the knowledge they had to give.
She’d spent many an hour packing slippery, greasy ball bearings into rings. She knew better than most what a hazard they could be if stepped on. Two years earlier, she’d twisted an ankle on one, fallen, and chipped her elbow. Doc had mended it, but not before Mack, her S&P instructor, had chewed her out for her carelessness.
She smiled down at the huge canisters of ball bearings as she recalled his words: “Don’t leave shit scattered around. You leave it out, some fool’s gonna trip over it.”
Oh yeah, she thought. These’ll make a fine trap. And she could use herself as the bait.
The dock was eerily quiet, with only the three strangers standing guard. Katie kept to the shadows, her back pressed against the bulkheads as she eased her way deeper into the area.
The door to the mechanics room was open and unlocked, left that way by the three goons after they’d rounded up all the Cobalt employees. Katie forced herself not to wonder about the workers who’d been here when the ship docked so unexpectedly.
She also kept her eyes averted, ignoring the dark stain marring the open expanse of deck—something she strongly suspected might be blood. Instead, she focused her attention on the three men standing guard as she slipped into the bay, her shoulders relaxing somewhat when she made it there without incident.
The room was lit by nothing more than emergency lights, which suited Katie just fine. Moving with silent confidence, she angled her way to the shelves lining the far wall, where stacks of parts were stored.
As she neared, her eyes caught on her objective: boxes filled with ball bearings, almost too heavy for her to lift on her own.
Pulling a maglev cart away from its charging port against an adjacent wall, she carefully set three full boxes onto the cart. These were followed by two canisters of lubricating grease.
She pushed the cart over to a side exit, wedging her fingers into the seam of the doors to ease them apart manually. She held her breath as she pushed the cart out into the shadowed recesses of the dock. Her destination, the entrance off the main corridor, was a mere twenty meters away.
The focus of the three
men remained outward, toward the bay doors and the external sensor feed that showed any approaching vessels. Their backs were to the door, confident as they were in the knowledge that they had every Cobalt person locked away in their quarters.
Still, staging her trap in full sight of the three men was more than Katie was willing to risk. She opted for the smaller, secondary door instead. It was off to the side, and out of their line of sight.
There was a catwalk that wrapped around the dock, lining three of the four bulkheads. Conveniently, there was a ladder—well, more a wall of rungs, built into the bulkhead just to the right of the door—that led up to it.
Katie grabbed a length of steel cable and slung it over one shoulder. She lifted one of the boxes of ball bearings, hefting it carefully up each rung as she climbed. The box was heavy, so it was a slow, tedious process, but her tall, rangy body was deceptively strong, toned by months of hard work on Cobalt tugs.
Once on the catwalk, she carefully positioned the box right at the walkway’s edge, just above the door. Looping the steel cable around the container, she threaded it across two ceiling joists before coiling the rest into a bundle that dangled within arm’s reach from the floor.
She climbed back down and took stock of the items remaining on her cart. Before she could scatter the ball bearings, she needed to fully coat them, both to minimize any noise they might make, and to increase the hazard of the trap.
Opening the first can of grease, she dumped great globs of the thick sludge into the remaining two boxes of ball bearings, working it with her hands to evenly coat them. She took her time, pausing when there was a lull in the conversation between the thugs, only to resume when they began talking once more.
It felt to Katie like it took forever to quietly upend the two boxes and get the small, round, goopy spheres in place, but finally, she was done. She stood back, surveying her work with a sliver of satisfaction.
Now all she had to do was bait them into chasing after her. Her course was committed to memory—a narrow corridor free of both axle grease and ball bearings.
All she had to do was piss them off enough that they’d abandon their posts to hunt her down.
Guess it’s showtime….
FOURTEEN
Sierra Twelve
Main Concourse
{Heads up,} Mike called out from his position farther down the concourse. {Incoming. Looks like one tango, one hostage. Hostage appears to be injured.}
Thad and Lane backed away from the door, their weapons tracking the two figures as they approached.
{Can you see any change from inside?} Lane asked Ell.
The sniper was quiet for a beat, and then said, {No.}
Thad scanned the approaching figures with a trained eye. The way the tango moved suggested she had no real military training. By this point, the team had come to the conclusion that none of the secessionists did.
His gaze shifted over to the older man the woman was shepherding. He held his side as if injured, and was sporting a slight limp.
“Move it,” he heard the woman snap. She punctuated her words with a small shove.
Thad’s jaw worked, and he forcibly tamped down on the anger that rose at the sight.
The man stumbled, recovered, and then shot the armed intruder a heated glare. “Moving as fast as these old bones will carry me, you secessionist bitch,” he snarled.
When she moved to shove him again, he flinched away, and picked up his pace.
{I’d like to shove her,} said Mike, his tone one of quiet rage.
{Copy that,} Thad murmured. {Stay chill, hoss. Stay chill.}
{Get ready,} Lane warned. {We go in when they go in.}
Following her cue, Thad released a small cloud of audio chaff and then activated the magnetic field that would keep the colloid cloud close around him. He stood poised, his posture mirroring Lane’s, two unseen warriors ready to spring into action.
The woman must have contacted the team inside the control center over a private channel, for as she and her prisoner approached, Thad could hear muffled shouts being exchanged from within. He could tell something had the leader agitated, but the feed Jack had hacked wasn't great at separating out voices, and the SS members were talking over one another, exchanging heated words that came out in garbled yells.
{Sounds to me like they think someone has managed to escape confinement,} Lane commented after a moment.
{No, it’s not that. I think…} Asha paused.
From her vantage point under the consoles, she could hear the clearest, so they waited for her to fill them in.
{They know about the vigilante,} she finally announced. {They discovered her when they couldn’t reach the patrol she took out. The woman coming your way claims that old man can tell them who it is. Something about a guy named Fred. No, hold on.} Asha’s voice sounded confused. {A…dog named Fred?}
Over the feed, Thad saw the young man sitting at the traffic controller’s console blanch at those words. His hand jerked, knocking a stylus to the ground.
{That didn't go unnoticed,} Lane observed.
One of the SS men, their leader, stalked toward the young man.
{He's demanding that Jeremy tell them more about Fred and his owner,} Asha supplied. {Jeremy's saying something about the dog usually accompanying its owner on her flights, but not this time.}
As the woman and her prisoner neared, the control center’s doors parted. Thad slipped through, followed by Lane. They took up stations on either side of the door just as the old man limped across the threshold. Everyone inside stopped talking and turned to look expectantly at the newcomers.
“Well?” the SS leader demanded.
The woman who had brought the old man in gestured for him to speak. “Tell ‘em.”
“Ain’t nothing to tell.” The old man scowled.
“That dog wasn’t there when we got to Medical, and now it is. Where’s its owner?”
Thad saw the old man’s eyes land on the young man at the STC console. Something passed between the two.
“You kilt her, ya secessionist bastards,” the old man said, his voice starting out soft, only to rise at the end as his ire built. “She was the one on that tug, an’ ye blew her outa the black!”
{Our vigilante’s the pilot of that tug?} asked Ell.
{It fits,} Lane’s mental tone was thoughtful.
Thad’s eyes landed on Lane’s outline. {Guess I’d assumed our hacker was someone closer in, a dockworker maybe, or someone working an EVA repair.}
She shifted, her head turning as if to look at him. He saw her nod. {I’m sure that’s what she was banking on. Who would have thought she’d launch herself from a tug a few hundred thousand klicks out?}
{Look at the Cobalt employees’ faces; they’ve come to the same conclusion. The STC controller’s trying to hide it, but he’s a poor actor,} Ell commented.
“Get back down there,” Thad heard the secessionist leader order the woman who had brought the old man in. He gestured to one of his men. “Gardner, go with her. I want that doctor—and the dog—rounded up.”
Thad glanced over at Lane, wondering how she would handle the tangos splitting up and potentially taking more hostages. He saw her arm rise, the silhouette warning him to stay his hand as the two SS thugs passed by his position on their way out the door.
{Mike, two tangos coming your way. En route to Medical. Follow and neutralize.}
{Good copy. Will follow and neutralize,} came Mike’s voice. It returned after a moment’s pause. {Boss? You see what Jack just sent?}
Thad’s gaze flicked down to the lower left of his HUD, where an icon blinked at him. Its tag read ‘our vigilante.’ Toggling it brought up a personnel file, a smiling photo of a tall, gangly young woman, proudly holding a puppy.
Katie Hyer. Age: 18. Orphaned, age 12. Recently emancipated.
Foster father: James Slater. Chief Medical Officer, Sierra Twelve.
{Shit, she's just a kid.}
{A year past minimum recruit
ment age,} Lane reminded him.
{Old enough to have skills; young enough to have no sense of her own mortality,} Ell’s voice slid into the silence.
Another icon blinked, this time a report from Jack. Thad brought it up alongside the other, and skimmed it quickly.
{Jack thinks he may have found her. They’re on their way to intercept.}
* * *
Micah glanced over at Jack as they closed in on their vigilante. {Hard to believe the person who took out those two secessionists is an eighteen-year-old. That’s one hell of an EVA she did.}
{She did it with a disabled locator beacon, too. Kid’s got balls, you gotta give her that.} The look on Jack’s face was one of grudging admiration.
They’d just crossed behind the central hub when Jack stopped abruptly, one hand raised in warning.
Micah brought the reticle of his CUSP to his eye, but the other man waved it down.
{Not us. Her.}
{That’s a bit vague, Jack. Care to explain?}
Jack gave a low chuckle. {I’m monitoring her activities. Take a look. In this instance, I think a picture really is worth a thousand words.}
A feed popped up on Micah’s overlay, labeled with the tag, ‘Sierra Twelve Warehouse, Sector Delta-Four.’
Something about the image seemed out of place, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Then it hit him.
Most civilian stations and platforms had an edge of grunge to them, especially in less trafficked areas, like a warehouse sector. But this one had a sheen to it. It was shiny, spit-polished like a Navy deck after a staff sergeant ordered his new recruits to clean it.
Seconds later, Micah realized why, when the door slid open to admit a man and a woman. Both were armed, identifying them as one of the SS patrols. The minute their feet hit the warehouse floor, the secessionists went sprawling, and their weapons spun away.
{It’s covered in ice!}
Operation Cobalt – A Military Science Fiction Thriller: The Biogenesis War Files Page 8
