Quinn nodded, brows drawing together. “The thought had occurred to me,” he admitted. “Got any suggestions?”
“Yeah,” she drew the word out thoughtfully, playing out the scene in her mind.
Placing her hand over the door’s control mechanism, she deposited a round of breaching nano into it. It synched with the software in her wire, showing her a lock that was easily a decade or more out of use.
“Okay,” she murmured. “That’ll be easy enough to pick.”
She looked over her shoulder at Quinn and then Rafe, who had the fourth hostage hoisted over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry.
“Stay clear of the door,” she instructed Rafe, waving him over toward Quinn. “Quinn, open the door on my mark. Be prepared to back me up like you did when we took out Baby Face. Got it?”
Quinn nodded and both men stepped back against the bulkhead. Ell moved to the opposite side of the door, crouching low to the deck. “On three. One…two…”
Quinn triggered the door and Ell propelled herself up and into the guard who had turned at the sound. An oof sounded from the pirate as he landed on his back, his weapon clattering to the deck.
Peripheral vision told her Quinn had engaged another guard just as the man beneath her rolled. Ell barely escaped the fist that came crashing down toward her face, jerking her head to the left at the last moment.
She thrust her fist upward in what looked like a cross jab. The man’s chin jerked back instinctively, but she wasn’t going for the chin. Instead, she hooked her fingers around the bony scapula ridge that ran just behind the top of the man’s shoulder and pulled. That action levered Ell up while propelling the man toward the deck.
The pirate was now face down with Ell on top. She reached for the pistol strapped to the man’s right thigh, but the pirate tried to buck her off. Ell fought to put the man in a grappling hold but found herself suddenly airborne.
She landed against the bulkhead with a soft grunt just as she heard the click of a combat rifle and a low, guttural, “Freeze!”
Ell recognized that voice.
She looked up and saw familiar brown eyes, narrowed on the guard she’d been battling. The owner of those eyes gave her a quick look, his smile a brief slash of white against an ebony backdrop, before turning back to glare the pirate.
Thaddaeus Severance was a powerhouse of a Marine, as charismatic as he was strong. Ell had learned long ago she was defenseless against the captain’s easy charm, so she wasn’t surprised to find herself grinning back at him like an idiot.
The man had won her over the moment they’d first been introduced. Elodie had always hated her first name, had felt it far too flowery for a Marine. His first words had put paid to that.
“El-o-die,” he’d rolled the word around in his mouth, his signature smile curving slowly about his lips. “Now that, there, is one badass name.”
She’d thought he was hazing her…until he explained.
“Never met someone whose name spelled out what would happen if you messed with her.” He’d shaken his head in admiration. “Elo-die. Hello-die. Sweetest combat name I ever heard.”
Ell shook off the memory and rolled to her feet as Thad spoke.
The words, though clipped, were spoken in a distinctive and familiar twang as he tilted his head down to indicate his tactical vest. “Zipties, right pocket. Antidote code, left.”
She nodded, reaching for the nanopackage.
“Thought you needed rescuing, ami,” he said in a low rumble only she could hear. “Glad to see my intel was wrong.”
“I never say no to a helping hand,” she murmured in reply, bending to slap the restraint on the guard Thad had pinned.
Thad gave a low “Oorah,” and then snapped his rifle back out to cover the passageway and she crossed to apply the Ziptie to the third guard and hand out antidotes to Rafe and Quinn.
As Ell scooped up the rifle that had gone flying when she first tackled the guard, Thad nudged the pirate. “C’mon coo-yon, get up.”
Ell shot Thad a quick glance as she helped haul the pirate to his feet. “You alone, Captain?”
“Nope. Jack’s with me, as are Asha and Boone.”
Ell saw the look that Thad leveled at her when he mentioned those last two names.
Asha, the medic who’d kept her alive after the IED exploded, killing Mike, their teammate.
Boone, the man who had taken her place as the team’s sniper, while doctors worked to rebuild her.
She managed to keep her expression neutral, but only just. Moments later, she saw the icon for a combat net pop up on her overlay.
{You’re about to have company,} she heard Boone warn Thad as she joined. {Headed your way.}
Thad swore. {How the hell did they know we’d sprung the prisoners?} he demanded.
{Coincidence, maybe?} Jack’s voice sounded doubtful. {But they’re inbound, half a klick aft of your position.}
A map appeared, showing icons denoting friendlies in green, tangos in red. Five reds were converging on them from three different directions.
{That’s no coincidence. Move out,} Thad ordered, gesturing them to follow. He turned and shot the major a questioning look. “Need help with that hostage, ami?”
Rafe shook his head. “I’m good. Lead on, Captain.”
Ell fell into a run behind Thad as the big Marine raced toward the hatch and the Shadow Recon ship she knew awaited them. Quinn followed, Rafe bringing up the rear.
Five years, she thought. It’s been five years since I was last with the team. How the hell did I end up back here?
TWO
GNS Wraith
Straits of Sargon
Akkadia
Wraith’s cockpit was tense and quiet, all four members of her crew focused on keeping the ship’s tenuous connection to the pirate station hidden from its residents.
{Asha and I will flank them,} a voice came across the Marine combat net they were monitoring. {We’ll drive ’em to you Boone.}
{Wait one,} a second voice interrupted, the voice of Boone, the team’s sniper. {Two more approaching. Patrol, coming up rim passageway, spinward side, in five.}
A two-click acknowledgement followed.
Captain Jonathan Micah Case let the communication flow past him. Anything the Marines needed the ship’s crew to know about could come through Yuki, his co-pilot.
Right now, Micah’s world had shrunk to a single point, a feather-light connection between the Direct Action Penetrator Helios he commanded and the battered hatch the fast attack craft hovered beside.
The connection between the wire embedded inside his brain and the ship’s SyntheticVision system was so deep, Micah couldn’t have said where the ship ended and he began.
It was as if the ship wasn’t even there. Or, rather, he was the ship.
He felt as if he could reach out and touch the accordioned surface of the tube snugged up against the dull silver of the station, though he didn’t dare. At the moment, each gesture, even the slightest of hand movements, meant something more. His limbs were the ship’s thrusters. Her sensors, his eyes.
Without this deep link, he never could have maintained the delicate balance required to keep an exit point open for the Marines and the hostages they’d been sent in to retrieve. He needed the advantage the SV link provided to remain in perfect sync with the small habitat as it rotated upon its central axis.
Wraith should have been able to lock in a velocity that matched the fusion plant driving the station’s central axis, but the plant was old and poorly maintained. Its rate of rotation fluctuated just enough that it required Micah to ride it constantly.
A lesser pilot might find this challenging—but a lesser pilot would not be commanding a DAP Helios. Few could fly an attack craft of Wraith’s caliber; fewer still could operate her with such precision.
To a one, those pilots who could lay claim to such a distinction were members of the Alliance’s elite Shadow Recon teams.
The sound of weapons fire coming
across the combat net indicated the Marines had surprised a small group of pirates guarding the hostages.
{There goes our quiet ride out of here.} Yuki’s voice was dry as her hands danced across the co-pilot’s console, scanning for enemy spacecraft.
He’d caught the rhythm of the station’s lumbering spin. Knowing a smooth patch was ahead, he chanced a quick glance past the station’s curved hull to the dense ring of asteroids that lay between them and the gate at the Alpha Centauri system’s heliopause.
Micah’s mind made the rough calculations as his eyes returned to the umbilical before him. Three AU and some change.
His gaze focused briefly on the readout overlaid on his three-hundred-sixty-degree view. The Bravo Charlie that Thad had placed onto the hatch’s external access pad still read green. The BC, or breaching canister, was programmed to send false signals back to the pirates’ monitoring system to make it seem as if the hatch was still securely sealed.
That was good news. The pirates might know they had intruders, but they couldn’t know yet exactly where they’d entered, though all entrances were now suspect. Hopefully, they’d be able to extract before the pirates had a chance to trace their location.
{Three down.} Jack, Thad’s second.
{Make that four.} Asha. {Last one’s yours Cap.}
{Got ‘im.} Thad.
On the heels of her comm came Boone again. {Perimeter’s clear.}
No more words were said, but everyone aboard Wraith knew what would be coming next.
It was time to exfil.
The ship’s open hatch began to fill with Marines in powered battle armor. Micah monitored both interior and exterior feeds as the first to arrive launched himself through the umbilical.
The man wrapped gauntleted fingers around a handhold, piking himself into the ship with economical movement. In an instant, he had reversed his position, bracing to receive the hostages.
It was then that Will noticed they had company.
{Two technicals just launched,} the flight engineer and crew chief sang out from the cradle behind Micah. Will pushed the feed to him with accompanying data that laid out the specs of each craft.
Both were improvised fighting vessels. One was a small cargo tug with a railgun bolted to its undercarriage; the other was an ancient comm-relay satellite that had been retrofitted with a pair of 5 mm lasers.
The speed at which they shot from the small station’s shuttle bay belied their ungainly appearance. Turning in a tight arc, the noses of both crafts aimed for the open hatch.
Inside Wraith, the hostages were being pulled inside, one by one, Marines hot on their heels. The first Marine hauled Ell Cyr through the opening and then turned, his hand already extended to catch the next hostage. Ell braced on the other side of the hatch, assisting with the catch and urging the hostage to make a hole for the next person inbound.
Three seconds later, Micah heard a {Go! Go! Go!} as Thad sealed the end of the umbilical and pushed it away from the hatch.
{Maneuvering!} was all the warning Micah gave the team. He kicked the nose over, dipping down and away from the two vessels attempting to flank Wraith on both sides.
He spared a glance at an internal feed and was relieved to see Thad being hoisted into the ship. Boone reached past him to pull the umbilical in after he cleared the opening. Micah cut the feed when the ship registered full hull integrity, and returned his attention to the aggressors on his tail.
{Incoming,} Will warned, followed by a flash of tracer light that told him the tug’s railgun had fired.
The cloud of drones surrounding Wraith were under Yuki’s control; she’d disengaged their cloaking routine when the technical had showed, flipping them into a point-defense formation.
A pair of them broke off, reconfigured as electronic countermeasures. One of the Dazzlers began to emit decoy EM while the other jammed signals. Yuki engaged the rest of the drones in point-defense, their lasers chewing into the slugs the tug had tossed at them.
{Nina! Steel!} Micah began jinking the ship in an evasive pattern, and his gunner responded instantly. She’d had the two pirate ships centered in the reticle of her RAU-19 triple-barrel railgun ever since Will had identified the tangoes. Now, she went weapons free.
Micah felt the vibration through his deep connection with the ship, heard the small foomp-foomp of the railgun as it returned fire. The tug tried to evade but it wasn’t built for maneuverability, its makers never envisioning it going head-to-head with a DAP Helios.
The steel rounds slammed into the tug just aft of its tiny cockpit. Though better armored than most tugs, it was no match for the projectiles’ closing velocity, and the slugs tore into the small vessel’s hide as if it were tissue paper.
The RAU spat another short burst of fire to finish the tug off just as Micah tweaked the ship’s thrusters to avoid a laser shot from the converted satellite. Nina reacquired the satellite and took the shot at the same time Yuki unleashed laser fire from point defense to chase down Wraith’s wild slugs and incinerate them.
His co-pilot’s action was automatic. Once a slug was fired in space, it kept going until it found an object with enough stopping power to arrest its velocity. That might be a non-issue if it ended up impacting an asteroid, but it could just as easily hit an innocent vessel, a mining platform, or a space habitat.
Leaving ballistic ammunition shooting through a populated system was the kind of thing only terrorists and pirates did. Cleanup laser fire went part and parcel with good trigger discipline. If Yuki had been too busy to address it, Wraith’s SI would have released a cleanup drone to address the matter.
Tug out of commission, Micah twisted the Helios and Nina let fly a twenty-kilogram tungsten sabot that punctured the center of the satellite and continued through, embedding itself into the pirate station’s flank.
Sparks flew from the satellite as its two jury-rigged lasers exploded, the fiery bloom a sharp, attenuated thing, as explosions in a vacuum tended to be.
{Shit! Tacticals were just a diversion, folks.} Will’s exclamation was accompanied by the wailing of Wraith’s proximity alarms as Micah spotted a salvo of smart missiles appear from behind the station.
He ducked. Connected as he was to Wraith, the ship followed suit. The oncoming missiles did as well, their onboard computers compensating for every course adjustment he made.
{Dazzlers,} he called to Yuki. The thought barely had time to form before a full dozen additional drones came shooting out from Wraith’s hold.
Had he not known they were there, he might have missed them. Their sensor cross-section was almost indistinguishable until they reached the envelope—and then they lit up, smothering the missiles in a cacophony of EM.
The missiles lost lock on Wraith. He saw their noses wobble and dip, seeking the strongest signal that matched the Helios they’d been programmed to strike.
There were too many points in space broadcasting that identical signature; to a one, the missiles turned, locking onto the nearest drone. The impacts were impressive, successive detonations, one after the other, immolating both missile and Dazzler alike.
{Heads up!} Will’s voice held a warning. {Time for the main attraction.}
The flight engineer’s comment was followed by a stream of data detailing weapons load-out as two Akkadian Hydra Mark V fighters, bristling with armament, appeared from behind the curve of the station. Wraith’s SI pinged a warning, letting Micah and the rest know the vessel had already acquired a targeting lock.
The SI responded first, sending the ship into a series of complex twists faster than even Micah’s augmented pilot’s reaction time could match.
He joined in, mixing his own moves with the more predictable computer-generated evasions as laser pulses lanced toward them from the Hydras. He threw Wraith into a helical turn, pulling her up abruptly, only to whip her over onto her side in a blindingly fast move.
He did it again and again, corkscrewing through the black in a series of increasingly complex and u
npredictable moves, while Yuki and Nina hammered at the attacking vessels.
The Dazzlers weren’t as effective when pitted against human-augmented SIs, so Yuki deployed them as auxiliary weapons platforms, harrying the fighters, using their agility and maneuverability to eat away at the enemy’s defenses.
Nina managed to sever the fuel feed on one of the Hydra’s fusion drives and its accel drop was instantaneous. Micah spared it a look as its pilot veered off at a constant velocity it now had no way of stopping, but that moment of distraction cost him.
The second ship scored a hit on Wraith’s flank. The laser bit into the ship’s ablative surface, the impacts searing like a hot poker against unprotected skin, before dispersing.
Micah ignored it. He’d long ago grown used to the sympathetic echo of pain that skipped along his neural interface before the SyntheticVision system could dampen it. Quickly enough, it faded, the shot’s kinetic and heat energy dispersing through the Helios’s picofoam interlayer with minimal effect to the craft.
Twice more, Micah dipped and twisted, thrusters firing in a mad and drunken dance, until one last tungsten salvo ripped through the remaining Hydra’s shadow shield, its fusion plant’s safety interlocks sending it into automatic shutdown.
“Nice job,” he heard, just as a firm hand clapped down on his shoulder and the simulation ceased. The pirate station morphed into a decommissioned destroyer, pulled from a boneyard and towed into place.
The fictional Alpha Centauri gate disappeared off his sensors, to be replaced by a Military Operations Area adjacent to the Hawking habitat, in orbit around Procyon’s F-class star, Merki.
The Hydras resolved into a pair of Alliance Novastrike fighters, and the tacticals turned back into standard targeting drones, used for warfare simulations and live-fire test runs when the MOA was active.
Awareness of his physical surroundings inside the ship also returned. As usual, it took a few additional seconds for Micah to extract himself from Wraith’s SyntheticVision feed. The sensation felt a bit like surfacing from a deep, crystalline pool.
Operation Cobalt – A Military Science Fiction Thriller: The Biogenesis War Files Page 11
