by A. R. Knight
“I noticed the evaluation before,” Gregor said, standing right where Rovo had stood before Zaydi went all assassin on him. “The suit, I believe it is meant for endurance operations. Long term, little reinforcement.”
“Keep the soldier going.” At first, Rovo admired the ingenuity, then he realized what it would actually mean. “So they could send us out further, for longer.”
Gregor nodded, “Perhaps it is good we retired when we did.”
“Retired? Sure.”
Rovo and Gregor continued talking over plans while the rookie felt out the suit. The control center’s blast-bolt scarring didn’t prevent Gregor from releasing the power armor from its restraints, and Rovo waddled, then walked, then even lunged across the room with it. For all its fancy life-saving enhancements, the power armor still felt familiar: kinetic boosters, weight compensators for every limb, and a visor that would pick up potential threats and splash them across his screen.
That last pronounced itself as Rovo completed another loop, making sure he could move both the legs and arms simultaneously without passing out. Despite the power armor’s assistance, the damn stuff was still heavy, and definitely not within the surgeon’s medical advice for Rovo’s recovery.
The visor splashed red behind, and then, as Rovo turned, in front. Red tended to mean weapons out and pointed at the suit, or close enough that the suit’s billion cameras could consider them threats.
This time, those threats belonged to two agents, their crimson-and-black uniforms clogging up the small doorway Gregor had blown apart.
“Company,” Gregor said as Rovo put himself square between the agents and his squad mate. “Your lead?”
“For once, yes,” Rovo agreed. “Can you handle me protecting you?”
The agents, both looking too fresh-faced to know what they were getting into, had pistols raised. While they’d looked about to come running into the room, seeing Rovo prompted a hasty retreat, followed by a shouted threat to disarm and surrender.
“I do not need protecting,” Gregor replied, “but it would be amusing to see you crush them.”
“So we’re not surrendering?”
“I think not.”
“Okay then.”
Rovo stomped towards the small chamber, twisting sideways to let the armor fit through. Even with the turn, he mashed off the door remnants, cracking through into the concourse with a drunken buffoon’s grace.
The two agents had split apart, one facing Rovo’s back, the other his face. Both fired their pistols, the measly bolts splashing off the armor without the slightest effect. Despite his burned lungs, his bruised bones, and a drug-dulled headache, Rovo swung up a cocky smile, reading the suit’s kinetic boosters for combat.
He might have some fun today after all.
Sixteen
Behind The Glass
It took a week after the mission, but eventually her captain told Aurora to do something about Deepak hanging around after their training sessions. Aurora laid it out for the junior officer, told Deepak straight out that Sever, like all the other squads, was here for the cash.
“And we’re damn good,” Aurora continued as they shared another mess hall lunch. “Give us what we’ve earned.”
Deepak didn’t back down from the criticism, didn’t try to toss it off but met Aurora’s suggestion with the seriousness she put into it. He set his fork and knife down, stuck out a hand, and Aurora, after giving it a quizzical eye, shook it.
“You want a starring role, you got it,” Deepak said. “You’re right, you can handle it.”
The next job would be a few weeks away, and Sever spent those weeks jazzed up, training harder than before. In the hours between training sessions, Aurora tweaked her power armor, went to extra briefings for anyone interested in squad leadership—and the extra cash that came with it, and kept running into Deepak.
Lunches, dinners, and some nights burned on the Nautilus observation deck, talking shop and a little bit of everything else. Aurora didn’t even have trouble admitting she liked Deepak, his cheery devotion to duty, and the man did have a way of getting the best wines on the cruiser. She found the fastest, least traveled routes from his cabin to hers and back again, a mission for two.
And when the assignment came, and Deepak dropped Sever right where they wanted to be, he didn’t wink Aurora’s way this time. Instead, Sever earned Deepak’s trusted look, and Aurora matched his steady stare.
Ready.
Finally.
The walk to the airlock, where Auroa, Sai, and Eponi were supposed to be cast out in to the black ether, proved to be a fertile opportunity to delve for ideas. When you’re steps away from death, there’s a freedom that sinks in, shaping the possibilities and letting the creative ones rise up and gain purchase.
Renard, the bastard that’d infiltrated the Nautilus with his swarming agents, felt he had control. He could snap his fingers and have a cadre of undercover gunners burst forth and demand his desires at rifle’s end. Even so, the Nautilus held thousands upon thousands of DefenseCorp squaddies. Soldiers that owed their allegiance to the admiral and to DefenseCorp’s boots-on-the-ground division. Most squads had commanders that, like Aurora, kept DefenseCorp’s clandestine arm at, well, arm’s length.
All too often, the pre-mission intelligence had turned into a strategy of soaking the adversary in bodies until they gave up. Those bodies were never agents.
“Which is why, if we make it clear to this ship what’s going on, we’ll get the troopers on our side,” Aurora said as they headed down the red-lit concourse towards the docking berths. “We’d outnumber the agents, and we could kick them off this ship.”
“Still don’t get why you think they’d all fight for us,” Eponi said. “What’s Deepak going to do when Renard tells him to ignore your order?”
“He won’t have a chance,” Aurora replied. “Because you’re not going to give Deepak or Renard a choice.”
“Sounds like I’m not going to be thrilled with what you say next.”
As if Aurora cared. Eponi would pull off what her commander needed her to, not because Aurora had any real standing in their post-DefenseCorp hierarchy, but because if Eponi did anything different, she’d wind up dead.
After dishing out the details to the pilot, Aurora dropped Eponi and Sai off at the Prisa’s berth. Aurora took their weapons, excepting Sai’s sword, and with a promise to contact after carrying out the plan, set off on her own.
Convincing a ship that the attackers weren’t coming in from the outside but were, instead, seeded from within wouldn’t be easy. The change had to be hard, had to be total. Make every squad treat anyone else as a threat.
And bet that the agents, once threatened, would give themselves up.
The Nautilus had its massive bridge, and most communications routed through there. But not all. Ships this large needed a back-up base, a place that could become the de facto command deck if the bridge were incapacitated by enemy fire or accident. The Nautilus had its comm center on the second level, by the Quartermaster and above the engines.
Opposite the bridge, with maximum protection.
Walking the corridor, solitary in the red, tangled with her memory’s expectations. The Nautilus existed to be loud. To be active. For its concourses to churn with business being done. With every echoing step along the clear floor, the ship’s wrongness increased. As if Aurora had transplanted away from reality to a cleaner, more terrible fiction.
Deepak’s own actions added to the corrosion. He’d been Aurora’s sometime friend, always respected colleague, and yet, he’d twisted Renard’s knife. There were a thousand things the admiral could’ve done to warn Aurora, to warn Sever. In the quiet corridor, Aurora counted them off as she walked, from secret secondary transmissions, to written notes, to squad codewords that the agents watching him might not understand.
“Was it really because you care so damn much about this ship?” Aurora asked herself as she passed the last berth, where the Nautilus transit
ioned from shipping to everything supporting the big craft.
The idea didn’t make any sense. The agents were always a tighter, smaller force. They could never take the Nautilus unless Renard pulled every agent from everywhere and stuck them on the ship, an impossibility. Deepak had to be misreading the situation, or he knew something big Aurora couldn’t guess.
Ahead, after a brief section allayed to rapid refining for volatile materials taken off visiting vessels, the Quartermaster’s glowing letters pulled Aurora forward. Still nobody, which seemed odd, considering the invasion order. Nautilus squads should’ve been pressing the berths, securing places like the Quartermaster that could be valuable to an attacking enemy.
But if the troopers weren’t here, then where?
The Quartermaster’s ten window slots were shut, presenting a long wall without much else going for it. At the far end, Aurora could make out the transition, with blue flagging banners, to the secondary comm center. Thus far, the deserted march had been eerie, but hardly dangerous. After nearly getting spaced, Aurora wouldn’t complain.
The peace lasted till she passed by the third window. Aurora kept her pistol drawn, held down by her waist, so hard it whipped up and ready as the blind retracted. Her trigger finger exercised restraint when Aurora saw an older woman standing behind an assistance bot, using the thing’s spindly arms for cover.
“Don’t tell me that was an accident.” Aurora etched her words with knives.
“No, no,” the woman replied, “I have to talk to you before you make a mistake.”
“Then talk.”
The woman shook her head, “Not here. They’re waiting for you now, but they’ll come looking soon enough.” To Aurora’s left, between the fourth and fifth window, a service door whisked open. “Come back, where it’s safe.”
Behind the Quartermaster’s counters? Even discounting the current situation, Aurora hadn’t ever been back there. The place had so many safeguards, security, and audits that any squaddie dumb enough to go digging would find themselves busted back to guard duty in seconds.
Curiosity, and the woman’s hinting at an ambush much further down the line, pushed Aurora to the service door and through it. Caution kept Aurora’s pistol raised.
After a meter long entryway, Aurora found the secret kept behind the closed windows and the counters and the bots: the Quartermaster’s storage spaces were beautiful. Goods stacked atop shelves went back as far as Aurora could see—or, at least, that’s what the crystalline lighting made it feel like. The item menagerie required to fulfill the Nautilus’s staff’s myriad needs clustered in long rows, criss-crossing here and there as deemed appropriate by whatever gods controlled this packaged paradise.
The flowing compliments advancing through Aurora’s impressions spawned from the rainbow brilliance decorating each row, each section, each container. As if cloaked in flickering wisps, every spot stretching in every forward direction from Aurora seemed to catch a luminescent fire, the shelves aglow, their items little miracles to be chosen by the lucky bots.
“A bit much, isn’t it?” The woman who’d invited Aurora said, now freed from her bot shield. “I see you’re having the same reaction most do when they come back for the first time.” She laughed once, a pin prick thing. “It’s all pretty when you see it once. Try staring at it for hours and days and years.”
“But . . . why?” Aurora couldn’t help but ask. That such a resplendent space had been hidden back here all along, and Aurora was no beauty admirer, seemed a crime. “What’s the point?”
“Oh, it’s all for the bots. The reflected lights tell them at a distance precisely what items among our millions are located where. It’s all very sophisticated.”
Aurora knew a hint when she heard one. The woman hadn’t called her back here to discuss the Quartermaster’s intricacies. With effort, Aurora turned her eyes away from the shimmers and focused on the woman, on the still bots behind her, waiting at closed windows for customers that wouldn’t come.
“So I’m here,” Aurora said, remembering she still held her pistol and choosing not to hold it in the woman’s face. The Quartermaster staffer had on her uniform, had her hands visible, and looked about as threatening as a furry Talpa back on Wexer. “What’d you want to tell me?”
“That your plan won’t work.”
“And you know my plan how?”
The woman cocked her head in the look given by the patient to their lessers, “You should be dead, and instead you’re here, heading towards the comm center. It doesn’t take much to discern your intentions.”
Aurora shrugged, “So?”
“So perhaps you ought to change your tactics,” the woman said. “I gave an associate of yours a little drive. On it, there is information that would help you. Did he give it to you, by chance?”
“An associate?” Aurora said. “And no, I don’t have any drive.”
“Of course you don’t.” The woman clicked her tongue, waved back at the shiny inventory. “All of this is going to be turning against us very soon. DefenseCorp is making changes, and when they’re finished, you and I and every other soldier aboard this ship will be unnecessary.”
Aurora stepped back from the woman, bought space to bring her pistol to bear, “You’re not just some Quartermaster aide, are you?”
“Look what we have here,” the woman said, more to the bot on her left than to Aurora. “Rare are such smarts in the squads.”
The squads? Every slur had its origins, its home. Squads, said that way, was no different.
“Agent,” Aurora said, this time bringing the pistol right up and ready. “Cut the cryptic words and tell me why I shouldn’t burn you right here?”
If the threat had any effect, the woman didn’t show it, “Tell me, Aurora. Why did you choose to join Sever squad?”
“Don’t play games,” Aurora replied. “My friends are in trouble, and I don’t have time.”
That, at least, seemed to get a respectful nod. Maybe the agent figured Aurora didn’t know much more than guns and runs, but at least Aurora stuck to her priorities.
“Fine. Not all of us want what Renard’s after,” the woman said. “If there’s any part of DefenseCorp that would have a hidden group working against it, it would be ours. The Nautilus is on the front line of a larger plan, one you stumbled on by accident because that scientist couldn’t take Dynas any longer.”
Aurora trimmed through the words, looking for the meat behind the fat.
“So you want us to stop Renard,” Aurora said. “From whatever he’s planning. Already on it, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“Oh, not just Renard,” the woman said. “DefenseCorp is at an inflection point. Cash is no longer enough for some who see an opportunity in a galaxy without competition. We must remind them that the punishment for power is too severe for their ambitions.”
“Talk straight.”
The woman sighed, “You want your objective? You want your insurrection on this ship? Then let me help. Perhaps we can both get what we’re looking for in the end.”
“Great. Glad you’re in,” Aurora started back towards the door and the concourse on its other side. “Coming?”
“One moment,” the woman said. “Before we go rushing off into the enemy, why don’t we make sure we’re prepared?”
Aurora looked at her pistol, a standard-issue thing with a power pack good for a few dozen shots before dwindling to empty. The agent might have a point.
“Okay, but quick,” Aurora said, then snapped her left hand’s fingers when the agent started back towards the stacks, drawing the woman’s look her way. “And what’s your name?”
“Vana,” the woman replied. “Though you won’t find anything if you go looking.”
Aurora shook her head as they headed back into the stacks, hunting weapons. Always like an agent to assume an agenda.
Vana wasn’t wrong, but Aurora didn’t care about her. She had more important agents to destroy, squamates to save.
Seventeen
Follow The Plan
The Prisa sat where Sai and Eponi had left it. A stain still marred the docking bay floor leading from the doors to the craft’s boarding ramp, now sinking down to meet them after Eponi entered in the unlocking code on the Prisa’’s front strut. Unlike the concourse, the docking bay kept its silver-white lighting, its quiet sounds, its empty feel.
“For a ship being invaded, it’s real calm,” Sai quipped as the Prisa’s ramp touched down.
“Aren’t we supposed to change that?”
Aurora had mentioned the scare tactic as the plan, and the trio had discussed a way to do it. A way that sounded difficult in conversation and loomed even worse as Eponi and Sai stepped up to put it into practice.
“It’s not going to be easy,” Sai said as they went up the ramp. “You ever lead an attack on a ship before?”
“Sai, I’m a kart racer.” Eponi threw a disgusted look at the charred bits still clinging to the Prisa’s center floor. “Besides, when was the last time DefenseCorp sent us into a space conflict?”
Not for a long time. Sever had its role to play, one tied to ground-based assaults. The Nautilus wasn’t a nimble vessel out doing pirate hunts or clamping down on any feisty corporate fleets daring DefenseCorp’s space security dominance. Rather, Deepak’s mammoth force slugged its way from world to world, hanging in the skies and sending its doom-dealing waves planetside.
“Guess we’ll have to learn quick,” Sai said. “Which turret do you want me in?”
“Neither.” Eponi kept going towards the cockpit. “Less accurate, but you can control’em both from the cockpit. If we get into an actual dogfight, we’re done anyway, so you might as well stay where I can blame you when things go wrong.”
“I’m thrilled.”
“Bet you are.”
The Prisa’s cockpit presented four seats in a two-by-two formation, giving the pilot and co-pilot front and center while the back two offered views and consoles for systems management. Coming from a career in drop shuttles, where Sai spent his time locked into a gunnery system in the back, sitting somewhere he could see much of anything felt novel.
